Rudolf Otto and the Limits of Religious Description

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Rudolf Otto and the Limits of Religious Description

L. Philip Barnes

Religious Studies / Volume 30 / Issue 02 / June 1994, pp 219 - 230DOI: 10.1017/S0034412500001505, Published online: 24 October 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0034412500001505

How to cite this article:L. Philip Barnes (1994). Rudolf Otto and the Limits of Religious Description. ReligiousStudies, 30, pp 219-230 doi:10.1017/S0034412500001505

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Rel Stud. 30, pp. 219-230 Copyright © 1994 Cambridge University Press

L. PHILIP BARNES

RUDOLF OTTO AND THE LIMITS OFRELIGIOUS DESCRIPTION

In a recent study entitled 'Numinous Experience and Religious Language',1

Dr Leon Schlamm has endorsed Rudolf Otto's well known and much dis-cussed account of the relationship of religious experience to religious langu-age, and then used this position to criticize some highly influential voices inthe continuing debate on the precise nature of mystical experience. The aimof this paper, in response to Schlamm, is to question the plausibility of Otto'saccount in The Idea of the Holy2 of the nature of religious knowledge and hisclosely related understanding of the relationship between religious experi-ence (or as he prefers, numinous experience) and religious language. Byimplication, this also calls into question Schlamm's use of Otto's position inhis criticism of those writers on mysticism that he takes issue with, chieflySteven Katz and those who propose an essentially Kantian interpretation ofmysticism. However, for the most part I shall leave the contemporary debateon mysticism unaddressed, though my comments do have a bearing on it. Ifthere is a wider target, it is chiefly those interpreters of religion, likeSchlamm, who conceive of the relationship of religious experience (or thereligious object itself) and religious language in essentially the same way asOtto. One thinks immediately here of Friedrich Schleiermacher,3 whom Ottoadmired greatly, and who stands in the same Liberal Protestant tradition.4

Also Karl Barth, who ironically, for all his strictures of Liberal Protestantism,actually propounded a view of the meaning and nature of religious languagewhich is remarkably similar to the views of both Schleiermacher and Otto;at least at the beginning of his theological career, in his famous commentaryon Romans: all that talk of God as 'the inexpressible' and 'the WhollyOther'.5 In addition one could mention those classical texts of Hinduism and

1 Religious Studies, xxvm (1992), pp 533—51 -2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), the title of the original work in German is Das Heilige -

'the Holy'.3 The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1928), an English translation of the 2nd substantially

revised edition of 1830; see Chap, i, particularly pp. 3-31 and pp. 7&-8.4 See Otto's 'Introduction' to Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers

(New York: Harper & Row, 1958); also Otto 'How Schleiermacher Rediscovered the Sensus Numinis',in Religious Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), pp. 68-77.

5 (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), a translation of the 6th German edition (1918), seeparticularly pp. 36, 42, 49, 98, 141, 250, 331, 422 and 505. Initially Barth took Otto's The Idea of the Holyas supportive of his own 'dialectical' or ' neo-orthodox' theism, but on further reflection became criticalof it.

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22O L. PHILIP BARNES

Buddhism,6 which like many contemporary writers on mysticism (e.g. thelate Deirdre Green7), conceive of mystical experience and the truth which itreveals as ' beyond the scope of discursive thought, language and empiricalactivity'.8

I shall begin by providing a short summary of Otto's account of numinousexperience and the relationship he believes to obtain between religiousexperience and its linguistic expression. This will clarify the view that I amcriticising.

According to Otto, experience of the holy, or as he more characteristicallycalls it, numinous experience, is 'the innermost essence of religion', and thatwhich gives religion its distinctiveness. The holy has both a rational and anon-rational aspect or nature. The rational nature of the holy allows it to bedescribed and classified, whereas its non-rational aspect, which Otto believesis the more basic and original, is beyond description and communication. Atits deepest level the holy is 'ineffable' and 'inexpressible'. Thus experienceof the holy is similarly beyond description and qualitatively unlike any otherexperience. Yet it constitutes the essential source of knowledge of the divine:numinous experience 'is a religious feeling providing a unique form ofreligious knowledge inaccessible to our ordinary rational understanding'.9

The holy may defy conceptual and rational analysis, but is neverthelessknown to us in numinous encounter.

