Rudolf Otto (1869-1937)

Using Jakob Fries's epistemological scheme of Wissen, Glaube, and Ahndung, "Understanding, Belief, and Aesthetic Sense," (to use Kent Richter's translation), Ruldolf Otto expands the meaning of Ahndung beyond the merely aesthetic by introducing the category of numinosity, which is the quality of sacred or holy objects, persons, or experiences in religion.

Otto's word derives from Latin numen, "the divine will, divine command; the might of a deity, majesty, divinity." On analogy with omen, which we retain in English, Otto coined "numinous" (numinosus, like the existing ominosus, "ominous") and "numinosity" (numinositas). I have not found a corresponding term in Greek, and the original meaning of numen itself was "a nodding with the head, a nod," which seems to have indicated how the statue of a god, carried by attendants, might nod in oracular answer to a question. This is a common phenomenon, through which the will of the god, and then his power, came to be indicated. Although perhaps lacking in Greek, there are comparable terms in other languages [note].

Although Otto is often classified as a theoretician of mysticism, "numinosity" is not fundamentally a theory of mystical experiences, because every practitioner of any religion regards certain things as sacred to that religion. The "sacred" and the "holy," and the "unclean" or "polluted," are categories that apply (non-metaphorically) to peculiarly religious objects in an entirely universal and cross-cultural manner.

Otto's greatest limitation is in fact the residual rationalism of Kant and Fries. This is expressed best by Otto himself, in the foreward to his famous The Idea of the Holy [Das Heilige, 1917]:

Before I ventured upon this field of inquiry I spent many years of study upon the rational aspect of that supreme Reality we call "God," and the results of my work are contained in my books, Naturalistische und religiöse Weltansicht (Eng. Tr. "Naturalism and Religion", London, 1907), and Die Kant-Friesische Religions-Philosophie [The Philosophy of Religion based on Kant and Fries, London, 1931]. And I feel that no one ought to concern himself with the "Numen ineffabile" who has not already devoted assiduous and serious study to the "Ratio aeterna".

What Otto inherited from Kant and Fries was the theory that reason itself unavoidably and necessarily produces the "Ideas" of God, freedom, and immortality. Otto therefore regarded religions as more developed, not just in the sense that they embodied refined moral conceptions, but in so far as they were associated with the concept of God and the retributions or rewards of an afterlife. Since religions like Buddhism did not have a God, and religions like ʾIslām did not have a sufficiently, for Otto, moralized God, they were developmentally inferior to Christianity.

Thus, ironically, while Otto is often dismissed as a mystic, the real barrier to the generalization of his system was the rationalistic theology of Kant and Fries. If reason is not regarded as naturally and necessarily productive of Christian theological concepts, then nothing prevents Otto from properly recognizing the common elements of all world religions. There is no doubt, indeed, that the Buddha, as the "Blessed One," is a supremely numinous person, whatever his ontological status with respect to ultimate reality. The tendency to personalize the object of religion can thus be acknowledged, without requiring the metaphysics of a Supreme Being. Similarly, the element of arbitrariness in the Will of God in ʾIslām is no more than a reflection of the polynomic independence of numinosity and morality. This has recently been nicely expressed by Jacques Barzun:

The truth that religion and morality are at odds with each other is rarely acknowledged, probably because the two desires are equally strong in the human breast, reflecting there the respective demands of society and of the self. [From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present, HarperCollins, 2000, p.55]

The Friesian would only correct this to say that the "respective demands" are, not "of society and of the self," but of reason and of Ahndung.

Otto's point cannot be appreciated until religion is understood as addressing more than what is right and wrong or good and beautiful. The final mysteries of life and reality cannot be answered by science, ethics, politics, or art; for none of them can even begin to address the issue of the meaning or purpose of the whole, or of the sufferings of an individual human life, which inevitably comes to a more or less arbitrary and unsatisfactory end. Nevertheless, most human beings have lived their lives and reached their ends with some sense of ultimate meaning, however irrational or inexplicable, whether through an overtly religious approach, philosophical resignation, or some obviously fraudulent religion substitute (Marxism, etc.). Otto's Friesian theory, only a footnote to philosophy and religion in the 20th century, nevertheless has offered the best chance for conceding to each its due for philosophy, science, religion, and the plurality of world religions.

Otto's falling out with Leonard Nelson, by whom he was introduced to Friesian theory, was due in part to Otto's greater political conservatism and to the rationalism that led Nelson to make vaguely positive statements about religion but not specifically positive statements about any actual religions. Even Otto's preference for Christianity did not prevent him from exhibiting great interest in all world religions.

On Miracles

The Mystery of Miracles

On the Sublime and the Numinous

The Kant-Friesian Theory of Religion and Religious Value

The New Friesian Theory of Religious Value

Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation

Rudolf Otto in Rem B. Edwards' Reason and Religion

Rudolf Otto Biography at "Religionsgeschichtliche Schule"

History of Philosophy

Philosophy of Religion

Otto on Home Page

Home Page

Copyright (c) 1996, 2000, 2009, 2017 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved

Rudolf Otto (1869-1937); Note

While I have not yet seen a term in Greek comprable to numen in Latin, I am intrigued by ὀργή, orgé, and its derivatives, like ὄργια, órgia. There are two basic meanings to ὀργή: (1) "natural impulse, temper, temperament, disposition, nature"; and (2) "passion, anger, wrath." If this is attributed to the gods, as it can be, it will not be the will or power of the god, but the god's anger -- probably because of the god's will being violated and in preparation for the god's wrathful power being manifest.

With ὄργια, we seem to get something rather different, but more overtly related to the divine nature, in two forms again: (1) "secret rites, secret worship," of initiates, particularly of Dionysius, but, as we see of Demeter; and (2) "any worship, rites, sacrifices." This is where we get the word "orgy," which is a practice, secret or not, involving general debauchery and particularly promiscuous group sex. This is the implication of the rites of Dionysius in The Bacchae by Euripides, but it has not been imputed to the rites of Demeter at Eleusis. The modern orgy rarely has anything to do with religion, while the "fall" of Rome is popularly attributed to debauches that no longer would have existed after Constantine instituted Christianity, and would already have been uncommon among the soldier emperors of the Third Century. It is clear that even to the most sober of historians -- or perhaps particularly to them -- paganism was just more fun.

But how in the world do we get from the meaning of ὀργή to that of ὄργια? This is what intrigues me. If ὀργή were itself the numen, the connection would be easy enough, as the divine power can be summoned and felt in the divine rites, perhaps to an orgiastic extent. The divine wrath may already be divine power. But I don't think I can go further than that. "Anger" in Latin, ira, doesn't have these other associations.

Return to Text

Fear and Tremendum:
Rudolf Otto in Lenn Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary
Philosophical Investigation

How could any ancient or primitive soul
have higher thoughts than savagery permits?

Lenn E. Goodman, Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation
[Routledge, 2017, p.73], falsely attributing the principle or sentiment questioned here to Rudolf Otto.

---

Karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana /
mā karmaphalahetur bhūr mā te sango 'stv akarmaṇi,

Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward.
Work not for a reward; but never cease to do thy work.

The Bhagavad Gita, 2:47, Juan Mascaró translation [Penguin Books, 1962, p.52],
being some "higher thoughts" from an "ancient soul"; cf. Kant's categorical imperative.

---

The first of these [strands in religion] is what Professor Otto calls the experience of the Numinous. Those who have not met this term may be introduced to it by the following device. Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room’, and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a mighty spirit [let’s say an angel, ] in the room’, and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking -- a sense of inadequancy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it -- an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words ‘Under it my genius is rebuked’. This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain , 1940 [Macmillan, 1944, HarperOne, 2001, pp.5-6; forms of British punctuation in evidence]. [note]

---

Judaism seems to me to be concerned almost exclusively with the moral attitude in life and to life...

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

Albert Einstein, quoted by Norman Lebrecht, Genius & Anxiety, How Jews Changed the World 1847-1947, Scribner, 2019, pp.189-190.

---

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

W.B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium" [616, The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Christopher Ricks, Oxford, 1999, p.526].

---

This is indeed the word of a noble messenger.
It is not the word of a poet: how little is your belief!
And it is not the word of a seer: how little you reflect!

ʾal-Qurʾān, Sura 69:40-42 [translation, Arabs, A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, p.130, translation modified]; see here.

---

τί γάρ; μὴ καθαρὸς ἔσται βροτὸς ἐναντίον τοῦ Κυρίου
ἢ ἀπὸ τῶν ἔργων αὐτοῦ ἄμεμπτος ἀνήρ;

Numquid homo Dei conparatione iustificabitur?
aut factore suo purior erit vir?

Can a mortal be more righteous than God?
Can a man be more pure than his Maker?

Job 4:17

The purpose here is not a general review of Lenn Goodman's Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation. Instead, Goodman's book is taken as an example of how Rudolf Otto and his theory of numinosity () are treated in some contemporary philosophical literature involving religion. Goodman's presentation or interpretation of Judaism or Jewish philosophy, whatever its merits, is of incidental or tangential concern. His treatment of Otto, however, is noteworthy as being markedly different from that of Rem B. Edwards, reviewed elsewhere.

Where Edwards gives us a neutral, if mistaken, description of Otto's theory in a general philosophy of religion book, in Goodman's chapter on "Holiness" we find what can only be described as a polemic against Otto, with what seems to be real hostility, along with insults and implied smears [pp.71-73]. I'm not sure I can explain the motivation for this nature of the treatment; but for the better part of three pages we get an analysis where hardly a sentence does not contain, with a tone of animosity, some misunderstanding or misrepresentation of Otto's theory [note].

Goodman's presentation certainly builds on problems such as we see in Edwards, which are current in academic philosophy of religion. And as with Edwards, Goodman displays no familiarity with the Friesian background of Otto's treatment, despite Otto's own plea for consideration of his earlier, foundational work, and its Friesian context -- something ignored by what might be nearly all readers of The Idea of the Holy. Nor does Goodman show any critical evaluation of the familiar mistaken constructions of Otto's theory, e.g. as something just about mysticism. At this point, "due diligence" would have suggested some improvement in those terms. But we don't see it. Also, Goodman not only neglects the Friesian background of Otto's theory, but we also find misconceptions, with flashes of hostility or contempt, about areas of Kant's philosophy that are used or relied upon by Otto.

That is odd, since Goodman's project seems to be to reduce religion, or at least Judaism, to morality. That was also Kant's project, and Goodman furiously attacks Otto's (sensible) departures from it. Indeed, we can say that Otto's fundamental thesis is that there is more to religion than morality (following Fries), a lot more (beyond Fries), contrary to Kant; and it is not surprising if Goodman reacts sharply, passionately, and defensively against this. Yet Goodman also ends up trying to discredit Kant, using points that do not discredit Kant (and, if correct, would also discredit Goodman), while ignoring others that do.

Thus, Goodman exhibits some confusion about whether morality is based on reason or on Biblical revelation. He condemns Otto for a rejection of "rationalism," but then he attacks the moral rationalism of Kant, which Otto appropriates in its entirety. And he condemns Otto for rejecting or ignoring the moral system of Biblical Law and Prophets, even though he clearly does not, and Goodman's accusations and insinuations are quite false, without basis in the text of Otto's book -- indeed, contradicted by it. So, as we will see, Goodman is left with a tough choice. Is he a rationalist in morality, where he must agree with Kant and Otto, or is he a Biblical textualist in morality, which would exclude Kant, but actually does not exclude Otto, whom he mistakenly attacks? Goodman's confusion and dilemma seem to result from what are debating techniques, not logic, in his polemic against Otto.

These circumstances may require some more than incidental reflection on the nature of Goodman's book. His reaction to Otto is as though monotheistic religion in general, and Judaism in particular, has been personally insulted, with other kinds of religion (including most historical religions, ancient and modern), unworthy of our attention, inappropriately, perhaps "romantically," promoted.

But Goodman has targeted Rudolf Otto, not Joseph Campbell. And Otto has no such preference. And if Otto has any bias against Judaism, it is simply, without rancor or animus, in favor of Christianity -- a bias Otto shares with Kant (who, unfortunately, does not seem free of the rancor or animus -- and who does not, as it happens, obviously profess any identifiable version of actual Christianity). But while Goodman accuses Otto of "historical chauvinism" for such bias, as we will see, Goodman is not free from something of the same sort, since he assumes that the proper focus of Otto's work, and its sins, occur only in relation to Judaism -- or at least Judaism as interpreted, constructed, and affirmed, if not promoted, by Lenn Goodman. However, it will help to consider, as I go along, what Goodman would actually have meant by "chauvinism" in a case like this. Since Goodman seems to have nothing but contempt for ancient religion (only "romantics" care about it), it is hard to see why he is not a lot more biased and "chauvinistic" than Rudolf Otto.

Yet, as philosophy of religion, Otto's concern is properly with all the varieties of religion. Goodman's is not. This is not surprising, perhaps, in a book about Judaism, but it constitutes a focus that cannot be externally and prescriptively imposed on Otto, with acidic rebukes for deviation. And I am left with the impression that noticing other religions, especially ancient or, in monotheistic terms, anomalous ones, constitutes for Goodman the "romantic" preference and morally debased promotion of such religions, rather than the conscientious attention required for a historian and philosopher of religion, whose duty is faithful description and understanding.

Instead, Goodman says that his project is to "restore the Hebrew idea of the holy to its moral roots" [p.xiv]. It may be much more difficult, as we will see, to suppose that there are "moral roots" of the holy in many other religions -- which compromises the generality of Goodman's project and vindicates Otto's. Goodman, as is understandable, is a advocate of Judaism, or at least his philosophical take on Judaism -- which would seem to ignore ritual features of Judaism whose rationality or relation to morality are not readily apparent -- and which ends up involving foolish criticisms of free market capitalism, a problem I have addressed in detail elsewhere.

As such, Goodman does not show much interest in a general philosophy of religion or what that would require. But then he doesn't acknowledge or perhaps even understand the different focus and perspective in Otto, or the parochialism of his own project. The upshot of all of Goodman's comments seems to be that the academic, historical, or philosophical study of ancient or polytheistic religions is illegitimate, motivated only by "romanticism" -- with the added irony that there is actually little of that in Otto's Das Heilige, which really focuses on Christianity and Judaism. For a better treatment of all the phenomena of ancient religion we need Mircea Eliade or, more profoundly, someone like Mary Lefkowitz.

Furthermore, it is hard to come away from Goodman's treatment of Judaism without the feeling that he has given Leibniz a strong run for his money in terms of apologetics and "just so" stories of rationalistic theodicy. The terror imposed by God on Abraham, by demanding the sacrifice [sacrificium -- "make," facere, "sacred," sacer] of his son; the disasters and massacres inflicted by God on the Egyptians, because God has "hardened the heart of Pharaoh" to resist releasing Israel (from, as some politicians might put it now, their "fair share" of "public service" in the building of new cities -- perhaps "urban renewal" -- the traditional Egyptian corvée, ); and the terror, suffering, and murder inflicted on Job and his family, merely to test Job's faith -- aptly described by C.G. Jung as, "the unvarnished spectacle of divine savagery" [Answer to Job, Bollingen, Princeton, 1958, 1973, p.4]:  All these are dismissed by Goodman with clever but strained interpretations, or, particularly in the case of the Egyptians, overlooked.

Whatever the merits of such theology and theodicy, it is irrelevant to Otto's work, except perhaps in so far as we can see how, as part of the moralization of Mosaic religion, it softens or deflects the fear, terror, or dread (, , ) involved in dealings with God. Otto might well say, indeed, that Goodman does simply what we expect to be done in the moral tradition of religious Israel, rendering God increasingly comforting, reasonable, just, and loving. Yet numinosity, as something rather different, and God's own contrary personality, continue to peek out. Also, there is a tendency to this progression, for which Christianity might be offered, as Otto (and Jung) does, as the logical culmination of the process. Goodman's reflections on this would be of interest; but we don't get any.

The disinterested person reading the Hebrew Bible is more likely to be struck by the elements of fear than with the righteousness or compassion of God, such as it is. In this, we should recollect that the apparently morally deficient character of the Old Testament God was the reason why the Gnostics rejected the proposition that he was the genuine Godhead. Instead, he was to them a kind of imposter, an arrogant, confused and self-deceived "Demiurge." This involved a rejection of the Jewish basis of Christianity that has, in effect, been disturbingly promoted by those who regard Gnosticism as preferable to the orthodox Christianity of the Church Councils (now seen, in best Protestant terms, as a conspiracy of the scheming and dishonest priesthood), which affirmed the continuity and identity of God between the Old and New Testaments. What we need to take away from this phenomenon is that it testifies to the moral ambiguity and ambivalence of stories about the God of the Hebrew Bible, which Goodman does not seem to recognize [note].

The relevant interest of Otto in the frightening nature of God was already famously shared by Søren Kierkegaard, who in turn draws no attention or mention from Goodman. Instead, we find Goodman celebrating the text that says "Do not scorn [or abhor] the Egyptians" [Deuteronomy 23:7/8], when an Egyptian (like Manethō) might think that it is a little late for that, and the damage has been done, both in the great number of dead and even in the "plundering" of the Egyptians of gold and silver [Exodus 12:35-36], which added insult to injury. Ignoring this aspect of the issue, for the sake of affirming the magnanimity and love of God for all -- after he leaves a large part of the wholly innocent and inoffensive population of Egypt, and their farm animals, dead -- does not reassure us of Goodman's objectivity, even as his blindness to the deficiencies others see in the God of the Old Testament does not reassure us of the honesty of his theodicy.

Indeed, one perhaps cannot help but notice that the classic movie version of The Ten Commandments [1956] ends with the stirring exhortation (only in English, of course), as Israel is about to cross the Jordan River:

καὶ διαβοήσετε ἄφεσιν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς πᾶσι τοῖς κατοικοῦσιν αὐτήν.
Et vocabis remissionem cunctis habitatoribus terrae tuae.
Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.
[Leviticus 25:10, with the great voice of Charlton Heston echoing in memory]

Although inscribed (in English) on the Liberty Bell, this is gravely out of context here, meant only for those bound for service until the Jubilee, and the actual exhortation on the original occasion was:

[Deuteronomy 7:1] When the LORD your God brings you into the land which you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations -- the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you -- [7:2] and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then --

ἀφανισμῷ ἀφανιεῖς αὐτούς,
usque ad internicionem.
you must destroy them totally.

οὐ διαθήσῃ πρὸς αὐτοὺς διαθήκην,
Non inibis cum eis foedus,
Make no treaty with them,

οὐδὲ μὴ ἐλεήσηε αὐτούς.
nic misereberis earum.
and show them no mercy. [boldface added]

Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959) evidently thought that proclaiming liberty (echoing the Liberty Bell) sounded better than mass murder without mercy. As it does. However, altering the instructions of God in terms of modern liberal, tolerant, and anti-colonialist sensibilities is deceptive and dishonest. And anyone who knew their Bible (more likely at the time of the movie than now) would detect the distortion. For our purposes here, the point is the revealing response in this case of Hollywood, out of embarrassment, to what is a morally ugly feature of the Old Testament and its Deity. No obvious "moral roots" there -- the "many nations" are just inconveniently in the way [note].

It is not clear that Goodman's theodicy suffers the least embarrassment or inconvenience from this kind of thing. Instead, Goodman wants to accuse Otto of not understanding the uncompromised righteousness of the Mosaic God. In fact, Otto may have understood better than Goodman; and it is possible that God himself feels more embarrassment than Goodman, as we will see.

Let me start with the first sentence in Goodman's treatment of Otto [p.71]:

In search of the primitive essence of the spiritual, Rudolf Otto sought to break apart the unity of holiness with goodness, peace, wholeness, love, justice, and beauty that God discovered to Abraham. [boldface added]

Whatever it may be that God discovered to Abraham, and Goodman's interpretation raises a few questions (as we shall see), if the "unity" of all these characteristics means that they all mean the same thing, then it is puzzling that all languages that I know of have different words for them.  And if there are different words because they have different meanings, then whether they all form a "unity" or not, a philosopher, like Otto, or a lexicographer can investigate what those meanings are and how they are different.  The unity that they may then have or not have is another question, and actually irrelevant to the primary search.

