Toward a Genealogy of the Holy:

Rudolf Otto and the Apologetics

of Religion
Gregory D. Alles

This article reads Rudolf Otto’s thought, especially his classic book Das
Heilige (The Idea of the Holy), against the background of an intense, early
struggle to reconcile the religiosity of his childhood with the claims of the
natural and historical sciences. In doing so, it sees Otto as creatively con­
tinuing and combining two theological traditions: the neo-Lutheranism
that he learned especially from F. H. R. Frank at Erlangen and the liberal
theology that he learned from Hermann Schultz at Gottingen. Although it
has become customary to see Otto’s thought, including Das Heilige, as a
classic contribution to the science of religion, Otto’s work emerges from
this reading as a late moment in the branch of systematic theology known
as apologetics. In his best-known writings Otto developed an apologetics
not of Christianity but of religion.

On 14 MAY 1888 Rudolf Otto enrolled in the University of Erlangen.

After a year of military service there, and despite personal misgivings, he
enrolled in the University of Gottingen on 6 May 1889. Six months later,
on 7 November, he returned to Erlangen, where he studied for the next
three semesters. Then, on 23 April 1891, he returned to Gottingen. There,
after two more semesters, he sat for his first theological examination,
which he passed on 26 March 1892 (Liidemann and Schroder: 75;
Prorector und Senat der Universitat Gottingen 1889, 1892; Universitat
Erlangen 1889, 1891).

Gregory D. Alles is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies,
Western Maryland College, Westminster MD 21157.

My thanks go to Michael Pye and Philipps-Universitat Marburg for the opportunity to gather
these thoughts together.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion June 2001, Vol. 69, No 2, pp. 323-341
© 2001 The American Academy of Religion

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 324 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Otto’s oscillation between these two universities, Erlangen and

Gottingen, reflects more than personal indecision. It plots geographi­
cally an intense struggle to reconcile the religiosity of his childhood with
the claims of the historical and natural sciences. In this essay I want to
observe the course and results of that struggle. In the process I will rein­
sert Otto into two theological traditions that are now largely forgotten:
the Erlangen version of neo-Lutheranism (Neuluthertum), represented by
F. H. R. Frank, and the liberal theology that Hermann Schultz developed
in Gottingen against his better-known colleague, Albrecht Ritschl. My
claim will be that in several crucial respects Otto’s work represents a cross
between these two traditions. My primary example will be Otto’s most
famous book, Das Heilige.
In contrast to a practice that became dominant in the mid-twentieth
century of reading Das Heilige as a classic of the “science of religion” (e.g.,
Alles; Waardenburg), I want to read it as a late moment in the branch of
systematic theology known as apologetics. That is, I want to read it as a
general apologetics of religion. I recognize that it is hardly news to claim
that Das Heilige is a theological work (Almond; Frick; Schutte; Siegfried).
It was in part on the basis of this book that Otto received the chair in sys­
tematic theology at the University of Marburg in 1917. But I hope to for­
mulate the old news more precisely. It may be helpful to remind ourselves
of some of Das Heilige’s most prominent themes before we attempt to trace
their genealogy.

OTTO’S THOUGHT
Das Heilige begins with a distinction between the rational and the non-
rational, the conceptual and the experiential. Otto concedes that the high­
est religions are distinguished by the quality of conceptualization that they
contain, but even they cannot escape the experiential dimension that stands
at the heart of religion. Ultimately, religion is a matter of feeling.1 To iden­
tify that feeling, Otto turns to the word heilig (holy). Although this word
often carries moral connotations, as when one speaks of Heilige Elisabeth
(St. Elizabeth), it has, Otto claims, a more primary sense that is devoid of
moral associations. To designate that more primary sense, Otto coins the
word numinous, a word that has since passed into common parlance. The
numinous, he claims, cannot be taught; it is not a matter of ideas and propo­
sitions. It is an experience; it can only be undergone and evoked.

1 Note that by Gefuhl Otto does not mean emotion but a cognition or sensation that has not yet
been conceptualized. Otto 1950: 13 omits a footnote in later German editions that both makes this
point and refers readers to a more extensive discussion in Otto 1932a. 327

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 Alies: Toward a Genealogy of the Holy 325