Otto's account of the holy focuses (as the sub-title of his book indicates)10

on the relationship of the rational to the non-rational in religion, givingpriority to the latter, in opposition to the prevailing religious apologetics ofhis day. His account of this relationship is also integrally bound up with anequally nuanced and controversial interpretation of the nature and functionof religious language. For Otto, the truth of religion extends beyond theboundaries of language. There are religious truths too deep for words, in thesense that there are certain religious experiences which cannot be described,but which nevertheless convey knowledge of the holy. Religious experienceis primarily a feeling which defies conceptual understanding and lies beyondthe domain of discursive reason. Consequently, what is distinctive of religioncannot be adequately communicated by language. Even when we have saidall that we can about religion, we still have not touched that which is mostvital to it: experience of the holy. Thus religious language is chiefly evocative

6 See the relevant chapters of Walter T. Stace's collection of mystical texts, The Teaching of the Mystics(New York: New American Library, i960), pp. 30—101.

7 'St John of the Cross and Mystical "Unknowing"', Religious Studies, xxn (1986), pp. 29-40,particularly p. 30.

8 T. R. V. Murti, 'Samvrti andparamartha in Madhyamika and Advaita Vedanta', in M. Sprund (ed.),The Problem of Two Truths in Buddhism and Vedanta (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971), p. 17.

9 Schlamm, op. cit. p. 533.10 'An Inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational'.



OTTO AND RELIGIOUS DESCRIPTION 221

rather than descriptive; it seeks to evoke the experience of the holy, ratherthan describe it. The rational dimension of religious faith is parasitic upona non-rational and non-verbal core. As Schlamm notes, ' [at] the heart ofthis collection of [Otto's] claims about numinous experience is an epistemo-logical assumption about the distance separating religious language andexperience'.11 And it is this epistemological assumption which Schlammhimself wishes to clarify and defend.

From what I have said, it is clear that there are two central planks inOtto's interpretation of religion: (a) religious knowledge is essentially non-conceptual in form; and (b) the parameters of religious experience and truthextend beyond the parameters of religious language. Both together, accord-ing to Otto, entail that what is most real in religion is beyond description andpropositional expression. These closely related propositions are common toa number of writers on religion, past and present, of widely different theo-logical and religious persuasions; provided we allow that different forms ofreligious experience can be substituted for numinous experience. For ex-ample, as is well known, Schleiermacher regarded ' a feeling of absolutedependence' (das schlechthinige Abhdngigkeitsgefiihl) as the essence of religionand the type of experience which provided immediate knowledge of God.Schlamm and other contemporary writers want to say much the same thingas Otto, but this time with regard to mystical experience. In what follows Ishall challenge the tenability of both (a) and (b), suggesting that neither istenable in the light of a post-Wittgensteinian understanding of the nature oflanguage and experience, and their relationship to reality. In doing this, Ishall also draw attention to the largely apologetic motive which underscoresOtto's interpretation of religion; a motive which is frequently overlooked,though not infrequently exploited, by commentators.

II

According to Otto, although numinous experience is a genuine encounterwith the holy, this encounter cannot be translated into speech: knowledge ofthe holy is 'inexpressible', beyond conceptual understanding and descrip-tion, and incapable of being grasped by the intellect in its cognitive orrational mode. For him, there seem to be two species of knowledge —immediate awareness, which is non-conceptual or pre-conceptual in formand rational (because conceptual) knowledge. He writes accordingly:

Something may be profoundly and intimately known in feeling for the bliss it bringsor the agitation it produces, and yet the understanding may find no concept for it.To know and to understand conceptually are two different things, and are often evenmutually exclusive and contrasted. The mysterious obscurity of the numen is by nomeans tantamount to unknowableness.12

11 Schlamm, op at. p 533. 12 Otto, op. at. p. 135.



222 L. PHILIP BARNES

Before considering the plausibility of this distinction between non-concep-tual and conceptual forms of religious knowledge, let us pause briefly to notethe apologetic use to which it is put by Otto; for carefully integrated into hisaccount of the nature of religion is a defensive strategy to protect religioustruth claims. That this is the motive behind Otto's distinction is made clearin a number of places - no more so than the one I shall quote in full, in amoment. But first I want to place the passage in context. It comes at the endof a chapter on 'Divination in Christianity T o d a y ' - divination here is atechnical term for that human faculty by which one 'genuinely' (Otto'sword) recognizes the holy.13 Ironically, Otto is referring to the lack ofepistemic force numinous experience has for those without such experience.Yet implicitly the point is being made that numinous experience has epi-stemic force for those who do have the experience. From this he goes on toconclude that the rational criticism of those who do not have the experienceis of no relevance for those who have, and even more controversially still, andagain implicitly, that the truth and proper content of religion entirelydepends upon numinous experience (it is after all the essence of religion).Given that what is important in religion is non-rational it follows for Ottothat rational apologetics cannot commend religion, and more importantly,rational criticism cannot effectively criticize religion. On this scheme ofthings, religious faith and commitment to the holy are compatible withextreme scepticism regarding the historical and literary sources of a particu-lar religion. This is the clear implication, as Otto himself notes.

There can naturally be no defence of the worth and validity of... religious intuitionsof pure feeling that will convince a person who is not prepared to take the religiousconsciousness itself for granted. Mere general argument, even moral demonstrations,are in this case useless, are indeed for obvious reasons impossible from the outset. Onthe one hand the criticisms and confutations attempted by such a person are unsoundfrom the start. His weapons are far too short to touch his adversary, for the assailantis always standing right outside the arena! But if these intuitions, these separateresponses to the impress of the Gospel story and the central person to it - if theseintuitions are immune from rational criticism, they are equally unaffected by thefluctuating results of biblical exegesis and the laboured justifications of historicalapologetics. For they are possible without these, springing, as they do, from first-hand personal divination}11

From this it is quite clear that Otto is attempting to do much more thanaccurately describe religion. His intention is quite clearly to defend religionagainst criticism, and he does this by locating what is essential to religionbeyond the domain of rational knowledge, by opposing religious intuitionsof pure feeling to our normal categories of knowing. It is at this point thathis distinction between non-conceptual and conceptual knowledge is mostclearly seen for what it is: an apologetic device to safeguard the autonomyof religion and protect religious truth claims from rational criticism.

13 Otto, op. at. p. 144. 14 Ibid. p. 174, Otto's emphasis.




But does it make sense to speak of what can be known, in Otto's case thenuminous object, while maintaining that knowledge, in his case religiousknowledge, is not conceptual knowledge? The plausibility of this positiondepends on the plausibility of Otto's distinction between non-conceptualknowledge and conceptual knowledge and his assigning of what is importantin religion to the former rather than the latter. Of course he accepts thatreligion can be rationally criticised, but such criticism, because it is con-cerned with what is secondary, i.e. religion in its rational mode, does notdetract from religion in its essential non-rational mode. Religious experienceis a separate and distinctive moment in human experience and is, in prin-ciple, invulnerable to rational, or for that matter moral, criticism. But howsecure is this distinction, and the immunity of religion from criticism whichgoes with it?

Otto assumes that one can distinguish between feeling or awareness andthought, and that although both are categories of knowledge, only the latteris conceptual in form. Yet feeling for Otto has an object: in religious feelingthis object is the holy. Thus one feels the holy, knows the holy, but one doesnot have conceptual knowledge of the holy. As he says the holy 'can be firmlygrasped, thoroughly understood, and profoundly appreciated, purely in,with, and from the feeling itself'.15 He postulates the idea of a domain ofexperience, independent of the formative activity of the mind in applyingconcepts, in which there is direct contact with a reality which transcends thehuman self. In a moment of experience untouched by language the holy isrevealed to the inner self.

