Ricerc@Sapienza

In this paper I will argue that Rudolf Otto’s theory of religion is characterized by a tension between the notion of ‘Numinous’ and that of ‘Wholly Other’. This tension emerges especially in the difficult passage of The Holy, in which Otto defines the relationship between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ in terms of schematization. While fascinans and tremendum find their respective schema by virtue of the cooperation with the rational elements of the holy, the Wholly Other provokes a crisis of the schematization as such, which can be fully appreciated only by reading The Holy within the conceptual framework of The Kantian-Friesian Philosophy of Religion.