![]() ![]() Otto notes that the category of the holy resembles the category of the beautiful in “that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts.” (5) The holy and the beautiful cannot be adequately defined, yet they are palpable objects of experience. (In a later chapter, Otto will assert that mysticism “is the stressing to a very high degree, indeed the overstressing, of the non-rational or supra-rational elements in religion.” (22)) In what follows, Otto draws attention to passages in the Bible and other sacred texts, which when reread without the customary ethical presuppositions bring us up against the terrible, primordial significance of the sacred. However, actual worship, culminating in mystical contemplation of the divine, discloses an altogether irrational, “ineffable” object whose attributes elude conceptualization. These elements constitute the rational dimension of the divine, rational in the sense that it can be articulated in clear concepts. Theology tends to fasten on those elements of the divine that can be made intelligible and given ethical meaning. History and the A Priori in Religion: Summary and Conclusion The Manifestation of the “Holy” and the Faculty of “Divination” The Holy as a Category of Value: Sin and Atonement “Mysterium Tremendum”: The Analysis of “Tremendum” ![]() The Elements of the “Numinous”: Creature-Feeling Numbers in brackets refer to pages of this edition. These notes are based on the 1958 Oxford University Press edition of the translation by John W. ![]() Sumerian votive figures from Tell Asmar, Iraq. ![]()
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