Can there be experience of an external object, as the holy is believed to be,an experience in which you learn something about the object (should it onlybe its existence), which does not involve conceptual understanding? Ottowrites in places as if religious feelings can be isolated from religious conceptswithout loss of meaning. Rather I would suggest that if the feeling of the holyis intentional, then it cannot be specified apart from reference to its object,and thus it cannot be independent of thought. One difficulty for Otto is thatreligious experience cannot be specified without reference to the holy: ex-perience without reference to the holy is not religious experience. In addition,this reference to the holy also requires, or presupposes, that the feeling, thereligious feeling, is the result of divine operation; without this judgement theexperience again remains without religious import. (Of course there is noproblem about having experience of x where you know nothing about x andlearn nothing about x in the process, even x's existence.) To invoke the holyas the cause of experience/feeling is to employ concepts, and quite complexconcepts at that, such as the concept of divine agency, the notion of aninvisible, powerful, personal spirit, etc. The criteria for identifying religiousexperience include reference not only to concepts but also to a specific belief

15 Ibid. P . 3 4 .



224 L - PHILIP BARNES

about how the experience is to be explained. Explanation and thus concep-tual understanding enter into experience from the outset. There is no privi-leged domain where religion can retreat to and remain immune from criti-cism, for once explanations are given and concepts used, it is appropriate toinquire of their appropriateness and adequacy.

Another way of exposing Otto's mistaken account of religious knowledgeas non-conceptual is to question his assumption that feelings are independentof thought and concepts. I have argued above that despite what he says, hisanalysis of numinous experience does require the subject of the experience toapply concepts, for it is only by their application that the experience isidentified and classified as religious. But one can go further than this andquestion his general assumption that feelings are independent of languageand conceptual understanding. According to Otto, unlike thought, feelingsor emotions cannot be accurately conveyed to another in words, but can beknown only by acquaintance; for feelings to be known they must be experi-enced at first hand. At one point toward the beginning of The Idea of the Holythe reader 'is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religiousexperience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness.Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience,is required to read no further.'16 In the context of Otto's work as a whole hisinvitation here is again clearly apologetic, for he clearly believes that every-one has deeply felt moments of religious experience. But this is not the pointI want to take up at present, rather I am interested in his understandingof feelings and emotions which this passage assumes and reveals; namelythat feelings - feeling of the holy - are, as it were, intensely private. Oneknows feelings only by acquaintance, as he says, those without theexperience/feelings should 'read no further'. In other words, those withoutthe feelings have no understanding at all of what the experience is like. Butsurely this fits uncomfortably with Otto's opinion, noted earlier, thatnuminous experience is ineffable or inexpressible: for what is the differencebetween having an experience which is inexpressible, and cannot be reportedin speech, and not having the experience? The result of both is silence. Inaddition, how is this enjoined silence consistent with his quite full anddetailed description of numinous experience?17 But overlooking this, let usjust take what he says at face value. In any case he might contend that hisdescription of a numinous experience is actually not descriptive butevocative. I don't think this defence is plausible but let us grant it for the sakeof pursuing the argument.

For Otto, words do not describe feelings but rather (in some unspecifiedsense) direct the hearer to the relevant part of his or her own experience.

16 Ibid. p. 8.17 I have considered the ineffability thesis, i.e. the thesis that religious experience, or even the religious

object itself, cannot be described in language, in 'Relativism, Ineffability and the Appeal to Experience:a Reply to the Myth Makers', Modern Theology vn (1990), pp. 101-14, particularly pp 107-10




Words serve as reminders of an experience once enjoyed or as signposts toenable one to discover an aspect of experience previously unattended to, butthere all the same. The idea is of feelings and emotions which a particularindividual has no language to express, but which still constitute knowledgefor that individual. Emotions, as it were, are empty of conceptual meaning,and exist prior to and independently of conceptual understanding; theyrelate contingently to the language which may subsequently be used toexpress them. This picture of emotions as directly and intuitively known,and independent of cognitive assumptions, has been challenged by recentwork in the philosophy of mind and language, work largely inspired by thephilosophy of the 'later' Wittgenstein.18 According to Wittgenstein ourfeelings and emotions are parasitic on our acquisition of language, for it is inlinguistic and conceptual terms that emotions are to be distinguished. Ouruse of'feeling' words presupposes an interpretative framework of meaning,conceptual and linguistic rules, a shared public world, and so on. It is onlyagainst this context that the vocabulary of feeling words are significant andgain a meaning. Once this conceptual content (and context) is recognized,it then raises the issue of whether emotions are appropriate or not to thesituation. For example, if the object towards which an emotion is directed isfound to be non-existent then the emotional response is in an important senseunjustified or unnecessary. Our assessment of emotions is parasitic upon ourassessment of the world and the objects of the world.

