Before religion became "morality touched with emotion" it was the emotion itself, or a group of emotions, and it still is. Those emotions are, in the translator's summary, "the feeling of the ‘uncanny,' the thrill of awe or reverence, the sense of dependence, of impotence, or of nothingness, or again, the feelings of religious rapture and exaltation."The author of the present book calls them the non-rational feelings, the sense of the tremendous, the awful, the mysterious, or, in a word of his own choosing, the "numinous."Roth author and translator make it clear that religion must accommodate both the numinous and the ethical. The idea of the Holy (Das Heilige), which is fundamentally an inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational, is a book which has established itself, since the English translation first appeared in 1923, as a classic in the field of religious philosophy.
"It is a book that every Christian thinker needs, and this translation has firmly established its position as an authoritative and lucid representation of an acknowledged classic of religious thought.” -London Quarterly Review