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The Idea of the Holy
The Idea of the Holy
Subtitled An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, Otto’s 1917 Das Heilige names what the previous century of liberal theology had explained away: the irrational core of religious experience, the feeling of terror before the sacred, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans that is wholly other.
Otto coins the numinous to designate this experience — not the rational idea of God, but the immediate datum of an encountered presence that seizes the human subject. The numinous is at once terrifying (the tremendum) and fascinating (the fascinans); it is a unique kind of apprehension, sui generis, not to be reduced to ordinary intellectual or rational knowing. Otto’s argument is that religion’s true ground is pre-conceptual: the rational forms of theology are downstream of an experience the rational forms do not generate.
The book’s importance for the depth tradition is structural. Jung adopts the numinosum as the very thing religion carefully considers (Jung 1958, par. 6). Eliade adopts it as the affective core of hierophany (Eliade 1957). Without The Idea of the Holy, neither Jung’s Psychology and Religion nor Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane could have been written in the form they took. The Idea of the Holy is the twentieth century’s foundational text on what religion is, prior to what religion says.