The phrase, "the primitive essence of the spiritual," raises particular questions -- especially about "primitive," which will be addressed below. Otherwise, this misstates the issue. Otto wants to discern the distinctive, characteristic, and perhaps "essential" meaning of terms like "holy" and "sacred," with their equivalents in other languages. What this would have to do with "the spiritual" is a further question,

But do we not think spirits [δαίμονες] to be either gods [θεοί] or the children of gods?
Socrates, Plato's Apology of Socrates, 27c-d, Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1914, pp.100-101; translation modified

depending heavily on what a word like "spiritual" is supposed to mean. Socrates got Meletus to admit that if there were "spiritual," δαιμόνια, things (πράγματα), then there are "spirits," δαίμονες; and if there are spirits, then there are gods, θεοί. But these words don't mean the same things now, and "spiritual" seems to get used to mean almost anything.

So what Goodman says doesn't tell us much, and certainly nothing about what Otto was doing. Perhaps that was the point. If Otto's goal was vaguely "spiritual," then perhaps his mind was just as vaporous as those who speak confusedly about "spiritual" things, often because they don't believe in "institutionalized religion" and have no inclination to profess any identifiable faith. Thus, Alexandra Wolfe, interviewing Elaine Pagels says, "A major point of her work... is the idea that there are many ways to be spiritual outside of 'official' religion" ["Weekend Confidential," The Wall Street Journal, "Review," October 27-28, 2018, p.C6]. I'm not sure how much scholarship is necessary to reach such a conclusion, which, of course, has nothing to do with historical religions -- all of which are dismissed as "official," an expression that would seem to be a red flag for those now called "unchurched." It is a curious condition to be a historian of religion, like Pagels, who then valorizes the absence of any actual religion.

This is very far from what we are dealing with in Rudolf Otto, whose objects are the faith and practice of actual religions. The more familiar we are with them, the better. But I am left wondering how familiar, or respectful, Goodman is of world religion.

So, for a first sentence, this seems like a bad start.

The irony, perhaps, of Goodman's remark here, is that in the theory presented in these pages, following Kant, Fries, and Otto, there is a unity of the holy with all other forms of value. But this unity only occurs among things in themselves, while in phenomenal reality value splinters into separate categories, like the magnetic substates in quantum mechanics (illustrated in the diagram), which vary independently -- with the primary evidence for this being the occurrence of dilemmas.

This is allowed by a Kantian theory, in which a consistent metaphysics of transcendent objects is not possible, while my understanding of Goodman's system is that it involves some adherence to Neoplatonic metaphysics, which is substantially continued in a Jewish philosopher like Moses Maimonides, but which leads to the Metaphysical Horror examined by Leszek Kołakowski.

Neoplatonism, Maimonides, and even Kołakowski, with his attempted fixes, according to Kantian philosophy, all partake of "Dialectical Illusion," with speculative theories that generate their own contradictions. Thus, Otto's claim that the holy is not a matter of reason, but that it involves unique predicates like what is "uncanny" (), may just offend Goodman's rationalism -- with the added irony that "rationalism" is probably not what comes to mind when most people would think of the ins and outs of Jewish ritual observance and law -- or any law, for that matter, where, as Robert Heinlein says, swallowing camels and straining at gnats are required courses in every law school.

The complications that can arise in Jewish law are well illustrated by Roger Horowitz, who begins his book on kosher food with the confrontation that occurred the first time that his father's (Orthodox) family dined with his mother's (Conservative) family at the conclusion of Yom Kippur. The former were offered a plate of sturgeon, which they did not regard as . As it happens, this had long been a matter of dispute in rabbinical circles, since sturgeon does not possess the kind of scales otherwise canonically required for fish under kosher definitions. However, since sturgeon are obviously fish in every other way, some authorities have long allowed that the anomalous scales are nevertheless, in essence, scales. Something like this is not easily resolved to everyone's satisfaction ["My Family's Sturgeon," Kosher America, How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food, Columbia University Press, 2016, p.7]. More about how well Jewish law (or, for that matter, Islāmic, with its own dietary laws) is rationalistic, or fits Otto's theory better, we will see below.

Were we to know things in themselves the way we know phenomenal objects, then rational predicates of unconditioned realities would form a seamless whole with the contents of Ahndung, the Friesian "intimation" of the transcendent that provides the epistemic category for Otto's sense of numinosity. Thus, in empirical knowledge, Kant posits a synthesis of the categories of the understanding with sensation, Empfindung (or, as he often says, "intuition," Anschauung, although this implies conscious knowledge, as "sensation" may not), which produces perception [note].

Yet, with respect to things in themselves, Kant does not allow anything corresponding to feeling or sensation, leaving our representation, not only unsynthesized, but lacking half of the equation necessary for it. Jakob Fries makes up for that by restoring a realism of aesthetic sense -- although the synthesis still cannot be completed, except phenomenally -- which adds the numinous to experience.

So religion does not constitute knowledge the way science does. Since Goodman doesn't have this particular complaint against Kant, and seems unaware of the move by Fries, he has no background or sympathy for the subsequent development by Otto, as we will see below. And, as I continue, we should keep in mind that what for Kant corresponds to science, in the application of reason to things in themselves, is morality, whose remaining and opaque transcendent mysteries include free will, the force of moral obligation, our own individual status in eternity, and any possible mechanism of cosmic justice, i.e. what in Indian religion is called "karmic recompense."

...comparative research has been struck by the fatal resemblance of the religious conceptions we revere to the mental processes of primitive peoples and times.

Sigmund Freud, quoted and translated by Peter Gay, A Godless Jew, Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis [Yale University Press, 1987, p.5], from Die Zukunft einer Illusion, The Future of an Illusion, 1927.

Something that stands out in the first quote above is the word "primitive."  If this means "primary" as in prima principia ("first principles"), then it is no more than what we should be doing, which is to discern the essence, as a natural kind or conventional artifact, of the meaning(s) of the words.  "Holy" is not exempt from this, however much we may want it to encompass all the other forms of value.

On the other hand, if "primitive" means people with spears dancing in the jungle, then we have gotten off to a bad start, since "holy" means something in all religions, ancient or modern, that I am aware of.  Ancient religions, or those isolated in the jungles, may have something to say about the origin or early nature of religion, but this is not the focus of Otto’s examination in the passages that Goodman cites at this point (running from page 2 to page 5 of The Idea of the Holy of the Oxford edition). But Goodman's use of "primitive" seems to indicate that Otto is somehow only concerned with "primitive" religion. Some indication of this comes next on the page [note].

Coining the term "numinous" to designate the holy as experienced, Otto muffled the tones of love and longing that steady the monotheistic message. His quest was for a "profounder religion" than rationalism knows, deeper than mysticism too, he explained, if mystics must curtain their epiphanies in talk of the ineffable (ἄῤῥητον). [ibid., following, boldface added]

Of course, Otto has no interest in muffling "the tones of love and longing that steady the monotheistic message," and says nothing about it on the page that Goodman cites. Love and longing may or may not be particularly to be associated with monotheistic religions, but the description of them is a different question from the meaning of "holy," which is what Otto addresses.

Next, we get the serious, indeed absurd, confusion that somehow Otto has a "quest" for a "profounder religion," when his project is descriptive and phenomenological and may even amount to little more than the pursuit by Socrates of definitions. By saying this, Goodman reveals a complete misunderstanding of Otto's project and goals. Something that bears repeating:

By saying this, Goodman reveals
a complete misunderstanding of Otto's project and goals.

Otto is not looking to create or reform any religions. He is just looking at the ones that exist and have existed, to see what they are like -- and I would wonder where Goodman thinks he has gotten the contrary impression, since he cannot, and does not, quote Otto to that effect. Goodman's interpretation is nonsense.

But Otto's approach is just what we might expect a historian and philosopher of religion to do, although, to be sure, most philosophers of religion have difficulty, sometimes astonishing difficulty, focusing on actual religions in their own terms -- while philosophers often happen to have their own ideas about what religions should be about, usually with no connection to or precedent from historical religions (this is already conspicuous in Goodman's Neoplatonists), or bizarre, non-canonical, and idiosyncratic interpretations of them. And philosophers never, simply never, take miracles or supernatural events seriously.

Could Rudolf Otto simply be the first philosopher who does not reject the phenomena of actual religions as being, in some sense, not just unworthy, but some kind of fraud or mistake? -- a wicked deception and mystification of priestcraft? I wonder. Even William James, a psychologist overtly engaged in a descriptive project, cannot help but impose, as we will see, his own prescriptive ideals.

As for a religion beyond what "rationalism knows," Goodman might find himself at odds with St. Thomas Aquinas long before Rudolf Otto, since anyone who believes that religion contains an irreducible element of faith will find no satisfaction with a religion that is no more than what "rationalism knows." Since his project begins with Immanuel Kant, for whom religion is morality, morality is reason, and "faith" (Glaube, fides, πίστις) in fact has little to do with what that means to anyone else, it would not be so extraordinary for Otto to add anything to the nature of religion to get it beyond the merely rational. One wonders if Goodman would have similar objections if Otto were really no more than a Thomist in contending that faith contributes an element to religion more than "rationalism knows." My suspicion of Goodman's rationalism, as a reflex of Neoplatonic metaphysics, and of Maimonides in particular, is substantially confirmed in this one remark [note].

Here and in subsequent remarks, Goodman promotes the idea that Otto is looking for a new "primitive" and "profounder" religion, not only purged of "rationalism," but also of morality. This grotesquely misrepresents Otto's entire thought, in which the progress of religious development, already evident in Judaism, is to increase and deepen, not erase, moral consciousness. Yet, as we will see, Goodman relies on his distorted and fantastic characterization, something no proper Kantian would ever be found advocating. Instead, we eventually encounter the paradox of Goodman upbraiding Kant, in dismissive and scatological terms, for advocating rational morality! -- thereby subverted Goodman's own stated goals of valorizing both "rationalism" and the "moral roots" of the sacred.

Instead, Otto's actual "quest" is to discern features of religious experience and phenomena, not unlike the studies of William James (whom he cites in a note on page 10 of The Idea of the Holy), where the "holy" cannot be dismissed with a reductionistic rationalism -- certainly not Kant's. Thus, the "quest" is to identify what is already in religion -- the religion of believers rather than reductionistic philosophers -- not how it is to be made more profound than what "rationalism knows." That has already been done. In every religion. Including, pace Goodman, Judaism.

As we have seen in the treatment of Rem B. Edwards, Otto is commonly misunderstood as basically talking about mysticism. And in the previous quote we see Goodman introducing mysticism where Otto says nothing about it in the cited text. I don't think Otto gets to anything about mysticism until page 21 of The Idea of the Holy, which is well beyond the passages that Goodman references. There is certainly nothing on page 5 of Idea about Otto's "quest" being for something "deeper than mysticism," whatever that would be, especially when Otto himself uses "the ineffable (ἄρρητον)" to mean what he himself is talking about -- something that he compares, not to mystical experience, but nota bene to "the category of the beautiful" (a Friesian reference, discussed below).

But this comparison upends Goodman's entire complaint, and it should remind us of the accusation by other philosophers that Otto's theory adds nothing to the analysis of the "sublime" (τὸ ὕψος, hýpsos) by Edmund Burke and Kant himself. Yet neither of them discerned a sense of the genuinely "uncanny" or supernatural in the sublime; and somehow, I might add, concerns about religious pollution -- μολυσμός, μίασμα, -- never trouble aesthetics. Otto, as it happens, does not pay sufficient attention to pollution; but he does mention it, while I don't think Goodman pays it any attention, or mention, despite extensive concern with pollution in Jewish law -- for instance, that a woman who gives birth to a girl is unclean twice as long as a woman who gives birth to a boy [Leviticus 12:2-5] -- something no Enlightened opinion would take seriously, even while the woman, posing no danger to others, is herself in grave danger of post partum infection, which accounted for many deaths in the days before antisepsis when physicians would perform autopsies and then, without washing, attend childbirth.

Also, we might be reminded of the thesis of G.E. Moore that the "primitive" meaning of the word "good," or at least the meaning of an intrinsic rather than an instrumental good, cannot be unpacked in a conceptual definition. Moore famously asserted that "good" can be definined no more than "yellow" can be to a blind person. This did not make Moore a mystic, and "primitive" in this sense does not conjure people with spears dancing in the jungle. Instead, it is an example of the same kind of caution that we now encounter in Otto, or in aesthetics, where there are elements of meaning that are primary and irreducible, perhaps in all value terms, so that "good," "beautiful," and the numinous all share an element that cannot be eliminated in favor of some child or artifact of reason.

Goodness and other "rational attributes" may be "essential" to God, but they are (in Kantian terms), "synthetic" -- not intrinsic to the experience of the divine as such. Kant's "holy will" misses the openings to ecstatic violence: "We generally take 'holy' as meaning 'competely good.'... Kant calls the will which remains unwaveringly obedient to the moral law from the motive of duty a 'holy' will... But this common usage of the terms is inaccurate" -- an overglaze masking the frenzy of antic piety: "if the ethical element was present at all, at any rate it was not original."

This is referenced by Goodman to page 5 of Idea, but terms like "ecstatic violence" and "frenzy of antic piety" do not occur in the text there -- although eventually Otto will note manifestations of "intoxicating frenzy" and "wild and demonic forms," which, of course, occur in historical religions [pp.12-13]. At this point, as fundamental to numinosity, they are irrelevantly supplied by Goodman's fevered imagination and betray a considerable misconstruction and bias in his interpretation.

Indeed, perhaps I should take a moment to consider a historical religion for which terms like "ecstatic violence" or "frenzy of antic piety" might be appropriate. Did the Aztecs practice a "primitive" religion? No more primitive, perhaps, than those of Egypt or Babylon, except for a salient feature that to the Conquistadors could only be explained by the direct presence of Satan.

Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, pyramids of war god Huitzilopochtli and rain god Tlaloc; foreground spire of Quetzalcoatl as wind god Ehecatl

The Aztecs had developed what might even be called an industrial level of human sacrifice, and they had refined their techniques of war so that it was mainly for the purpose of capturing sacrificial victims. Cutting the beating heart from the chest of a sacrifice and then flaying his skin so that a priest might dance while wearing it sounds like something for which we could use the words "violence," "frenzy," "antic," "wild," and "demonic" -- or "horror." The priests, identified by their distinctive tattoos, were systematically exterminated by the Spanish. Apologetics that seek to dismiss the portrait of Aztec rites as Spanish calumnies are refuted by their representation in Aztec (and Mayan) art, much of which was unknown to the Spanish and only recovered in modern archaeology.

Does it mean that this will then be Otto's "primitive" and "profounder religion"? Probably not. Otto does say that religious practices "can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering" [op.cit., p.13]. With the Aztecs, the "almost" there can be eliminated. If Aztec practices were "holy," as they certainly were to them, there might seem to be nothing that we could unify with the "goodness, peace, wholeness, love, justice, and beauty" identified by Goodman.

Tezcatlipōca, the "Enemy on Both Sides," Necoc Yaotl; page 21, Codex Borgia, Vatican Library

As good cultural relativists, perhaps we would need to say that Aztec religion is just as good and beautiful as any other; but, at the very least, their bloody altars and refuse of flayed and mutilated bodies might take some getting used to.

But Rudolf Otto, to be sure, is no cultural relativist; and, primitive or sophisticated, Aztec religion, and the comparable practices of the often more admired Mayans, are not going to measure up to the levels of moral observance that Otto sees in more evolved, and truly more profound, religion. Indeed, far from Aztec or Mayan religion being morally "schematized" to any extent, we might want to say that their practices involve positive evil and wrong. Nor are those judgments only to be imposed by imperialistic and ethnocentric Spanish invaders:  the Spanish obtained valuable Indian allies among the communities that had long been terrorized by the Aztecs for sacrificial victims. The Aztecs were destroyed in great measure by the revenge of their traditional Mexican enemies. The final assault on Tenochtitlán was by thousands of men, most of them Indians.

What can Goodman say about this? Should he deny, as Kant did with Judaism, that this is religion at all? After all, what have we to go on to "restore the Aztec idea of the holy to its moral roots"? Scholars would seem to have discerned no such "roots." When we see the Mayan glyph for "sacred," , must Goodman say that this is a lie, illegitimate, or means something else? It cannot possibly mean "holy" the way we, the bien pensants, mean "holy." Or does Goodman's approach fail to save the phenomenon? Is this not now prescribing the nature of religion (as philosophers prefer), based on the paradigm of Mosaic faith, rather than describing (as historians and philosophers of religion ought) what are undoubtedly religious phenomena? Does Goodman want to accuse Otto of the principle that "to understand all is to forgive all"? Is Otto going to forgive Aztec human sacrifice, or even celebrate it, because in its "primitive" savagery it is a "profounder religion"? I hardly think so. In fact, for Otto, what is more "profound" is what is more rational and more moral. Goodman can hardly disagree with that.

But we cannot credit Goodman with a generally applicable philosophy of religion unless his principles can apply to Aztec practices as well as to Jewish. He makes no effort to produce such a philosophy; and, all things considered, in a book about Judaism, there is no reason why he should. But he then has no ground of complaint against Rudolf Otto and should not dispute a theory whose general terms and purpose he does not and will not consider. To the extent that Otto deviates from evenhandedness, with a preference for Mosaic religion, Goodman can hardly object, since this is the preference that he demands. While the two of them can have their little argument about whether Christianity is or is not morally advanced beyond Judaism, the rest of us can appreciate that Otto's theory provides a descriptive power that will work beyond monotheism, and yet will also allow us to apply moral judgment to more "primitive" religions.

Since the practice of Aztec religion appears to be innocent of moral doctrine, to say the least, we have half of what is requisite for a test of the independence of the sacred from the moral. Thus, if there are religions without morality, as with the Aztecs, Maya, or, as it happens, Shintō, and morality without religion, as with conscientious atheists and self-described "humanists," this demonstrates that the two categories of value vary independently and so are, in fact, independent. This is the modest minimum of the thesis advocated by Rudolf Otto (and seconded by C.S. Lewis in the following note). In a book about Judaism, there is no particular reason why Lenn Goodman need worry about any of this; but if he was going to pick an unnecessary fight with Rudolf Otto, he then did have an obligation to consider the data set of world religions and the larger focus of Otto's project, without falling into the very "chauvinism" of which he accuses Otto, by taking his own interpretation of Judaism as religiously paradigmatic and authoritative and ignoring the falsifying evidence of other religions, or even, as it happens, of Judaism itself [note].

A disturbing sign of irreligion in Sigmund Freud was when, on the first Friday night (17 September 1886) after their marriage (14 September), he prohibited his young bride, Martha Bernays, from lighting Sabbath candles. There would be no Sabbath dinner in the Freud household. This was reported by her as "an upsetting experience," without any consolation in Freud's promise that he would nevertheless retain all that was "life-affirming" in Judaism. This is perhaps the typical conceit of secularized Jews, that the only value in traditional Judaism was that it was "life-affirming." Domestic tyranny, however, seems like a poor start to demonstrate anything of the sort [note].

To broaden our scope a bit again, we might go back to features of Greek and Roman religion that may have vanished in the Mediterranean world and Middle East but where comparable practices are alive and well in India and the Far East. Where on street corners in Athens or Rome there were Hermae, in Tokyo we find similarly placed shrines to the Bodhisattva Jizō (Sanskrit, ), who, with red bib and cap or hood, will, among other things, protect children.

That was not generally the job of the Hermae, but in Rome that is where unwanted babies could be abandoned, to be rescued by passersby -- in Rome, desperate childless women did not need to steal children from hospitals (which didn't exist), as sometimes happens today. I grew up without such divine protection on my street in California -- Father Serra could at least have left a shrine to a Saint -- I think that would be St. Pancras or St. Nicholas, both protectors of children.

But there is not a lot of "ecstatic violence" in the cult of Jizō, or St. Pancras. Quite the contrary. Of course, Christmas office parties, with the jolity of St. Nicholas, and the liberal addition of alcohol, might have been accused of having a "frenzy of antic piety" [note].

Jizō also protects travelers; so we also find him, sometimes in some numbers, along roadsides.

So, between a reference about mysticism and the "ecstatic violence" business, Goodman seems to be introducing matters that are extraneous to the cited text, irrelevant to the main analysis, and deceptive as to the tone and nature of the whole theory. Indeed, a suspicion I have about Goodman's use of the term "primitive" is that it goes back to a notion floating around that both Otto and Eliade were in the business of revalorizing pagan religion as contributions to a Nietzschean delegitimization of Judaism and Christianity and the Nazi revival of German paganism -- the "profounder religion" just because it is "primitive" and more authentically German, or Aryan.