Otto wants to distance his account of numinous experience from

Schleiermacher’s description of the heart of religion as a feeling of abso­
lute dependence. The crux of the problem is Schleiermacher’s use of the
terms relative and absolute. According to Otto, they imply that the differ­
ence between a religious and a natural feeling of dependence, such as
dependence on one’s parents, is a difference in quantity. That is wrong.
The feeling of dependence that characterizes numinous experience dif­
fers radically from any natural feeling of dependence. It is a difference of
quality, not quantity. Otto then develops his analysis of numinous expe­
rience as a mysterium tremendum etfascinans.
Although in theory the numinous is a mystery that both repels and
attracts in equal measure, Otto’s rhetoric is less balanced. He begins with
and writes the most about the tremendum. Reminding readers not only
of biblical language about the wrath of YHWH but of a tremor that is
physical as well as psychological, Otto stresses three dimensions of the
tremendum: it is awe-evoking and unapproachable, it is overpowering, and
it is energetic. For its part, the mysterium evokes not tremor but stupor,
stunned silence, in the face of what is encountered as “wholly other.” The
fascinans represents aspects of grace and love, but Otto’s account of this
dimension is the least powerful and interesting of the three.
I cannot say much here about the manner in which Otto tries to unite
the irrational or experiential aspect of the numinous with the rational or
conceptual aspect. It is too complex and puzzling. Suffice it to say that
Otto conscripts the Kantian term schematization for duty in this regard
and that his successors have tended either to reject this move or simply to
ignore it. But we should not overlook a notorious fence that Otto con­
structs about his entire analysis: ,
The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply felt reli­
gious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of conscious­
ness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his
experience, is requested to read no further; for it is not easy to discuss
questions of religious psychology [actually Religtonskunde, religious stud­
ies] with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the dis­
comforts of indigestion, or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any in­
trinsically religious feelings. (1950: 8)

To my mind, these and other claims that Otto makes are very prob­
lematical and deserve careful systematic analysis and critique.2 For ex­
ample, Otto assumes that religious experience precedes conceptualization
—“Representations of spirits and similar conceptions are rather one and

2 Perhaps the best place to start is Colpe.

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 326 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

all ‘rationalizations’ of a precedent experience” (1950: 26)—but how does

he know? Is it not equally possible that religious experiences are evoked
by ideas, expectations, and social contexts? Furthermore, Otto insists that
the differences between numinous and ordinary experiences are qualita­
tive, not quantitative, but that makes no sense. Unless Otto means to say
that the same word is used entirely equivocally in the two contexts, sig­
nificant qualitative similarities must allow us to speak of, for example, both
human and divine wrath. Similarly, Otto claims that numinous and or­
dinary experiences are at one and the same time analogous to one another
and yet totally different, claims that are simply contradictory. In purvey­
ing an essentialism that puts a certain kind of feeling into the heart of all
religion, Otto’s analysis does not simply project Christian concepts onto
the rest of the world but denies powerful currents within Christianity it­
self, such as the thought of Albrecht Ritschl. Otto’s account of the primal
reality of numinous experience depends on a reconstruction of human
psychological history that is at best dubious and entirely speculative. John
Reeder has argued at considerable length that Otto’s use of the word
schematization makes no sense at all. Perhaps most puzzling, Otto simply
declares people who disagree with him incompetent and thereby makes
their objections irrelevant.
Although I am convinced that such analysis and critique are impor­
tant, I do not wish to pursue them here. Rather, my interests are biographi­
cal, historical, and genealogical. They tend not so much to assessment as
to interpretation, and they are oriented not to the study of religions per
se but to the history of knowledge. In moving toward a genealogy of the
holy, I want to address Otto’s university studies prior to his passing the
first theological examination. I certainly do not mean to attribute Das
Heilige to this period. It dates to almost twenty-five years later. But Otto’s
early university years did mark the starting point for developments that
would eventually find their culmination in Otto’s most famous book.

DECONVERSION AND RECONVERSION

The best guide to this period of Otto’s life is the autobiographical state­
ment that he wrote at the end of 1891 for his first theological examina­
tion.3 It tells a story of deconversion and reconversion, of loss and recov­
ery of faith.
The starting point is the traditional Lutheranism that Otto had im­
bibed at home, in school, and in church. In the 1870s and 1880s Darwin­

3 The final version appears to be no longer extant My account depends on an unpublished rough
draft (Otto 1891) For English translation, see Otto 1996 50-60; see also Boeke- 131-132.

