Rejecting the Numinous Gods

“Our idea of holiness is greatly truncated today; we limit it in thousands of scrupling and schoolmarmish ways. We have lost any understanding of the numinous. We do not know what it would be like to walk through a grove of ancient trees sacred to the holy and terrible gods, and then be converted to the worship of One holier, and stranger, and mightier than these. We reject the shining of the ancient and numinous gods, not because we repudiate those gods as every Christian must, but because we have rejected the very idea of the numinous. We reject them, not because they are creatures, but because they remind us of the divine” (AIA, p. 44).