 At least some elements of Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1959) lend themselves to an interpretation of this kind. Here, Otto speaks of how God is made known primordially as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, as a reality that is at once attractive but also inspires a kind of fear or dread. This sort of dread, Otto insists, is sui generis: it is a distinctively religious kind of fear that befits our relation to God, and while it is akin to the fear we associate with the “weird,” it is not to be simply conflated with this or any other kind of non-religious fear.