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 Alies: Toward a Genealogy of the Holy 327

ian views and historical claims about the Bible were matters of public
controversy. While Otto was growing up, he confronted these views. In­
deed, he argued about them with his classmates in the Gymnasium, and
when in May 1888 he left home for the University of Erlangen, he did so
in pursuit of an apologetic mission. He wanted to learn how to defend
traditional Christianity against historical and scientific attacks.
Contrary to his expectations, Otto’s entrance into the university ac­
tually initiated a process of deconversion. That process took place in two
steps. The first, which was less extreme, had both a theoretical and a prac­
tical dimension. Otto found that F. H. R. Frank and other theologians in
Erlangen promulgated a form of theological “subjectivism” that rejected
traditional notions that attributed the authority of the Bible to “objective”
factors like divine inspiration. He also found that they were less stringent
in their religious practice, for example, the observance of Sunday, than
he had been accustomed to at home. Initially surprised, Otto eventually
became fascinated by Frank. He abandoned the views that he had brought
with him from home and became a Frankian.
But Otto could not remain a committed Frankian. The courses he
attended in Gottingen in summer semester 1889, especially Hermann
Schultz’s course on apologetics and Rudolf Smend’s course on Psalms, as
well as the sermons he heard in the University Church at Gottingen—
Hermann Schultz was the university preacher—confronted him with a
new way of thinking whose force he found difficult to resist. A trip to
England confronted him with a religious plurality that no longer allowed
him simply to dismiss other forms of Christianity besides Lutheranism.
And after Emil Selenka’s course on Darwinism (Erlangen, winter semes­
ter 1888-89) he found it impossible simply to dismiss evolutionary theory.
Worst of all, Frank’s subjective approach presupposed the personal con­
victions that Otto had begun to doubt, and so it did not allow him to
address any of these issues. A crisis ensued, culminating in a second, more
severe deconversion: “What was certain and normative? ... I lost the
ground under my feet. That was the end of my studies in Erlangen. I had
gone there not so much to study the truth as to study the best means of
defending an opinion. I left with the resigned intention of seeking noth­
ing but the truth, even at the risk of not finding it in Christ” (Otto 1891:
6 recto and verso, translated in Otto 1996: 57).
Despite Otto’s resignation, his crisis of faith did not lead to a rejec­
tion of Christianity. It was followed by a reconversion. Otto embraced the
Christianity that he encountered at Gottingen, both the historical ap­
proach to the Bible prevalent there and Schultz’s systematic theology. But
apparently he did not turn his back entirely on Frank and the Erlangen
school. He credits Theodor Haring, to whom Das Heilige would eventu­

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 328 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

ally be dedicated, with teaching him not simply to dismiss or look with
disdain on the views that he had just abandoned.
When Otto wrote his autobiographical statement in late December
1891, his reconversion was still only tentative. He did not fully work out
his own views until the publication of Das Heilige in late 1916 (imprint,
1917). Even twenty-five years after his first examination, however, his
thought retained the marks of his early struggles. In crucial respects it
developed as a cross between the Erlangen and Gottingen traditions—with
significant innovations, to be sure. The end result was that Otto surren­
dered his initial goal of defending traditional Christianity against mod­
ernist critique and theological liberalism, but he did not entirely give up
his apologetic mission. Instead, he embraced and formulated a different
kind of apologetics—not a defense of Christianity but an apologetics of
religion.

ERLANGEN NEO-LUTHERANISM
In Otto’s day Erlangen was a major theological center for neo-
Lutheranism (Hein; Wendelhorst). It had been founded in 1743 with the
express stipulation that its professors should defend the Lutheran con­
fessions—normative compendia of Lutheran beliefs dating from the
Reformation and its aftermath—against all syncretism, fanaticism, and
pietism. In that context syncretism referred to any mixing of Lutheranism
with Calvinism, and the declaration of the Prussian church union in 1817
gave renewed energy to the apologetic mission. But in Erlangen syncre­
tism seemed to pose more of a threat than pietism, so that unlike other
neo-Lutheran theologians, the theologians of Erlangen emphasized reli­
gious experience, specifically, the Christian experience of regeneration,
in addition to a reliance on the Bible and the Lutheran confessions. It is
customary to distinguish two generations of Erlangen neo-Lutheranism.
A representative thinker of the first generation was Johann Christian
Konrad von Hofmann (1810-77); the major figure of the second was Franz
Hermann Reinhold Frank (1827-94).
Hofimann’s book, Der Schriftbeweis: Ein theologischer Versuch (1853),
gives a good idea of the Erlangen approach. It envisions the task of arriv­
ing at the truth of Scripture as the mutual confirmation and criticism of
three sources: interpreter, context, and text—the experience of the indi­
vidual Christian, the teachings of the community (the church), and scrip­
tural testimony. In practice many neo-Lutherans placed heavier empha­
sis on the context (the teachings of the church) than on the text (the Bible);
they claimed that one read the Bible rightly when one read it in terms of
the Lutheran confessions. For Hofmann, the experience of the interpreter

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 Alies. Toward a Genealogy of the Holy 329

was crucial. As he wrote, “Theology is only free science [freie Wissenschaft]

