The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto

Author:Rudolf Otto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

XII. The Numinous in Luther

In Catholicism the feeling of the numinous is to be found as a living factor of singular power. It is seen in Catholic forms of worship and sacramental symbolism, in the less authentic forms assumed by legend and miracle, in the paradoxes and mysteries of Catholic dogma, in the Platonic and neo-Platonic strands woven into the fabric of its religious conceptions, in the solemnity of churches and ceremonies, and especially in the intimate rapport of Catholic piety with Mysticism. For reasons already suggested, the mysterious is much less in evidence in the official systems of doctrine, whether Catholic or Protestant. Particularly since the time when the great mediaeval scholastics (the ‘theologi moderni.’ so willed) replaced Plato by Aristotle and welded the latter and his method on to the doctrines of the Church, Catholic orthodoxy has been subjected to a strong rationalizing influence, to which, however, actual living religious practice and feeling never conformed or corresponded. The battle here joined between so-called ‘Platonism’ and ‘Aristotelianism’, and in general the long persistent protest against the scholastics, is itself in large part nothing but the struggle between the rational and the non-rational elements in the Christian religion. And the same antithesis is clearly operative as a factor in Luther’s protest against Aristotle and the ‘theologi moderni’.

At that time Plato himself was known (very imperfectly) chiefly through the interpretations—and misinterpretations— of him by Augustine, Plotinus, and Dionysius the Areopagite. Yet it was a true feeling that led the contrasted attitudes of mind to choose the names of Plato and Aristotle as their battle-cries. Plato did indeed make a powerful contribution towards the rationalization of his religion, for according to his philosophy the deity had to become identical with the ‘Idea of the Good’, and consequently something wholly rational and conceivable. But the most remarkable characteristic of Plato’s thought is just that he himself finds science and philosophy too narrow to comprise the whole of man’s mental life. He has indeed properly no Philosophy of Religion; he grasps the object of religion by quite different means than those of conceptual thinking, viz. by the ‘ideograms’ of myth, by ‘enthusiasm’ or inspiration, ‘eros’ or love, ‘mania’ or the divine frenzy. He abandons the attempt to bring the object of religion into one system of knowledge with the objects of ‘science’ (επιστήμη), i.e. reason, and it becomes something not less but greater thereby; while at the same time it is just this that allows the sheer non-rational aspect of it to be 80 vividly felt in Plato, and indeed vividly expressed as well as felt. No one has enunciated more definitively than this master-thinker that God transcends all reason, in the sense that He is beyond the powers of our conceiving, not merely beyond our powers of comprehension.

‘Therefore is it an impossible task both to discover the Creator and Father of this Whole Universe and to publish the discovery of him in words for all to understand.’

Aristotle’s thought is much more theological than

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