Every serious student of religion is familiar with the German scholar Rudolf Otto’s concept of mysterium tremendum. Mysterium tremendum refers to that ineffable fear that accompanies the experience of encountering the Divine. This is not a natural fear, such as [one] might obtain should one happen upon a lion. This is a supernatural, “cosmic” fear that is grounded in the recognition of a power so awful, inescapable, and beyond restriction that it nearly stupefies. Here one is brought face-to-face with one’s contingency and ceatureliness before an irresistible Creator whose very presence inspires an inscrutable sense of danger, indebtedness, and a will to appease. All of this is accompanied, moreover, by a “personal feeling of nothingness and abasement before the awe-inspiring object directly experienced.” To be sure, there are other emotional and psychological moments attending mysterium tremendum, for example, fascination, love, mercy, even pity. But none of these are capable of fully breaking the association of the Divine with the elements of categorical otherness and inescapable power.Mysterium tremendum, in Otto’s analysis, lay at the center of all religion. From primitive times to the present, religion has been essentially a manifestation of and response to mysterium tremendum. For the most part, throughout human history, the real or putative object of mysterium tremendum has been God. A notable exception emerges, however, in the encounter of the Negro with the white man on the transatlantic slave ships and the plantations of North America. In a brilliant essay, “The Oppressive Elements in Religion and the Religions of the Oppressed,” Charles H. Long speaks of a false or “spurious mysterium tremendum” that befell Blackamericans in the New World. This was a mysterium tremendum in which the fear-inspiring, inescapable other whose presence engendered a sense of danger and a will to appease was not God but the white man and the critical categories of modernity he had created: race, civilization, culture, primitiveness, I.Q., and so on. According to Long,“The other” of religious experience, with its impenetrable majesty, was replaced by the quixotic manipulation of a fascinating trickster whose rationality was only a veneer for control.In a real sense, Blackamericans (like other orphans of modernity) were “created” by the forces of white supremacy and the theoretical disciplines of the Enlightenment. This “second creation” complicated the task of breaking through to the First Creation and the primordial meanings enmeshed in the God-created self. In many ways, Blackamerican religiosity and protest are manifestations of a desire to transcend this second creation and reconnect with the first. For Blackamericans are instinctively driven by the belief that the “second creator” can only by trumped by the First, and the First Creator can only be accessed by resisting, indeed rejecting, the second creator (qua creator).
-pgs. 172-173 of Dr. Jackson's Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection
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