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Rudolf Otto and the Limits of Religious Description

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

L. Philip Barnes
L. Philip Barnes
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy and Politics, University of Ulster, Coleraine, Co. Londonderry BT 52 1SA
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Extract

In a recent study entitled ‘Numinous Experience and Religious Language’, Dr Leon Schlamm has endorsed Rudolf Otto's well known and much discussed account of the relationship of religious experience to religious language, and then used this position to criticize some highly influential voices in the continuing debate on the precise nature of mystical experience. The aim of this paper, in response to Schlamm, is to question the plausibility of Otto's account in The Idea of the Holy of the nature of religious knowledge and his closely related understanding of the relationship between religious experience (or as he prefers, numinous experience) and religious language. By implication, this also calls into question Schlamm's use of Otto's position in his criticism of those writers on mysticism that he takes issue with, chiefly Steven Katz and those who propose an essentially Kantian interpretation of mysticism. However, for the most part I shall leave the contemporary debate on mysticism unaddressed, though my comments do have a bearing on it. If there is a wider target, it is chiefly those interpreters of religion, like Schlamm, who conceive of the relationship of religious experience (or the religious object itself) and religious language in essentially the same way as Otto. One thinks immediately here of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom Otto admired greatly, and who stands in the same Liberal Protestant tradition. Also Karl Barth, who ironically, for all his strictures of Liberal Protestantism, actually propounded a view of the meaning and nature of religious language which is remarkably similar to the views of both Schleiermacher and Otto; at least at the beginning of his theological career, in his famous commentary on Romans: all that talk of God as ‘the inexpressible’ and ‘the Wholly Other’. In addition one could mention those classical texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, which like many contemporary writers on mysticism (e.g. the late Deirdre Green), conceive of mystical experience and the truth which it reveals as ‘beyond the scope of discursive thought, language and empirical activity’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , June 1994 , pp. 219 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 Religious Studies, XXVIII (1992), pp. 533–51.Google Scholar

2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1950)Google Scholar, the title of the original work in German is Das Heilige–‘the Holy’.

3 The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1928)Google Scholar, an English translation of the 2nd substantially revised edition of 1830; see Chap. 1, particularly pp. 3–31 and pp. 76–8.

4 See Otto's ‘Introduction’ to Schleiermacher, Friedrich, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (New York: Harper & Row, 1958)Google Scholar; also Otto, ‘How Schleiermacher Rediscovered the Sensus Numinis’, in Religious Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), pp. 68–77.Google Scholar

5 (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), a translation of the 6th German edition (1918), see particularly pp. 36, 42, 49, 98, 141, 250, 331, 422 and 505. Initially Barth took Otto's The Idea of the Holy as supportive of his own ‘dialectical’ or ‘neo-orthodox’ theism, but on further reflection became critical of it.

6 See the relevant chapters of Walter T. Stace's collection of mystical texts, The Teaching of the Mystics (New York: New American Library, 1960), pp. 30–101.Google Scholar

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9 Schlamm, op. cit. p. 533.

10 ‘An Inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational’.

11 Schlamm, op. cit. p. 533.

12 Otto, op. cit. p. 135.

13 Otto, op. cit. p. 144.

14 Ibid. p. 174, Otto's emphasis.

15 Ibid. p. 34.

16 Ibid. p. 8.

17 I have considered the ineffability thesis, i.e. the thesis that religious experience, or even the religious object itself, cannot be described in language, in ‘Relativism, Ineffability and the Appeal to Experience: a Reply to the Myth Makers’, Modern Theology VII (1990), pp. 101–14Google Scholar, particularly pp. 107–10.

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21 Ibid. pp. 14–19, and p. 119.

22 Ibid. p. 42.

23 Language, Truth and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1946), p. 9.Google Scholar

24 One is tempted to draw a comparison here with Wittgenstein's conclusion in the Tractatus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), 6.522Google Scholar, when he says that ‘there are things which cannot be put into words’. By this Wittgenstein arguably meant such things as ethical values, aesthetics, and more controversially, religion.

25 See Swinburne, Richard, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 11–49.Google Scholar

26 See the relevant essays in Alston's, Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; also relevant is Miller, Barry, ‘Analogy Sans Portrait: God-talk as Literal but Non-anthropomorphic’, Faith and Philosophy, vii (1990), 63–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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29 Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)Google Scholar; also Richard Swinburne, op. cit., pp. 50–84, and idem., Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 39–51; and very recently Yob, Iris M., ‘Religious Metaphor and Scientific Model: Grounds for Comparison’, Religious Studies, xxviii (1992), 475–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 I would like to thank Professor Robert McKim of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for written comments on an earlier version of this paper.