. . . when I the Christian am for me the theologian the most proper object
of my science” (10). One consequence of this view was that Hofmann
narrowly limited the range of theological competence: “Whoever does not
know any prior, internal surrender, of a sort that he conceives to be con­
sistent with the content of the holy scriptures or a confession of the church,
or even with a teaching that has prevailed in the church for some time,
such a person remains a mere reporter in a matter that is not foreign,
perhaps, but one that will certainly lie outside of him- or herself” (9).
It is not clear whether Otto actually knew Hofmann’s Schriftbeweis.
His autobiographical statement refers to a “Hoffmann,” but the exact
reference is uncertain. What is certain, however, is that Frank had a pro­
found influence on Otto. The autobiographical statement attributes that
influence to the strength of Frank’s personality, but Otto was also strongly
attracted by Frank’s ideas. As is apparent from System der christlichen
Gewissheit (2 vols., 1870-73), Frank’s ideas occupied a conceptual uni­
verse similar to Hofmann’s. That survey of “apologetics,” together with
its dogmatic sequel, System der christlichen Wahrheit (2 vols., 1878), pro­
vided Frank’s overview of the entire field of systematic theology.
Although System of the Christian Certainty stands at the head of Frank’s
systematic enterprise, it claims not to be a work of apologetics in the strict
sense of the word, for in writing it Frank did not intend to convert any­
one to Christianity or to defend Christianity against non-Christian op­
ponents (18-19). His goal was simply to give an account of the certainty
that was “for the Christian as such an inalienable reality, implanted in and
with faith” (1). For Frank, certainty did not refer to a personal assurance
of salvation, as if in response to the question, “Are you saved?” It referred
to a union of subjectivity and objectivity, the harmony of being and idea,
experience and knowledge (74). When faced with alternative claims, he
was not concerned to assess those claims before some sort of universal
tribunal. As he put it, his aim was “merely from the standpoint of the
Christian certainty, and for that certainty, to give an account to ourselves
of the nature and the weakness of that opposition” (150). Such views led
Frank, like Hofmann, narrowly to restrict theological competence. In
doing so, he distinguished sharply between moral and natural phenom­
ena. The phenomena of the natural world could be known by anyone, but
moral phenomena could not: “Before we can think of exchanging expe­
riences with anyone regarding [a moral, as distinct from a natural, phe­
nomenon], we must know whether he has a sensorium for things of this
kind; otherwise, he speaks as a blind man concerning color” (103-104).
It is not hard to see why a student like Otto, who was not certain but, rather,
unsure of Christian claims, would find Frank’s approach inadequate. He

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 330 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

was searching for a certainty that Frank (19,23) presupposed was already
there.

GOTTINGEN LIBERALISM
If Erlangen was a bastion of neo-Lutheranism, Gottingen was a bas­
tion of theological liberalism. Historical biblical studies were extremely
strong there. The 1890s were the heyday of the Religionsgeschichtliche
Schule, and some of Otto’s closest friends and collaborators—Heinrich
Hackmann, Wilhelm Bousset, Ernst Troeltsch—were members of this
school (Ludemann and Schroder). Otto’s high regard for historical bibli­
cal work is shown later by the prominence he gave to Julius Wellhausen
in his address Sinn und Aufgabe moderner Universitat (Otto 1927, trans­
lated in Otto 1996: 162-179). But Otto himself was somewhat removed
from the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule. His own orientation was toward
systematic theology, and in that area Gottingen was experiencing some­
thing of a transition. Albrecht Ritschl, the dominant systematic theolo­
gian there, had died on 20 March 1889, about a month and a half before
Otto’s first matriculation in Gottingen. Ritschl’s younger colleague and
successor Hermann Schultz (1836-1903) became the formative system­
atic influence on Otto.
In many respects Otto seems to have defined himself by rejecting
Ritschl.4 Like Otto, Ritschl was a Kantian and so conceived of religion in
terms of judgments of value as opposed to judgments of fact. But beyond
a rudimentary commitment to Kantianism, Otto’s thought and Ritschl’s
diverge sharply. Ritschl (3.228) rejected Schleiermacher’s appeal to any
individual experience of a universal whole and looked instead to a per­
sonal God who acts in the world. He emphasized that God was not wrath­
ful but loving—loving not in a sentimental sense but in the sense of being
active in the human community to bring about the Kingdom of God
(3.282). Furthermore, Ritschl saw little point in studying religions other
than Christianity, and he had little sympathy for the mystical dimension
of religion. In his major work, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung
und Versdhnung( 1870-74), he wrote, “If it is asserted that the human spirit
does not consist merely in feeling, knowing, and willing, but exists behind
all of these as a definite kind of being and life... that this dark background
is acted on by grace in a purely passive way, and that this relationship must
first be ascertained before its consequences can be observed in spiritual
actions—then this mystical psychology is simply useless, whether for theo­

