Mysterium Tremendum

Mysterium tremendum, as deployed in Boothby's reading of Lacan, names the irreducible experience of awe and dread that structures religious sensibility — but radically relocated from its classical theological referent (the majesty and terror of a transcendent God, cosmos, or natural sublime) to the immanent enigma of the human Other. The concept draws on Rudolf Otto's phenomenological category of the "numinous" — that which inspires simultaneous fascination and terror — and reframes it through a Lacanian lens: the mystery in question is not celestial or cosmological but is precisely the opacity that every human Other carries insofar as they harbour das Ding, an unassimilable kernel of Real that no symbolic articulation can exhaust. Religion, on this account, is not primarily a defensive formation (as in Freud's analysis of it as collective obsessional neurosis or wish-fulfilling illusion) but a positive orientation toward that locus of constitutive unknowing around which desire perpetually circles without arriving.

The theoretical move is accordingly a re-reading of re-ligare — the etymological root of "religion" as re-binding or re-linking — as what binds the subject back to the Real it cannot master. The sacred is constituted not despite but through the irreducibility of Das Ding: that "No-thing" which is simultaneously most intimate and most foreign to the subject (extimacy), the excluded centre around which the subject's desire organises itself. The mysterium tremendum thus designates the affective-structural register in which the subject registers its encounter with this extimate void — an encounter that is anxiety-laden precisely because the Other's opaque jouissance cannot be reduced to a familiar, symbolisable object. The "trembling" before the mystery is, in Lacanian terms, the trembling before the Real as it shows through in the Neighbour.

This concept appears in diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred (p. 201) as the pivot of Boothby's argument against a purely Freudian, reductive reading of religion. Where Freud treats religion as repression's cultural byproduct — a collective neurosis or projective defence against helplessness — Boothby's Lacanian reframing positions the sacred as a genuine, structurally necessary orientation toward the Real. The mysterium tremendum is thus an extension of das Ding (the irreducible, pre-symbolic Thing around which desire orbits) into the register of religious experience, and a specification of Extimacy (the topology whereby what is most alien is simultaneously most interior) as the very ground of the numinous. It also invokes the Neighbour concept: the mystery is explicitly located in "our tense relations with the human Other," recalling Lacan's reading of the Nebenmensch as the bearer of an undomesticable, anxiety-generating jouissance.

The concept sits at the intersection of Anxiety, Desire, and the Real: the tremendum is the affective signal (like anxiety) that the subject has come too close to the unrepresentable void; it is what desire perpetually orbits without resolution (as with das Ding); and it is disclosed in the encounter with the Real that punctures every imaginary or symbolic domestication of the Other. As a novel formulation in the corpus, mysterium tremendum functions as a bridge term — translating Otto's phenomenology of the sacred into Lacanian structural topology and thereby rehabilitating religion not as illusion but as a culturally elaborated practice of maintaining the "right distance" from das Ding, comparable to what Lacan describes as the ethical work of keeping the Thing neither too close nor too far.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.201)

the religious sensibility is oriented toward a mysterium tremendum, though with the crucial qualification that the mystery involved is less about the celestial orbs whirling above our heads than about our tense relations with the human Other

The phrase "tense relations with the human Other" does the decisive theoretical work: by redirecting the mysterium tremendum away from "celestial orbs" (the cosmological or theological sublime) and toward the proximate human Other, the quote enacts the full Lacanian displacement — grounding the sacred not in transcendence but in the extimate Real lodged within the Neighbour, making anxiety before the Other's opacity the structural core of religious awe.