The Idea of the Holy: a pantheist interpretation


Principles of pantheism* by Paul Harrison.


Featured, December 12, 1996.

God's power is not known and cannot be known directly - it is known only through the universe, which is the real power and mystery.

Eruption at Stromboli, 1984. Photo J. Alean, Stromboli on-line.


As well as his special space-time characteristics and his powers over the physical universe, God is thought to have the power to evoke special emotions in us. The power that evokes these emotions was definitively described in Rudolf Otto's book The Idea of the Holy, published in 1917.

Otto set out to analyze the distinctive character of the holy or numinous, abstracted from any particular religion - drawing on Eastern as well as Western religions plus a gifted and clear introspection.

The central character of the numinous, according to Otto, was a "mysterium tremendum et fascinans" - a dread and yet alluring mystery.

Otto proceeded to analyze the separate elements: mystery, dread and attraction. Below we shall examine each of these, seeing how the physical universe itself gives rise to them. The objective character of the universe is quite capable of evoking these emotions in us, and is the probable origin of these religious feelings which believers mistakenly attribute to their gods.


Mysterium - God's mystery beyond comprehension.

The mystery of the numinous awakes in us not just a feeling that we cannot understand. It is:
The wholly other, that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible and the familiar, which . . . fills the mind with blank wonder and astonishment.
Otto, op.cit.
Otto insists that this "wholly other" has about it something alien, something quite incommensurable with our own nature. However, he also acknowledges that mystics experience the numinous in a different way, one of love and identification and merging.

The cosmos has all these characteristics of mystery. Although it is open to understanding through science, the mystery of its ultimate origins, of its apparent regularity, and of its continuing existence will never be fully grasped.

Science may try to "explain" the origins of life and matter - but those origins lie billions of years in the past, and we can never observe them. Explanations of origins will always remain theories that can never be directly tested. Because we are stranded in time on a small beach of the ocean of cosmic history, the ultimate mysteries will never be explained beyond all doubt.

Even present reality poses mysteries which no human brain has yet succeeded in grasping. Photons are never observed except as particles hitting a screen. But if a beam of photons is sent through two slits, an interference pattern builds up on the receiving screen, which only waves can produce. Even more puzzling, this interference pattern gradually builds up even if the photons are sent through one by one - as if the photon is passing through both slits at once and interfering with itself.

Quantum mechanics provides mathematical descriptions of this kind of behaviour - but no physicist so far has developed a way of making it intelligible to us. As one eminent quantum physicist put it: "Anyone who claims to understand quantum mechanics has not understood it."

If science resolves the problems of quantum mechanics by leaping into higher dimensions, this still does not resolve our feeling of mystery - because we cannot grasp any reality with more than three spatial dimensions, however hard we try.

And whatever progress we make in science, there remains the basic, unresolvable mystery of existence itself. Because we appear to ourselves to be mind, and existence as an apparently different substance called matter, existence will always seem at times alien and incommensurable. Once we grasp that mind too is a facet of matter, the alienness is lifted.


Mysterium tremendum - the awe of God.

By awe Otto means the feelings that people have in the face of an overwhelming and uncontrollable power - a feeling of dread of something uncanny, something incalculable and arbitrary, something unapproachable, which could transfix anyone who came too near like a bolt of lightning.

This Something has a quality akin to absolute power. It awakens feelings of "creature-consciousness" in us - awareness of the absolute superiority or supremacy of a power other than oneself. In the face of it we have a sense of personal nothingness and submergence, as if the Something is the sole and entire reality.

We also have the sense of an unbounded, urgent energy, "a force that knows not stint nor stay, which is urgent, active, compelling and alive."

All these feelings are very much to the fore when the people of Israel encounter Yahweh at Mount Sinai.

Exodus:

19.18. And Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire; and the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain quaked greatly. 19. And as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him in thunder . . . 21: And the Lord said to Moses, `Go down and warn the people, lest they break through to the Lord to gaze and many of them perish . . 24 do not let the priests and the people break through to come up to the Lord, lest he break out against them.
21:18. Now when all the people perceived the thunderings and the lightnings and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled; and they stood afar off and said to Moses, `You speak to us, and we will hear; but let not God speak to us, lest we die.'. . 21 And the people stood afar off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.

Deuteronomy:

4.15 You saw no form of any kind the day the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire . . . 4.33 Has any other people heard the voice of God speaking out of fire, as you have, and lived?

Yet these passages also show clearly how the physical universe itself carries the mysterium tremendum in full. For in all probability Exodus is describing a volcanic eruption. I will post extensive evidence for this in the future. (For some of this see Roland de Vaux, The Early History of Israel, Chapter 14.IV, Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 1978.)