4 Contrast Frick, who places Otto in a tradition running from Ritschl through Harnack

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 Alies■ Toward a Genealogy of the Holy 331

retical or practical purposes” (3.175-176). Otto’s position is almost the

diametrical opposite.
Hermann Schultz’s influence on Otto was much more positive. As we
have seen, when Otto refound his theological feet after his crisis, he was stand­
ing on foundations laid by Schultz. When on 17 April 1897 Otto suddenly
abandoned his goal of becoming a minister and envisioned the possibility
of an academic career, it was to Schultz that he immediately wanted to turn
(Otto 1897). Schultz would become Otto’s Doktorvater and his senior col­
league and supporter; indeed, it seems that he almost became Otto’s father-
in-law. Fortunately for us, in the 1890s, during the time when Otto was a
student, Schultz published his basic theological courses in apologetics, dog­
matics, and ethics. Of most interest here are the lectures that were instrumen­
tal in Otto’s deconversion, Schultz’s lectures on apologetics: Grundriss der
christlichen Apologetik zum Gebrauche bei akademischen Vorlesungen (1894).
Schultz ascribes to apologetics a double purpose: “to maintain the
validity of the religious view of the world over against the tendencies that
would disown religion, and to establish Christianity’s claim to be, for our
age as for others, the perfect embodiment of religion over against those
who dispute its permanent significance” (1). In effect, Schultz divided
apologetics into two branches, the first a general apologetics of religion
and the second a specific apologetics of Christianity. But he actually di­
vided his lectures into three parts:

1. “Defense of the Religious View of the World”;

2. “Philosophy of Religion. Religion in Its Historical Phenomena,” ac­
tually an allgemeine Religionsgeschichte or general survey of the history
of religions from nature religions through culture religions to pro­
phetic religions; and
3. “Defense of Christianity” as “the Perfect Embodiment of Religion.”

It is not possible to give a complete presentation of Schultz’s view of reli­

gion here, but several features of his general apologetics of religion are
worth noting.
Underlying Schultz’s approach to the apologetics of religion is a sharp
distinction between the world of nature and the world of conscious ex­
perience. Naturalistic materialism, he concedes, is the best approach to
the world of nature, but it has nothing to say about the world of conscious­
ness, where religion resides. This is particularly unfortunate because the
experience of consciousness is our most immediate and therefore our most
certain knowledge (Schultz: 94-95).
Unlike Ritschl, his senior colleague of many years, Schultz thought that
Schleiermacher was basically correct: The source and foundation of all

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 332 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

religion is feeling, specifically, the feeling of being dependent on a power

that is distinct from all objects of the material world. The human response
to this encounter is basically axiological; it evokes judgments of worth or
value (Schultz: 17, 20-27). One may think in this regard of what Otto saw
as the response of the human being in the face of the numinous—“I am
nothing”—or of his rewriting of Descartes’s cogito: peccavi ergo sum, “I have
sinned, therefore I must exist” (Otto 1950: 21, 1981: 147; cf. Frank: 5). But
Schultz faulted Schleiermacher for neglecting the active, practical side of
religion, and he used this axiological response as a way to integrate the world
of practical action into his account and so to link up with Ritschl’s thought.
Unlike the Erlangen theologians, Schultz did not seek to reconcile in
detail individual experience with specific teachings of the Bible or the con­
fessions. He acknowledged that these texts made philosophical, scientific,
and historical errors and saw their proper interpretation as aimed not at
the letter of the text but at its spirit, its underlying meaning. Therefore, he
championed not a confessional Lutheranism but, as Otto would later do, a
“free evangelical conception of Christianity” (Schultz: 56, 77, 254).
Also unlike the Erlangen theologians, Schultz did not limit religious
feeling to the Christian experience of regeneration or even to Schleier-
macher’s intuition of the universe. He gave it a very different and very
specific content. According to Schultz, genuine religious feeling is found
even in the earliest religions, but in the earliest stages the basic religious
feeling is “neither love nor admiration, but at bottom ‘fear,’ mingled with
trust in the help which is expected from [deities]” (125). Schultz saw this
tension between fear and trust continuing even into the most developed
of religions, Protestant Christianity. In a manner reminiscent of the tra­
ditional dogmatic distinction between the deus absconditus, the hidden
God of nature, and the deus revelatus, the God revealed in Jesus, Schultz
distinguished between the awful Holy One who judges and the loving
Father who forgives (210). Of particular interest here is his description of
the awful Holy One: “We face the God concealed in the processes of na­
ture as something absolutely foreign to us. He crushes us and is utterly
outside of our spiritual life, uncomprehended, incomprehensible (sacred
awe, spiritual estrangement)” (291). To be sure, Schultz did not use Otto’s
famous phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans. But every major ele­
ment of the concept was present.