Against Otto, feelings do not provide independent, non-conceptual, (andsufficient) epistemic grounds for the existence of objects in the external world.He seems to assume that because one has a feeling (without conceptualcontent!), or emotions of a certain kind, that one is entitled to believe in acorresponding object in the real world, and not just in the imagination. Butas I have already argued there are two problems here. In the first place ourfeelings come already clothed in conceptual dress, they are not immune fromcriticism and direct in the sense Otto believes. And secondly, feelings can bejustified or unjustified, and once this is recognized an appropriate place mustbe given to reason and argument, so that real objects (by which I mean hereobjects existing externally and independently of the human self) can bedistinguished from imaginary objects.

in

The second issue I indicated I would address is Otto's account of therelationship of religious truth to religious language, which I summarizedunder (b), namely, the parameters of religious experience and truth extend

18 See Philosophical Investigations (Oxford. Basil Blackwell, 1958), and On Certainty (Oxford' BasilBlackwell, 1967;.




beyond the parameters of religious language. Much of what I have saidabove has a bearing on this, so we are not beginning from scratch.

According to Otto, asking how religious language both functions andacquires its meaning is asking of the relation between the non-rational aspectof the holy and the rational. Religious language is the bridge from experienceto description, from the non-rational to the rational. But how is this bridgeerected and how does it function? Otto identifies two connections betweenreligious experience, as felt, and its linguistic and conceptual expression: onebased on the association of ideas, and related to the ineffability thesis; andthe other, which is accorded a more subsidiary role, a Kantian type theoryof schematization. O. R.Jones has argued that Otto's use of Kant here isquite foreign to Kant's original intention and not fully compatible with aKantian epistemology.19 For these reasons I shall omit discussion of this laterpoint and focus on the former.

For Otto because numinous experience is non-conceptual there is nonatural language to express it (hence his ineffability thesis). However, hedoes grant that some terms can function in an indirect manner to bring theexperience into 'clearer consciousness', while not actually describing it. Thusnuminous experience cannot be described, but it can be evoked or arousedby analogous feelings, i.e. those natural feelings which most closely resemblenuminous feelings. This Otto calls 'the law of the association of feelings'.20 Ihave no doubt that Otto is saying something valuable here, but again thereis conceptual confusion. Certainly the descriptive technique of clarifying anexperience by drawing parallels with other more familiar experiences is bothhelpful and illuminating. For example, Otto compares numinous feelings tothe creeping feeling one experiences in the presence of a corpse;21 the formerare different but not unlike the latter. The drawing of comparisons betweenone experience and another is common enough to be unproblematic andrequires no special attention: it is a case of the more familiar (or, as in theexample above, the potentially more familiar) being used to illuminate theunfamiliar. But what of the conceptual confusion I spoke of? Again it relatesto Otto's understanding of the nature and function of language in generaland religious language in particular.

In Chapter vii of The Idea of the Holy, entitled 'Analogies and AssociatedFeelings', Otto reflects on how one feeling can 'excite another and call it intoconsciousness... A feeling... can arouse its like in the mind; and the presenceof the one in my consciousness may be the occasion for my entertaining theother at the same time'.22 But his reflection here is not very deep, for hissetting out of the comparison between numinous experience and other formsof experience is of course conceptual and linguistic. (The medium he uses todraw the comparison is literary.) Yet his general view of language is that

19 The Concept of Holiness ( L o n d o n : G e o r g e Allen & U n w i n , 1961), p . 127.20 Otto, op. at. pp. 42-9. 21 Ibid pp. 14-19, and p 119. 22 Ibid. p. 42.




feelings cannot be described (because they are non-conceptual, and this inturn is required because they are not expressible in the sense-terms, seebelow), similarly so with religious feelings. But in drawing the comparison heassumes that feelings, i.e. those natural (non-religious) feelings akin to nu-minous feelings, can be described: natural feelings must be capable of con-ceptual description, for how else is the comparison possible? Feelings mustbe able to be distinguished from each other in language if real communi-cation is to take place; and Otto assumes this is making his comparison!

