HOLY, IDEA OF THE. [This entry attempts an assessment of the role of the German theologian Rudolf Otto and his book The Idea of the Holy in setting forth a distinctively phenomenological interpretation of the nature of religion.]

Rudolf Otto's work during the first half of his career culminated with his publication, at the age of forty-eight, of Das Heilige (1917), translated as The Idea of the Holy (1923). Published in an age of high hopes for science, it has as a central concern the assertion of the autonomy of religion. Otto's position is diametrically opposed to what has come to be called reductionism, that is, the explanation of religion as a creation of human culture, a response to psychological or social needs that is in some sense the product of those needs. Otto, by contrast, asserts the autonomy of religion in the sphere...