In response to some comments on this post on my movie-blog, I started thinking about Rudolf Otto again. Some time back I
devoted over half a dozen posts to my reading of Otto’s most famed
book, THE IDEA OF THE HOLY, which originally I knew only through a
C.S. Lewis essay. Though I believe these posts show how Otto’s
thinking informed his concept of “the uncanny,” I wrote them
before I had fully formulated my literary concept of “artifice,”
influenced by but not determined by some of Northrop Frye’s
formulations.
When Rudolph Otto published IDEA OF THE
HOLY in 1923, he was in effect challenging an intellectual tendency
in his time to define religion purely in terms of either
“naturalistic” or “marvelous” phenomenologies. Religion, of
course, was in every clime and time justified in terms of a
phenomenology that transcended the strictures of space and time.
Creation-myths show this transcendence of natural law most clearly.
The world is created from some marvelous series of events, whether it
springs from the bones of fallen giants or from God moving on the
face of chaotic waters. A few scattered skeptical accounts of
universal genesis did appear during certain archaic periods. Still,
it’s fair to state that the assertion of purely naturalistic
explanations didn’t really gain ground until the growth of
non-religious or even anti-religious philosophies in Europe’s
post-Renaissance eras.
Otto, being a Lutheran theologian, was
inevitably allied to the notion of a marvelous Christian theology, in
which God had sent his only begotten son to be sacrificed by and for
humanity. He was, as IDEA makes clear, quite aware of the
intellectual currents of the preceding centuries, which tended to
view not only the world, but religion itself, as reducible to natural
causes. For instance, in 1902 William James had in essence taken an
empiricist attitude in analyzing THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS
EXPERIENCE. And while James’s catholic approach to world religions
may have influenced Otto, the theologian rejected James’s emphasis
on naturalistic explanations of religious practice.
As I commented in HOLY NUMINOSITY PART5, Otto held to the Christian belief that other religions were not
valid in terms of revelation. Yet he also advocated what might called
an Aristotelian sense that the “crude, primitive forms” of early
religion had at least foreshadowed “the more highly developed forms
of the numinous emotion,” that is, the ability to experience the
awe and dread lurking beneath the naturalistic appearance of the
universe. I don’t believe that Otto says all that much in IDEA
about the reality of Christian metaphysics, but only because he’s
more concerned with showing how his notion of “the numinous”
pervades all religions, crude and advanced alike.
What makes the early religions crude by
Otto’s lights is that they derive their “daemonic dread” from
entities that Otto considers unreal in terms of phenomenology—ghosts,
abstract forces like mana. An advocate of naturalistic phenomenology
would of course argue that the entities of the higher religions, such
as heaven-sent saviors, were just as unreal, but Otto does not argue
this point. His concern is to show that human beings have a special
capacity for transcendent emotions which are not reducible to
naturalistic affects like fear or lust, and that this capacity
appears in both the lesser and the greater religions.
Though Otto does not systematize his
use of the term “the uncanny,” he applies it largely to the crude
religions of daemonic dread. Modern readers of any persuasion might
tend to view a ghost-story as a concept belonging to a marvelous
phenomenology, but Otto does not believe primitives to be capable of
such advanced concepts. The ghosts of early pagan stories are mere
fancies, having no more reality than a ghost in a Sherlock Holmes
tale—my comparison, not Otto’s. But in Otto’s paradigm, even a
crude concept of ghosts still invokes the numinous capacity, which
makes the early pagan fancies relevant to Otto’s project of
defining all religious activity as rooted in something other than
naturalistic causes. Otto does not use the term “artifice” at
all, certainly not as I am using it. However, in effect he has stated
that made-up stories, stories that have no real relevance to the
phenomenological nature of the universe, stimulate emotions that
exceed the limits of naturalistic phenomenology.
In this essay I revised Northrop Frye’s
opposition of “myth” and “verisimilitude,” suggesting that,
because “myth” had so many divergent meanings, “artifice” was
a better term for the totality of the fictional (and religious)
tropes through which human beings create coherent narratives.
