Primary Holiness

Abstract This chapter proposes an account of primary holiness—the underivative holiness that God exhibits—that takes as its starting point Rudolf Otto’s theory of the experience of holiness in The Idea of the Holy. While there is much in Otto that is worth rejecting, his idea that the distinctive mark of the holy is its involving both a fascinans aspect and a tremendum aspect is both plausible and fruitful. The fascinans aspect is that the holy is experienced as overwhelmingly attractive. The tremendum aspect is that the holy is experienced as repelling, but in a normative sense—one experiences the holy as something in whose presence one is not fit to be, and so one is out-of-place by drawing too near. This is the basis for a plausible normative theory of holiness: to be holy is to be a being with respect to which such responses are appropriate.