L’INFLUENZA DI OTTO NELLA CONCEZIONE DEL SACRO DI MARÍA ZAMBRANO

Abstract · The in uence of Otto on María Zambrano’s Conception of the Holy · María Zambrano ex- plicitly claimed to owe Rudolf Otto her discovery of the holy. In all her work, the Spanish thinker has taken up and reworked most of Otto’s suggestions concerning the categories of the holy, the numinous, and the saint. Especially in her fundamental essay El hombre y lo divino (1955), Zambrano incorporates Otto’s proposal to the point that this work is intended as a sort of rewriting of his fa- mous masterpiece. The result is a reading of the holy as an obscure matrix of life, at the same time ambivalent and ambiguous and never eliminable through any form of secularization or demitiza- tion. Zambrano distinguishes the sphere of the holy from that of the divine; she also highlights the dialectical tension between both poles, qualifying poetry and the philosophy of the origins (among other philosophies) as a transformation of the holy into the divine. A transformation that cannot eliminate an unavoidable reference to the holy as a ‘visceral’ dimension of existence.