TOWARD A GENEALOGY OF THE HOLY

In certain key respects Otto’s thought is a cross between these two lines,
Erlangen and Gottingen, Hofmann-Frank and Schultz. The latter is
weighted more heavily.

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 Alies: Toward a Genealogy of the Holy 333

First, Schultz’s vision of apologetics seems to have significantly defined

the shape of Otto’s writing program. His major publications proceed as
if they were attempting to work out in detail the two parts of an apologetics
that Schultz had only sketched, the apologetics of religion. In 1904 Otto
published a general defense of religion against naturalistic materialism
under a title that could not have been more Schultzian: Naturalistische und
religiose Weltansicht (translated as Otto 1907). He followed this in 1909
with his systematic treatment of the philosophy of religion, Kant-Fries’sche
Religionsphilosophie (translated as Otto 1931). His last and final statement
along these lines was also his most famous: Das Heilige. After the publi­
cation of Kant-Fries’sche Religionsphilosophie Otto had intended to write
a general overview of the history of religions. Indeed, he had an agree­
ment to publish such a volume with J. C. B. Mohr in Tubingen (Otto 1909;
Siebeck), and in 1911 he began a “world tour” in preparation for these
pursuits. But the project turned out to be very ambitious, and Otto spent
many of his later years working on what was in some sense a preparation
for it: an examination of Hinduism in comparison with Christianity (esp.
Otto 1926, translated as Otto 1932b; 1928). Otto never did write a gen­
eral history of religions, but the Religionskundliche Sammlung (museum
of religions) that he founded in Marburg is directed to similar ends, even
if it utilizes a different medium of communication (Kraatz).
Throughout Otto’s career the bulk of his publications concerned the
first two parts of apologetics as conceived of by Schultz, the apologetics
of religion. He always presumed the superiority of Christianity, but he
never took up the task of writing an apologetics for it properly speaking.
That is, he never attempted, as Ernst Troeltsch did, to demonstrate the
superiority of Christianity. And although Otto always taught dogmatics,
he never published in the field. Within systematic theology, his only ma­
jor venture outside of an apologetics of religion came toward the end of
his life, when he began to publish on ethics (1981). It is difficult to say if
Schultz’s influence had any impact on this venture, but Schultz had seen
a lack of attention to ethics as a major failing in Schleiermacher’s account
of religious experience.
The impact of Otto’s student days did more than define the shape of
his writing program. Gottingen and Erlangen also defined in significant
ways the content of his thought. The more important influence was Schultz.
Like Schultz, Otto presumed that some form or other of Kantianism was
necessary to protect religion from materialist criticism; he distinguished
between naturalistic and religious worldviews and conceived of religious
experience, in Otto’s case, numinous experience, as a primary datum of
consciousness. Again like Schultz, Otto saw religion as a particular kind
of feeling; he tried to make this assertion more precise first by appealing

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 334 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

to Schleiermacher, then by appealing to Fries, and finally through the

analysis contained in Das Heilige. That last analysis hinges on the account
of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, and although Schultz did not
use these terms, all of its elements are present in his analysis of religious
feeling, including “the wholly other” and the emphasis on religious fear.
Finally, like Schultz, Otto does not limit religious feeling, that is, numinous
experience, to Christianity. He sees it as present in all religions, and he
associates its earliest stages with the tremendum. Not only are all of these
features quintessential Otto; they probably encompass all that many people
know of Otto’s thought. It is curious that when voiced by Schultz these
ideas belong to Christian apologetics but when voiced by Otto they count
as Religionswissenschaft, the science of religion.
Erlangen was certainly not the influence on Otto’s thought that
Gottingen was, but its influence was not negligible either. After all, in his
last lectures before his retirement Otto was still able to call himself a “pi-
etistic Lutheran” (Frank: 14). Otto’s deconversion amounted to a rejec­
tion of the specific content of the Erlangen synthesis: the uniqueness of
Christianity and of the Christian experience of regeneration along with
the affirmation of a confessional theology as the proper account of that
experience. As Otto later wrote in Das Heilige, “What we Christians know
as the experiences of grace and the second birth have their parallels also
in the religions of high spiritual rank beyond the borders of Christianity.
Such are the breaking out of the saving ‘Bodhi,’ the opening of the ‘heav­
enly eye,’ the Jñána, by tsvaras [sic] prasãda, which is victorious over the
darkness of nescience and shines out in an experience with which no other
can be measured” (1950: 38).
Nevertheless, Erlangen’s influence lingers in important formal patterns
of Otto’s thought. In chapter 1 of Das Heilige Otto favors experience over
an orthodoxy of words and ideas; in chapter 8 (chapter 7 in the English trans­
lation) he struggles to relate the irrational and the rational by means of Kant’s
notion of schematization. This interplay of the rational and the irrational,
along with the primacy of the latter, is reminiscent of the Erlangen concern
to reconcile the experiential and the ideational. The basic problem is the
same, although the solution is formulated in different terms. For the Erlangen
theologians, religious experience is capable of rational formulation in con­
fessional theology—in this case, too, finitum capax infiniti (the finite is
capable of the infinite)—but for Otto it remains at heart irrational, incom­
prehensible, ineffable. As he writes of the mysterium in Das Heilige, “[It] is
in very truth positive in the highest degree, though here too, as before, it
cannot be rendered explicit in conceptual terms” (1950: 30).
Further, in keeping with Erlangen theology but also in keeping with
Jakob Friedrich Fries and the Pietism that lies behind Erlangen as well as