Since Otto published in 1917, the Nazis, of course, didn’t even exist; and Otto had retired in 1929 before they came to power. Since both Otto and Eliade were serious Christians, it is preposterous that they would be part of such a project -- although, to be sure, plenty of Christians made their peace or compromised with Nazism; and Hitler himself, for all his underlying neo-paganism, tried to portray himself in Christian terms (even as a Teutonic Knight). Controversy continues over Eliade's attitudes, but it is clear that he spent the entire War trying to get out of Europe to the United States, which first landed him in London during the Blitz and then in Portugal, after Romania entered the War. Occasionally, we find triumphant assertions that Hitler was a Catholic -- an entirely non-practicing Catholic, of course, who seems to have forgotten to summon a priest for Last Rites before committing the mortal sin of suicide [note].

A sound complaint against Otto, on the other hand, would be his quaint belief, that we still find among many people, that their own religion is the best one -- which in Otto goes along with his belief, common to Kant, that Christianity is morally superior to all other religions. Kant, of course, denied that Judaism was even a religion -- for reasons idiosyncratic and incoherent enough to raise suspicions of simple anti-Semitism. But Goodman seems to think that, unless moral goodness is the exclusive meaning of "holy," then Otto is devalorizing monotheistic religion, or rational morality, in favor of the "primitive." This is a confusion, at least [note].

Otherwise, in the last passage quoted above from Goodman, Otto merely points out the reductionistic nature of Kant's use of "holy," which is applied, for instance, to the "holy will" of angels, whose actions are entirely in conformity with the (rational) dictates of morality, and are "holy" for that reason alone. In turn, Goodman has misused one of Kant's most important epistemic terms. "Synthetic" means that the meaning of the predicate of a proposition is not contained in the subject -- otherwise the proposition is "analytic." Thus, Goodman's expression, "not intrinsic to the experience," misapplies the word. The "experience of the divine" is an experience, not a concept, whose elements may be expected to consist of various concepts or features, united by the process of "synthesis" into both the relevant concepts and the subsequent perceptual experience.

We have no evidence for it in this book, but Goodman may be continuing the epistemology of Aristotle, Leibniz, and even Hegel that the axioms of philosophical systems, the "first principles of demonstration," are analytic, and are thus true merely by their meaning. They are self-evident. This may underly his confusion over the meaning of "synthetic."

The Kantian Moral Law itself, although its derivation is more than a bit muddled (until Fries and Nelson), is best regarded as a synthetic a priori proposition, which means it is not true by logic or definition, but can be denied without contradiction. This happens to be what Hume also says about morality, which is a "matter of fact," of sentiment (a common view in the Scottish Enlightenment), found in human nature, and not of reason.

Goodman, however, uses "synthetic" to mean that "Goodness and other 'rational attributes'" are "not intrinsic to the experience of the divine as such." This is quite false, since Otto's point is only that goodness is not intrinsic to the basic meaning of the "sacred" -- while the propositional principles of all these matters of value, and the experiences to which they are applied, are going to be logically synthetic. The "experience of the divine," in turn, is going to be unique to the forms of each religion, and the God of Abraham and Isaac is distinguished for his claims, at least, of righteousness. But not, to be sure, Tezcatlipōca.

Otherwise, if "holy" () means morality, and if morality means kashrut (, kašrûth, the terms and practice of kosher, , "fitness, purity, legitimacy"), then Judaism as a whole would be analytically and self-evidently true, and religions like Shintō or Taoism, devoid of moral doctrine, would be analytically false. Such a doctrine would not belong to a proper and conscientious philosophy of religion, and it is hard to imagine that Goodman would really want to say anything of the sort. But his misuse of "synthetic" raises the issue.

Thus, goodness and "other 'rational attributes'" can easily be intrinsic "to the experience of the divine" with synthetic predications; we often find them as part of such experiences; and Otto himself had previously written an entire book, Die Kant-Friesische Religions-Philosophie, as we have seen above, about the rational (very Kantian) features of religion. At the same time, as a historian of religion, Otto suspects that the "ethical element" was not "original" in religion -- for instance as when we see Euthyphro telling Socrates that "the pollution is the same," ἴσον γὰρ τὸ μίασμα γίγνεται, whether a murder is committed by a stranger or by his father. His concern, and the reason why he is approaching the King Archon's Court in Athens, is first of all the religious scruple about pollution, μίασμα, rather than the moral concern about justice or righteousness. He might be comfortable as a practitioner of Shintō.

Goodman is free to argue that an "ethical element" is present in the Bible right from the beginning, and so is there intrinsic to holiness. At the same time, we are also free to question this, and doubt the thesis as an artifact of a strained and tendentious theodicy, or suspect that even early Judaism has already experienced moral development, as Otto himself holds; but, unless we also want to claim that Biblical religion is the only true and original religion (which many Jews and Christians may actually want to argue), we cannot ignore the absence of an "ethical element" altogether in many ancient and a few modern religions. The Iliad may be the "Will of Zeus" being brought into fulfillment, but it is very hard to make it out as morally edifying. Euthyphro cites the belief of people that τὸν Δία τῶν θεῶν ἄριστον καὶ δικαιότατον, "Zeus as the best and most just of the gods" [6a], but Socrates cannot accept the righteousness of the principle that Euthyphro wishes to prove, that conflicts among the gods have an edifying moral basis, with his mythological examples. Hesiod is not morally paradigmatic.

While conceding that Otto thinks that "goodness and other 'rational attributes' may be 'essential' to God," Goodman at the same time continually finds reasons why he can say, on some reading of Otto (or Kant), not only that they are not, but that religion is more real and "profound" without them. So they are "not intrinsic to the experience of the divine as such." But this is quite false. If goodness is not part of the original meaning of "holy," that is irrelevant to whether both may not be part, not only of the essence, but of the experience of the divine. Goodman has committed a sophism (confused by his misuse of "synthetic") by substituting "divine" where the sentence he states might even be true, but only for the narrower term "numinous."

With our Aztec friends, the experience of the divine may not have involved much in the way of goodness, compassion, or surgical antisepsis, but to infer that Otto viewed Mosaic religion in something like the same way (as Goodman, without reference to the Aztecs, seems to imply) is absurd, and is directly contradicted by what Otto says. If, in Mosaic religion, the unity of goodness and divinity is "essential," as Goodman allows, then his misuse of the Kantian term "synthetic" cannot make this mean something else, i.e. that goodness has been "muffled," an "afterthought," "sluiced off," "varied colorations... are lost," or similarly rendered trivial, superficial, or secondary, a "carapace" (all terms that Goodman uses). As I demonstrate, Goodman's analysis is troubled and discredited by multiple points of misunderstanding, not only of Otto, but of the Kantian philosophy that underlies him. Reason and the rational are, in fact, "essential" in Kantian philosophy precisely because, in parallel to numinosity, they reach to the roots of the transcendent. As religion evolves, the parallels combine, or at least asymptotically approach.

Otto shunts aside the stream of rational mysticism from Parmenides and Plato, Philo, Plotinus, Maimonides, Spinoza, and beyond. The language of stolid obedience in which he caricatures Kantian ethics mocks a reasoned ethical stance, slighting Kant's Enlightenment ideal of autonomy and ignoring the harmony of spontaneity with thoughtful committed action and intent that lay at the heart of the ethics of character from Aristotle and the Stoics to Maimonides and Spinoza, and down to our own time. Restive and romantic, Otto parodies reason as calculative, even calculating, rather than deliberative, halting rather than natural. Thought is stripped of feeling, in denial of the Platonic axiom and biblical presumption that value is what draws reason, whether it manifests itself as truth, beauty, or goodness -- and oblivious of Spinoza's recognition (and the Pragmatists' insistence) that every judgment is value-laden. Romantics often fail to recognize that if the heart hath reasons that reason knoweth not, it's typically because reason has been penned and pilloried by a false epistemology, and the intellectual penchant of the heart as been ignored. [op. cit., p.71, color added]

This remarkable paragraph -- and it is a single paragraph in Goodman's book -- has almost nothing to do either with what Otto happens to say in the cited passages or with what we can otherwise construe as his project in The Idea of the Holy. Goodman gives us to understand that Otto features some sort of critique or criticism of Kantian ethics, with disparagements of reason, when he actually does nothing of the sort, or even hints at anything of the sort, either in this passage, in The Idea of the Holy overall, or anywhere. Yet most of what I have just quoted is an indignant, if not furious, response to this non-existent criticism. The misreading and misunderstanding of Otto has gone far indeed if it all comes to this, which is almost entirely nonsense. As Socrates said, "yet when it comes to truth, so to speak, they said nothing," καίτοι ἀληθές γε, ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν, οὐδὲν εἰρήκασιν. [Apology 17a].

If "value draws reason," this would be why Rudolf Otto has written Das Heilige, to give a reasonable examination of the value of the sacred. And if Goodman accepts that "every judgment is value-laden," then of course he would be interested in judgments that embody the value of the sacred or the holy. But his complaint then would seem to be that the holy is not a value, and, indeed, he lists values as only "truth, beauty, or goodness." Perhaps he does not mean this to be an exclusive or exhaustive list. Yet, if he denies that the sacred has any meaning beyond moral goodness, that would be what he does really mean. The denial that the sacred is a distinct value means that it does not draw his reason, and that his judgments are not "laden" with any such value. "Holy, holy, holy," [Isaiah 6:3] is simply an expression where we can do a logical substitution, "good, good, good," , without any loss or change of meaning. Why Judaism, or any religion, would then have a distinct word for "holy" is puzzling. In fact, the proposition is absurd; and Goodman's complaint here only serves to condemn and refute his own argument. Where Otto simply wants to distinguish what is unique and distinctive about sacred value, Goodman, from his own principles, inadvertently and paradoxically proves that the sacred, in its own right, is no value at all.

And since Goodman apparently has a complaint against "irrational" mysticism, we might expect him to address his critique to Existentialist Jewish philosophers, like Martin Buber (1878-1965), who are part of a larger tradition (both religious and atheistic) founded on a critique or rejection of rationalism. But Buber isn't even mentioned in Goodman's book, which seems like an astonishing oversight in a "philosophical investigation" of Judaism.

Of the philosophers cited by Goodman, it is not clear to me how Parmenides, the man who introduced logical argumention into Greek philosophy, would ever qualify as a mystic; and, while Plato is sometimes so characterized, I don't think there is really any foundation for calling him one either. As for the Neoplatonic tradition of genuine mysticism that begins with Plotinus -- whose influence we may be seeing in Goodman grouping Parmenides and Plato as mystics -- the problem is that this does not match up very well with Mosaic religion.

The God of philosophers, mystics or otherwise, is usually an impersonal being who bears little comparison to the God of actual theistic, let alone polytheistic, religions. The paradoxes of this have been examined in the discussion of the intriguing Metaphysical Horror by Leszek Kołakowski -- while Goodman has already told us that "divinity does not mean horror" -- referring to the actual horror through which God put Abraham in demanding the sacrifice of Isaac [p.70].

This impersonal characteristic of the philosophical God is the most clearly evident, not only in the absence, in Goodman's treatment, of Martin Buber, where the popular I and Thou [Ich und Du, 1923] is all about the intuitive personal relation to God and others, but also where Goodman's own list ends, with Baruch Spinoza, whose God was so little like that of Abraham and Isaac that the philosopher was expelled and anathematized by his own Dutch Jewish community. It is hard to see how Goodman's own "tones of love and longing" have anything to do with so impersonal and indifferent a Being as Spinoza's God, for whom we are mere transient wrinkles in his own eternal Attributes, with no claim on his care or attention for anything so unworthy and ephemeral as our own personal interests or existence.

If Goodman thinks that religion is properly founded on the "rational mysticism" of Spinoza, it is hard to see how he can then justify observing the practices of a religion like Judaism, the very practices that were abandoned by Spinoza himself as irrational, superstitious, and, shall we say, "primitive"? Miracles? Forget about it. Spinoza's God, in his "perfection," offers nothing for us to fear or hope. No prayer, no supplication, will mean anything to him. Events, including our own actions, are ground out by the necessities of his own nature. Spinoza's Christian friends kept hoping that, abandoning and abandoned by Judaism, and as he began to use the Christian name "Benedict" instead of the Jewish "Baruch" [], he would convert to Christianity. However, nothing about that religion was any more rational than the other.

Goodman's idea that Otto has some sort of complaint here with Kant’s ethics -- "typecasting virtue as obedience," he says -- is based on no more than Otto's accurate description of Kant's theory of the "holy" will of angels, which is not tempted by human self-interest or sensible pleasures to violate the Moral Law. Angels have the same consciousness of rational duty as human beings. It is just that they are without the (sensuous) temptations to which we are vulnerable and consequently never deviate from their duty.

But if we can construe "obedience" into the consciousness of angels, this would actually be following in a certain tradition, where we can find Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) saying, d'autant que l'obéir est le principal office d'âme raisonnable, reconnaissant un céleste supérieur et bienfaiteur, "since to obey is the proper office of a rational soul, recognizing a heavenly superior and a benefactor" [Essays, II, xii; French text, "Apologie de Raimond Sebond," Essais de Michel de Montaigne, Livre second, Éditions Gallimard, 2009, p.232].

As it happens, Kant is not original with his idea of the "holy" will of angels. St. Thomas was first again. Angels are incapable of sin:  Angeli beati peccare non possunt, "The beatified angels cannot sin..." Bonum creatum, in se consideratum, deficere potest, "Created good, considered in itself, can fail," Sed ex coniunctione perfecta ad bonum increatum, qualis est coniunctio beatitudinis, adipiscitur quod peccare not possit, "But from the perfect union with the uncreated good, such as is the union of beatitude, it is rendered unable to sin" [Summa Theologiae, Part I, Question 62, Article 8; Latin-English Edition, Volume I, NovAntiqua, CreateSpace, 2008, p.712, translation modified]. So if God represents bonum increatum, "uncreated good," angels are helplessly obedient.

So again, as when it sounds, more than once now, like Goodman's complaints could first have been directed at St. Thomas rather than Rudolf Otto, now we might ask how, in the interpretion of Kant's theory of the conformity of angels to perfect moral rationality, this is to be negatively construed as no more than irrational (which is what Goodman means) "obedience," pace Montaigne. Since Goodman is the one who wants rationality and righteousness to coincide, he has no real complaint against St. Thomas, Montaigne, Kant, or Otto.

At the same time, while we're at it, how can we then say that angels have free will, if they can never act otherwise than they do? This constitutes a good question -- but it applies to Leibniz as well as to Kant, since Leibniz also believed in a free will that nevertheless was always determined by the knowledge presented in the "preestablished harmony" of representation to each soul. In Spinoza, of course, there is no free will, even for God (who has no will and does not, in his perfection, deliberate or need to).

We must reflect, however, that Kant, Leibniz, and Spinoza all reject some basic features of Christian theology (which we would suspect in Spinoza but serves to discredit the connection of Kant and Leibniz to traditional theology). Satan and other angels revolt against God and are cast from Heaven. This means that they had free will and were capable of disobedience. St. Thomas could perhaps cook up a reason for this, but I don't think that Kant would be able to. Without the revolt, Hell would have no staff: No Satan, no Fallen Angels, no demons. All of them live in states of disobedience to God. Certainly there is no Hell in Spinoza, but now we must suspect that there isn't for Kant either, highlighting his heterodoxy.

But all of this is also irrelevant to what Otto is doing -- besides the "will of angels" being an anomalous foray by Kant into speculative metaphysics -- or to whatever Goodman thinks Otto is doing. Yet Goodman takes Otto's accurate description of the Kantian angelic will and uses it to upbraid Otto in several wholly irrelevant and gratuitous sentences, with bizarre observations such as that "thought is stripped of feeling," which really makes one wonder what sort of phantom is provoking him -- although perhaps, as feeling is indeed different from thought, he is offended that fundamental religious feeling is theoretically isolated in numinous experience.

Goodman's whole passage is unsupported in the cited text, irrelevant to the issue, and improbable to impossible for Otto as a Kantian philosopher.  It is religions adopting a good rational Kantian system of morals that elevates ("schematizes") them in Otto’s system.  Without that, Kant would have thought, they are not religions at all. It is about Goodman that we can wonder if he has so ahistorical a notion of religion.

Furthermore, we get Goodman saying that "Otto parodies reason" and is "restive and romantic." I really can't say what he is talking about or where he gets this. If G.E. Moore says that "good" cannot be defined, does this make for a "parody" of reason? Is Moore "restive and romantic"? Lighting the Sabbath candles may indeed be "romantic," but I don't get the "restive" part, unless we are getting more, again, in the way of "ecstatic violence" or a "frenzy of antic piety" -- perhaps if Stephen King's Carrie White happens to be attending [Carrie, book 1974, movie 1976].

On the other hand, if we are going to worry about parodies of reason, are not the "Lord's inexplicable decrees" in Jewish law vulnerable to such complaints? But there is no parody of reason in Otto, who accepts Kant's system with only the complaint that rational morality cannot describe all the phenomena of the sacred, just as Jewish law accepts the mandatory practices of , kašrûth, or St. Thomas accepts that propositions of dogmatic theology are known only by faith.

The final statement of the paragraph is particularly curious:

Romantics often fail to recognize that if the heart hath reasons that reason knoweth not, it's typically because reason has been penned and pilloried by a false epistemology, and the intellectual penchant of the heart as been ignored.

Goodman is here referring to the famous saying by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), about the heart having reasons that reason cannot understand, which is why we suddenly get some kind of archaic language (although Pascal said it in French); but he then turns it around to the opposite of what Pascal, who himself experienced profound mystical episodes, meant by it. Goodman is saying that, free from a "false epistemology," reason will provide the "intellectual penchant of the heart" with sufficient rationality after all. So he is disagreeing with Pascal, without explicitly saying so, or mentioning Pascal, who must have been one of these "romantics" we have been hearing about. But Pascal was a great mathematician and so must have known a good deal about reason, certainly enough not to confuse it with his religious experiences.

I am curious how many people who have read Pascal would actually come away with Goodman's interpretation: None, since Goodman's interpretation is laden with his own ideology. Otherwise, Pascal appears to say no more than St. Thomas, that there are things of faith that wholly escape the reach of reason. And if we do not mix wool and linen, or we light the Sabbath candles, these are sacred acts by which we feel the holy Will of God, regardless of rational justification or moral purpose. David Gelernter compares the light of the candles on the woman's face, the wife and mother of the family, to the glow that the face of Moses is supposed to have acquired while visiting with God [op.cit. p.115; Exodus 34:33]. This is religion with, not just numinous, but miraculous, overtones. Goodman might not want to be reminded of the glowing face of Moses, which was then concealed with a veil, lest it alarm the Israelites.

But what we have seen is not the end of Goodman continuing to irrelevantly excoriate Rudolf Otto:

By typecasting virtue as obedience Otto perpetuates the stereotype of the ethical as hidebound and elides moral virtues like tact, warmth, generosity, cheerfulness, and caring. [ibid.]

To remind the reader, however tedious it may become, this entire elaborate reproach is based on nothing more than Otto's reference to Kant's theory of angelic will. The theory certainly raises questions, but about Kant, not about Otto. It has nothing to do with the nature of "virtue as obedience," or otherwise -- although it raises intriguing questions. All Otto is doing is to accuse Kant, indeed, of reductionism, that the "holy" is not just the perfectly moral will (like that of Confucius at 70), but something more and different. Goodman has built a Straw Man, imagining some sort of ethical dispute that doesn't exist and is irrelevant to the topic.

Perhaps this is something that indeed "elides moral virtues like tact, warmth, generosity, cheerfulness, and caring," because they are irrelevant to the treatment of a sacred space -- unless possessing such virtues is part of the purification necessary to be free of pollution. But God only demands that Moses take off his sandals, not that he reform his character. That really doesn't come up -- which means that this instruction from God, by Kant's strict definition, is idolatry, because "something else besides morality" is "of itself, a sufficient condition for man's conforming... to that being's will." Wearing or not wearing sandals, in observance of what is holy, stands outside (like any consideration of pollution or purification) the moral terms of the will of Kant's God.

Thus, if Judaism is basically the religion of Moses, then this religion begins with a man hearing a voice out of an unconsumed but burning bush. Socrates and Muḥammad also heard voices, but not in so visual, vivid, striking, and miraculous a scene. But there is certainly nothing rational or moral about it [note].

