Rudolf Otto > Quotes

“And 'the holy' will be, in Dr. Otto's language, a complex category of the 'numinous' and the 'moral', or, in one of his favourite metaphors, a fabric in which we have the non-rational numinous experience as the woof and the rational and ethical as the warp.”
― Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational

“A characteristic common to all types of mysticism is the Identification, in different degrees of completeness, of the personal self with the transcendent Reality.”
― Rudolf Otto

“Genuine divination, in short, has nothing whatever to do with natural law or the relation or lack of relation to it of something experienced. It is not concerned at all with the way in which the phenomenon—be it event, person, or thing—came into existence, but with what it ”
― Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

“A characteristic common to all types of mysticism is the Identification, in different degrees of completeness, of the _personal self with the transcendent Reality.”
― Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

“Genuine divination, in short, has nothing whatever to do with natural law or the relation or lack of relation to it of something experienced. It is not concerned at all with the way in which the phenomenon—be it event, person, or thing—came into existence, but with what it means, that is, with its significance as a 'sign' of the holy.”
― Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

“Genuine divination, in short, has nothing whatever to do with natural law or the relation or lack of relation to it of something experienced. It is not concerned at all with the way in which the phenomenon came into existence, but with what it ”
― Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

“Both imaginative Myth, when developed into a system, and intellectualist Scholasticism, when worked out to its completion, are methods by which the fundamental fact of religious experience is, as it were, simply rolled out so thin and flat as to be finally eliminated altogether.”
― Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

“Genuine divination, in short, has nothing whatever to do with natural law or the relation or lack of relation to it of something experienced. It is not concerned at all with the way in which the phenomenon—be it event, person, or thing—came into existence, but with what it means, that is, with its significance as a 'sign' of the holly.”
― Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

“,.....mysticism leads to a valuation of the transcendent object of its reference as that which through plenitude of being stands supreme and absolute, so that the finite self contrasted with it becomes conscious even in its nullity that ‘I am naught, Thou art all’.”
― Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

“I propose to call it 'creature-consciousness' or creature-feeling. It is the emotion of a creature, submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.”
― Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational

“Genuine divination, in short, has nothing whatever to do with natural law and the relation or lack of relation to it of something experienced. It is not concerned at all with the way in which a phenomenon— be it event, person, or thing— came into existence, but with what it means, that is, with its significance as a 'sign ’ of the holy.”
― Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

“This is already to be observed on the lowest and earliest level of the religion of primitive man, where the numinous consciousness is but an inchoate stirring of the feelings. What is really characteristic of this stage is not — as the theory of Animism would have us believe — that men are here concerned with curious entities, called 'souls' or 'spirits', which happen to be invisible. Representations of spirits and similar conceptions are rather one and all early modes of 'rationalizing' a precedent experience, to which they are subsidiary. They are attempts in some way or other — it little matters how — to guess the riddle it propounds, and their effect is at the same time always to weaken and deaden the experience itself. They are the source from which springs, not religion, but the rationalization of religion, which often ends by constructing such a massive structure of theory and such a plausible fabric of interpretation that the 'mystery' is frankly excluded. Both imaginative 'myth', when developed into a system, and intellectualist Scholasticism, when worked out to its completion, are methods by which the fundamental fact of religious experience is, as it were, simply rolled out so thin and flat as to be finally eliminated altogether.”
― Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational