ABSTRACT
Speaking at Rudolf Otto’s graveside service, Heinrich Frick recalled “Otto’s own description of how he had once, in remarkable circumstances, encountered the power of the Holy with utter clarity”:
It was on his journey through North Africa, and he found himself in a poor Moroccan synagogue on Yom Kippur, just at the climax of the ceremony. What a contrast! Here was a pathetic, impoverished building with a tiny gathering of equally pathetic human beings (Existenzen) – and in this context the dazzling hymn of the trisagion, the seraphim’s song of praise from the prophet Isaiah: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” By the fl ickering light of the candles the full majesty of the Lord of heaven and earth seemed to be present in the midst of our poverty and paltriness. Afterwards Rudolf Otto experienced the Holy in other religions, too, at more magnifi cent sacred places and in higher cultures. But it seemed to him that the contrast [between the setting and song in the synagogue] made that single impression the most shattering of all. Later he identifi ed that experience as the precise moment (Stunde) when he discovered his understanding of the Holy, and he described it in moving words. (Frick 1937a: 5-6)
Three and a half decades later this moment had been reduced to a formula: “It is particularly noteworthy that Otto came to know the experience [of the holy] not primarily from reading sacred texts but on a journey as a spontaneous religious experience in a Jewish synagogue in Morocco, as he himself told me” (Ernst Benz 1971: 36).
