Soderblom’s Analysis of the Sacred in Comparative Religion

What is it that makes a place, an object, or a moment feel fundamentally different from everything else in ordinary life? Why does stepping into a cathedral, standing at the edge of a vast canyon, or witnessing a solemn ritual produce a feeling unlike anything in day-to-day experience? These questions lie at the heart of the philosophy of religion, and two scholars in particular – Nathan Söderblom and Rudolf Otto – gave them their most rigorous and enduring answers. Their work on the concept of the sacred transformed how scholars study religion across cultures, and their ideas remain central to the field today.

Who was Nathan Söderblom? 🔗

Nathan Söderblom (1866-1931) was a Swedish Lutheran theologian, historian of religions, and ecumenical pioneer. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1930 for his efforts in promoting international church unity. But his intellectual legacy runs even deeper than his ecumenical work. Trained at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he earned his doctorate in comparative religion, Söderblom spent his academic career arguing that the study of religion could not be reduced to theology or ethics alone. It had to begin from within religious experience itself – specifically, from the experience of holiness.

During his productive years at Uppsala and Leipzig universities, Söderblom wrote extensively on religious history, religious psychology, and the philosophy of religion. He helped give shape to comparative religion as an academic discipline, insisting that all the world’s religions deserved serious scholarly attention – not merely as backgrounds to Christianity, but as phenomena worthy of study on their own terms.

Söderblom’s core claim: holiness is the heart of religion 🔗

In 1913, Söderblom made a bold and far-reaching assertion: the central notion of religion is holiness, and the distinction between the sacred and the profane is fundamental to all authentic religious life. This was not a minor theoretical point – it was a claim about what religion essentially is. For Söderblom, you cannot understand any religion without first understanding what that tradition regards as holy and how it separates the holy from everything ordinary.

The word “sacred” comes from the Latin sacer, meaning “set off” or “restricted.” Something was designated as sacred when it was unique or extraordinary, removed from common use and treated with special reverence. Söderblom’s insight was that this marking-off of the holy from the ordinary – the sacred from the profane – was not specific to one religion or one culture. It was a universal structural feature of religious life everywhere.

The positive and negative dimensions of the sacred 🔗

One of Söderblom’s most important contributions was recognizing that the sacred carries both positive and negative connotations. The sacred is not simply the “good” or the “pure” in a straightforward moral sense. It also encompasses that which is dangerous, forbidden, and set apart precisely because of its overwhelming power.

Because the sacred contains notions both of a positive, creative power and a danger that requires stringent prohibitions, the common human reaction is both fear and fascination. This dual quality is visible across world religions. In ancient Rome, the word sacer could mean something blessed and set aside for divine use – but it could equally mean something accursed or polluting. Similarly, the Polynesian concept of tapu (taboo) designated both things specially blessed because of their power and things dangerous to touch for the very same reason. Whatever was tapu carried extraordinary energy that required strict handling.

This means the sacred is not a simple category. The sacred includes basic dichotomies of pure-impure, and pollutant-versus-free. Entering the sacred realm could bring vitality, strength, and blessing – but approaching it improperly could bring harm. The sacred, in Söderblom’s framework, is always a site of heightened significance, power, and risk.

The sacred versus the profane 🔗

The profane refers to the ordinary, everyday world – the realm accessible to common sense and routine experience. The profane world consists of all that people can know through their senses: the natural world of everyday life that people experience as comprehensible or at least knowable. It is not inherently sinful or negative; it is simply the world as it functions without sacred significance. The profane is the background against which the sacred becomes visible.

What makes the sacred/profane distinction so analytically powerful is its universality. Every religion draws this line somewhere, even if the specific objects, places, or times considered sacred differ dramatically from one tradition to another. A river, a mountain, a text, an animal, a day of the week – any of these can become sacred when a community designates it as set apart. The line between sacred and profane is not given by nature but drawn by religious communities through ritual, belief, and practice.

Rudolf Otto and the concept of the numinous 🔗

Just four years after Söderblom’s 1913 declaration, a German theologian named Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) published a book that would become one of the most influential works in the study of religion in the twentieth century. Das Heilige (1917), translated as The Idea of the Holy (1923), introduced a concept that fundamentally changed how scholars understood religious experience: the numinous.

Otto is regarded as one of the most influential scholars of religion in the early twentieth century, and his key contribution was to argue that at the core of all religious experience lies something that cannot be explained by ethics, reason, or social function. He called this irreducible quality the numinous, derived from the Latin numen meaning “divine will” or “divinity.” According to Otto, the numinous is a particular category of human thought connected to an objective but ineffable reality of the holy. It cannot be derived from anything else – it is, in Otto’s terms, sui generis, a class of experience entirely its own.

Wholly other: the numinous as beyond rational categories 🔗

Otto’s central claim is that the holy presents itself as something wholly other (ganz Andere) – utterly different from anything in ordinary experience. The numinous is beyond rationality and language; it cannot be fully expressed in concepts. It can only be evoked, pointed toward, or awakened in those who have encountered it. This is why Otto insisted that the numinous cannot strictly be taught – it can only be recognized by those who have already experienced something like it.

