Life

Natural inside Peine touching Hanover, Otto attended a Gymnasium Adreanum within Hildesheim & exposed at a universities of Erlangen and Göttingen, from in which he received each his doctor's degree (sustaining the dissertation on Luther) and habilitatiin on Kant. Around 1906, he became extraordinary prof (watch professor), and within 1910 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Giessen. Within 1915, he became ordinary prof at a University of Breslau, and around 1917, at a University of Marburg's Divinity School, then one of a best known Protestant seminaries in the world. Although he received many more calls, he remained within Marburg for the rest of his life. He retired inside 1929 and died eight years later, probably following from either the malaria infection he had caught in one of his numerous expeditions. He is buried in Marburg cemetery.

Work

Otto's best known operate, The Idea of the Holy (published first around 1917 as Das Heilige), is one of the virtually all successful German theological books of the 20th century. It has never been away from print & is today available within astir Xx languages. A book defines a construct of the holy place when that which is numinous. Otto explained a numinous as a "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self". He coined this recently term according to a Latin "numen" (immortal). This expression is unrelated to Immanuel Kant's noumenon, the Greek term on to a conjectural rational intuition. These are the mystery (Latin: mysterium tremendum) that is both fascinating (fascinans) & terrific at a equivalent instance. It as well sets a paradigm for the survey of religion that focuses on the want to understand the religious as a non-reducible, original category within its have perfect. This paradigm was under lot attack between more or less 1950 and 1990 but has made the hard comeback since so.

German-U.s. theologizer Paul Tillich acknowledged Otto's influence on him, when did Romanian-Western anthropologist Mircea Eliade. Eliade utilized a construct from either A Idea of the Sanctum when a starting point for his have 1957 book, a Sacred & the Profane (ISBN 015679201X).

Books available in English

Naturalism & religion, London 1907 A life & ministry of Jesus, Chicago 1908 A Idea of the Sanctum, Oxford 1923, ISBN 0195002105 Christianity & a Indian Religion of Grace, Madras 1928 ''India's Religion of Grace & Christianity Likened & Contrasted, Future York 1930 A philosophy of religion according to Kant & Fries, London 1931 Religious essays: The supplement to The Idea of the Holy place, London 1931 Mysticism east & west: The comparative analysis of the nature and severity of mysticism, Future York 1932 A original Gita: A song of the Supreme Lofty A single, London 1939 The Kingdom of God & a Boy of Human: A Survey in the History of Religion, Boston 1943 Autobiographical & Social Essays, Berlin 1996

Translations
A Idea of the Sanctum has been translated into Persian by Prof. Homayoun Hemmati under title of Mafhoome Amre Ghodsi'', Tehran, 2001.