All the majesty, unapproachability, energy and raw power of Yahweh derive not from any supernatural being but from the real objective qualities of a volcano. Yahweh is a metaphor for the inconceivable power of the earth's magma - itself only a small manifestation of the overwhelming power of the universe, so clearly visible in the Hubble photos.

That power has all the force of an absolute ruler of the most absolute kind. It can smile on us and give us life. It can turn on us suddenly and destroy us through disaster or disease. Its power is utterly unapproachable. Its greatest concentrations on earth are volcanoes: when these erupt our only option is to flee. Its greatest concentration in our vicinity is the sun, so powerful that we cannot stay exposed to it for more than a few hours, and cannot gaze directly at it for more than a second without being blinded.

It also possesses energy which is constantly active, burning in sun and stars, bursting in lightning, churning in oceans, bubbling inside all living things and in each of us, changing all things without cease.

There are many others examples of divine majesty described in terms of the power of storms, of earthquakes and of suns, in the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita and other texts. In all cases the supposed power and majesty of transcendental gods is not directly sensible: it can be seen only through its effects in the physical universe.

But there is no need to imagine that an invisible imaginary entity might be responsible. The Universe itself inspires the same feelings.


Mysterium fascinans - the allure of God.

If the divine mystery only inspired dread, then our only religious response would be submission and propitiation. But it also inspires an opposite set of emotions, those of yearning, love and even ecstasy.

To explain these believers refer to God's qualities of love, mercy, forgiveness, or his gifts of grace and salvation.

The believer:

feels a something which captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often to the pitch of dizzying intoxication; it is the Dionysiac element in the numen.
Otto, op. cit.
We know that the beauties of nature can inspire deep love. In the most sensitive people it may inspire something akin to ecstasy - a feeling of being enveloped by a mother, of belonging to a family, of yearning for a lover.

These feelings are not simply romantic imagination. Nature is our mother. She bears us and nurtures us, as she does all natural beings. We are all like a huge extended family, all related genetically back to the first cell.

The night sky has a similar effect, as an enveloping beauty beyond all words, a dark enfolding womb. And again, that feeling is not imagination. We came from the darkness. Our elements were forged in distant suns, scattered by ancient supernovae, gathered in new nebulae and concentrated in the sun.


Relating as humans to the supra-human.

My family has a beautiful Birman cat. He has sapphire-blue eyes, dark brown face and white coat. To us he seems like a member of the family. But he relates to us not as another human would, but true to his nature as a cat. He rolls on the floor and loves us to rub him round the head and under the neck, where his mother would lick him. He clenches and unclenches his paws, as he did as a kitten to get milk from his mother's teats. Sometimes he conceives an inexplicable terror, and runs off wild-eyed.

In the same way we relate to the universe not as stones or waterfalls or trees - but as humans. We open our mouths in mute incomprehension before its mystery. We shudder at its immeasurable power. We experience the transports of love at its nurturing beauty.

The Universe is just as mysterious, awesome and alluring as God is claimed to be, and in its impact far more so. For when people talk of God's mystery, they talk either of the mystery and power of the universe as an expression of God's power, or as an analogy for God's power. Either way, God's power is not known and cannot be known directly - it is known only through the real universe, which is the real power and mystery.


OTTO'S "MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM ET FASCINANS"

DIVINE ATTRIBUTEOBJECTIVE BASISHUMAN RESPONSE
Mysterium - the "wholly other"
Alien otherness. Incommensurability with mind. Astonishment, dumb stupor
Tremor - awe or dread
Divine "wrath" Unpredictable destructiveness Dread
Majesty Raw power Submergence of self
Urgent active energy Constant flux Wonder
Fascina - allure
Love Nurture by nature Belonging
Grace Beauty Love
Salvation Union Ecstasy


PANTHEISM

is the belief that the universe and nature are divine.
It fuses religion and science, and concern for humans with concern for nature.
It provides the most realistic concept of life after death,
and the most solid basis for environmental ethics.
It is a religion that requires no faith other than common sense,
no revelation other than open eyes and a mind open to evidence,
no guru other than your own self.
For an outline, see
Basic principles of scientific pantheism. Top.

If you would like to spread the message of scientific pantheism please include a link to Pantheist pages in your pages and consult the Help page.


Pantheist pages: index.
Basic principles of scientific pantheism.
The divine cosmos.
History of pantheism.


Suggestions, comments, criticisms to: Paul Harrison, e-mail: harrison@dircon.co.uk
The elements pages have been accessed with their images times since October 21, 1996.
Copyright & copy: Paul Harrison 1996. Posted May 14, 1997.