Rudolf Otto

Rudolf Otto (Peine, 1869 – Marburg, 1937) was a German Lutheran theologian, philosopher and comparative religion scholar. He is regarded as one of the most influential students of religion in the early twentieth century, above all for coining the concept of the numinous. He worked within liberal Protestant theology, but his main aim was to defend religion against naturalist critiques.

Raised in a devout Christian family, he studied at Hildesheim, Erlangen and Göttingen. His doctoral dissertation dealt with Luther, and he later turned to Kant. He became an extraordinary professor in 1906, taught at Breslau from 1915 and at the Marburg divinity school from 1917, where he stayed until his retirement in 1929. Between 1911 and 1912 he travelled through North Africa, Palestine, British India, China, Japan and the United States, which deepened his interest in other faiths. He died of pneumonia in Marburg in 1937, after a fall from a tower the year before.

His thought starts from the idea that religious experience has a non-rational core. In The Idea of the Holy (1917), his best-known book, he described the numinous as a non-rational, non-sensory experience that presents itself as wholly other, at once terrifying and fascinating. The word comes from the Latin numen and has no etymological link to Kant's noumenon. With it he argued that religion should be studied as an original category, irreducible to morality or reason.

His influence reached Paul Tillich, and Mircea Eliade, who took his concepts as a starting point for his study of the sacred, as well as the Spanish thinker María Zambrano. His approach was heavily criticised between 1950 and 1990, but it has regained strength since then.