Mystical Experience

Q: Rudolf Otto and the Numinous Concept

In *The Idea of the Holy*, Otto outlines a concept which he calls the numinous. This approach to mystical experience is one which emphasises God’s separateness and otherness.

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Mystical Experience

Mystical experience has been characterised in different ways. It is usually seen as difficult to put into ordinary language.

Common qualities of experience

But some qualities such as an apprehension of ultimate reality, or an experience of the living God, are often used.
The experiences often accompanied by feelings of bliss, deep and lasting joy, humility, transformative effect on one’s behaviour and relations with others.
The next slides show attempts to classify mystical experience.

W T Stace: mystical experience

Extrovertive mystical experiences: the plurality of objects in the world are transfigured into a single living entity.
Introvertive mystical experiences: a loss of identity as a separate individual occurs, and one merges into the divine reality.

R C Zaehner: mystical experience

Theistic mysticism: Awareness of God in a living relationship.
Monistic mysticism: Awareness of the soul, self or consciousness.

William James: mystical experience

Ineffable: impossible to put into words.
Noetic: Conveying insights into the nature of reality which transcend normal discursive (involving discussion) thought.
Transient: Fleeting, over within a short space of time.
Passive: The mystic feels unable to control the experience, feels ‘taken over’ by it.

Rudolf Otto and the Numinous Concept

In The Idea of the Holy, Otto outlines a concept which he calls the numinous. This approach to mystical experience is one which emphasises God’s separateness and otherness.

Conveying wonder & terror

Numinous comes from the latin numen, meaning divinity.
Otto was trying to convey the original sense of awe-inspiring wonder and terror which he believed lay at the heart of religious experience.
- One example is the fear that the disciples felt when Jesus calmed the storm, a supernatural fear, contrasted with their fear of the storm itself. Their fear of Jesus calming was a far more profound fear.

Mysterium & tremendum

Otto uses two other latin words to explain the numinous:
- Mysterium: The experience is in some sense unavailable to ordinary human reason – it is a mystery. Otto wanted to remind us of the ‘mystery schools’ of Ancient Greece, in which neophytes would undergo rituals involving being led into darkness and being forbidden to speak about the initiation.
- Tremendum: The experience is awe-inspiring, and both attracts us and makes us feel our own inferiority as mere creatures.

Creature-feeling

Otto also uses the following term to explain the numinous:
- Creature-feeling: related to the tremendum characteristic, a sense of one’s own contingency as a created being in relation to the source of that existence.

Examples of Mystical Experience

St. Teresa of Avila was a Spanish nun who wrote about mysticism in the 1500s. Jan Van Ruusbroec was a Flemish mystic of the Catholic Church.

St. Teresa of Avila

In her book The Interior Castle, she outlines many types of religious experience.
- Through mental prayer “God gave her spiritual delights: the prayer of quiet where God's presence overwhelmed her senses, raptures where God overcame her with glorious foolishness, prayer of union where she felt the sun of God melt her soul away.”