The second confusion is related to this. Otto writes as if words have ameaning only when that meaning can be specified in terms of sense experi-ence and properties. It is because of this that, for him, the content of'feeling'words, values, the holy, etc, cannot strictly be described, that is, because theyare not reducible to sense impressions; if they were they could be clearlyexpressed. In this respect his position is not unlike that of the logical posit-ivists, who attempted to marry cognitive meaningfulness to empirical verifi-ability. A. J. Ayer is typical of this school when he proposes that ' a statementis held to be literally meaningful if and only if it is either analytic orempirically verifiable'.23 On the basis of this, and further revised criteria, itwas concluded that religious, and indeed moral, statements were factuallyempty, literally having no sense. Where Otto differs fundamentally from thepositivists is that he believed, unlike them, in a realm of meaning beyond andoutside experience as limited by this empiricist criterion. It was in this'transcendent' realm that he located feelings, values, and of course the holy;and given that such 'realities' cannot be described in sense terms (and thusare according to him non-conceptual), Otto concluded that language wasalmost totally unsuited to expressing them. Basically such realities werebeyond language, though none the less real.24

Otto certainly believed that essentially language cannot express religiousmeaning and value, and when he was prepared to compromise this byallowing a religious use of language he insisted that words were being usedin an 'indirect', 'odd', and 'symbolic' way. Language is appropriate todescribe (by way of one to one correspondence) objects, properties, andrelationships in the world but when extended analogically and meta-phorically becomes unreliable and conceptually confused. When language isused beyond its natural realm (of sense impressions) its meaning becomesunclear - hence the numinous can be felt but not conceptually known.

This account of the relationship between language, experience and realityis deeply flawed. While accepting that Otto does not limit knowledge to whatis verified by sense experience, he does nevertheless use this principle to

23 Language, Truth and Logic ( L o n d o n : Gol lancz , 1946), p . 9.24 One is tempted to draw a comparison here with Wittgenstein's conclusion in the Tractatus (London:

Routledge & Regan Paul, 1953), 6.522, when he says that 'there are things which cannot be put intowords'. By this Wittgenstein arguably meant such things as ethical values, aesthetics, and more contro-versially, religion.




distinguish what can be clearly said (and thus conceptual) from what cannotbe said (thus non-rational or non-conceptual), or at least from what mustforever remain unclearly expressed. Religious language is assigned to thelatter. I have already argued that the distinction Otto draws betweenconceptual and non-conceptual knowledge is untenable, and it is now widelyaccepted that any attempt to define factual significance in terms of any of thecommonly proposed empiricist criteria of meaning is unsatisfactory for bothinternal and external reasons.25 This leaves one final point: Otto's equationof conceptual and linguistic clarity with what is capable of literal expression,basically what can be expressed in sober, non-metaphorical prose, and hisequation of what is unclear and confused with the language of metaphor,language and symbol. Again, for Otto, religion is expressed through thelatter, and thus is expressed poorly and unclearly.

I have a number of objections to this. First, although quite a number ofmodern theologians (e.g. Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, John Macquarrie) havecontended that we cannot speak literally of God, the truth of this is beginningto be regarded as not at all obvious, once some simple misunderstandings arecleared away. William Alston has argued that much of the opposition toliteral talk of God is based on a false association of what is literal with whatis univocal or empirical. He perhaps has done more than an other philos-opher to rehabilitate the notion that certain predicates have a literal ap-plication to God, predicates like love, knowledge, powerful, and so on. ForAlston, once it is recognized that words with a literal sense can be legitimatelyused in quite different linguistic contexts (i.e. once the link between 'literal'and 'univocal' is broken), then the way is open for a literal interpretation ofmany of the predicates we use of God. Our concepts of love, knowledge andpower can be purified by eliminating all those features which pertain toembodiment, temporality and so forth, leaving a core of meaning which canbe (literally) attributed to God.26 I shall leave the matter here.

