The phenomenology of religion is an approach that seeks to describe religious phenomena as they present themselves to believers, deliberately setting aside (or "bracketing") the question of whether their objects are real, in order to grasp the recurring essences and structures of religious experience. Borrowing its method and its key term (epoche, the suspension of judgment) from the philosophical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, it aims at an empathetic, descriptive understanding of what the sacred is like from the inside, rather than explaining religion away in social, psychological, or evolutionary terms. Its landmark work is Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (1917), which identified the core of religious experience in the encounter with the "numinous", the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the awe-inspiring, overwhelming, yet compelling mystery that is the felt presence of the "wholly other."
The Romanian-born historian Mircea Eliade developed the approach influentially, analyzing recurring structures across religions, the distinction of sacred and profane space and time, the "hierophany" or manifestation of the sacred, the symbolism of the center and of cosmic renewal. The phenomenological approach has been criticized for assuming a universal "essence" of religion and for a method that can float free of history and social context, and much of the field has moved toward more historically and culturally grounded study. But its enduring contribution is its insistence that religion must first be understood on its own terms, as it is lived and felt, before it is explained.