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 Alies. Toward a Genealogy of the Holy 335

Fries, Otto’s account of numinous experience is highly introspective. For

Otto, the ultimate criterion in judging accounts of religious experience is
the degree to which they correspond to the religious scholar’s own experi­
ences. He writes, “What is meant [by the term mysterium] is something
absolutely and intensely positive. This pure positive we can experience in
feelings, feelings which our discussion can help to make clear to us, in so
far as it arouses them actually in our hearts” (1950:13). And about the claims
of a person who lacks the appropriate sensorium Otto writes, “The artist,
who for his part has an intimate personal knowledge of the distinctive ele­
ment in the aesthetic experience, will decline his theories with thanks, and
the religious man will reject them even more uncompromisingly” (1950:
8). One might reformulate Hofmann’s dictum as follows and apply it to
Otto: “Reltgionswissenschaft is only free science when I the religious person
am for me the scholar of religions the most proper object of my study.”
The privileged position of introspection had important consequences
for Otto’s thought. On the one hand, it determined his approach to the
interpretation not just of the Bible, as it did with Hofmann, but of all sa­
cred writings. Otto was certainly not averse to textual criticism, as his
rather idiosyncratic identification of the layers of tradition in the Bhaga-
vadgita demonstrates (1939). But his underlying goal was to find in the
text the dimensions of feeling that he had identified through his own in­
trospection. As a result, philologists have often found his interpretations
suspect. On the other hand, Otto’s orientation toward personal experi­
ence led him, as it did Hofmann and Frank before him, to adopt a limited
view of competence. As we have seen, Otto asked those who could recall
no numinous experiences to stop reading his book. They would not be
able to understand it.
This restricted view of competence is instructive. In Das Heilige Otto
is writing a particular kind of science of religion, a distant kin to F. H. R.
Frank’s System of the Christian Certainty. It is an apologetics of religion
but not a full-fledged one. In this system of religious (rather than Chris­
tian) certainty Otto does not attempt to defend religion against all oppo­
nents in a no-holds-barred discussion. He limits competence to those
individuals who already recognize numinous experience and observes in
passing how from this point of view various naturalistic accounts are
unsatisfactory (cf. 1950: 15). But Otto diverges from Frank’s program in
an important way. Frank presumed the experience of Christian regenera­
tion and then proceeded to analyze it. Otto does more.5 Instead of assum­

5 One can speculate that Otto adopted an altered strategy because he knew from personal expe­
rience the limits of a science of certainty that simply presumed the presence of a particular reli­
gious experience.

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 336 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

ing that his readers already share a sense of numinous experience, he at­
tempts to evoke it in them. “There is only one way,” he writes,
to help another to an understanding of [numinous experience]. He must
be guided and led on by consideration and discussion of the matter through
the ways of his own mind, until he reach the point at which “the numinous”
in him perforce begins to stir, to start into life and into consciousness. We
can co-operate in this process by bringing before his notice all that can be
found in other regions of the mind, already known and familiar, to resemble,
or again to afford some special contrast to, the particular experience we
wish to elucidate.... In other words our X cannot, strictly speaking, be
taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind. (1950: 7)

We might say that Das Heilige places the new wine of Schultz’s apolo­
getics of religion, with its view of religion as rooted in feeling, especially
the feelings of fear and trust, into the old wineskins of Frank’s system of
certainty. But it also does more. When Otto seeks to evoke numinous
feelings in his readers, he is no longer merely writing an academic system
of religious certainty or an apologetics of religion. He is delivering an
apologetic sermon.

