The Idea of the Holy: part 1

"This book, recognizing the profound import of the non-rational for metaphysics, makes a serious attempt to analyse all the more exactly the 'feeling' which remains where the 'concept' fails, and to introduce a terminology which is not any the more loose or indeterminate for having necessarily to make use of 'symbols'." - Rudolf Otto.

In this blog, I plan to put into my own words the thoughts of Rudolf Otto in his book 'The Idea of the Holy'. The book claims to be an 'inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational'. It has always fascinated me that there might be a part of religion which is non-rational. That is, a part which can't be put into concepts. We feel so comfortable calling God good, or a person, or rational; but isn't there another part of us which feels that these concepts don't capture the whole reality of what God is: that these concepts can't capture it?

In his book, Chapter 1 is called 'The Rational and the non-Rational'. The rational is what we can put into the form of concepts. By analogy to human experience, we apply to God, say, the concept of 'goodness'. If a theology is rational, it will be content to call God good, and leave it at that. The more concepts we have about God, the more rational we are, and so the more knowledge we have about God, and so the better the religion or theology. But do these concepts capture God completely?

It might seem so. The Bible is written in concepts. But Otto says that's to be expected, since concepts make up language. So, when we call God 'good', 'goodness' is an essential attribute of God; but 'goodness' only tells us about a part of God's entire essence. God's deeper essence alludes what the concept reveals; the part of God that the concept can't reveal needs to be understood in a way that doesn't use concepts. We have to understand God's deeper essence in some other way, since if we couldn't use any concepts, we couldn't say anything about Him. However, throughout the ages, people have favored the rational over, and to the exclusion of, the non-rational.

If we look to mythology to give us a clue about the origin of religion, we can't look at the rational evolution of concepts. Such an evolution has nothing to do with how religion came to be. Religion's origin has to do with something non-rational. And so Otto concludes that Religion can't be fully explained and understood in terms of the rational. We begin to explain the origin of Religion with the 'category of the Holy or Sacred'.

We've seen that there are rational and non-rational aspects to Religion. The rational parts are those that can be put into concepts; the non-rational parts are those that cannot. If we are to fully understand Religion or God, we must look at the non-rational idea of the Holy or Sacred.