ABSTRACT
But by no means must this terror be accounted as a negative, reductive experience, as Dostoevsky's oeuvre discloses. For Dostoevsky terror is an important spiritual element, a religious emotion akin to other religious emotions, though recreated on another aesthetic plane, like love, or suffering, or longing, or rapture. That is, terror could be both transportive and transactional as, initially, an aesthetic force or agent. Ultimately, it is another doorway to the holy, through which one travels from a profane to a sacred world, tha t other world which Prince Myshkin alone sees and offers as a new reality and that makes him, in the eyes of most men and women, the enemy. Such terror makes for entrance into the "mystic way," and, as a numinous element of energy or urgency, to adopt here Rudolf Otto's terms, aids in the transcendence of self. Terror has theopathic and determinate powers that help awaken the self to consciousness of Divine Reality and then purge the self in the anticipation of divine illumination. Terror, in this religious and special emotional sense, as it is conveyed in The Idiot, is one of the fundamental numinous properties of the "mysterium tremendum. " I t is, likewise, part of a process of the total religious experience, or passional consciousness, that inheres in and comprises the very phrase mysterium tremendum, nowhere more definitively described, in all of its conundrums and animadversions, quantitatively and qualitatively, empirically and metaphysically, than in Otto's words:
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 last 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 strongest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its 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.2
