The Antibody Network ·The Clearing
Reading 4 of 5 The Veil Thins

The feeling that has its own name

Rudolf Otto, a German theologian, gives the experience a technical vocabulary in 1917.

The reading — Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige (1917); English trans. John W. Harvey, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford University Press, 1923)

The Idea of the Holy

> The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. … It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what?

— Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (1923), ch. IV

> In other words, our X cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind.

— Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, ch. II

Mysticism 1917 CE Open this teaching on the Map →
The framing

Otto’s contribution to the study of religion was to notice that the experience the mystics describe has a stable structure across cultures. He named it the numinous. It has two aspects: mysterium tremendum, the awe and dread of encountering something wholly other, and mysterium fascinans, the simultaneous magnetic pull toward it.

What Otto did, philosophically, was protect this kind of experience from being explained away. It is not an emotion, not a belief, not a metaphor. It is a category of human experience with its own phenomenology. The contemplative traditions have always known this. Otto gave the rest of us a way to name it without flinching.

Carry with you
When have you felt the two halves at once — pulled toward something and frightened by it?