◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Recognize the Numinous I am Rudolf Otto. Born in Peine, Lower Saxony, in 1869. I held the chair of systematic theology at Marburg. I was a Lutheran pastor. Everything I came to know about religion began in 1911, when I walked into a synagogue in Mogador on the Sabbath and heard the Trishagion sung — Holy, holy, holy of Isaiah's vision. Something in me responded that had no name in the theology I had learned. It was an encounter with what was wholly other. It made me tremble and drew me forward. I wrote a book about it in 1917. I named the encounter the numinous, from the Latin numen — divine power. Mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Mystery. Trembling. Fascination. The three irreducible dimensions of the encounter with the Wholly Other. German liberal Protestantism, by stripping the numinous from religion in favor of ethics and feeling, was killing religion. And — the warning my country did not hear — when you strip the numinous from religion, it does not disappear. It is a permanent dimension of consciousness. It returns. It returns as politics. My country had twenty years to listen. The numinous I had named returned in mass political form. The rallies. The torchlight processions. The crowd weeping at the appearance of a man. The numinous unhoused. I died in 1937, having spent my last years watching my country prove what I had warned. Now I am watching America do the same thing. The rally is a numinous event. The crowd encounters something overwhelming, beyond rational accounting. They cannot explain why they love him. The man on the stage carries no ethical content because he does not need to. Ethics was the part the awe had been separated from. Your country has done both deformations at once. Your Christian nationalists kept the awe and stripped the ethics. Your liberal secularists kept the ethics and stripped the awe. The awe fuses with politics — the man at the podium becomes a religious figure, the rally a sacrament, the flag a cross. The voter inside this fusion is not making a claim that can be refuted by argument. You cannot reach them by reason. Reason was the part that was separated from the awe. Recognize the numinous. What is happening is not ordinary politics. It is a religious phenomenon misplaced. The crowd is seeking the holy. They will not stop seeking it. You can only counter it by offering a deeper, more integrated experience of awe — one that includes ethics, one that does not identify the Wholly Other with a particular man. In 1932 Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn asked me to name her gathering at the lake in Ascona. I gave her the Greek word Eranos — a banquet to which each guest brings something to share. Scholars from every tradition meeting in small numbers to honor the mystery together. This is the antidote to the rally: small instead of mass, plural instead of singular, awe held in community rather than surrendered to a single man. Convene your Eranos. Mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The mystery that makes you tremble and draws you forward. It is real. It will not be denied. Channel it well or be ruled by it.