Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans (Q2Q XII)

To follow up on The Mind's Enigmas, the previous post in this "Quickening to Qualia" series: In that post I lauded the late Carl Sagan and his "dialogue" with the cosmos; he treated it with the respect due a Thou, not an It.

Carl Sagan's Contact

Sagan, who died in 1996, was a force behind the scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In Sagan's 1985 science fiction novel Contact, the earth in fact receives an intelligent signal from outer space. Ellie Arroway, the radio-astronomer who finds the signal, at one point tells her lover, the president's science adviser:

"The theologians seem to have recognized a special, nonrational — I wouldn't call it irrational — aspect of the feeling of sacred or holy. They call it ‘numinous.’ The term was first used by ... let’s see ... somebody named Rudolph Otto in a 1923 book, The Idea of the Holy. He believed that humans were predisposed to detect and revere the numinous. He called it the misterium tremendum. Even my Latin is good enough for that.

"In the presence of the misterium tremendum, people feel utterly insignificant but not personally alienated. He thought of the numinous as a thing 'wholly other,' and the human response to it as 'absolute astonishment.' Now, if that's what religious people talk about when they use words like sacred or holy, I'm with them. I felt something like that just in listening for a signal, never mind in actually receiving it. I think all of science elicits that sense of awe." (p. 153)

Rudolf Otto's's The Idea of the Holy

Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) was an eminent German theologian and scholar of comparative religion who published Das Heilige or The Idea of the Holy in, actually, 1917. (1923 may have been when an English translation appeared.) In it, Otto found that there was something "'extra' in the meaning of 'holy' above and beyond the meaning of goodness" (p. 6). This something beyond the purely rational he called numen, or the numinous.

The numinous was, Otto said, a mysterium tremendum, and also a mysterium fascinans. A discussion of his thought can be found in this online essay, "Otto on the Numinous."

Otto's idea of a mysterium tremendum has to do with a unique sort of sublime dread that makes us tremble before, and at the same time hallow, the source of all mystery. An albeit inadequate word for this experience is "daunting." "Awful" ("awe-full") is a word that gives us a true sense of the "majesty" that provokes such dread.

A mysterium fascinans is, however daunting and awe-full, one that is also entrancing, beguiling to us. The very same mystery that most cows us also "allures [us] with a potent charm" (p. 31). What most frightens us most fascinates us. What most fascinates us most frightnens us. Here is the real meaning of the expression "fear of God."


What if we could turn directly toward that fearful, majestic mystery and address it, quite familiarly, as Papa? That is exactly what Jesus did, though in his language the word was not Papa but Abba. Abba was how he spoke to his Father, the Lord God in Heaven.

In Carl Sagan's novel Contact, Ellie Arroway, the protagonist who is something between an agnostic and an atheist, experiences both fascination and fear as she is launched in a speed-of-light-surpassing space vehicle toward the source of the Message, which has shown earthlings how to build the vehicle and make the journey. At the other end of her outbound leg, the source of the Message appears to Ellie in the form of her own beloved father, long since dead. Again, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans ... as Papa.

In his PBS series Cosmos, Sagan is awestruck at the sheer majesty of the universe. It has been through his mastery of space science, the viewer may muse, that Sagan has earned the right to call the cosmos itself Papa. He is at one with all its vastness and grandeur, its encompassing alienness and yet its potential hospitability. He has achieved atonement (at-one-ment) with the existent that he treats as Father — and as Thou.