Rudolf Otto
(1869-1937)
Born in Piene, Germany, Rudolf Otto was one of the foremost German systematic theologians of the late-nineteenth century. He was educated at the University of Erlangen and the University of Göttingen in liberal theology and history of the Bible. Although originally having planned on entering the ministry, Otto's arrangements were forced to change due to staunch resistance from the ultraconservative German Lutheran Church and their hesitance to give him an appointment. Instead, Otto took a teaching position at the University of Göttingen and began studying the work of Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843)--an influential German philosopher who worked to rationalize Immanual Kant's philosophy. Otto was so taken with Fries that he helped to begin a Neo-Fresian movement within his academic circle and wrote one of his first books on the philosophy of Fries and Kant. Otto is probably best known to scholars of religion for what is considered by most to be his best work, The Idea of the Holy. In this book, Otto contends that religion--or better put, religious experiences and sentiments--is a phenomena complete unto itself, or sui generis. For this reason religion cannot be broken up, according to Otto, into other types of phenomenon (this supposition has come under scrutiny by modern scholars who disagree with Otto and instead use the theory of reductionism to provide insight into the nature of religion). Otto also thought that religion was knowable a priori (or independent of [that is, prior to] experience) and therefore its study comprises a completely different sphere of knowledge from other academic disciplines. Assuming this religious sentiment to be universal among human beings, Otto was also interested in the history of religions and traveled to India in 1911-1912 to study Sanskrit and Hinduism. It was through this journey that he began to struggle with the theological problems of the presumed Christian superiority in the face of his growing knowledge of what we now refer to as the "world religions."
Major Works
Naturalism and Religion (1904)
The Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant and Fries (1909)
The Idea of the Holy (1917)
Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism
(1926)
Quotation
"The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt
religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of
consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in
his experience, is requested to read no farther; for it is not easy to
discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the
emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say,
social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feeling.
We do not blame such an one, when he tries for himself to advance as far
as he can with the help of such principles of explanation as he knows,
interpreting 'aesthetics' in terms of sensuous pleasure, and 'religion'
as a function of the gregarious instinct and social standards, or as something
more primitive still. But, the artist, who for his part has an intimate
personal knowledge of the distinctive element in the aesthetic experience,
will decline his theories with thanks, and the religious man will reject
them even more uncompromisingly."
- from Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1917)
Select Web Resources on Otto
Online
Information on Rudolf Otto by Gregory Alles
"Approaching
the Numinous: Rudolf Otto and Tibetan Tantra," by Donald S. Lopez
Secondary Literature on Otto and Religion
Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, pp. 161-167. Open
Court Press, 1975.
Walter H. Capps, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline,
pp. 20-25. Fortress Press, 1995.
Jaques Waardenburg, Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion:
Aims, Methods and Theories of Research, pp. 432-459. Walter de Gruyter,
1999.
Gregory D. Alles, "Otto, Rudolf," The Encyclopedia of Religion,
2nd edition. vol. 10, pp. 6928-6931. Macmillan Reference USA, 2005.