The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom

Abstract

reading of terms like ‘religion’, ‘religions’, ‘mysticism’, and mysterium tremendum is much more nuanced and complex and makes much more of the plurality within both religious ideas and feelings than he has generally been credited with. Yet, it is Otto’s vision of a common core of all religions that enables Melissa RaphaelLevine (chapter 6) to give a fascinating account of the numinous consciousness and modern Jewish thought and Tulasi Srinivas (chapter 7) to suggest ‘wonder’ as creating a new understanding of certain experiences “that transform our knowledge of what is by awakening us to realities of what can be” (181). It is this same vision of a common core that enables Robert Baum to explore the numinous in traditional African religions (chapter 9). As Baum recognizes, Otto was an heir of nineteenthcentury evolutionary accounts of religion and had relegated traditional religions to the category of pre-religious. However, Baum demonstrates that there are present in African religions not only those aspects that evoke fear and trembling (that Otto discerned) but also deities of care and compassion who can ease obstacles from people’s paths through life. What then is the relevance of Rudolf Otto to the contemporary study of religion? Alles reminds us that, for Otto, the category of religion is used strategically to address three principal concerns: firstly, that religion not be lost by deriving it from something else; secondly, that the diversity of empirical religions be preserved; thirdly, that religion as practised be rescued from dead theology. These are principles in the study of religion as valid now as they were a century ago and an enduring legacy of Otto’s work. They ensure now, as they did then, that the student of religion has a scholarly sensibility attuned still to the presence of the numinous in modern religious life.