“Artifice” always draws upon this imagined totality to give
narratives structure, just as “verisimilitude” draws upon the
totality of lived experience to give narratives credibility.
Since I am not a materialist, I do not
argue against phenomenologies that explain the visible world in
marvelous terms, as proving-grounds for the war of Good and Evil or
as a meaningless mote in the eye of an indifferent god. I only state
that as soon as human beings translate their concepts of the
marvelous—no matter how those concepts are obtained—into
narrative, then they must structure concepts of the marvelous by the
use of artifice; the use of elaborate tropes. In Jesus’s time, the
Romans used real crosses for the mundane purpose of punishing thieves
and rebels. But although Christian religion asserts that Jesus died
on a real cross made of real wood, the real substance of the
Christian cross is composed of earlier story-tropes about sacrificial
victims perishing in or around trees. Eventually such tropes become
so elaborate that the cross, rising from a hill called Golgotha,
becomes covalent with the Tree of Knowledge, and the hill with the
skull of the long dead Adam.
Now, uncanny phenomenologies do not
diverge this much from verisimilitude. Causality remains
naturalistic, but the events depicted suggest the presence of the
numinous through the heightened emotions possible only through the
appropriate tropes. Though the story of King David is often seen as a
precursor to the meta-narrative of the Messiah, not that much of
David’s story is marvelous in nature. If one discounts from the
narrative the implicit will of God in David’s exploits, David’s
closest encounter to anything that even seems marvelous is the story
of the giant Goliath. Yet Goliath is not a mythic giant, but a mortal
who happens to be about ten feet tall—an unlikely, but not
indubitably marvelous, stature. Verisimilitude is much more of an
influence upon the narrative of King David than upon that of the King
of the Jews, but in the end, David’s story is also meant to
stimulate, through artifice, the sense of what Otto calls “the
numinous.”
In my writings I’ve usually
referenced the Kantian concept of the sublime in place of the
numinous, an association Otto explicitly denied, for reasons relating
to Otto’s concept of his own religion. In essence, my long and
winding exploration of the different phenomenological categories of
fiction exists to refute Tzvetan Todorov’s purely empiricist
formulation of those categories I call “uncanny” and “marvelous,”
which he viewed as subsumed by “the Real.” Otto would probably
not endorse any of my conclusions. But I like to think he would
prefer them over the dreary materialism of either Todorov or any
similar Marxmallow pundit.
2 comments:
As to whether the incident itself was meant to evoke numinous feelings, here's a cogent section of David's address to Goliath:
45 Then said David to the Philistine, Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied.
So, even though there's no indication that God has conferred any special power on David, as he did with Moses and others, his heroic act still represents the working-out of Israel's special destiny. It's my assumption that, to the devout, all religious history is equally valid, with or without miracles-- but even the most mundane goings-on don't boil down to a neutral record of "stuff that happened." Maybe "straight history" doesn't evolve until writers like Herodotus provide the example.
That doesn't mean that ancient people didn't have that "straight history" mindset under the proper circumstances. Sumerian scholars have found the equivalent of "bills of lading" written on cuneiform, and those certainly weren't meant to denote anything but "stuff that happened."
Now, I'm definitely extending the meaning of what Otto wrote. The only things that he says are "uncanny" are "fantastic images" brought forth from the human mind; images that he Otto believes stem from crude beliefs in ancestral ghosts, daemonic presences, and the like. Otto doesn't say anything about the way the human mind might conjure with the images of purely human individuals who happen to be "differently abled." But folklore is replete with beliefs about people getting luck from touching a hunchback's hump, or fearing the glare of "the evil eye."
Now, depending on what source you believe, Goliath might've merely been a head taller than any Israelite, or he might've been six cubits tall-- meaning nine feet. A nine-foot tall man is perhaps possible, but he probably wouldn't be able to wield a big bronze spear, so we're not really dealing with straight history in his story. He's not a giant in the way Thor's Jotuns are, but I tend to think he still signifies the world of evil and chaos--and in this way he provides an adversary for the forces of order, represented by David.
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