Secondly, and more importantly, it can even be granted that religiousadherents and theologians do use words in an analogical or extended way,but this contra Otto, in itself, does not necessarily lead to confusion, ambi-guity, or loss of meaning. This point can be made in two ways. The first isto note that the equation of clarity with literality is really an unwarrantedlegacy of verificationism. Lurking at the back of this equation is the notionthat there is an ideal descriptive (literal) form of language to which all otherlinguistic uses must conform in order to be meaningful and truth-stating.The logical positivists certainly thought of scientific language in this way(but see below). Again Wittgenstein's later philosophy has exposed themistakenness of this. There is no ideal language, either scientific or otherwise,

25 See Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1977;, pp. 11-492 6 S e e t h e r e l e v a n t essays in A l s t o n ' s Divine Mature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical Theology

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); also relevant is Barry Miller, 'Analogy Sans Portrait: God-talk as Literal but Non-anthropomorphic', Faith and Philosophy, vn 1 igqo:, 63-84



OTTO AND RELIGIOUS DESCRIPTION 220.

which provides a blueprint for all meaningful and significant linguisticutterances. In the Investigations Wittgenstein introduces the notions of'language games', 'forms of life', and the slogan 'meaning as use' to showthe way language is a social phenomenon, imbedded in a particular socialcontext, and to illustrate the legitimate variety of linguistic usage. Ordinarylanguage, the thought forms within which we act and think, is filled withmetaphor and symbol. Think of the explanatory activity of drawing acomparison, the question 'What is it like?' - literally to what can it becompared ? And a request for a comparison is a request for an analogy. Thegiving of an analogy makes things clearer (or at least it is intended to), ratherthan confuses. My second point is closely related to this, for it is to note therole analogy and metaphor play in the sciences. There was a time, not allthat long ago, when philosophers of a positivist bent, compared religionunfavourably with science, on the basis, inter alia, that the former employedmetaphorical and symbolic language, whereas the latter relied exclusivelyon a literal use of language. More recent studies of the language andmethodology of science, however, have revealed that the scientific enterpriseis not as patently objective, verifiable and literal as positivists once imagined.It is now widely recognized that symbols, metaphors, and extended meta-phors in the form of interpretative models play a significant role in scientificdescription and theorizing. The analogous employment of metaphors andmodels in science and theology has been noted and explored by a numberof writers, most significantly by Ian Barbour,27 Sallie McFague28 and JanetSoskice.29 I f 'pure ' science resorts to metaphor and analogy in the quest forclarity, then it would be churlish to conclude, as Otto does, that the religioususe of metaphors tends to disguise and conceal, rather than reveal, religioustruth.

In this paper I have subjected to criticism Rudolf Otto's highly influentialinterpretation of religion, which has recently been endorsed by LeonSchlamm. I focused on two particular propositions: (a) religious knowledgeis essentially non-conceptual in form; and (b) the parameters of religiousexperience and truth extend beyond the parameters of religious language. Ihave argued that neither of these propositions is tenable in the light of recentdevelopments in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. Ihave also suggested that Otto's intention in sharply distinguishing non-conceptual religious awareness from our ordinary categories of knowing isinspired by the apologetic motive of protecting religion's autonomy, not justin the sense of insisting that there is a distinctively religious domain of

27 Myths, Models and Paradigms (London: SCM Press, 1974).28 Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language ( P h i l a d e l p h i a : F o r t r e s s P ress , 1982 ) .29 Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford- Clarendon Press, 1985); also Richard Swinburne, op. at.,

pp. 50-84, and idem , Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 39-51;and very recently Iris M. Yob, 'Religious Metaphor and Scientific Model: Grounds for Comparison',Religious Studies, xxvni (1992), 475-85.



23O L. PHILIP BARNES

experience, but in the additional sense that religion, he believes, should beimmune from rational criticism. Such a strategy is as misconceived as itis unsuccessful. Equally unsuccessful is Schlamm's attempt to use Otto'sposition to challenge that line of interpretation of mysticism associated withStephen Katz, which teaches that mystical experience must necessarily andsubstantially conform to the particular religious allegiance of the mystic.That Katz's Kantian account of mysticism is deficient, I do not doubt, butit is deficient in ways inaccessible to those who follow Otto's interpretationof religion.30

Department of Philosophy and Politics,University of Ulster,Coleraine,Co. Londonderry BT 52 iSA

30 I would like to thank Professor Robert McKim of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaignfor written comments on an earlier version of this paper.


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Rudolf Otto and the Limits of Religious Description