Il sacro come fondamento dell’esperienza religiosa in Nathan Söderblom

Abstract

This essay explores Nathan Söderblom’s concept of the sacred as a potential foundational structure underlying religious experience. By examining his phenomenological approach, the discussion considers how Söderblom’s idea of the sacred partially anticipates Rudolf Otto’s well-known notion of the numinous. Söderblom highlights a more complex interaction in which the sacred simultaneously attracts and repels, consecrates and contaminates, suggesting a dynamic tension at the heart of religious phenomena. Furthermore, Söderblom’s perspective emphasizes the role of historical manifestations and ritual practices as expressions of the sacred, pointing to a lived and embodied dimension of religion that resists purely psychological or reductionist explanations. The essay also examines Söderblom’s commitment to ecumenism, considering how his ideas foreshadow later developments in interreligious dialogue and the ethical navigation of tensions between particularity and universality, as evidenced by the Nobel Prize he received in 1930.