Similarly, the mysterious mirror in the sanctum of a Shintō shrine represents the deity, in a religion where we generally do not have images of the gods, the , kami, as objects of worship.

Small shrine with foxes, Fushimi Inari Taisha, Kyoto

Without question it is a sacred object, even as a mirror is also one of the three sacred treasures of the Japanese Throne (with a jewel and a sword -- since 1185 AD the original sacred sword has lain on the sea floor at the site of the fateful Battle of Dan-no-Ura). Its holiness is not because of its goodness, and its beauty is only incidental to its status -- although what is enshrined is often closed and unknown, whether it is even a mirror or not, to the public. But we know it by where it is, and by how we are expected to approach and treat it. It is owed the reverence that Moses owes to the ground upon which the bush burns. Indeed, the whole shrine, within its torii gateway, is "sacred ground," and the mirror (or fetish, etc.) is itself the equivalent of the burning bush.

Goodman continues:

Biblical ḫesed and jen, its Confucian counterpart, do not loom large here. Nor does the independent-mindedness and resolve figured in the Torah's recurrent vision of the exiled shepherd who becomes a faithful spiritual and moral guide, often sharply contrasted with the dutiful if successful agrarian. Otto's analysis siphons off intellectual virtues like insight and creativity -- not to mention Aristotelian phronesis, leaving the heart of religious experience a dark precipitate of feeling assayed as morally opaque: [ibid.]

The irrelevance of this, since Otto denies or excludes no such virtues, becomes painful. Of interest is the comparison of Hebrew , "goodness, kindness, mercy" to the similar Confucian virtue of . But the latter is not a religious term in Confucius -- any more than phronesis, φρόνησις, is in Aristotle. What is such a term in Greek would be hosios, ὅσιος, "pious, devout, religious," or in Chinese , "propriety, manners, rites, ritual." The latter is what was rejected by Taoism precisely for the emptiness of "mere ritual" and insincere manners. Yet mere ritual, especially making offerings to the family dead and tending their graves, is a very large part of the practice of religion by Confucians. Confucian scholars might not in fact believe in the afterlife, but they would never dream of courting the public humiliation and censure that would go along with neglecting the family cult. And the sort of people who are indignant at the idea that Confucianism was ever a religion, would dismiss the ritual requirements of as irrational superstition. And, of course, "ḫesed and jen" may not "loom large" in Otto's treatment because he is not talking about morality or virtues, which are presupposed, but about something else. The idea that he is dismissing or belittling morality or virtue, or "intellectual virtues like insight and creativity," is without foundation in Otto's theory. But I don't see what is so hard to understand about the observation on religion that, "there is something else going on there."

Goodman continues with a long quote from Otto, which I now give in the full paragraph used by Otto, without the deletions in Goodman's treatment. This is about, indeed, the "something else" I have just referenced:

It will be our endeavour to suggest this unnamed Something to the reader as far as we may, so that he may himself feel it. There is no religion in which it does not live as the real innermost core, and without it no religion would be worthy of the name. It is pre-emintently a living force in the Semitic religions, and of these again in none has it such vigour as in that of the Bible. Here, too it has a name of its own, viz. the Hebrew qādôsh [], to which the Greek ἅγιος and the Latin sanctus, and, more accurately still, sacer, are the corresponding terms. It is not, of course, disputed that these terms in all three languages connote, as part of their meaning, good, absolute goodness, when, that is, the notion has ripened and reached the highest stage in its development. And we then use the word 'holy' to translate them. But this 'holy' then represents the gradual shaping and filling in with ethical meaning, or what we shall call the 'schematization', of what was a unique original feeling-response, which can be in itself ethically neutral and claims consideration in its own right. And when this moment or element first emerges and begins its long development, all those expressions (qādôsh, ἅγιος, sacer, &c.) mean beyond all question something quite other than 'the good'. This is universally agreed by contemporary criticism, which rightly explains the rendering of qadosh by 'good' as a mistranslation and unwarranted 'rationalization' or 'moralization' of the term. [Otto p.6; Goodman pp.71-72, boldface added, deleted parts of paragraph in red]

If Otto wants to direct us to the "something" that the reader "may himself feel it," Goodman obviously isn't feeling it. Before we see Goodman's response here, let me pause again with David Gelernter:

"Be holy." The standard English lexicon of biblical Hebrew (Brown, Driver, and Briggs, or BDB, 1907), gives the following derivation for the Hebrew kadosh, holy: "possibly the original idea is separation, withdrawl." Why? Holiness is a spiritual idea, separation a mere physical gesture. Holiness is ordinarily defined in abstract, theological terms. The word holiness "indicates the highest value or -- more precisely -- what can be said by men (or angels) when God comes immediately to mind, as in Isaiah 6:3: 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts'." Why should "be holy" mean (as the rabbis suggest), "be separate"?

Holy things are of course set apart from daily life -- from rough handling, dirt, and indignity. But it is also true that if you start with chaos, you must separate to create. Creation means separation, and the Creator is holy. So it is only natural that holiness and the act of separation (of defying chaos) are connected. [op.cit., pp.27-28]

With Gelernter we have a different perspective than what we find in either Otto or Goodman. Otto, however, would have no objection to "holy" as meaning "separate," since sacred things, indeed, must be kept separate, especially from pollution. Thus, the term "profane," profanus, as the opposite of all that is holy, simply means "before the temple," i.e. outside the sacred precinct. The separation of the holy from both the polluted and the worldly has been examined in these pages elsewhere. On the other hand, the separation of the holy from the polluted or worldly is a sense of the matter entirely different from the moral content that, contra Otto, Goodman is so vigorously promoting. Also in this passage, with Gelernter's reference to the Brown, Driver, and Briggs dictionary, we may have some notion of what Otto meant by "contemporary criticism."

It is the triconsonant root, , that Brown, Driver, and Briggs gloss as "poss. orig. idea of separation, withdrawl" [The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, Hendrickson Publishers, 2000, reprinted from the 1906 edition by Houghton, Mifflin and Company, p.871]. The noun, , they then define as "apartness, sacredness," and the adjective, , as "sacred, holy...of God, as separate, apart, and so sacred, holy" [pp.871-872]. While we may wonder whether, with , "possibly the original idea is separation, withdrawl," there is no doubt, as Gelernter examines in his entire chapter of "Separation," that this is a feature of the meaning, one that is strongly related to the non-moral meaning of "holy." We want righteousess in the face of evil, to defeat it, not protected in its own sanctum. But on the three dense pages where Brown, Driver, and Briggs examine the meanings associated with the root , none of them seems to be "good, absolute goodness," as Otto allows and Goodman demands.

Goodman continues in response to the quoted passage:

To assign moral content to the idea of the holy in ancient biblical texts, Otto argues, is "a mistranslation," an anachronism, "unwarranted 'rationalization' or 'moralization.'" Hebrew ideals are primitive -- not least, in Genesis. But the primitive is real. Thought and morals are an afterthought awaiting Christian and philosophical reconstruction. How could anyone so lost to time as Abraham or the biblical prophets have thought moral thoughts as fine and refined as Kant's?

Note that the quotation that Goodman glosses as "Otto argues" is what Otto himself attributed to "contemporary criticism," about whose origin we may have had some clue.

Otherwise, here we have what seems to be a bizarre reversal. Where before Otto is upbraided for abandoning the rational morality favored by Kant, in exchange for "obedience," now suddenly Otto is too Kantian, disparaging the moral ideals of the Hebrew Bible as falling short of the "moral thoughts as fine and refined as Kant's." Now, this is actually what Kant says, holding that the Old Testament is really just political legislation -- something unheard of in the ancient world -- and not really morality at all. The falseness and incoherence of this has been examined elsewhere. Otto clearly goes nowhere near that far; and he holds the Bible as exemplary and paradigmatic of religion, morally as well as otherwise, as we have seen, not its absence.

Yet if we gather from elsewhere that Otto does think that Christianity advances morally beyond Judaism, how is that relevant to the quoted passage, which in fact says nothing of the sort? Indeed, Goodman says that the Old Testament must be entirely innocent of moral development, since, "Thought and morals are an afterthought awaiting Christian and philosophical reconstruction." I would be astonished if Otto thought anything of the sort, especially when Otto has just said, about "holy" in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (the three languages of the Titulus, the plaque nailed to the Cross that identified Jesus as the "King of the Jews"), that "these terms in all three languages connote, as part of their meaning, good, absolute goodness, when, that is, the notion has ripened and reached the highest stage in its development." Since Hebrew is one of those languages, Otto encompasses good, absolute goodness in the usage of the Hebrew Bible -- which Goodman is saying must await the "afterthought" of "Christian and philosophical reconstruction." Goodman, indeed, seems to know a lot about "philosophical reconstruction."

To paraphrase Goodman's question:  How could anyone so lost to reading comprehension have thought that Otto did not perceive, and honor, the moral teachings of the Old Testament? Yet Otto also honors the Bible as embodying a numinosity that, while "a living force in the Semitic religions," stands out from other religions, such that "of these again in none has it such vigour as in that of the Bible." Indeed, as religions are founded on some episode, in whatever manner, of religious intuition, its power is manifestly remarkable in the survival of Judaism, as in its daughter religions, Christianity and ʾIslām.

Goodman having accepted that Otto is disparaging Judaism, we have the paradoxical accusation of "chauvinism" that I have already noted above:

Otto is not alone in his historical chauvinism. His brand [sic?] finds a ready market in romantic appetites for religious warmth, where crabbed reason is deemed wanting -- or in discontent with the tales and strictures of familial and communal piety that have come to seem oppressive and demanding of credence or obedience. [op.cit., p.72]

One might think that "tales and strictures of familial and communal piety" would involve "religious warmth" with little reference to reason, crabbed or otherwise. Again, lighting the Sabbath candles in the weekly ritual, to the major ritual of the Passover Seder, it all sounds like something that Goodman, not Otto, would be disparaging, for its arbitrary irrationality. And what is it that will "seem oppressive and demanding of credence or obedience"? Would this not be things like the ritual demands of Jewish law? Things that dwell happily and beautifully in Otto's theory, but that, as it happens, were abandoned and rejected by Baruch Spinoza, who would have no "credence or obedience" in irrational superstitions? Spinoza who, after all, is generally taken in popular culture to have simply been a materialist and an atheist? An impression not to be contradicted by his own behavior. Not much romance there, to be sure, not like the warmth of the Sabbath candles in the midst of one's family -- the family that Spinoza, for his heresies, sadly and tragically lost.

I should pause to reflect on the use of two terms in this quote. One, "chauvinism," the other, "brand." What could Goodman have in mind by accusing Otto of "historical chauvinism"? The very idea of "chauvinism" would mean an excessive or wrongful nationalism or partisanship. So of what is Otto an excessive or wrongful partisan? Christianity? We could make that case, although it is not clear how Otto's preference for Christianity exceeds that of Goodman for Judaism. But even allowing such a charge, it unfortunately confuses Goodman's condemnations of "romanticism" or a promotion of the "primitive" in Otto's system. A sober preference for Christianity, as somehow morally advanced on other religions, leaves no room for the primitive and romantic irrationalism that otherwise seems to be Goodman's principal complaint and ominous indictment against Otto. It is going to be one or the other, if Goodman does not want to embrace the incoherence of accusing him of both.

Also, how is this "historical" chauvinism? Otto, with followers like Eliade, is the one with some perspective on the history of religion (of which Eliade wrote a long account). I do not see it in Goodman's treatment, which ignores anything outside the tradition of Monotheistic religion and Greek philosophy (with one reference to Confucius, who is not, to Western understanding, a religious figure), with the unsubtle implication that interest in anything else is for Nazis or terrorists, i.e. "romantic," irrational, and violent. So, as I have said above, it may be that "historical chauvinism," whatever we might mean by it, is actually the problem with Goodman, not with Otto.

And then we get the business of Otto's "brand," which implies some sort of movement, affinity, trademark, or widespread ideology. Yet an informed use of Otto's philosophy of religion can barely be found beyond Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and, as referenced here, C.S. Lewis. So we are thrown back to speculation why we are getting insinuations from Goodman, and not open accusations, with whatever Goodman has in mind. As Bob Dylan would say, why doesn't he just come out once and scream it. And the insinuation is, of course, that this "romanticism" is for the sort of pagan religion that German chauvinism and Nazi ideology wished to revive, with the Jewish heritage of Christianity eliminated, if Christianity is to survive at all. Since such a charge cannot credibly be made in an open way against Otto, we get insinuations instead, and the use of terms like "chauvinism," "romanticism," "primitive," and "brand," without Goodman explaining very much, or at all, what he means by them.

These are devices of sophistry and, really, bad faith. But it also seems to go back to something about Otto that really, at least, bugs Goodman; and it is not clear we can understand that. It may be that Goodman has some sense that it is impossible to maintain the sort of rationalism that he esteems, while at the same time wedding this to Judaism, whose rationalism is not at all obvious, both in terms of Revelation as such and in terms of the contents of Jewish Law, where the revelatory and arbitrary seem to overwhelm the rational -- the very reason that "Enlightened" anti-Semites, like Voltaire, dismissed Judaism as irrational, superstitious, and reactionary. Yet, as I will now consider, it is not clear that Goodman can consistently favor a moral rationalism in the first place, implying that a Kantian rational morality suffers error without a Biblical basis.

Having found the highest morality in Kant's marmoreal spires, where duty ventures to fly free of the metaphysical inhibitions of the Critique of Pure Reason, Otto draws no moral distillate from the Patriarchal histories he sees swirling far below. [ibid.]

Here it is not clear who earns more of a rebuke from Goodman, Kant or Otto. Indeed, it is hard to tell whether we are mainly getting scorn directed at Kant, and not Otto, for the idea that "duty ventures to fly free of the metaphysical inhibitions of the Critique of Pure Reason." This is what Kant believes, since the Moral Law makes an unconditional command, to do what is right regardless of consequences, such as would not be justified by the forms of conditioned, phenomenal existence in experience. If Goodman has some problem with this -- and I expect he does, not being a Kantian -- he might want to digress with some explanation how that is wrong, before returning to scorn for Otto.

But if there is some kind of complaint here against Kant, in whose theory the contents of morality can be investigated and constructed independent of the Biblical text, Goodman would find an opponent long before Kant and Otto in the person again of St. Thomas Aquinas, who also believed that morality was a matter of reason independent of Revelation -- otherwise it would not have been possible for there to be "virtuous pagans," morally cogent teachings from pagan philosophers, or a ground for naive unbelievers to recognize the goodness of Christianity and accept conversion -- as the Court of Kamehameha II was eager to do when Protestant missionaries arrived in Hawai'i.

So perhaps Goodman must decide what he is saying. Is his customary coupling of morality and rationality to mean that morality can be derived from reason alone, in which case this rebuke of Kant is vacuous? Or are St. Thomas, Kant, and Otto entirely dependent on "Patriarchal histories" for morality, in which case morality is only a matter of Revelation and not of reason? It is a tough spot. And he is in danger of affirming something deeper "than rationalism knows" just to get in a swipe at Kant and Otto. That would be a high price.

But scorn for Otto seems irresistable, in that evidently Otto derives "no moral distillate from the Patriarchal histories." But, of course, there is no reason for Otto not to, except that as a Kantian, if not a Thomist, he does think that morality is a matter of reason independent of Revelation. And also, as it happens, morality is not the subject matter of The Idea of the Holy. Yet from what Otto does say, we might begin to wonder if Goodman, after the passages he cites, has actually read the rest of Otto's book; for Otto says:

The venerable religion of Moses marks the beginning of a process which from that point onward proceeds with ever increasing momentum, by which the numinous is throughout rationalized and moralized, i.e. charged with ethical import, until it becomes the 'holy' in the fullest [Goodman's?] sense of the word. The culmination of the process is found in the Prophets and in the Gospels. And it is in this that the special nobility of the religion revealed to us by the Bible is to be found, which, when the stage represented by the 'deutero-Isaiah' is reached, justifies its claim to be a universal world-religion. Here is to be found its manifest superiority over, e.g., Islam, in which Allah is mere 'numen', and is in fact precisely Yahweh in His pre-Mosaic form and upon a larger scale. But this moralizing and rationalizing process does not mean that the numinous itself has been overcome, but merely that its preponderance has been overcome. The numinous is at once the basis upon which and the setting within which the ethical and rational meaning is consummated.

The capital instance of the intimate mutual interpenetration of the numinous with the rational and moral is Isaiah. [op.cit. p.75, boldface added]

So I would wonder how Otto managed to derive "no moral distillate" from Isaiah, when he cites that prophet precisely for his moral sophistication. Goodman seems to have skipped, ignored, or forgotten passages like this, which also contradict his assertion that Otto regards reason or morality as an "afterthought awaiting Christian and philosophical reconstruction." The "religion of Moses" seems a little early to be an "afterthought." It is Muslims, on the other hand, who could be taking umbrage [note].

The expression "swirling far below," perhaps with scatological overtones, has therefore been insultingly supplied by Goodman for a contemptuous attitude that Otto does not have and is the opposite of what he explicitly asserts; and it would, after all, be inconsistent with the Kantian theory that Goodman also seems to be disparaging, since Kant believes that morality connects us directly to the rational essence of things-in-themselves.

Otto's theory does not depart from this. Otto, following Jakob Fries, merely posits an alternative modality for our access to the transcendent, equal and parallel to morality. What Fries did, as it happens, was simply to do the same thing with aesthetic sense (as Kent Richter translates it), restoring the aesthetic realism that Kant had abandoned after Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. This is why, as we have already seen above, Otto compares the status of the holy to "the category of the beautiful." In the big picture, Otto has simply added an extra term to the epistemology of Fries, which corrected the aesthetic subjectivism of the mature Kant (as in the Critique of Judgment).

Goodman, confusing us with whether he dislikes Kant or Otto more, betrays no familiarity with Friesian epistemology, little sympathy with Kantian epistemology and metaphysics, and so has ignored Otto's own exhortation to read the Naturalistische und religiöse Weltansicht and Die Kant-Friesische Religions-Philosophie before venturing into Das Heilige. Of course, nobody reads them; but a sustained polemic against Otto, such as we have here, does owe the reader some kind of familiarity with where Otto is coming from. Goodman's implication that Otto regards morality as the content of a toilet means that he has a deficient understanding of the Kantian status of Otto's morality, or perhaps even of Kantian morality itself.

In the middle of the paragraph I have been quoting, Goodman turns to the chapter in Otto on the mysterium tremendum, where, much like William James, Otto begins to lay out a description of elements of religious experience. In this, Goodman might have compared Otto to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, which uses terms that also occur in Otto. But perhaps Goodman doesn't think that Kierkegaard is interested in religion. In any case, I will begin with the sense we can get from some Biblical quotes, and from a song by Bob Dylan.

καὶ τὸν φόβον ἀποστελῶ ἡγούμενόν σου
καὶ ἐκστήσω πάντα τὰ ἔθνη,
εἰς οὓς σὺ εἰσπορεύῃ εἰς αὐτούς.

Terrorem meum mittam in praecursum tuum,
et occidam omnem populum ad quem ingredieris.

I will send my terror before you, and will throw into confusion
all the nations against whom you shall come.

Exodus 23:27; color added

---

ἰδοὺ ἡ θεοσέβειά ἐστι σοφία,
τὸ δὲ ἀπέχεσθαι ἀπὸ κακῶν ἐστιν ἐπιστήμη.

Ecce timor Domini ipsa est sapientia
et recedere a malo intellegentia.

Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;
and to shun evil understanding.

Job 28:28, cf. wisdom; color added

---

Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run"
Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61"

"Highway 61 Revisited," Bob Dylan, The Lyrics 1961-2012, Simon & Schuster, 2004, 2014, p.178

Now, Goodman continues in the paragraph I was last quoting above:

Trawling, as he thinks, beneath their surface, he hauls in the mysterium tremendum and lands a seine-full [sic] of the species, some strangely still, once yanked from their dark element, others thrashing violently. [ibid.]

