Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy)

Rudolf Otto was a German theologian and scholar of comparative religion, and Das Heilige, first published in 1917 and translated into English by John W. Harvey as The Idea of the Holy in 1923, is his own foundational primary text introducing the concept of the numinous, the nonrational and overwhelming quality of the experience of the holy, as distinct from purely ethical or rational accounts of religion. As Otto's own primary statement it is the correct source for what the concept of the numinous originally meant in his own formulation. Its limit is that it is a work of comparative and phenomenological theology from a specific early twentieth century German intellectual context, not an empirical study, so a claim about its reception or critique needs a separate secondary source.