The Seba library treats Fascinans in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including Eliade, Mircea, Armstrong, Karen, Hoeller, Stephan A.).
Otto sets himself to discover the characteristics of this frightening and irrational experience. He finds the feeling of terror
Eliade situates Otto’s analysis of the numinous — of which the fascinans is the attractive pole — as the founding gesture of modern phenomenology of religion, centering the irrational character of sacred experience.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
The prophetic experience of the mysterium terribile et fascinans was at one and the same time rape and seduction
Armstrong applies the paired tremendum/fascinans formula to Jeremiah’s prophetic encounter with Yahweh, reading the compulsion of divine speech as a simultaneous violation and enticement that embodies the fascinans in its most visceral biblical form.
, A History of God, 1993thesis
never content with anything short of a knowledge of the heart when it came to the ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’ (the awesome and bewitching mystery) of the unconscious
Hoeller deploys the fascinans as the characterizing quality of Jung’s engagement with the unconscious, distinguishing genuine depth psychology from popularizing humanistic approaches that domesticate the numinous dimension of psychic life.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982thesis
No special feeling is implied or to be evoked, neither mysterium tremendum nor fascinans. It would also be totally impossible to call a god himself hieros
Burkert explicitly contests the universality of Otto’s numinous categories by demonstrating that the Greek term hieros carries no affective charge of awe or attraction, thereby restricting the fascinans to non-Greek phenomenological territory.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting
The ‘dizziness’ and the unique feeling of the uncanny, which we have called stupor and tremor, are here clearly noted by Chrysostom
Otto traces in Chrysostom’s exegesis of Psalm 139 and in Paul’s exclamation in Romans the experiential content of the numinous — the stupor and recoil — that constitutes the subjective ground from which both tremendum and fascinans arise.
, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting
the religious ‘feeling’ properly involves a unique kind of apprehension, sui generis, not to be reduced to ordinary intellectual or rational ‘knowing’
Otto’s prefatory argument for the sui generis character of religious feeling establishes the epistemological premise that makes the fascinans legible as genuine cognition rather than mere emotion.