Of course, we don't need to do any "trawling" (note the contemptuous and dismissive use of this word) or go beneath any surfaces to recognize the feelings in religious experience. It's all on the surface. But we should note how this works for the tone here. Religious feeling comes from a "dark element" and perhaps is landed on our deck "thrashing violently." This is the picture of Otto that Goodman has been promoting from the beginning with terms like "primitive." Since religious manifestations can indeed be violent and thrashing, Goodman looks forward to displaying this as though it is the heart and soul of numinosity. Having thrown back all the other fish, he catches a shark and displays that as characteristic of all ocean life. But the awkward thing here is that, indeed, there are religious phenomena that are violent and thrashing -- like the Aztecs tossing sacrificial victims, suddenly without their hearts, down the steps of the Templo Mayor. Does Goodman want to deny that this is religion? Or just not his religion? But then isn't that "historical chauvinism"?

But by opposing thought to authenticity he loses the rich diversity of the catch, sluicing off any that seem too wholesome.

Otto does not oppose "thought to authenticity," certainly not by using a term from Existentialism -- "authenticity" -- whose implication is antinomian and amoral. As for what is "sluiced" off, the idea that this is how morality or thought, or anything "too wholesome," is treated is a misconception and distortion, since Otto is merely focusing on one feature of religious experience, not dismissing all the rest of it, let alone anything "wholesome" from it. But Goodman perhaps is determined, acting for Otto, to reduce everything to those people with spears dancing in the jungle, or perhaps, as I have helpfully suggested, Aztec priests displaying a freshly excised, still beating, bloody heart. Enjoy.

Religious feeling, stripped of all accretions, he urges, appears "in sudden strong ebullitions of personal piety... in the fixed and ordered solemnities of rites and liturgies, and again in the atmosphere that clings to hold religious monuments and buildings, to temples and churches..." The varied colorations of the catch are lost: Religious feeling is free because it is irrational --

Religious feeling, without any stripping or chipping, as we focus on certain features, reveals particular characteristics. But if Goodman is saying that "the varied colorations" are "lost," perhaps he should not do so with a list of things that are precisely "varied colorations." Rites, liturgies, monuments, temples, churches, etc. -- this extends across very different categories, and what is more, are external objects and not just the subjective states that otherwise seem mainly to be Otto's concern (as they were for William James), but that are consistent with his theory (not to mention how that is applied by Mircea Eliade, particularly to "sacred spaces"). "Rites and liturgies" are regarded by many (like Spinoza, Freud, Einstein, and certainly Kant as well) as irrational and empty ritual. If so, it is actually hard to see how Goodman would not agree with them: We never do see Goodman addressing the irrationalities of kašrûth.

Baptism in Kansas, 1928, John Steuart Curry (1897–1946), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

In Goodman's "rational mysticism," what does baptism accomplish? Or, for that matter, circumcision? Isn't this just, as James Frazer would say, some kind of absurd magical thinking? The City of San Francisco recently almost banned circumcision, as the mutilation of children, until accusations of actual anti-Semitism sobered up the good politically-correct (though often trendily anti-Semitic) citizens of the City. In turn, we are free, of course, just because we are free, not because the "irrational" is free. That, again, would be more like Existentialism, not like good Kantianism. If Goodman wants to accuse Otto of being an Existential irrationalist, he should both say so and then explain what that would mean in proper Existentialism -- where, as Sartre says, "all is permitted."

Goodman now gives us a quote from Otto again; and I have again filled out the passage with what Goodman leaves out:

If we do so we shall find we are dealing with something for which there is only one appropriate expression, 'mysterium tremendum'. The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at least it dies away and the soul resumes its 'profane', non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicating frenzy, to transport and ecstasy. It has wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of -- whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures. [Otto, p.12-13; Goodman, p.72, deleted parts in red]

We might note that Goodman has edited the passage so as to place emphasis on the part with "spasms and convulsions," although, to be sure, he gives us a little bit of the "gentle tide" and "tranquil mood." But those, with what he has deleted, are now ignored:

All true. There are religious frenzies and spasms of fanaticism. We witness them daily in the horrors wrought by al-Qa'ida and Daesh [i.e. ISIS, ISIL, or the "Islamic State"]. [ibid., p.73, boldface added]

Suddenly, it is all fanaticism. And the detailed raptures of St. Teresa of Ávila -- certainly not part of Goodman's tradition of "rational mysticism" -- now perhaps make her the equivalent of Islamic Terrorism. Imagine that, St. Teresa the suicide bomber.

I am not unfair to Goodman here. He picks out one extreme of religious frenzy, and moral debasement, and clearly wants to smear Otto with somehow endorsing it, or of valorizing it beyond the other forms of experience that he details. This is sophistry, and it is unworthy of Goodman. But, again, what does he think he is saying? Are not even the Jihadists part of religious phenomena, which the historian or philosopher of religion is bound to address? Or are we supposed to disqualify them from the study of religion? He admits "there are religious frenzies and spasms of fanaticism," so clearly he cannot exclude them from study. But do we address Aztec religion as a "frenzy" or a "spasm of fanaticism"? It does not seem in quite the same category, since it was practiced routinely for centuries, although just as challenging to what seem to be Goodman's principles of philosophy of religion.

But how did thought and moral regard become an outer carapace? [ibid.]

Because they didn't. Reason in Kantian philosophy is not a "carapace," but Goodman says so to dishonestly imply that Otto's theory can be used to endorse religious fanaticism and terrorism. Instead, according to Kant, reason is our window, in the form of the Moral Law, to the innermost nature of things. Empirical reason is confined to phenomena, but moral reason goes all the way. If Goodman doesn't know this, his understanding of Kant remains rudimentary.

But it does so, as critics of Kant often note, where morality occupies the transcendent only abstractly and formally. Kant can generate some real feeling in his narrow frame over "the Moral Law within me" -- das moralische Gesetz in mir -- but the feeling itself has no objective epistemological or metaphysical status in Kant's philosophy (before we even begin to consider the defects in Kant's version of the Moral Law). Fries added a realism of aesthetic feeling to that; and Otto noticed that in the variety of actual religions, which are resolutely ignored by Kant and Fries (and Leonard Nelson -- and Lenn Goodman), there is a bit more to it. But at this point, Goodman is nowhere through with his Straw Man:

The argument grows paper thin: Concepts become schematizations (Kant's term). Experience, at bottom, is unconceptual. [ibid.]

Here the complaint again seems to drift from Otto to Kant, and we have the problem, not just that Goodman misunderstands Otto, but that he also misunderstands Kant. Experience is not "at bottom unconceptual" because, to be admitted to consciousness, sensations must be synthesized according to the categories of the understanding. This requires an affinity between concepts and sensations, and it produces conceptualized conscious experience -- something, to be sure, not always appreciated by Kant commentators, but discerned and sharply affirmed, long ago, by Schopenhauer. Thus, again, Goodman's understanding of Kant seems distorted, confused, or rudimentary.

The "schematization" in Kant is the form that categories like causality must take when applied through the "pure intuitions" of space and time. Similarly, while numinous sensations are directly connected to the transcendent, the phenomena of religion are also in space and time, where all the features of religion, including morality, are not just constructed and embedded together, but obviously are expressed differently in different religions, and also evolve over time. Christians, Jews, and Muslims may like the idea of eternal and unchanging Revelation; but the historian of religion, and so the philosopher, cannot see and credit the data in quite that way.

Goodman saying that "Concepts become schematizations" seems to be a way of saying that they are superficial, inessential, and perhaps even trivial. But a Kantian schemzatization takes something from transcendent reason, like causality or morality, and embodies it in visible phenomena and experience. But Goodman, confused or untutored again, presents it as the opposite, so that the visible is either free of the transcendent or the transcendent is now free of reason and morality. If we are not dancing in the jungle, as Goodman sees Otto, it isn't religion. Anything else must just be the hot air of Hebrew prophets -- or maybe just Christians and philosophers.

Perhaps I am unfair. But if I am too harsh, I feel provoked. Rudolf Otto does not deserve to be associated with "al-Qa'ida and Daesh." It is a smear -- unless Goodman wants to commend him for having a theory of religion than can address fanaticism, or human sacrifice, as well as the "goodness, peace, wholeness, love, justice, and beauty that God discovered to Abraham" (by demanding, of course, that he kill his son). But that is not the sense I am getting off this.

The tremendum, at its base, is fear, or something very like it, the kind of dread or terror that "first begins to stir in the feeling of 'something uncanny,' 'eerie', or 'weird.'" [ibid.]

While the tremendum is not, "at its base," fear, there is no doubt that fear is part of the phenomenon, as it often is in the face of experiences of no more than the sublime, which, in nature, can be pretty frightening. But if Goodman has read his bible, fear -- , , , all "fear, terror," or "dread"; φόβος or θεοσέβεια in the Septuagint -- is not hard to find, as in the epigraphs above.

But tremendum "at its base" means "trembling" (the future passive participle from tremō, to tremble) not fear, which gets us the English word "tremendous" (Latin tremendus, "such as to cause dread, awe-inspring, terrible," Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2015, p.2170), and rather closely describes the phenomenon of worship that earned both the Quakers and the Shakers their names. Perhaps the Quakers represent the same kind of fanaticism as al-Qa'ida. William Penn the suicide bomber. Or not [note].

Otto himself directly contradicts Goodman's statement here about fear. We might think that Job is beaten down by the fear of God, and his overwhelming power [Job 38-41]; but Otto has a different take on it:

The mysterium, simply as such, would merely... be a part of the 'absolute inconceivability' of the numen, and that, though it might strike Job utterly dumb, could not convict [sic, convince?] him inwardly. That of which we are conscious is rather an intrinsic value in the incomprehensible -- a value inexpressible, positive, and 'fascinating'. This is incommensurable with thoughts of rational human teleology and is not assimilated to them; it remains in all its mystery. But it is as it becomes felt in consciousness that Elohim is justified and at the same time Job's soul brought to peace. [op.cit., p.80]

The natural response of fear is to induce flight. That's not what happens with Job. The natural response of mystery is to hesitate in perplexity. That's not exactly what happens with Job. But the natural response of fascination is to be attracted and drawn in. This is what satisfies and pacifies Job. Quite the opposite of fear and, in this case, overriding it. Exactly the same thing happened to Moses, who saw the burning bush and said, "I will turn aside and see this great sight" [Exodus 3:3]. He was drawn in, and fascinated. What could be so fascinating? Beauty, yes. As the movie star fascinates. The sublime, yes. As Niagara Falls fascinates and awes. But if there is a truly supernatural character there, it will be something more. Numinosity. As the presence of a god, if not the God, fascinates.

To be sure, there is little in the text to suggest Otto's interpretation. Job's own responses to God's display "out of the whirlwind" are muted and submissive [Job 40:4-5, 42:2-6]. Considering that God does nothing but detail and display his might and power, without the slightest attention to the righteousness of Job's case, or the justice of God's own actions, Job's response is simply of one cowed, beaten, and terrified. Yet God continues his boasts and triumphs, even after, as Jung says, "Job has long since been knocked out" [op.cit. p.18].

So Otto's reading here may be generous and charitable. His reasoning must be read into the text. The best we can do is perhaps what Job says at 42:3, "Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful [] for me, which I did not know," and 42:5-6, "I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes." We get a distinction, that hearing and words were not enough (meaning that the discourse of Elihu, son of Barachel, let alone the three other speakers, was ineffective), but now that Job has seen, it makes a difference. And the difference may come down to one word, , "[things] being wonderful" -- in the Septuagint, μεγάλα καὶ θαυμαστά, "great and wonderful [things]."

With the Hebrew verb, the adjective is , pilʾi, "wonderful." This is not much, but it may be enough on which to hang Otto's reading. The wonder, , peleʾ, of it can be more than force, power, fear, or threat. Wonder can be Otto's fascinans numinosity; and I am reminded of Howard Carter's reaction when first looking into the tomb of Tutankhamon, and he answered Lord Caevarvon's question about what he saw, saying, "Wonderful things" [θαυμαστά].

The Book of Job remains morally incomplete, which the text itself seems to acknowledge, as Job's family and friends, "comforted him for all the evil [, 'evil, misery, distress, injury'] that the LORD had brought upon him" [42:11]. But is it incomplete for Job? Does what he has seen, the [τὸ θαῦμα], overwhelm and compensate for what is otherwise the cruel injustice of it all? Otto says yes, although, we should note, Jung may not have agreed.

Curiously, I don't see a word for "wonderful" in the Latin text. The Vulgate says et quae ultra modum excederent scientiam meam, "and which exceeds beyond the measure of my knowledge," leaving out what has done this exceeding. St. Jerome has left out a word for what is there in Hebrew and Greek.

In any case, the undoubted presence of fear in one's experience of the Almighty Supreme Being, a person erratic, touchy, and suspicious -- who says:

,
ὄτι Κύριος ὁ Θεός σου πῦρ καταναλίσκον ἐστί, Θεὸς ζηλωτής.
Quia Dominus Deus tuus ignis consumens, est Deus aemulator.
For the LORD your God is a devouring fire; he is a jealous God.
[Deuteronomy 4:24, color added]

-- is not so surprising. Perhaps the Quakers (and Job) were just afraid. But Goodman seems to think that the fearful phenomena of the uncanny, eerie, or weird is something that refutes or embarrasses Otto's theory. It doesn't. When we see that Neanderthals tied up their dead before burial, we not only wonder what they were worried about (the dead returning?), but we realize that religious beliefs are now involved with them, both that the dead are to be buried, with grave goods, and that they may even represent a threat.

Does this draw any curiosity from Goodman? Perhaps not in a book about Judaism, but then he goes far beyond that to engage in a general polemic against Rudolf Otto. Doesn't it bother him just a little to walk by a cemetery after dark? But perhaps such feelings, so infantile, so superstitious, are beneath the notice of the rational philosopher. The dead there are just rotting meat, as any proper Neoplatonist knows.

Romanaticism mans the door: Emotions that look raw enough may pass, but thoughtful devotion stands outside. How could any ancient or primitive soul have higher thoughts than savagery permits?

Since Otto himself mentions the equivalent of "thoughtful devotion" ("a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship") in a passage that Goodman himself has just quoted, acting as though this stands "outside" religious experience requires some effort. Obviously, Goodman is obsessed with the "ancient or primitive soul" and "savagery," but if he thinks that this is all that Otto is talking about, he really has not been paying attention -- indeed, he supplies all this out of his own imagination. It looks like emotions only count for Otto if they "look raw enough." This is nonsense, and we cannot credit Goodman with a conscientious or honest evaluation of the text.

So I must take Goodman's use of "romanticism" to mean the valorization of people with spears dancing in the jungle as religiously superior to Mosaic religion, when Otto happens to say exactly the opposite, precisely because of the moral maturity of the latter. Goodman had said earlier in his book, "To romantics the holy becomes the tremendum that may ultimately demand suspension of the ethical" [p.31]. The "romantics" here must mean Otto, who, again, says nothing of the sort, but just the opposite. Yet, when Goodman seems to realize this, he must fall back on the complaint that Otto does not esteem Judaism as much as (his own) Christianity [note].

The Sacrifice of Isaac, Mosaic, Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna, 527-547 AD; intervening angel reduced to hand from cloud

But we must not miss the most important point. It doesn't matter that God stops Abraham. The damage has already been done. The angel tells Abraham that God will honor him because he was willing to sacrifice his son. What kind of righteousness is that? We want people who are willing to commit murder when told to? [see the dilemma here]. As Socrates asks, "Whatever does the god mean?" τί ποτε λέγει ὁ θεός; [Apology 21b].

What it looks like is that God changes his mind. If he never wanted child sacrifices, as the Phoenician gods did, he wouldn't have asked for one in the first place. He would not have put Abraham through three days of terror. Instead, we see a moment of divine evolution, in which God becomes more righteous.

This, as it happens, is the theme of Answer to Job by C.G. Jung, some of whose observations I have already noted -- and it would not surprise a Rudolf Otto who thinks of the moralization of religion as a historical process. It is just hard to wrap our minds around the idea that God might not have always been perfect, and needed to get better. Jung sees God as losing the moral contest with Job, and it is not hard to see why. Goodman needs and produces an extra-textual, apologetic theodicy where the evils that befall Job are due to natural events, not to God, baited by Satan, inflicting gratuitous tests on him, which incidentally happen to wipe out all his children, even his livestock, and leaving him with some sort of skin disease [Goodman, pp.23-24].

But consequently we may have an explanation why an angel rather than God himself stops Abraham. God is embarrassed. We see something similar in the play Ion by Euripides, where Mary Lefkowitz points out that Apollo sends Athena to speak for him "because he was afraid that Ion would reproach him" [Euripides & the Gods, Oxford, 2016, p.105]. Apollo had not been acting well, begetting an illegitimate child and then abandoning child and mother, but now he wants to make amends. Good for him.

If God stops the sacrifice of Isaac, good for him. If he wants to make amends to Job for killing all his children and livestock and ruining his life, good for him -- although I don't see how God ever made it up to the Egyptians, after he afflicted and killed so many of them. But all of this, as with the Greek gods, makes the God of Abraham and Isaac more human -- and, oddly enough, more real and appealing than the impersonal deities of people like Plotinus and Spinoza. This is also the charm of a lot of Jewish lore about God, as examined by David Gelernter, for instance, as we may have heard, that God grants the prayer of the rich man, because he doesn't hear from him much, but not the poor man, because he hears from him all the time.

It may be hard to work that up into a reasonable, rationalistic theology, or theodicy; but if God was indeed the "friend" of Abraham, it is the kind of thing we might expect to happen. Because of its humanity. The "friend" just gets a little crazy, occasionally -- as Voltaire discovered with Frederick the Great. We know people like that; and, suitably domesticated (i.e. without the fear part), it meant that George Burns could make God an appealing, eccentric character. Spinoza's "perfect" God has the humanity crushed right out of him. No religion can live with it [note].

But wait a minute. We can't compare God, from a real religion, in the Bible, to a bunch of silly Greek mythology. Apollo, Athena, and Ion, and whatever they do, are not real persons or actions from actual religion; and nobody takes that stuff seriously unless they are divorced from reality and have some kind of poetic or romantic longing for a debunked and debased, virtually a comic book, past.

I don't know if Goodman would actually come out and say this, but it is the sense that I get. And it would, of course, be precisely, if anything, the "historical chauvinism" with which he wants to upbraid Otto -- where, of course, such a sin can only be practiced against a real religion, like Judaism. But if Greek religion was indeed real religion, then Apollo's treatment of Ion, in the sacred Theater of Dionysus at Athens, interpreted by the poet Euripides (whom Socrates says will speak, as the poets do, "by some inborn talent and by inspiration [ἐνθουσιάζοντες]" [Apology 22c]), is precisely what we can compare to God's treatment of Abraham.

Yet in this we certainly must contend with the remains of Enlightenment attitudes that the Greeks were far too rational to believe in the ridiculous stories of their own religion -- Socrates himself says so. Indeed, rationalistic Greek philosophers did undermine Greek religion and prepared for its replacement. The extent to which they did that, and the extent to which modern philosophers do not understand the values of Socrates himself, I have examined in relation to the question of the "impiety" of Socrates, where we find the irony of modern writers attacking Socrates for not honoring the gods, without the slightest intention of honoring the ancient gods themselves. So this is a matter dense with tendentious ideology, bias, and muddle -- problems of which Goodman is not in the least bit free. After all, we know that the Japanese who buy new amulets and talismans every year for their cars, homes, and workplaces say that they are not religious. This means that they don't take that silly stuff seriously, doesn't it? They just do it because Japanese are expected to.

Lenn Goodman, whose own moral sense enables him to see right through the contemptible, shameful, and appalling popularity of people like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, must accept both that the God of the Bible is, shall I say, a "colorful" person, of a difficult and fallible, but corrigible, nature, and that Rudolf Otto is the wrong person to attack, in the midst of a Leibnizian theodicy and theological whitewash, over some sort of moral deficiency or perversion, of which he is innocent. If Goodman wants to group Rudolf Otto in the same boat with the likes of Nietzsche and Heidegger, this is a grotesque distortion of the "moral roots" of Kant-Friesian philosophy in das moralische Gesetz in mir of Kant, about which Goodman seems to be confused or dismissive, despite the "rationalism" of it, that Goodman otherwise apparently endorses and even demands. He needs to get his story straight, and his reading of Kant and Otto clarified.

Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), The False Friend of Freedom

Rudolf Otto (1869-1937)

Rudolf Otto in Rem B. Edwards' Reason and Religion

On the Sublime and the Numinous

The Kant-Friesian Theory of Religion and Religious Value

The New Friesian Theory of Religious Value

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 1

Lewis says more about numinosity than can comfortably be fit into an epigraph, but he is insightful enough that we should pay some attention to it. First there are some examples he gives, beyond the thought experiment with the tiger, ghost, and spirit quoted above. That example itself relies a great deal on subjective responses, and the case of the "mighty spirit" depends greatly on how one might conceive such things. The angels of the television series Touched by an Angel [1994-2003], or even Clarence of It's a Wonderful Life [1946], make a very different impression from the canonical examples of angels as radiant and brilliant, of vast size and flaming swords. The reaction of Jimmy Stewart (1908-1997) would have been very different. At the same time, we should note that Lewis's phrase, "the object which excites it as the Numinous," implies the numinosity of the object, and not just of the experience, which is where Otto begins and where analysis may mistakenly leave the numinous as its only venue.

Going back further [before Wordsworth] we get a very pure and strong example in Malory [Le Morte d'Arthur, 1485], when Galahad 'began to tremble right hard when the deadly (=mortal) flesh began to behold the spiritual things'. At the beginning of our era it finds expression in the Apocalypse [i.e. the Book of Revelation] where the writer fell at the feet of the risen Christ 'as one dead'. In Pagan literature we find Ovid's picture of the dark grove on the Aventine of which you would say at a glance numen inest -- the place is haunted, or there is a Presence here; and Virgil gives us the palace of Latinus 'awful (horrendum) with woods and sancity (religione) of elder days'. A Greek fragment attributed, but improbably, to Aeschylus [#464, missing from the Loeb collection], tells us of earth, sea, and mountain shaking beneath the 'dread eye of their Master'. And far further back Ezekiel tells us of the 'rings' in his Theophany that 'they were so high that they were dreadful [; Ezekiel 1:18]': and Jacob, rising from sleep, says 'How dreadful [] is this place! [Genesis 28:17]' [pp.7-8]

Like his friend J.R.R. Tolkein, Lewis is comfortable mixing examples from Christianity and paganism, recognizing the legitimacy of ancient religion, which I am not clear that Lenn Goodman, like more traditional Christians, ever does. As we will see, Goodman apparently dismisses attention to ancient religion as "romanticism."

Thus, even with these examples, their evaluation depends on a certain background or assumptions. The "dark grove on the Aventine" need not be taken seriously by Jews or Christians; and Goodman, or even Kant, can attribute the tenor of Ezekiel's vision to the moral perfection of its objects. But Lewis continues with interesting epistemological reflections about numinosity, which strike at the deeper foundations of the issue:

Now this awe is not the result of an inference from the visible universe. There is no possibility of arguing from mere danger to the uncanny, still less to the fully Numinous... When man passes from physical fear to dread and awe, he makes a sheer jump, and apprehends something which could never be given, as danger is, by the physical facts and logical deductions from them. Most attempts to explain the Numinous presuppose the thing to be explained -- as when anthropologists derive it from fear of the dead, without explaining why dead men (usually the least dangerous kind of men) should have attracted this peculiar feeling. Against all such attempts we must insist that dread and awe are in a different dimension from fear. They are in the nature of an interpretation man gives to the universe, or an impression he gets from it; and just as no enumeration of the physical qualities of a beautiful object could ever include its beauty, or give the faintest hint of what we mean by beauty to a creature without aesthetic experience, so no factual description of any human environment could include the uncanny and the Numinous or even hint at them. There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given. [pp.9-10, boldface added]

This is Lewis at his philosophical best. His further argument, that "The Numinous is not the same as the morally good," is best left to the main text here, since this is the principle explicitly denied by Lenn Goodman. Also, the comparison here of the numinous to the character of physical beauty is also something that is done by Otto and discussed here in the main text. And I should point out that the "direct experience of the really supernatural" is what is allowed by the Friesian epistemology of Ahndung, although Fries himself thought of it only in aesthetic terms. Such "Revelation," however, would be available to all, while the proper term might be restricted to the Prophets who receive, as it were, a text message from Beyond -- e.g. , Iqraʾ bismi Rabbika, "Recite! In the name of your Lord!" [ʾal-Qurʾān, Sūrah 96, Verse 1] -- and not just a feeling.

One might argue that fear of the dead, as the contagion of death pollution, arose as the result of the experience of disease spread by corpses, and translated into a religious modality, where medicine as such didn't exist. This is possible. However, death pollution attends all the dead, whatever they died of. Again, this could be attributed to caution, having generalized from the experience of some cases of the transmission of disease.

On the other hand, the degree of the recognition of death pollution varies widely between religions and cultures, which one would not expect from a common prehistoric experience of empirical discovery. Indeed, sometimes we find the dead treated quite familiarly, as when Peruvian mummies, including the royal Incas, continued to hold court in their homes or palaces and were consulted, in their presence, in significant matters by way of mediums. The Egyptians, so famously concerned with death, were neither familiar with the dead, which were professionally prepared, wrapped, and safely buried -- the Egyptians did not play with mummies like modern looters, archaeologists, or horror movies -- nor were they apparently very worried about death pollution. Herodotus relates that the embalmers were shunned, not for religious reasons, but just because of the smell that clung to them. Herodotus, of course, could have been confused, but we otherwise get no hint from Egyptian records of the kinds of distaste and disabilities that attend the polluted Untouchables in India. We actually would know next to nothing about the status or treatment of embalmers without the account of Herodotus.

And for "empirical discovery" itself, physicans in the 19th century long continued to move, unwashed, from autopsies to obstetrics without noticing that women sickened and died far more often when this was done than when it was not -- as when midwives, who never did autopsies, delivered the babies. The professional resistance to the recognition of this now seems extraordinary, even when it was also known that a cut acquired during dissection could be fatal, as it was for William Hewson, the son-in-law of Benjamin Franklin's landlady in London, whose admission to the Royal Society had been sponsored by Franklin. Thus, it may reasonably be argued that fear of the dead and of death pollution was, as Lewis says, "not the result of an inference from the visible universe."

Anscombe v. Lewis

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 2

The best explanation I can see, after working on this page for three years, is that Goodman associates Otto with the irrationalism and nihilism of Existentialists, which includes people like Nietzsche and Heidegger. The overt hostility of the treatment furthermore may come from the association of Nietzsche or Heidegger, in turn, with the kind of neo-paganism, combined in the worship of nation and race, that was popular among the Nazis. That Otto was not an Existentialist, had no interest in any kind of neo-paganism, and subscribed to the full rationality of Kantian ethics absolutely destroys the suitability of this identification, which, however, Goodman does not explicitly state in any case.

That these falsifying facts intrude on his awareness, however, may be reflected in the attacks that we come to see on Kant himself, who otherwise would not seem to have originally been on the table. All of this betrays some level of a lack of either self-awareness or honesty in Goodman's mind, and a failure to explain several relevant things to the reader. More importantly, in all this Goodman has clearly made no effort to investigate or explain the actual Kantian and Friesian background of Otto's theory. This is negligent; it allows him to insinuate rather than accuse; and leaves ambiguities and obscurities that are fodder for simple sophistry.

The milder accusations of "romanticism," which Goodman does voice, may still imply some neo-paganism, but without warranting the level of hostility we see; and, given the attendant accusation of Otto's Christian "chauvinism," is no more cogent or coherent than the association with Existentialists -- which itself, again, would contain the irony that one of the most famous and popular of recent Jewish philosophers, Martin Buber (1878-1965), could be justly accused of it. The closest that Goodman comes to giving us examples of the "romanticism" he keeps invoking would be an unattributed quote from Blaise Pascal, whose terms and background we are left to construct for ourselves. Yet Pascal does not seem a suitable example of the 19th century phenomenon of "Romanticism," as might (at least chronologically) Kierkegaard, who also goes unmentioned, despite his relevance to the whole business.

I am reminded of the crossroads of irrationalism, Existentialism, and Romanticism in the account that Peter Gay gives of Paul Tillich (1886-1965) in the course of his treatment of the atheism of Sigmund Freud:

Tillich was not content with merely recognizing the utility of psychoanalysis in cultural criticism or pastoral practice. He preferred to enlist it in the great tradition of struggle against rationalism, which reached back to Duns Scotus, Paracelsus, and Luther. Modern history, to Tillich's mind, had witnessed "the victory of the philosophy of consciousness over the philosophy of the unconscious, irrational will," an unfortunate evolution epitomized by Calvinism, Descartes, and oppressive American religiosity. "But in spite of this victory, the protest was not silenced." The impressive cavalcade of objectors including Pascal, Kierkegaard, Marx, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, to say nothing of Kafka or of Bergson, with his élan vital, had prepared "the ground for what was to follow in the twentieth century," with Freud in the vanguard -- a stunning and incongruous intellectual pedigree that leaves the historian [i.e. Peter Gay] gasping for breath. [A Godless Jew, Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis, Yale University Press, 1987, p.89]

"Incongruous" is right, and the valorization of the "irrational will" (Marx?!) reminds us, unfortunately, of Nietzsche, if not Leni Riefenstahl. So Tillich's Existentialism may be just the sort of thing disliked by Goodman. Nevertheless, it is wholly foreign to Rudolf Otto, despite some affinities that we can see for Otto in the likes of Pascal, Kierkegaard, Luther, or Dostoyevsky (Достоевский), who in fact all represent traditional religion -- with Kierkegaard actually grounded in Kant; and Dostoyevsky well alert to 19th century Nihilism, whose fictional representatives seem to be fully developed Nietzcheans before their time. Goodman's own rationalism, in turn, deriving from Neoplatonism and/or Moses Maimonides, would no more appropriately be associated with someone like Descartes, let alone Calvinism or "oppressive American religiosity," whatever that is. In fact, Goodman's "rationalism" is novel and as much ill defined (certainly in relation to what Goodman should be explaining to the reader) as the "romanticism" he throws at Otto.

Therefore, I am compelled to see Goodman's polemic against Rudolf Otto as reflecting criticism or animosities that are basically unrelated to the Kantian and Friesian philosophy embodied in Otto's theory. Numinosity, as something extra-rational, just makes a convenient and well-known symbolic target, without any particular effort to understand where Otto was coming from philosophically, or even religiously. After all, as I will consider in the text, Goodman's attack on anything more "than rationalism knows" is going to bag St. Thomas Aquinas before it gets anywhere near Rudolf Otto, with a Parthian shot at (an unnamed) Blaise Pascal along the way, and I have yet to see anyone making a strong connection between St. Thomas and Existentialism, Nietzsche, Heidgger, Nazis, or Terrorists. It would be absurd, as indeed is the attack on Otto.

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 3

That the God of our Saviour should have been identified with the tribal god of Israel, is one of the most terrible confusions in all world-history.

Richard Wagner (1813-1883), quoted by Norman Lebrecht, Genius & Anxiety, How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947, Scribner, 2019, p.97; referenced to Oliver Hilmes, Cosima Wagner, Yale University Press, 2010, p.145.

Besides the Gnostics, mostly in the past, other varieties of Christianity involve the rejection of the Jewish origin and basis of Christianity. Some of the Modern Assyrians, namely the most extreme nationalists whose commitment to Christianity itself may be suspect (or explicitly denounced), promote the idea that Christianity derives, not from Judaism, but from the religion of the Ancient Assyrians. I don't think that the Assyrian Patriarch, the head of the Church of the East, accepts this sort of thing. But it's there, and part of it seems to involve overt anti-Semitism.

This serves to exalt the Ancient Assyrians (responsible for the deportation of the Ten Tribes of Israel), and it also coincidentally serves to align the anti-Semitism of these Assyrian nationalists with the anti-Semitism of militant ʾIslām and to curry favor with the present Jihadists. This hasn't done much good for any Assyrians. Jihadists now, like ISIS, no longer accept the Qurʾānic injunction to tolerate Christians and Jews. Even Christians who are anti-Semites, with a twisted "me-too-ism," get no special consideration. And, indeed, when ISIS conquered about half of Iraq in 2014, they began raping and enslaving Christian women and murdering and expelling all Christians from the areas under their control.

Despite this, the Obama Administration gave no special consideration to Christian refugees -- which included Chaldean Catholics and Syriac Orthodox Christians as well as the Nestorian Assyrians -- (1) because it wasn't the government of Iraq persecuting them and (2) because it would be a "religious test" to favor Christian over Muslim refugees. The latter principle, of course, would have excluded Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany -- as indeed Franklin Roosevelt in fact did provide no consideration for such refugees, who sometimes were returned to Germany, and eventually to their deaths. Indifference to Christians now is a matter of no interest to the mainstream Press in America -- which generally ignores Middle Eastern Christians, whatever is happening to them. What is likely, however, is that "liberal" and "progressive" opinion in the American Press sees only Muslims as victims (victims of us, of course, and of "Islamophobia"), regardless of what they are doing to anyone else, including Christians, Jews, or even other Muslims. This is part of the deeply anti-American ideology of the Left. Middle Eastern Christians just get lost in the shuffle, or they are dismissed with the thought that Christians are always oppressors. This makes the anti-Semitism of the Assyrian nationalists no more ironic but also no less ugly.

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 4

To make sure that Moses gets the message, God repeats his instructions, for instance at Deuteronomy 7:16:

And you shall destroy all the peoples that the LORD your God will give over to you, your eye shall not pity them; neither shall you serve their gods, for that would be a snare to you.

They will find out that the LORD is "a great and terrible God" [Deuteronomy 7:21]. In Hebrew this phrase is , in the Greek of the Septuagint, Θεὸς μέγας καὶ κραταιός, and in the Latin of the Vulgate, Deus magnus et terribilis. Hebrew , nôrāʾ, can also be translated "awesome," which isn't quite the same tone as "terrible," which obviously comes directly from the Latin. Ben Yehuda says that means "awe-inspiring, fearful, revered," which covers a lot of territory. But in Greek, κραταιός is actually just "strong, mighty, resistless," according to Liddell and Scott. So the meaning there is a little bit of a puzzle, whether God means to terrify or just overpower the peoples of Canaan, or if "awe-inspiring" is something different, like the "wonder," , experienced by Job. See discussion of , ʾÊl, here.

But God also warns what will happen should Israel not wipe out or drive out the previous people of Canaan:

[Numbers 33:55] But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those of them whom you let remain shall be as pricks in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall trouble you in the land where you dwell. [33:56] And I will do to you as I thought to do to them.

This is ominous, to say the least. But however we look at these statements and instructions, God is not out to give a fair shake or a square deal to the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Jebusites, etc.

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 5

While the meaning of Kant's terminology can shift around a bit, given the revisions in his thought, the "Transcendental Aesthetic" begins with definitions that hold with some firmness (colored coded to easily match the German with English words):

Die Wirkung eines Gegenstandes auf die Vorstellungsfähigkeit, so fern wir von demselben affiziert werden, ist Empfindung. Diejenige Anschauung, welche sich auf den Gegegstand durch Empfindung bezieht, heißt empirisch. Der unbestimmte Gegenstand einer empirischen Anschauung heißt Erscheinung.

The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by it, is sensation. That intuition which is in relation to the object through sensation, is entitled empirical. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is entitled appearance.

[German, Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1, Die Werke Immanuel Kants in der Ausgabe von Wilhelm Weischedel, Band III, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1956, 1974, 1995, §1, A20, p.69; English, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Translated by Norman Kemp Smith, Macmillan, 1929, St. Martin's Press, 1965, p.65; color added]

What we can retain from this with some clarity is that sensation, as a causal product, mediates the relation between the (external) object and intuition. This construction can be maintained through the rest of Kant's philosophy. Some complications involving these concepts, especially with "appearance," are discussed in response to Roger Scruton's confused idea of "Kant's 'Attack on the Noumenon'."

Kant Index

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 6

I am aware of the racial overtones of the expression "people with spears dancing in the jungle," and I think this needs to be made explicit when my suspicion is that Goodman wants to insinuate that Otto was a proto-Nazi whose ideal, identified as "primitive," could go back to 19th century racism and (anachronistically) Nazi neo-paganism. Goodman using expressions like "ecstatic violence," "frenzy of antic piety," and "savagery" all reinforces an accusation that Goodman is not candid or honest enough to make openly. If a little of the smear comes off on Goodman himself, he may deserve it.

The issue, however, reminds me of my Freshman Antrhopology class at the University of New Mexico in 1968. One of the books used was The Forest People [1961], by Collin Turnbull (d.1994), who lived for three years with the Mbuti pygmies of the Ituri Forest in the Congo. We might imagine, if there ever was a "primitive" people, in the "jungle," this was it. My Anthropology class just loved these people, with their little bows and poisoned arrows. But there was a curious feature about the book that stuck in my mind. Turnbull claimed that the pygmies essentially had no religion of their own. The tall people around them had plenty of religion and ritual, and expected the pygmies to honor and observe it all, but the Mbuti themelves didn't take it at all seriously. This was one reason for their popularity in the Anthropology class. They were said to treat everything as a joke, and this got the enthusiastic sympathy of the students -- who now could be said to have a racist distaste for the Africans nearby who were not irreligious.

Considering the misunderstandings or misrepresentations of other anthropologists, who often shamelessly have applied their own preconceptions and agenda to their research subjects, we might be excused some suspicion with Turnbull's claims about Mbuti religion. One possibility, of course, is that Turnbull was perfectly honest but that the Mbuti kept their religion secret, even after the white European had been hanging around for years. This would not be in the least surprising. To know the secrets, you need to be initiated, and Turnbull apparently was not initiated. Or, if he was, he faithfully maintained the secret himself.

Alternatively, the Mbuti took the rituals of the neighboring tribes with all seriousness and for some reason misrepresented their attitude to the anthropologist. Their jokes could indicate, not disbelief, but uneasiness. The rituals were not, in these cases, secret, but their inspection by a white foreigner still could be occasions of anxiety, which was relieved by joking.

Or Turnbull may have just projected onto the Mbuti his own dislike of religion, reproducing a narrative such as we find in a Star Trek episode, where the Enterprise deals with a planet whose people are so smart that they are already, at a technologically underdeveloped level, atheists. How much better if the actual pygmies of the Ituri Forest are themselves already without religion, theistic or otherwise. I have not seen an effort to debunk Turnbull's results -- although his work elsewhere has been questioned -- but then any modern anthropologist could share the ideology evident in the Star Trek episode. On the other hand, the Turnbull book does not seem to have been used as evidence that the "natural" state of the "noble savage" is to be without religion, which was invented later by priestly conspirators to empower themselves.

A genuine curiosity about Turnbull's book goes with the location of the Ituri Forest, which is in the extreme north-east of the country that has alternatively been the Belgian Congo, Zaire, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We know that in the VI Dynasty of Egypt an expedition up the Nile returned with a pygmy, which was such a novelty that the young King, Pepi II, eager to see him, wrote instructions for his safe keeping on the journey back. Back from where? We don't know. If the Egyptians got all the way to the Ituri Forest, then the Egyptians were much more ambitious explorers than we ever thought. Or the extent of settlement by the pygmies, north into the Sudan, may have been greater in the past. Today, it is hard to know. Or, the person who was being brought back was not an actual pygmy, but someone with some kind of genetic dwarfism. If the Egyptians had told us whether there were other pygmies where they found this one, that would clear things up. But they don't.

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 7

Otto devotes an entire appendix, "Chrysostom on the Inconceivable in God" [Appendix I, pp.179-186], to a detailed critique by St. John Chysostom, Patriarch of Constantinople (398-404, d.407), of the rationalistic theology that was already familiar in his day. Chrysostom was "against the theoretical 'Aristotelian' God of the schools." Since it would be many centuries before the appearance of the Aristotelian theology familiar to us, from St. Thomas Aquinas, Chrysostom clearly had something else in mind; and the only place where much in the way of an Aristotelian theology had been developed was in Neoplatonism. This would influence Christianity, Judaism, and ʾIslām for a very long time, and arouse intense controversy along the way, especially in ʾIslām, where the philosophers adopted it without much modification. If Maimonides did the same thing, then Chrystostom's complaint, seconded by Otto, may well apply to Lenn Goodman's "rationalism" also.