This is a crucial philosophical point. Otto was not saying that religion is irrational. He was saying that religious experience has a core element that exceeds rational categories – something that ethical or philosophical language alone cannot capture. The holy is not merely the morally good writ large. It is something encountered with a kind of awe and dread that has no exact parallel in any other domain of human life.

Mysterium tremendum et fascinans 🔗

To describe the structure of numinous experience, Otto coined one of the most memorable phrases in the philosophy of religion: mysterium tremendum et fascinans – the tremendous and fascinating mystery. This consists of a single, complex emotional response made up of shock, fear, and joy – what Otto calls “numinous emotion.”

The three components of this phrase each capture a distinct dimension of the encounter with the holy:

Mysterium refers to the quality of radical otherness. The numen appears as the “wholly other” – entirely different from the experiencer and all of creation – a completely transcendent presence, totally separate from the ordinary, and thus a mystery beyond rational comprehension. This is not ordinary puzzlement or intellectual curiosity. It is the sense of confronting something beyond all familiar categories.

Tremendum is the daunting, overpowering aspect of the numinous. The tremendum is the daunting and repelling moment of the numinous – it corresponds to the awe-inspiring character of divine wrath and majesty in religious traditions. Otto breaks tremendum down into three feelings: awefulness (an uncanny, eerie dread), overpoweringness (the sense of majestas – the sheer magnitude of what is encountered), and urgency or energy (the sense of a living, active force). Together, these produce what Otto calls “creature-feeling” – a profound awareness of one’s own smallness and dependency in the face of the divine.

Fascinans is the opposite movement: attraction, wonder, and delight. The numinous is experienced as fascinating, desirable, good, and comforting – it invites us into its fullness and produces a unique kind of spiritual joy. If tremendum repels and overwhelms, fascinans draws the person in. These two elements make up a “harmony of contrasts” – the holy both pushes us away and pulls us toward it at the same time.

How Söderblom and Otto complement each other 🔗

Söderblom and Otto are often read together because their projects are deeply connected, even though they approach the sacred from slightly different angles. Söderblom established the conceptual framework: holiness is the center of religion, and the sacred/profane distinction is the structural key to understanding religious life across cultures. His work was grounded in comparative and historical scholarship, drawing on a vast knowledge of world religions.

Otto built on this framework but pushed it in a more phenomenological direction. Where Söderblom emphasized the conceptual and structural role of the sacred, Otto was concerned with the quality of the experience itself. He wanted to describe, as precisely as language allows, what it actually feels like to encounter the holy. Otto elaborated his understanding of the holy from the basic ambiguity of the sacred – the fact that only the sacred can fulfill humanity’s deepest needs and hopes, and thus the reverence shown to it combines both trust and terror.

Together, their work established that religion cannot be fully explained by reducing it to social functions, moral teachings, or metaphysical beliefs. Something more immediate and more difficult to categorize is at the core – an encounter with a reality that is felt as both overwhelming and inviting, both terrifying and deeply desirable.

Why this matters for the comparative study of religion 🔗

The significance of Söderblom and Otto’s work extends well beyond academic theology. Their ideas gave scholars tools for comparing religious experiences across very different traditions without flattening them into a single mold. Since the first quarter of the twentieth century, many historians of religions have accepted the notion of the sacred as central to religious life – if not indeed its essential reality. Scholars like Mircea Eliade, Joachim Wach, and Gerardus van der Leeuw built much of their work on these foundations.

Otto’s concept of the numinous also found resonance far beyond religious studies. Carl Gustav Jung applied it to psychology and psychotherapy, arguing it was therapeutic and brought greater self-understanding. C. S. Lewis drew on Otto’s ideas in his theological writings, using the notion of numinous awe to describe what he called “the uncanny.” The concept has been applied to literature, art, music, and even the experience of encountering vast natural landscapes.

Söderblom’s insistence that holiness – not doctrine, not ethics, not ritual per se – is the beating heart of religious life also carries a broader lesson. It suggests that to understand any religion, one must first ask: what does this community regard as set apart? What is treated with the kind of reverence and caution that marks it as sacred? The answers to those questions reveal the deepest structure of a religious world.

What do you think? If the sacred is defined not by its content but by the quality of awe and separation it inspires, does that mean any object or experience could theoretically become sacred – and what would that imply about the nature of holiness itself? And does Otto’s claim that the numinous is beyond all rational categories make religious experience immune to philosophical critique, or does it simply point to a dimension of human life that reason alone has never been sufficient to explain?

References

1. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1930/soderblom/biographical/
2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nathan-Soderblom
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/sacred
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profane_(religion)
5. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rudolf-Otto
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Otto
7. https://www.britannica.com/topic/mysterium-tremendum-et-fascinans
8. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rudolf-Otto/The-Idea-of-the-Holy
9. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2025/05/24/otto/
10. https://www.magiscenter.com/blog/mysterium-tremendum-et-fascinans-numen
11. https://www.thecollector.com/rudolf-otto-revolutionary-idea-holy/