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Religion

Religion

Jung opens Psychology and Religion by reaching back through Latin to recover what the word once meant. “Religion, as the Latin word denotes, is a careful and scrupulous observation of what Rudolf Otto aptly termed the numinosum*”* (Jung 1958, par. 6). Religion is not a creed; it is the attitude peculiar to a consciousness which has been changed by experience of the numinosum (Jung 1958, par. 9). Creeds are afterthoughts — codified and dogmatized forms of original religious experience (Jung 1958, par. 10). The lived encounter precedes the dogma; the dogma protects the encounter; the encounter is the thing.

The classical root supports the Jungian definition. Cicero derived religio from relegere, to gather, to read again, to attend with care; Lactantius later replaced this with religare, to bind (Benveniste 1973). Benveniste settles for Cicero: “religio is a hesitation, a misgiving which holds back, a scruple which prevents”. Religion in the classical sense is the soul’s careful, awed re-reading of what addresses it from beyond. Eusebeia — Greek right reverence, the affective comportment that grows from sebas before the gods — names the same posture in the Hellenic register.

What Otto names the numinous and Eliade names the sacred is the object of this attention; what Edinger names the religious function of the psyche is its locus; what Hillman, in critique, names polytheism is its true plurality. Across all these readings the structure holds: religion is not what one believes but how one stands before what exceeds the will. Jung’s whole psychology of religion proceeds from this opening definition.

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