But Chrysostom himself did have specific Christian heresies in mind. Thus, Otto tells us that the Περὶ Ἀκαταλήπτου, De Incomprehensibili, was directed first of all at the ἀνόμοιοι, who were the "disciples of the Arian Aëtios, with their doctrine of θεὸν οἶδα ὡς αὐτὸς ὁ θεὸς ἑαυτὸν οἶδε ('I know God as He is known to Himself')," which seems like an extraordinary claim to make:

For his opponents had maintained that a conceptual knowledge of God is possible, definitive, and exhaustive, by means of notions, in fact by a single notion (viz. of ἀγεννησία, unbegottenness), in a word, that it is possible 'to know God exactly' (μετ᾽ ἀκριβείας εἰδέναι). [p.180]

This could well apply to Neoplatonic theology, as we even see discussed by Leszek Kołakowski, who sees all meaning and content drain out of such theology. However, it is not clear that we would know God as he knows himself, definitively and exhaustively, unless we know what God knows. Since Neoplatonic theology denies that God knows individuals, which got it in serious trouble in ʾIslām, that eliminates a lot of what a theistic God should know. But then an Aristotelian God apparently does know universals; and if he knows all of them, then, finite or infinite, this would go well beyond what we can know as human beings.

So there is a lot of wiggle room there. And with Goodman, we can't forget Spinoza, for whom God possesses an infinite number of attributes that we don't know about. Nevertheless, the God of all the philosophers, from Plotinus to Spinoza, is impersonal to a degree that cannot be tolerated by theistic religion. If Goodman accepts the personal God necessary to Judaism, he is not going to be able to derive it from the philosophical tradition. With St. Thomas, at least we could admit that the personal nature of God cannot be confirmed by reason alone.

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 8

C.S. Lewis perceived with great clarity that "The Numinous is not the same as the morally good" [The Problem of Pain, 1940, Macmillan, 1944, HarperOne, 2001, p.10]. He also is aware of the genuine importance of Hume's argument about "is and ought," which he reproduces with some eloquence, an achievement many self-professed followers of Hume, as F.A. Hayek remarks, fail to do:

All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality; that is, they feel towards certain proposed actions the experiences expressed by the word 'I ought' or 'I ought not'. These experiences resemble awe in one respect, namely that they cannot be logically deduced from the environment and physical experiences of the man who undergoes them. You can shuffle 'I want' and 'I am forced' and 'I shall be well advised' and 'I dare not' as long as you please without getting out of them the slightest hint of 'ought' and 'ought not'. And, once again, attempts to resolve the moral experience into something else always presuppose the very thing they are trying to explain -- as when a famous psychoanalyst [Freud!] deduces it from prehistoric parricide. If the parricide produced a sense of guilt, that was because men felt that they ought not to have committed it: if they did not so feel, it could produce no sense of guilt. Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience. And it has one characteristic too remarkable to be ignored. The moralities accepted among men may differ -- though not, at bottom, so widely as is often claimed -- but they all agree in prescribing a behaviour which their adherents fail to practice. All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt. The second element in religion is the consciousness not merely of a moral law, but of a moral law at once approved and disobeyed. This consciousness is neither a logical, nor an illogical, inference from the facts of experience; if we did not bring it to our experience we could not find it there. It is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation. [pp.10-11]

The horns of such a dilemma, however, are not exhaustive. Between illusion and revelation there is Kantian (or Thomistic) Reason. Otherwise, all of this is on target, and Lewis lacks only the clarity of a distinction between morality and prudence such as I have considered elsewhere. "'I want' and 'I am forced' and 'I shall be well advised' and 'I dare not'" -- these are all prudential considerations, alternatively positive and negative.

However edifying the moral wisdom of Lewis, and Hume, it is somewhat tangential to the problem on this page. Not to worry, Lewis comes to that next, and we find a rather strong expression of what in these pages is called the polynomic theory of value, in which categories like numinosity and morality vary independently:

The moral experience and the numinous experience are so far from being the same that they may exist for quite long periods without establishing a mutual contact. In many forms of Paganism the worship of the gods and the ethical discussions of the philosophers have very little to do with each other. The third stage in religious development arises when men identify them -- when the Numinous Power to which they feel awe is made the guardian of the morality to which they feel obligation. Once again, this may seem to you very 'natural'. What can be more natural than for a savage haunted at once by awe and by guilt to think that the power which awes him is also the authority which condemns his guilt? And it is, indeed, natural to humanity. But it is not the least obvious. The actual behaviour of that universe which the Numinous haunts bears no resemblance to the behaviour which morality demands of us. The one seems wasteful, ruthless, and unjust; the other enjoins upon us the opposite qualities. Nor can the identification of the two be explained as a wish-fulfilment, for it fulfils no one's wishes. We desire nothing less than to see that Law whose naked authority is already unsupportable armed with the incalculable claims of the Numinous. Of all the jumps that humanity takes in its religious history this is certainly the most surprising. It is not unnatural that many sections of the human race refused it; non-moral religion, and non-religious morality, existed and still exist. Perhaps only a single people, as a people, took the new step with perfect decision -- I mean the Jews: but great individuals in all times and places have taken it also, and only those who take it are safe from the obscenities and barbarities of the unmoralised worship or the cold, sad self-righteousness of sheer moralism... Once more, it may be madness -- a madness congenital to man and oddly fortunate in its results -- or it may be revelation. And if revelation, then it is most really and truly in Abraham that all people shall be blessed, for it was the Jews who fully and unambiguously identified the awful Presence haunting black mountain-tops and thunderclouds with 'the righteous Lord' who 'loveth righteousness' [Psalm 11:8] [pp.11-13, boldface added].

Lewis overlooks the wedding of religion to morality in the Egyptian judgment of the dead, in Zoroastrianism, in Indian religion, with Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Jainism, or in Confucianism. This is at least ungenerous, or bespeaks a certain lack of interest in world religion, curiously similar to that of Lenn Goodman; but were Lewis to include India in his purview, then his own "fourth stage in religious development," the Incarnation, would no longer be unique to Christianity. Krishna makes claims and promises comparable to those of Jesus, even as he recommends a moral principle equivalent to the Categorical Imperative.

Yet, even with his tribute to Abraham and Israel, C.S. Lewis would not go far enough for Lenn Goodman, who argues, in effect, that numinosity doesn't even exist, and that the "holy" not only means morality, but that morality is the only true holiness -- which excludes the "obscenities and barbarities" or the "frenzy of antic piety" or the "wild and demonic forms" of our Aztec friends, but also leaves us with the "cold, sad self-righteousness of sheer moralism" in the impersonal theology of someone like Spinoza, whose cold and impersonal God, however, pays no attention to the rights and wrongs of human life, which means he is not even "holy" according to Goodman's own definitions. A curious result.

WILL	ACTION		OBJECTS
	PERSONS	THINGS	GOODS	BEAUTY	RELIGION
INTERNAL	EXTERNAL

Note Lewis's use of the term "moralism," which in these pages means, following Leonard Nelson, the improper application of moral judgment beyond issues that are germane and proper to morality. We might well construe Lewis using the word in this way, since the "self-righteousness of sheer moralism" sounds like something that is excessive and beyond legitimate bounds. To the extent that we can interpret Lewis asserting that "moralism" is a fallacy, or that religion and morality are based on separate categories of value, which can vary independently, then we can award him the status of being a implicit Friesian philosopher. Like Otto, however, he falls short in attributing unique religious development to Christianity, which is not warranted from the perspective of world religion.

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 9

In 1938, after the Freuds escaped from Vienna and settled in London, a "young Oxford philosopher" visited Freud one Friday:

Freud's Office, with desk, consulting couch, and day bed, where he died in 1939, London, 2019

Martha Freud joined them and said to the visitor, "You must know that on Friday evenings good Jewish women light candles for the approach of the Sabbath. But this monster -- Unmensch -- will not allow this, because he says that religion is a superstition." Freud gravely nodded and agreed: "Yes," he said, "it is a superstition," to which the Frau Professor, addressing her visitor, rejoined: "You see?"

[Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis, Yale University Press, 1987, p.153]

Cassell's defines Unmensch as "inhuman creature, hard-hearted wretch, monster, brute." Then we get the sequel:

But the Friday night [29 September 1939] after Freud dies [23 September], Martha lights Sabbath candles at the family table. And she continues to do so for the rest of her life. [Norman Lebrecht, Genius & Anxiety, How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947, Scribner, 2019, pp.176-177]

Martha Freud does not die until 2 November 1951, aged 90.

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 10

In relation to the Roman practice of unwanted babies being left at the Hermae, there is a striking parallel in the modern cult of Jizō. In Jizō temples, women who have had abortions often leave notes to the children they have aborted. As at Rome, these were, of course, unwanted children. Where in the modern West, abortion involves either mere insignificant "tissue," to the secular, or the sinful murder of the unborn, to the religious, or a triumphant assertion of power, independence, or... something, to shockingly callous ideologues, in Japanese Buddhism some guilt can follow the procedure, without the act itself preventing the children from being born again in more favorable circumstances. The notes can thus be apologetic, with explanations for the woman's circumstances, together with best wishes for a better future.

For Christians, the fate of the aborted baby is not always clear. Traditionally, an unbaptized child goes to Limbo, where actual salvation will not be available. But in traditional theology, there was some question about when the soul entered the body; and the modern view that "life begins at conception," which would need to mean that the soul is present in a ferilized egg, is really a recent innovation. But Christians may no longer believe in Limbo at all, and it is possible many think that aborted babies will always go to Heaven. Nevertheless, whether Limbo or Heaven, the baby will have been permanently deprived of a normal life, and the sin of the mother would be considerable. In Buddhism, the evils of the business can be remedied, and Jizō himself can be enlisted to ensure a better future birth and circumstances for the child.

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 11

Goodman's view of Otto as "romantic" and as rejecting "rationalism" may be the result of a false association of Otto with contemporaries of an irrational bent, like Martin Heidegger and other Existentialists. For such philosophers, a project to "restore the Hebrew idea of the holy to its moral roots" would be problematic, since (atheistic) Existentialism tends to erase the "moral roots" of anything in any traditional sense ("all is permitted," in Sartre's paraphrase of Dostoyevsky); and even theistic Existentialism, as in Kierkegaard or Martin Buber, does not see meaning or morality as a rational matter either. You acquire both through faith.

Otto, as a Kantian, sees morality as entirely a matter of reason. Thus, Goodman cannot impeach his "rationalism" on that score, and if Goodman wants to leave us with the impression that Otto somehow shares the moral irrationalism of someone like Martin Heidegger, this is deceptive and sophistical. On the other hand, the disparaging remarks from Goodman, which I examine below, about Kant's moral rationalism may indicate an uneasiness in Goodman that the accusation against Otto of rejecting "rationalism" is not going to stick where it counts the most, in morality. So Kant's own moral rationalism must have some flaw in it. It does, but probably not in a way that will help Goodman.

Instead, an attack on Kantian morality makes it sound like Goodman himself prefers to find the basis of morality in Biblical revelation and in faith, putting him in the camp of Existentialists with whom he may otherwise wish to smear Otto by association. It is a tough choice for Goodman, to reject "rationalism" in morality in order to impeach Kant and Otto, but thereby join the ranks of irrationalists that include morally deficient people like Nietzsche and Heidgger, or to admit that in morality, which counts the most for Goodman, he is actually in the same rationalistic camp as Kant and Otto, thereby mitigating most of the force and bitterness of his critique of Otto. Goodman would share the same "roots" of morality, in Reason, as them. Horrors.

The issue of the moral deficiency of Existentialist philosophy arises in an interesting way in the case of the relationship to Martin Heidegger of Karl Jaspers (1883-1869) and Hanna Arendt (1906-1975). Both of them, personally and professional close to Heidegger, were shocked and surprised by Heidegger's adherence to the Nazi Party. Both broke with him, and fled Germany, but became reconciled, to an extent, after the War. Jaspers finally became permanently estranged, but the dilemma of Heidegger apparently plagued him the rest of his life, especially when he could not shake the idea that Heidegger was the better philosopher. The better philosopher who had become a Nazi and who continued to repeat some form of Nazi apologetic long after the War. Arendt seems to have remained comfortable with Heidegger by simply avoided the problematic areas of political discussion, and by deciding that she was not actually a philosopher herself -- conceding, again, Heidegger's superiority. This may be the most disappointing thing about both Jaspers and Arendt.

The problem for both of them seems to have been how to explain how such a great philosopher could have gone so wrong in matters of morals and politics. It seems that neither was ever quite able to square that circle, yet somehow remained attracted, attached, or intimidated by Heidegger and his obscurantism.

But what the whole business means is that neither ever really understood the nature and implications of Heidegger's thought, which had always been irrationalistic, amoral, nihilistic, anti-humanistic, anti-democratic, and violent. As Karl Löwith (1897-1973), a more acute critic, but personally acquainted with Heidegger also, would say, "It is not Heidegger, who, in opting for Hitler, 'misunderstood himself'." Both Nietzsche and Heidegger, of course, thought they were reacting against "Nihilism," but it is very hard indeed not to honestly see both as among its principal exemplars.

I was fortunate in that my first encounter with Heidegger was through a course on him in 1972 at the University of Hawai'i by J.L. (Jarava Lal) Mehta, who used Heidegger's short book, An Introduction to Metaphysics [translated by Ralph Manheim, Anchor Books, New York, 1959; German Einführung in die Metaphysik, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, 1953, 1998]. Mehta was a follower and acquaintance of Heidegger (who was still alive at the time), but we see in Heidegger's book that the process of the "uncovering" of Being does not produce knowledge, where, as Socrates said, "if I learn better [ἐὰν μάθω]" [Apology 26a]; instead it replaces an existing standard of "justice" (δίκη) with a new dispensation that, in its form of advent and content, will appear "terrible" (δεινός) in relation to the old.

As such, the "terrible" brutality of the Nazis is exactly what we should expect, while Heidegger could literally look out his window and see the Brown Shirts assaulting people; and Heidegger's post-War rationalizations betray a continuing complacency and personal deficiency of judgment and sentiment about such things. Heidegger was, in fact, a bad man; but this never quite registered with Jaspers and Arendt, who missed that dimension of the matter, excusing his behavior, even to the de-Nazification authorities, as "childlike." They seem to have lacked the imagination, perspicacity, or even courage to discredit and reject his philosophy.

Since Karl Jaspers was himself an Existentialist philosopher, he was perhaps ill equipped to grasp what was lacking in Heidegger, as a philosopher and as a person. With Lenn Goodman, some clarification is needed on what he considers the basis of morality. Is it Biblical Revelation? Reason? or somehow something else (perhaps the "history" and customary practices of Hume and Edmund Burke)? If it is Revelation, then he would not even be agreeing with St. Thomas, for whom morality actually was not a matter of faith, but of (Aristotelian) reason. And he could, in those terms, have no complaint against Rudolf Otto. But if he rejects the rationality of morality, against St. Thomas, Kant, and Otto, he is in no position to disparage Otto for a rejection of "rationalism," which smears him by implied association with people like Heidegger, Existentialists, or any other irrationalists. Just what Goodman's commitments are here seems confused.

I begin to wonder. Sometimes, when people are consumed with enough malice, they can forget their own reasoned arguments and just start saying anything to vent their animus. Whether morality is a matter of reason is something on which Goodman doesn't seem to have a coherent answer; but he does know that, whatever Otto thinks, it must be, not only wrong, but as evil as the Nazis. So he may be willing to just say anything, as moment by moment a chance comes up to condemn Otto. Why he seems to sputter in a kind of rage, consistency be damned, I cannot explain. Either morality is a matter of reason, and Kant and Otto are correct, or it isn't, and Goodman himself has rejected "rationalism," supposedly Otto's primary sin. This is senseless.

Another interesting case of irrationalism, neopaganism, and possible real Nazi sympathies actually involves Carl Jung. At least for a while, Jung seems to have been guilty of Goodman's charge against Otto that he seeks "the primitive essence of the spiritual" in order to create, or revive, a "'profounder religion' than rationalism knows." Thus, we find Paul Hollander telling us:

Carl Jung, the revered psychologist, too initially sympathized with Nazism, his attitude "shaped in part by the conviction that a new religion was needed to heal the modern soul," and Nazism appeared to offer such a secular-religious substitute. He also declared "in a lecture to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute... following the Nazi seizure of power, that 'the Aryan unconsicous has a higher potential than the Jewish.'" [From Benito Hussolini to Hugo Chavez, Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship, Cambridge, 2016, p.99; the embedded quotes here are from John Gray, The Silence of the Animals, 2013, pp.115-116; boldface added]

This sounds like Nazi sympathies in particularly ugly forms, and the anti-Semitic statement here was not unique. That Jung soon thought better of it, at least by 1936, is good; but the fact remains disturbing that Jung was ever tempted into such things in the first place. The moral force of his own Kantian background was not enough to prevent it, although Kant's own anti-Semitism would be no help.

Unlike the total absence of remorse in someone like Martin Heidgger, the degree of shame and mortification felt by Jung over this temporary enchantment with Nazism resulted, not only in the evidence of such sentiments being erased from his collected works, but in his apparent conviction that they had never existed. So he said, in 1948:

It must be clear to anyone who has read any of my books that I have never been a Nazi sympathizer and I never have been anti-Semitic, and no amount of misquotation, mistranslation, or rearrangement of what I have written can alter the record of my true point of view. Nearly every one of these passages has been tampered with, either by malice or by ignorance. Furthermore, my friendly relations with a large group of Jewish colleagues and patients over a period of many years in itself disproves the charge of anti-Semitism. [interview with Carol Baumann]

So Jung has either creatively misremembered the transient attraction -- a psychological phenomenon that would have been as familiar to him as to us -- or perhaps there was some truth to his charge that "these passages," presumably meaning the kinds of things just quoted, had been tampered with or falsified. Or he was just lying in 1948, to consciously contradict, if dishonestly, the evidence and preserve his reputation. In any case, the opposition to the Nazis soon displayed by Jung went so far as involvement with Allen Dulles (1893-1969), the agent in Berne of the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, prececessor the CIA, which Dulles later headed, 1953-1961) for much of World War II. The connection of Dulles to Jung was through the interesting intermediary of Dulles' mistress, who was a patient of Jung's. Jung passed information to Dulles from his contacts and did some profiling, in what are now familiar forms, of Hitler.

How Jung might have been vulnerable to the Nazi appeal merits consideration. Jung was not a philosopher or historian of religion and did not think simply in terms of description, phenomenology, and analysis, although there are elements of all these things in his thought and interests. Nor was he a devout or orthodox believer or practioner in Christianity or any religion. It is not hard to imagine that he would be open to the suggestion of a "new religion," even as Heidegger himself was looking for a living manifestation of an "uncovering of Being." It is not clear that there was ever anything of sort in Rudolf Otto. The Idea of the Holy is locked on actual religion, not on some fantasy or imagination of something else. And also, it is not clear that Jung ever had the degree of moral focus and seriousness evident in Otto, or embraced the sort of theory in Otto by which religion progresses through increasing moral development. For Otto, the "moral roots" of Christianity, in historical terms, are clearly, pace Goodman, in Judaism -- which even Nietzsche affirmed (in order to reject both) -- and we have no clue that Otto ever thought anything else.

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 12

Having noted Otto's preferences for Christianity, we might want to see how this is expressed. Otto says:

In the Gospel of Jesus we see the consummation of that process tending to rationalize, moralize, and humanize the idea of God, which began with the earliest period of the old Hebrew tradition and became specially prominent as a living factor in the Prophets and the Psalms, continually bringing the apprehension of the numinous to a richer fulfilment by recognizing in it attributes of clear and profound value for the reason [sic?]. The result was the faith in 'the fatherhood of God' and in that unsurpassable form in which it is peculiar to Christianity. [op.cit., p.82]

Now, we can understand how Christianity would "humanize the idea of God" by the Incarnation of God as an actual human. The rationality of this, however, has perplexed many, and attempts to produce a coherent account resulted in centuries of Christological controversies and Schisms that have never been reconciled. So the jury, to say the least, is still out.

On the other hand, the moral superiority of Christianity is questionable on two fronts:  First, that the moral teachings of Jesus generally consist of him quoting the Old Testament, which leaves us with the impression that the morality of the Prophets is quite sufficient for him; and second, that what are perhaps uniquely Christian maxims, such as μὴ ἀντιστῆναι τῷ πονηρῷ, Vobis non resistere malo, "Not to resist one who is evil" [Matthew 5:39], are open to question both for their wisdom and for their righteousness. I have detailed some of these problems in "Why I am not a Christian."

