C. Otto’s Hieroepistemic and Expressive Theory

Otto’s interpretation of the essence of religious experience is fundamentally hierophanic because he argues that religious experiences arise from the encounter of the human being with a form or state of being that manifests an aspect of existence that inspires awe as well as a compelling attraction. It also evokes a sense of the ineffable in relation to the effort to characterize it in terms of human conceptual categories. He develops the term myterium tremendum et fascinans, which is often described simply as the “numinous”, to represent this state of being or form of existence. The ideas of mystery, overpowering awe and a compelling fascination, are central to this concept. In the words of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, which tries to give a succinct definition of this term, it indicates the sense of an “unseen but majestic presence that inspires both dread and fascination and constitutes the nonrational element characteristic of vital religion”.

The hierophanic character of this theory consists in its emphasis on what Eliade, in another context, describes as the manifestation of the sacred by an otherwise profane phenomenon, a manifestation which subsumes the mundane character of that phenomenon and yet bodies forth a state of being beyond the mundane.

This conception implies that an agency acting from beyond the will of the subject impinges on the subject’s field of consciousness in a manner that inspires the responses of awe, the sense of an encounter with a mysterious “Otherness” and a compelling fascination. In focusing, therefore, on the recognition by the subject of a form or state of being independent of its own volitional processes, the theory emphasizes the activity of an agency external to the will of the subject acting on the subject.

In describing the theory as epistemic and expressive, we highlight its emphasis on the epistemological processes involved in interpreting and communicating the hierophanic experience. Otto focuses on the sense of the incommensurability between the plenitude of being realized through the encounter and the sense of the difficulty of interpreting and communicating the experience through conventional symbolic forms since the realities encountered in the meeting with the holy, as he describes it, seem to transcend normal human categories of apprehension and classification. He argues that the human mind, realizing this fundamental epistemic barrier, tries to interpret and suggest the character and effects of this experience in terms of phenomena to which it is accustomed. This effort does succeed in bringing the experience within the scope of human interpretation and classification but often achieves this at the price of vitiating the sense of the enigmatic potency of what has been encountered.4

---

4The dictionary definition of the numinous comes from Websters Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, 1961.The emphasis on the interpretive processes involved in processing, as it were, the hierophanic experience, recall Kant’s conception of cognition as possible only through the interpretation of phenomena within the structures of space and time and the consequent impossibility of apprehending the essential character, or noumenal reality embodied by phenomena. The human mind is limited, therefore, to the impressions, or phenomenal reality evoked by the elements of its experience, and, therefore, can not gain cognitive entry into their essential nature. These ideas are developed in his central epistemological work, The Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith(London:Macmillan,1963) His conception of the Sublime, however, as developed in The Critique of Judgement, tr. James Creed Meredith(Oxford: The Clarendon Press,1952) demonstrates a strong relationship to Otto’s conception of the numinous, particularly in terms of the paradoxical qualities of an experience which strangely reconfigures,.as it were, the conventional categories of human existence, and yet demonstrates a profound elevating power in its effects. One of the works in which Eliade develops the concept of hierophany is Patterns in Comparative Religion(London: Sheed and Ward,1958).