B. Otto’s and Armstrong’s Theories of Religious Inspiration

Two major conceptions of the origin of religious ideas are explored here. They are those developed by Rudolph Otto and Karen Armstrong. We may, for the purpose of this essay, describe Otto’s theory as hieroepistemic and expressive and that of Armstrong as representing an aesthetic humanism. The characterization of Otto’s theory as hieroepistemic is meant to highlight fundamental aspects of his conception of the essence of religious experience and the origin of religious ideas. His exposition of this could be seen as hierophanic,to borrow a term used extensively by Eliade, to refer to the perceived manifestation of the holy in a phenomenon which yet retains its existential character, as well as epistemic, in a manner that is illuminated by Kant’s concepts of epistemology in the Critique of Pure Reason.3

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3 The works of Otto’s and Armstrong’s which embody their theories most explicitly are Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, tr. John Harvey (London: Oxford UP,1958);Karen Armstrong, The History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam(New York: Alfred Knopf,1993).