Most straightforwardly it has been maintained that the One is holy because we feel a particular set of religious emotions towards it (Levine 1994, ch.2.2). For Rudolf Otto (1917), whatever is holy or ‘numinous’ is so characterised on the basis of our non-rational, non-sensory experience of it rather than its own objective features and, taking its departure from Otto’s work, one approach has been to argue that the feelings of awe which people feel towards God can be, and often are, applied to the