CONCLUSION
Nothing that I have written should be taken as a claim that all of Otto’s
thought derives from Schultz and Frank or as a denial of the role of Otto’s
own creativity. Creativity is certainly there. It is evident in matters of sub­
stance, for example, in Otto’s grounding of religion not in morality but
in a peculiar kind of numinous experience, in his reformulation of Kant’s
schematization in order to account for the relation between the experi­
ential and the conceptual, in the choice of which elements to take from
Frank and Schultz and which to neglect (e.g., Schultz emphasizes the per­
son of Christ much more than Otto), and in his subde probing of mental
states to which Schultz only alluded. Creativity is also evident in matters
of rhetoric. Otto created a distinctive vocabulary—the numinous and the
mysterium tremendum etfascinans—so powerful that it gradually found
its way into standard English, not an insignificant feat for a book written
in German. His evocative account of numinous experience resonated
powerfully in the years following World War I, as evidenced by the num­
ber of languages into which Das Heilige was translated shortly after its
appearance. These distinctive contributions are hardly unexpected. We
still read and write about Otto today. Hofmann, Frank, and Schultz are
largely forgotten.
At the same time, it should not be unexpected that Otto’s thought
reflected his education. In formulating his distinctive ideas, he took

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 Alies: Toward a Genealogy of the Holy 337

Schultz’s ideas on religion and apologetic program, subtracted (in con­

trast to Troeltsch) the defense of Christianity as the absolute religion, and
combined them with patterns of thought that he learned at Erlangen. In
this regard it is fitting that Das Heilige was eventually dedicated to Theodor
Haring, the Gottingen theologian who taught Otto not to “look with dis­
dain upon and quickly condemn a standpoint that [Otto himself had]
given up,” that is, the Erlangen school (Otto 1891: 7 recto).
But this process is of more than biographical significance, for in it we
observe a transition in the configuration of knowledge from Christian
apologetics to an apologetics of religion, indeed, the constitution of Re-
ligionswissenschaft, the study of religions, as an apologetics of religion. That
transition is tied up with the history of the category “religion.” Among
others, Talal Asad has discussed how the category “religion” has devel­
oped in the course of the last 500 years to deal with specific problems
within European Christianity. Otto’s adaptation of Schultz’s apologetics
of religion is a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century contribution
to that development. The specific problem was the success of the natural
and historical sciences in the course of the nineteenth century and the
threat that as a result the Christian faith would no longer be tenable.
Otto’s—and Schultz’s—solution granted the claim of science and history
that all knowledge was rooted in experience but insisted that human ex­
perience was plural, not unitary. Natural science provided a certain kind
of knowledge based on a certain kind of experience. But religion involved
a different kind of experience that was equally valid, if not more so, al­
though somewhat less universal in scope. This different kind of experi­
ence required its own special science to reveal its own special truth. That
is, it required a science of religion.
In advancing such claims Otto’s apologetics of religion contributed
to a critique of modernity from within a theological modernism. It felt
the full force of scientific and historical criticism, and in response it sur­
rendered crucial elements of the theological tradition: sources of knowl­
edge (scriptural revelation, confessional norms), doctrinal assertions, and
the insistence on the absolute uniqueness of Christianity. For example,
before World War I Otto advocated abandoning the Apostles’ Creed in
worship because people could no longer recite it with conviction (191 la,
1911b, 1911c, 1913, translated in Otto 1996: 219-228). But Otto’s decon­
version from traditional Christianity did not lead him to take up a natural­
istic critique of religion as others had done, for example, David Friedrich
Strauss (1873). His deconversion was followed by a reconversion that
allowed him to take up not a defense of traditional Christianity but an
apologetics of religion. To put it another way, it led him to formulate a cri­
tique of modernity. In a manner commensurate with Hans Kippenberg’s

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 338 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

recent account of turn-of-the-century science of religion more generally

(258), it cleared a space for the primitive within the modern (Otto’s tre-
mendum next to Ritschl’s love), the irrational within the rational.
The development of a science of religion as an apologetics of religion
made it possible for Otto partially to realize his childhood aspirations: to
immunize religion, if not traditional Christianity, against the septic in­
vestigations of history and the natural sciences and, as a result, to main­
tain his faith, if in altered form. But its legacy left an important question
unresolved. Is the ultimate goal of Religionswissenschaft to understand
religion or to make religion possible?
Today we confront this question in the context of different problematics,
such as the challenges of an increasingly pluralistic democracy and increas­
ing global exchange of information and commodities. We tend to read it as
presenting a choice between two mutually exclusive options, one public
(science), the other private (religion). In the terms of the U.S. Supreme
Court, in the context of a public educational institution it is legitimate to
teach about religion—and religions—but neither to promote nor to inhibit
it—or them. For Otto, however, this question did not present an either/or
choice. As an apologist, he presupposed that a true understanding of reli­
gion was at the same time an apologetics for it.

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