Parenting & Family Quote by Rudolf Otto

Otto’s line lands like a rebuke aimed less at children than at adults who sentimentalize them. Modern piety and pop-psychology love the idea that kids are naturally closer to the divine, little barefoot mystics with unfiltered access to wonder. Otto refuses that comfort. A child, he suggests, can be surrounded by “greatness” and “beauty” and still miss what matters - not because the child is defective, but because the capacity he’s talking about isn’t automatic. It’s cultivated.

The phrasing stacks its nouns with a preacher’s cadence: greatness, beauty, splendor, God. That escalation matters. Nature is not just pretty; it’s a staged encounter with something overwhelming. Otto’s broader project (most famously in The Idea of the Holy) insists that the religious experience is not mere appreciation or moral uplift. It’s the numinous: the uncanny “wholly other” that both attracts and unnerves. Children can be intensely perceptive, but Otto is arguing that the numinous requires interpretive equipment - a formed sensibility, a vocabulary, a willingness to be destabilized.

Subtext: awe is not the same as sensation. A kid can thrill at thunder or a mountain without reading it as “splendor” or “works.” Otto is pushing back against Romantic nature worship and against easy theology that treats God as obvious. If even a child doesn’t “notice,” then divinity isn’t self-evident; it’s disclosed through tradition, attention, and sometimes fear. The line’s quiet provocation is that innocence doesn’t guarantee reverence - and that wonder, like faith, is an adult discipline masquerading as a childlike one.