Thus, in each of the areas cited by Otto, there may be a question made. The humanity of Jesus perhaps is beyond question, but the rationality of this is a problem, muddling both the "rationalize" and "humanize" aspects of Otto's "process." Similarly, if the ethics of the "moralize" part rely on a world-denying practice, metaphysic, or eschatology, we worry again about the rationality of it, or at least the extent to which it can be generalized as a morality for ordinary life. "Resist not one who is evil," may be an excellent principle for a monk or a saint, but it seems to rule out self-defense, the police, and the criminal justice system. It also contradicts the practice of warfare from the Emperor Constantine to 20th Century Christian governments fighting Nazi Germany. Such Christians, naturally, often took more comfort from the Old Testament than from the New, without feeling that they had ceased to be Christians. There is something a little paradoxical there, which we might recommend to Otto's consideration.

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 13

The shrine of the Japanese sun goddess, Amaterasu-Ō-Mikami, the progenitor the Japanese Imperial House, at Ise, perhaps the most sacred place in Japan, is guarded with the most stringent pollution taboos. Sickness and death cannot be allowed within, or even mentioned. Since Buddhism had come to be associated with the rites of death ("Born Shintō, Die Buddhist"), nothing Buddhist could be allowed, or even mentioned. Even Buddhist terminology was prohibited; and where references were unavoidable, special euphemisms were substituted, e.g. "long-hairs" for monks, who, of course, shaved their heads.

In one famous incident in 1279, a local clerk, Kunihide, entered the precincts of Ise during the "rites of renewal," which occur every twenty years, when the central shrine, entirely of wood, is completely rebuilt. Kunhide had recently sat with a Buddhist monk, who had previously sat in the house of a lay monk, Kawata Nyūdō, who had just died. The Shrine priests learned of all this and ruled that Kunihide had entered the Shrine in a state of pollution, which had been transmitted through the intermediary monk. It is not clear what rites were required to remedy this violation.

The matter was a subject of discussion because Kawata Nyūdō was reputed to have become an ōjōnin, one reborn in the Pure Land of the Buddha Amitābha; and many believed that such a person could not be a source of death pollution -- "an ōjōnin is without pollution." Ise, and perhaps Amaterasu, disagreed. [Jacqueline Stone, Right Thoughts at the Last Moment, Kuroda Institute, U. of Hawaii Press, 2016, p.206]

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 14

This observation about ʾIslām by Otto, which we might dismiss as "historical chauvinism" or perhaps even "Islamophobia," finds an echo in Zoroastrianism, the original national religion of Iran, which fought back as well as it could in the long, losing, twilight struggle by which it was overwhelmed by ʾIslām. Most Zoroastrians long ago fled Iran for India, where they became the large and prosperous community of the Parsis, i.e. "Persians." The few who remained in Iran, no more than 20,000 in recent times, have been subject to further persecution in the days of the vicious fanaticism of the so-called Islāmic Republic.

For our purposes here, Zoroastrianism is a strikingly apt case. A characteristic accusation made by Zoroastrian sources, in the polemic generated after the Islāmic Conquest, was that, while ʾIslām attributes "99 Names" to God, not a single one of them is "the Good." Zoroastrianism itself is the "Good Religion," built around the idea that the cause of God requires a choice between good and evil. Good for God, called Ahura Mazda, the "Wise Lord"; evil for "Evil Mind," the equivalent of the Devil. With God goes life. With the Devil goes death.

The thesis of Otto that religions undergo a historic evolution of increasing moralization is dramatically evident in Zoroastrianism, when the Prophet Zoroaster (c.628-551 BC) took what was apparently a conventional polytheistic religion, comparable to the Vedic religion of India, and abrupted transformed it into an intensely moralized, monotheistic faith. Rarely has a single figure so thoroughly transformed a religion, although a comparison to Muhammad is unavoidable.

Where the history of the development of Mosaic religion, both theologically as a genuine monotheism and morally as a vehicle of hightened ethics, is a matter of great uncertainty and dispute, and while Zoroaster himself remains a shadowy figure, the effect of his advent is sudden and shocking. In the language of the sacred Avesta -- conventionally and not too imaginatively called "Avestan" -- the very word for "god," daeva, the cognate of deva, , in Sanskrit, has been transformed into the equivalent of "demon" -- just as the Greek word for "spirit," δαίμων, daimōn, written daemon in Latin, actually now is the word "demon." Meanwhile, what had been the demon in India, the , the asura, becomes the name of God himself, Ahura, in the Avesta.

Thus, in one catastrophic strike, all the gods of ancient Iran became evil. The revolution, however, did not succeed all at once. Under the Achaemenids, where Darius apparently is the first King influenced, if not named, by Zoroastrianism, the cults of some of the old gods, like Mithra and Anahita, nevertheless continued. Mithra even migrated into the Roman world and took on the form of a mystery religion. A monotheistic rigor in Iran is not really evident until the Sassanids, who then took up their religion with evangelistic fervor.

Thus, as a critic of ʾIslām in exactly the way Rudolf Otto would see the matter, Zoroastrianism is also a paradigm of a nearly instantaneous moralization process.

Other things about Zoroastrianism are such as to perhaps discomfit Goodman's apologetics for Judaism. Thus, the "Bounteous Immortals" of the religion, personified powers or attributes of God, look a whole lot like what angels would seem to be in later Judaism. The suspicion has therefore arisen that Judaism derived this idea from Zoroastrianism by way of the Jewish community in Babylon, where the Bible was apparently first written down and where part of the Jewish community remained, for centuries, after the Persian Conquest and after most of the Jews had returned to Palestine. And if not angels, why not the conflict of good and evil itself? The moralization of Judaism, in these terms, itself may have been the result of Persian influence. The moral emphasis of Mosaic religion thus may have been, to an extent, retrospective.

However, there is little beyond speculation in these associations of Judaism with Zoroastrianism, and most of the morally furious Prophets seem to antedate the Babylonian Captivity. But if there is not a connection, there certainly are parallels. Where the religions look rather different, however, is where what would have been an evolution of some centuries, perhaps, in Judaism, was something accomplished abruptly, with a single Prophet, in Iran.

We should not leave Zoroastrianism here without noting something else. Nietzsche credits Zoroaster with initiating the conflict between good and evil, and thus he brings him back in Also Sprach Zarathustra to end it, launching Nietzsche's own "beyond good and evil" ethics. This is a little inconsistent of him, since Nietzsche otherwise wants to credit (or blame) the Jews for introducing the very idea of "evil" as part of the "slave revolt in ethics," many centuries after Zoroaster. I am not clear to what sort of slave revolt Zoroaster was a party, but then Nietzsche often seems to treat his own arguments as rhetorical devices rather than the logical demonstrations of a serious theory.

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 15

With the Quakers, we get an exceedingly revealing comment from William James:

The Quaker religion which he [George Fox] founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in England. So far as our Christian sects to-day are evolving into liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position which Fox and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. [The Varieties of Religious Experience, The Library of America, Simon & Schuster, 1987, pp.15-16]

This is an extraordinary thing for someone to say if their business is the description and phenomenology of world religion, and right after James has just distinguished between statements of fact, "existential judgments," and those of value, "propositions of value," German Werthurtheil (Werturteil in modern spelling -- see Wert), or "spiritual judgments," with the warning that his observations about religion will be confined to the former category. Instead, James offers an endorsement of this particular anomalous sect, against which any other form of Christianity, or perhaps of any religion, is all but disqualified. Instead, not only is it possible to "overpraise" the Quaker religion, absurdly so, but James has suddenly forgotten his own project and principles, that it is not his job as a psychologist to "praise" a religion at all. If he wants to take on a judgmental role, then his book should have been The Varieties of Religious Experience, with a Guide to their Worth and Veracity. If he actually does that, without warning, his project is not honest or conscientious.

How Quakers might view the history of religion we get a hint from the life of Thomas Young (1773-1829), immoralized by his contributions to physics and his role in the decipherment of hieroglyphics:

If idolatry and superstition marked the Egyptians as foolish and frivolous, for Young it could scarcely have been otherwise. He may have shed the outer trappings of Quakerism, but subtle elements lingered in his suspicion of Egyptian religious practices, such as worship of theriomorphic deities. [The Riddle of the Rosetta, How an English Polymath and the French Polyglot Discovered the Meaning of Egyptian Hieroglyphs, by Jed Z. Buchwald & Diane Greco Josefowicz, Princeton, 2020, p.280]

Clearly not someone we want doing our philosophy or history of religion, and William James carelessly threatens to discredit his own project with praise and enthusiasm for anything that must now seem so narrow and bigoted.

The founder of Quakerism, George Fox, does seem to have been an extraordinary individual. And when the Spirit descended upon him, his behavior could seem quite mad. But founding an entire religious practice on the expectation of such inspirations, and regarding this as "more like the original gospel" than other Christian traditions and practices, are both views that are eccentric and extraordinary.

Indeed, an outsider now inspecting a Quaker meeting might have some difficulty identifying it as part of the Christian religion at all. The congregation, which sits around on benches or chairs arranged in a square, without altar, cross, or pulpit, simply looks at each other until someone is moved to speak, whether by the descent of the Spirit or by the recollection of some contemporay political or social outrage or fad. The "Friends" are without clergy, and one wonders to what extent the Bible or any religious learning, let alone exclusively Christian, is regarded as necessary. They draw little notice today as religion, but occasionally for political activism.

If William James esteems that above other forms of religion, then as both a historian and philosopher of religion, his value is going to be minimal. Of course, we need harbor no illusions that he was in any sense a historian or philosopher of religion. He was a psychologist, after the manner of his day; and his book, of course, is about "religious experience," where it is not at all surprising that "spiritual inwardness" would rank high on his scale of value. "Empty ritual," however dominant in the history of religion, will provide neither the centrality of "experience" nor the "spiritual inwardness" that would catch his attention, engage his interest, or earn his praise. Indeed, James makes this explicit, with the provision that he is not going to deal with the "institutional" side of religion, saying:

Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch. [p.34]

But James's statement about Quakerism reveals that this provision is not simply due to what are the appropriate objects of psychology, but it is due to his own "spiritual judgment" that these outward forms of religion are inessential, perhaps even the "sham" that he mentions. Part of the "liberality" of Christian sects evolving towards Quakerism must mean shedding these artifacts of the "institutional branch."

However, an empty room with people just looking at each other seems, not only lacking in the necessities of any historical religious practice, but really to hold the strong potential of being quite boring, rootless, directionless, self-referential, and nihilistic. It is an open invitation, not for the mad transports of George Fox, or for the "quaking" of possession that gave the Quakers their name, but for the relentless social indignation and political activism of modern "liberal" and trendy religion.

Otto, of course, follows in the footsteps of James to an extent, beginning the inspection of numinosity in terms of religious "feeling," and so as a matter of psychology. But this also reflects earlier concerns, from the age of Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Kierkegaard, and Jakob Fries himself, with Fries placing his own emphasis on Kantian critique as a form of psychology. But it is hard to imagine Otto being so dismissive of ritual and practice as to identify Quakerism as uniquely representative of the "original gospel truth" of Christianity, in terms of which the original Jewish background of the religion perhaps entirely vanishes. Then Eliade brings us further down to earth with the description of phenomena closely tied to historical religions, with vivid theories of sacred space and time. But at least no one would ever mistake George Fox for a rationalist.

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 16

Could Goodman be thinking of Kierkegaard rather than Otto? There is a chapter in Fear and Trembling entitled "Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical?"; and we find Kierkegaard saying:

Then why does Abraham do it? For God's sake, and what is exactly the same, for his own. He does it for the sake of God because God demands this proof of his faith; he does it for his own sake in order to be able to produce the proof. The unity here is quite properly expressed in the saying in which this relationship has always been described: it is a trial, a temptation. A temptation, but what does that mean? What we usually call a temptation is something that keeps a person from carrying out a duty, but here the temptation is the ethical itself which would keep him from doing God's will. But then what is the duty? For the duty is precisely the expression of God's will. [Penguin, 1985, 2003, p.88, boldface added]

Thus, where Goodman says, "To romantics the holy becomes the tremendum that may ultimately demand suspension of the ethical," Kierkegaard has appreciated that to obey God's command to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham must do wrong, violate ethics, and murder Isaac. It is not clear that Goodman discerns this problem, since he doesn't seem to admit that Abraham is being asked to commit murder. And he seems to think that because the sacrifice is stopped, therefore a moral problem never existed. But Kierkegaard is not so easily deceived or molified.

Now, perhaps Kierkegaard is a "romantic" because he lives in the era of Romanticism. Perhaps he does "demand suspension of the ethical," when he understands that God has demanded this himself, by ordering the murder of Isaac. I think Goodman wants to evade the direct harshness and wrongness of this. Kierkegaard does not, and he understands that God's command can be accepted only because of faith and because of the (Existentialist) absurdity and irrationality of God's actions and Abraham's situation. God avoids the commission of the wrong, but only after forcing Abraham to reveal his willingness to do it. This is a terrible thing to do to someone, and we wonder about a God who derives some satisfaction from breaking a person in this way. One of Kierkegaard's sketches gives us a possible aftermath:

From that day on, Abraham became old, he could not forget that God had demanded this of him. Isaac throve as before; but Abraham's eye was darkened, he saw joy no more. [p.46]

Goodman's analysis does not give us anything like the emotional versimilitude of this.

φόβοι δὲ καὶ ἠχὼ νυκτερινή, ἐπιπίπτων φόβος ἐπ᾽ ἀνθρώπους,
φρίκη δὲ μοι συνήντησε καὶ τρόμος καὶ μεγάλως μου τὰ ὀστᾶ διέσεισε,
καὶ πνεῦμα ἐπὶ πρόσωπόν μου ἐπῆλθεν, ἔφριξαν δέ μου τρίχες καὶ σάρκες.

In horrore visionis nocturnae, quando solet sopor occupare homines,
pavor tenuit me et tremor et omnia ossa mea perterrita sunt,
et cum spiritus me praesente transiret, inhorruerunt pili carnis meae.

---

Amid disquieting dreams in the night, when deep sleep falls on men,
fear and trembling seized me and made all my bones shake.
A spirit glided past my face, and the hair on my body stood on end.

Amid thoughts from visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on men,
dread came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones shake.
A spirit glided past my face; the hair of my flesh stood up.

Job, 4:13-15

In the epigraph we have the origin of the title of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling -- and in Hebrew. The first English translation is that given in The Interlinear NV Hebrew-English Old Testament [John R. Kohlenberger III, Zondervan Publishing House, 1979, 1987], whence also the Hebrew text, while the second is that from the Revised Standard Version [Cokesbury, 1946, 1952]. The Greek, of course, is the Septuagint, and the Latin from the Vulgate.

Curiously, this expression is not from the episode of Isaac and Abraham in Genesis, but from the book of Job. Also, the word here is not , which we have seen already. The former is "dread" in Brown, Driver, and Briggs, "fear, awe, dread" in Ben Yehuda, while is "terror, dread" in the former and in the latter. Both the King James and The Interlinear NV Hebrew-English Old Testament use "fear," while the Revised Standard Version uses "dread."

What we get in Greek and Latin in the first place preserve more of the word order from Hebrew, breaking up the "fear and trembling" phrase. Otherwise, what we see is a little mysterious. Both φρίκη and τρόμος seem to mean "trembling." First, φρίκη is "shuddering, shivering," and τρόμος is "trembling, quaking, quivering, esp. from fear" [Intermediate Liddell & Scott, Oxford, 1964, pp.872, 820, respectively]. Thus, since we expect there to be a nuance, the "fear" association is more with the second word, rather than the first, as in Hebrew. This seems odd. However, φρίκη comes from the verb φρίσσω, which seems to have a little more going on, such as "of the effect of fear, to shiver, shudder." But then this just adds up to both words being associated with suddering from fear. But then φρίσσω can also mean shivering from a chill, with goose flesh, which fits the final line of the quote.

In Latin, we get pavor and tremor, which both again mean "trembling," just as in Greek. Pavor is "trembling, quaking, produced by fear or exitement"; and tremor, "trembling, quaking, tremor... an object which causes fear and trembling" [Cassell's New Latin Dictionary, Funk & Wagnalls, 1959, 1960, pp.428, 613]. So in both Greek and Latin we seem to have insufficient differentiation between the words, where in Hebrew clearly handles the fear part and takes the trembling. What we expect to see in Greek is φόβος, but this had already been used in the text and translated "sleep," which seems anomalous. In Latin we might expect timor or, indeed, terror. So we have several curious features to these translations.

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Rudolf Otto in Lenn E. Goodman's
Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation; Note 17

βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι᾽ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι,
τότε δὲ πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον·

Videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate,
tunc autem facie ad faciem.

For now we see through a glass, darkly;
but then face to face.

1 Corinthians 13:12

Behind the story of Abraham and Isaac is the shadow of real history. Or perhaps the story of Abraham and Isaac itself is a shadow of the real history. Thus, the practice of infant sacrifice among the Phoenicians and the Canaanites does not seem to have been confined to them. It seems to have been practiced among the Hebrews themselves.

Jesus speaks of ἡ Γέεννα τοῦ πυρός, "the Gehenna of fire" [Matthew 5:22]. So "Gehenna" is used as a word for "hell." But this was originally a valley in Jerusalem, the "Valley of Hinnōm," -- shortened to "Gêhinnôm," -- where infant sacrifices took place. These sacrifices were by immolation, hence the "Gehenna of fire," and the "burnt offering" for which Isaac was intended.

The site in the Valley of Hinnōm for the immolations, and probably the burial of the ashes also, was the Tôpheth, (or "Tophet"; Greek Ταφέθ). The Phoenicians and Canaanites sacrificed infants to the gods Baʿal, , and Moloch, (Μόλοχ in Greek). Leviticus 18:21 specifically prohibits sacrifices to Moloch -- curiously, the Vulgate but not the Septuagint gives the name of the god, where ἄρχων, "ruler," is substituted.

Because the Greeks and Romans described Phoenician infant sacrifice, especially at Carthage, it was inevitable that some modern opinion would question the reliability of such accusations. They may have just been smears to discredit political enemies, especially Carthage. However, Canaanite and Carthaginian Tophets have been excavated, and archaeological opinion now is that they do indeed involve the burial of sacrifices, including children. Like similar attempts to explain away Aztec human sacrifice, the revisionism apparently fails.

With Lenn Goodman's polemic against Rudolf Otto, and his theodicy for Judaism, the question is whether his program to "restore the Hebrew idea of the holy to its moral roots" is discredited by those "moral roots" involving infant sacrifice. He can, of course, argue that such practices were never part of Judaism but had been introduced, corruptly, from the surrounding Canaanite religion. Fair enough. But we must consider whether there is really evidence for that. The textual prohibitions of infant sacrifice, let alone the story of Abraham and Issac, are attested centuries after such practices would have existed. The site of their actual conduct in Jerusalem, long remembered, like the names of Kings of Israel who conducted the rituals, would seem to tell against their being alien to the local religion. But there will be no certainty about this. The Bible fulminates against many improper practices, as at "high places," and the faithful may be excused for thinking that none of them was intrinsic to the original purity of Hebraic religion -- a "purity" that wedded the God of Abraham -- , ʾ^elōahh -- brought to Egypt with Joseph, the volcano God Moses found in Midian -- , YHWH -- and whatever Moses may have derived from his childhood in proximity to the Aton cult in Egypt -- , ʾ^adōn. Such "purity" thus sounds like Hebraic religion, like most religions, involved a mixture of practices.

But then we have Abraham and Isaac. And it is tempting, and more, to see it as recollecting or commemorating the moment when God changed his mind, and his practice. The Israelites had been doing, by God's command, what everyone had been doing, sacrificing children. Then God said stop it. How we take this will depend on our view of Revelation. Either it is eternal and unchanging, and is simply dropped in at a particular moment in history by certain prophets (something incomprehensible to Spinoza, by the way), or it is dropped in at certain moments because the Revelation itself changes, as God may change. That is more like Jung's take; and, of course, we might not expect it to be a popular idea among the faithful of particular religions.

But we can see Otto siding with Jung, at least in terms of history, if not in terms of the transcendent. God may not change, but Revelation may be something seen "through a glass darkly." Over time, the glass begins to clear, and the kaleidoscope of gods and rituals comes into better focus, or at least a better focus. The focus seems to have been a little different for the Buddha and for Moses. Or even for Jesus and Moses. Otto can easily say that part of the clarification, for the Buddha, Moses, and Jesus, is the better perception of the "moral roots" of the transcendent in the Kantian Moral Law. What doesn't yet get clarified, certainly not with Lenn Goodman, is the Antinomy of the Euthyphro.

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