The centrality of the concept of the numinous to the theology of Rudolf Otto can be viewed as an attempt to re-introduce the pertinence of religious and divine notions within a contemporary society dominated by the scientific and rational informed discourse of the post-Enlightenment. In this regard, there is a fundamental tension between the numinous and science: as Otto explicitly states the numinous, understood as “holiness – the holy – is a category of interpretation and valuation peculiar to the sphere of religion.” (119) According to this peculiarity, the numinous is “set apart from the ‘rational…in the sense that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts.” The numinous thus evokes a certain cognitive dimension, insofar as it is possible for the human mind to reflect upon the numinous – however, the numinous is not reducible to or merely the product of the rational structures of thought, which are advocated by modern science. Rather, the numinous identifies a certain limit to the possibilities of anthropomorphic knowledge through the stressing of the transcendence of the numinous to the latter. The evocation of the numinous is in this sense a radical critique of the hegemony of the discourse of the Enlightenment and science, as the numinous nominates a clear dimension of thought and experience that cannot be assimilated into a scientific world-view.

Concomitantly, with the rise of such scientific rationality as the dominant paradigm for human thought, what has emerged is a concomitant diminishment of the significance and potency of the numinous. In other words, the enlightenment presents an openly antagonistic position to the numinous, to the point of the latter’s elimination as a fundamental category of legitimate thought and human experience. Todd A. Gooch, in a study of Otto, summarizes that in “the hostility exhibited by the Enlightenment toward religious interiority…is only one expression of a mroe general neglect of affective experience, inwardness, and the non-relational apprehension of meaning in the world.” (196) Accordingly, the numinous is not an explicitly anti-anthropic category, but rather refrains from the reduction of human life to the rational. It is precisely this reduction that a fortiori excludes any notion of the numinous, insofar as the latter category is incompatible with the particular form of rationality that science advances. The interiority of the numinous is important in this aspect: the modern scientific discourse’s elision of the importance of subjective experience and interpretation in favour of an approach that seeks rational objectivity is precisely a discarding of the experience of the numinous as radically subjective and personal. By obviating this interiority, scientific discourse remains fundamentally unable to address the numinous.

Moreover, according to the dominance of the scientific paradigm, the numinous concomitantly loses its effectivity within human life. The scientific paradigm is in this regard an ideology in its own right, insofar as it proclaims the necessity of its own internal logic, which is the simultaneous postulation of the irrationality of any type of experience that does not fit within the presupposed rigor of its own discourse. Science as ideology thus erodes previous paradigms of human and social existence, in favour of the proclamation of the inevitability of a particular discourse. However, in this very erosion, science can be said to be complicit with a failure to grasp human experience in itself, insofar as the numinous, the holy and the religious have ostensibly played crucial roles throughout human experience.

Accordingly, science can be viewed as having eroded the both purely objective – in the sense of its historical presence – subjective experience of the numinous, according to its adherence to the singular paradigm of rationality. In this exclusion, the numinous only becomes defined negatively – as irrational. Yet at the same time, this gesture in itself can be viewed as thoroughly ideological and not scientific, since it follows from the declaration of the necessity and irreducibility of a singular particular mode of thought as rational. This essentially eliminates the manifold of the diversity of human experience and elides a crucial aspect of what it means to be human.