AS we have seen, the rationalising tendency operating within religion – and especially Western Christianity – distorts our perception of God, although Otto is quick to point out that discarding the rational altogether in favour of the numinous would be equally foolish.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Otto believes that the very idea of “the holy” is inconceivable (no pun intended) without the rational dimension and it must therefore be “permeated and saturated with elements signifying rationality, purpose, personality, [and] morality”. In fact the original manifestation of the non-rational that appears in the form of “primitive” religion is said to develop to a higher level as a direct consequence of the gradual rationalisation that provides ethical meaning. The initial fear of God turns into a sense of “awe” and, consequently, worship of the numinous in a more refined form:

The feelings of dependence upon and beatitude in the numen, from being relative, become absolute. The false analogies and fortuitous associations are gradually dispelled or frankly rejected. The numen becomes God and Deity. It is then to God and Deity, as ‘numen’ rendered absolute, that the attribute denoted by the terms qâdôsh, sanctus, ἅγιος, holy, pertains, in the first and directest sense of the words. It is the culmination of a development which works itself out purely in the sphere of the non-rational. (p.110)

The other side to this complementary coin involves studying the progress of rationalisation in the context of the numinous. Otto believes that, in the most balanced cases, the non-rational is nearly always in synchronisation with the non-rational and that the numinous “attracts” rational ideals such as obligation, justice and goodness:

These become the ‘will’ of the numen, and the numen their guardian, ordainer, and author. More and more these ideas come to enter into the very essence of the numen and charge the term with ethical content. ‘Holy’ becomes ‘good’, and ‘good’ from that very fact in turn becomes ‘holy’, ‘sacrosanct’; until there results a thenceforth indissoluble synthesis of the two elements, and the final outcome is thus the fuller, more complex sense of ‘holy’, in which it is at once good and sacrosanct. (p.110)

This mutual relationship, it is argued, necessarily transforms human history into a narrative of “salvation” and to embark upon a study of how it functions is not to open the gates to rationalism with a wild abandon but to allow the numinous to attain its completion.

Otto describes the outcome of this undertaking as the “self-fulfilment of the divine”.