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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
An assessment is made of Rudolf Otto's criticisms of Friedrich Schleiermacher's claim that religious feeling is to be interpreted as essentially involving a feeling of absolute dependence. Otto's criticisms are divided into two kinds. The first suggest that a feeling a dependence, even an absolute one, is the wrong sort of feeling to locate at the heart of religious consciousness. It is argued that this criticism is based on misinterpretations of Schleiermacher's view, which is in fact much closer to Otto's than the latter appreciated. The second kind of criticism suggests that the feeling of absolute dependence cannot play the foundational role assigned to it by Schleiermacher, since it is itself a secondary response. It is argued not only that Otto provides no justification for this criticism, but that Otto's own position is incoherent unless Schleiermacher's view is accepted.
1. Unadorned references such as this are to Rudolf Otto The Idea of the Holy, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950). This is a translation by John W. Harvey of the 9th German edition of Otto's Das Heilige.
2. All such references are to Friedrich Schleiermacher Der Christliche Glaube, 2nd edn – a work commonly known as the Glaubenslehre. I quote from its English translation by H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928).
3. I should perhaps mention that Otto begins this criticism by writing that, when one has the religious experience in question, there is ‘a self-confessed “feeling of dependence”, which is yet at the same time far more than, and something other than, merely a feeling of dependence’ (9). This is problematic, since Otto seems to be saying that the feeling at least involves a feeling of dependence, though more. If, however, a sense of dependence gives us a sense of our standing in being whereas creature-feeling gives us a sense of our own nullity, and these two are opposed, the subject of the numinous experience would be internally conflicted in a way that is never suggested by Otto.
4. Unfortunately, it still features in the literature. Robert Merrihew Adams, for example, rehearses this wholly groundless accusation: see his ‘Faith and religious knowledge’, in Jacqueline Mariña (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 38.
5. Otto Das Heilige (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1963). This first edition was originally published in 1917 by Trewendt & Granier, Breslau.
6. Nothing corresponds to ‘merely’ in the first German edition of Das Heilige, but it is not a wilful insertion by the English translator: ‘nur’ was indeed added by Otto in later editions of his work.
7. On the same page Otto, by implication, denies that it concerns the Sein of the numen. It is Wert-bezüglich rather than Seins-bezüglich. (‘Ontological’ is used in the English translation.)
8. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for this journal for suggesting the need to address this question.
9. Rudolf Otto The Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant and Fries, tr. E. B. Dicker (London: Williams & Norgate, 1931), 23. This is an English translation of Otto's Kantisch-Fries'sche Religionsphilosophie und ihre Anwendung auf die Theologie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1909).
10. Smith, A. D. ‘Schleiermacher and Otto on religion: a reappraisal’, Religious Studies, 44 (2008), 295–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
