When Faith Forgets to Tremble: Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans and the Filipino Struggle with Split-Level Christianity

We are a religious people. Step into any Filipino neighborhood and you’ll find a chapel, a Marian image draped with flowers, a family praying the rosary at dusk. Faith is the heartbeat of our culture. We call on God before meals, during storms, before exams and elections. Religion, for us, is not a private affair — it fills the air we breathe.

And yet, something is missing. For all our prayers and processions, our society remains marked by corruption, materialism, and moral confusion. We profess faith in God but live as though He were not watching. The late Jesuit psychologist Fr. Jaime Bulatao named this phenomenon “split-level Christianity.” It describes a deep disconnection between what we believe and how we behave, between Sunday worship and weekday conduct.

This fracture is not merely moral or sociological — it is, at its core, theological. It reveals a loss of the sense of the Holy that once gave faith its living fire. To borrow from Rudolf Otto, the early twentieth-century German theologian, the Filipino soul seems to have forgotten what it means to encounter the mysterium tremendum et fascinans — the mystery before which we both tremble and are drawn in awe.

The Holy That Both Frightens and Fascinates

Otto’s classic work, The Idea of the Holy (1917), describes religious experience as a confrontation with the numinous — a reality that overwhelms human categories. When one stands before the Holy, there arises a paradoxical mixture of fear and attraction: tremendum (the shuddering awareness of God’s majesty) and fascinans (the irresistible pull of divine love). This tension lies at the heart of authentic religion.

For Moses before the burning bush, Isaiah in the temple, or Peter before the miraculous catch, this encounter provoked both humility and adoration. They knew that God is not an abstract idea but a living presence — terrifying in purity, yet tender in mercy.

When that sense of awe is alive, faith transforms behavior. When it fades, religion becomes a mere set of customs — familiar, harmless, even sentimental. And this, perhaps, is where the Filipino experience falters.

The Familiar God

Over centuries of colonization and cultural adaptation, our faith grew rich in symbols and devotions. Yet this richness came with a cost: the Sacred became familiar. God became a household name, a comforting friend, a divine helper in times of need — but no longer the God before whom one trembles in silence.

Our fiestas, processions, and novenas express deep devotion, yet often slide into routine or spectacle. We have learned to celebrate the fascinans — God’s closeness and mercy — but have quietly forgotten the tremendum, His holiness and power. We prefer a God who blesses our plans rather than one who overturns them.

Thus, our faith thrives in emotion and ritual, but struggles in moral and existential depth. The numinous has been domesticated; the Holy, turned into habit.

The Split-Level Soul

This spiritual domestication has profound social consequences. Fr. Bulatao observed that many Filipinos hold two moral frameworks at once: the Christian conscience and the pragmatic code of survival in a complex society. One belongs to the realm of prayer and worship; the other governs politics, business, and daily relationships.

The result is what Bulatao called the “split-level” personality — devout yet compromising, reverent yet corruptible. The Filipino may kneel before the altar and cheat on taxes in the same week without sensing contradiction. This is not hypocrisy in the malicious sense; rather, it is a spiritual numbness, a disconnection between the sacred and the ordinary.

Behind that numbness lies the loss of awe. When God ceases to be the “wholly Other,” His commandments become negotiable. When the Holy becomes merely familiar, sin feels less like offense and more like inconvenience.

Why the Sense of the Holy Faded

Several cultural and historical factors contributed to this alienation from the numinous.

First, colonial evangelization, while sincere, often emphasized external conformity over interior encounter. Religion became associated with ritual obligation, moral duty, and communal belonging — all valuable, yet insufficient for deep conversion.

Second, modern secularization has made the transcendent seem remote. Urban life, digital distractions, and economic pressure leave little room for silence or mystery. God becomes part of our vocabulary, but not of our vision.

Third, there is an enduring fear of intimacy with God. To truly face the Holy means facing one’s own unholiness. It demands repentance, vulnerability, and change. Easier, then, to keep God near enough to bless us, but far enough not to transform us.

Recovering Awe

And yet, the Filipino soul remains deeply spiritual. Our instinct to bow before the sacred, to kiss holy images, to cry during a song of praise — these are traces of a sensibility not fully lost, only asleep. What we need is not more religion, but renewed encounter.

Recovering awe begins with silence — the willingness to let God speak first. It continues in reverent worship, where beauty and solemnity lift the heart beyond the ordinary. It deepens through contemplation, where prayer becomes listening rather than asking. And it bears fruit in integrity of life, when awareness of God’s presence reshapes how we treat others.

To tremble before the Holy is not to cower in fear, but to stand in wonder before love so great it humbles us. Only when we rediscover that trembling will our faith become whole again.

One Life, Not Two

Perhaps this is the task of Filipino Christianity in our time: to heal the split within the soul. To rediscover a God who is not just our companion in difficulty but our consuming fire; not only the God of fiesta but of silence; not only fascinans but tremendum.

When we once again stand before the Holy — with trembling and fascination — our devotions will recover their depth, our morality its coherence, and our culture its integrity. Then the split-level soul will become a single heart, burning once more with awe before the living God.

Nick Santamaria is a scholar of theology currently pursuing doctoral studies at De La Salle University and the Maryhill School of Theology. His research interests include the socio-anthropology of religion, theological anthropology, and the intersections of faith, culture, and modernity. He writes on the lived experience of belief, exploring how theology takes root in the everyday life of Filipino communities.