The concept of religion in the thought of Carl Gustav Jung

Religion for Carl Gustav Jung was, from an early age, the center of his attention and the target of his studies. The fascination it exerted on the Swiss psychologist was such that a good part of his works can be considered an attempt to understand the religious phenomenon, forming, in the general set of this author’s thought, a great treatise on religion. Coming from a Protestant tradition, from an early age he was confronted with the religious phenomenon, mainly in his own home, not to mention the countless experiences with the transcendent narrated by him in famous works.

This concern led Jung to a fervent attempt to insert his study, both in the field of psychology and psychiatric medicine, in the midst of the materialist German culture, in which the prevailing psychology was born in the cradle of Wundt and Skinner, as an organicist psychology devoid of of soul. In this way, the reflections and his main thought on the issue of religion find a better opportunity in his reference works on the subject. Jung tries to understand religious phenomena from the perspective of psychology, mainly highlighting the influence of the unconscious. The work intended to deal with this subject was entitled in the first compilations, Psychology of Western and Eastern Religion.

It is a set of writings that largely represent an effort by the author to demonstrate the presence of archetypes in religious symbols, and their psychological consequences on the model of psyche that he develops. As is the case of the text, Psychological Interpretations of the Dogma of the Trinity, in which Jung analyzes this important Christian dogma and criticizes the fact that the Trinity is not an adequate symbol for the Individuation process.

In his considerations, the presence of three elements (Father, Son and the Holy Spirit) does not satisfactorily contain the whole of the psyche. The Trinity excludes the 4th element, that is, the material and feminine aspects, denying them the shadow. In Symbol of Transformation in the Missa, the author highlights this religious ceremony as an element of strong psychological relevance, and reports that: “the mass can be classified as a rite of the individuation process”.

In Oriental Psychology and Religion, the typological difference of thought is presented right from the start, characterizing the Oriental as an Introverted Type and the Western as an Extroverted Type. This difference is the main factor that marks the diversity of religious experience and understanding of religion in these two world contexts. There are also texts related to the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, notes on Yoga and the West, Considerations around the Psychology of Eastern Meditation and the preface to I Gin: the Book of Transformations, by Richard Wilheim.

But what seems to be the pinnacle of considerations on religion is the text Answer to Job. The perspective adopted by Jung in this writing seems to be somewhat different. Until now, the texts revolved around demonstrating that psychology and religion were not enemies, but rather had points in common. In Job we see an open speculation in the field of theology. Jung, following Job’s path, tries to face the problem of good and evil, bitterly experienced by this biblical character.

From this point on, we can raise some questions. Starting with the question: what religion is it? What concept of religion does Jung use? How is this concept articulated in your thinking? Thus, before delving precisely into the study of the author’s thought, we are going to put some considerations on the agenda on the very concept of religion, and in this way, understand the term that best represents the assumptions of Jung’s thought.

Defining the concept of Religion

The term religion comes from religio, which originally dates back to the ancient Roman universe and has its meaning close to something scrupulous or careful. The link between religio and religiosus, according to Derrida, gives the meaning of “scrupulous in relation to worship” (Derrida, 2000, p. 52) related to a kind of care or zeal with the practices of Roman worship of the gods. In Cicero’s famous work, De Natura Deorum,12 the term religio is called relegere and reinforces the idea of ​​doing correctly or taking a careful stance in the practice of worship.

According to Azevedo, “Roman religious practice is associated with zeal, with a respectful relationship with the gods that makes it necessary to repeat the rites precisely. correct performance of the rituals gains extreme importance since it is the way to be in direct contact with the divinity” (Azevedo, 2010, p. 91).

The author Kerényi, on the other hand, reports that religio may be related to the question of listening, of knowing how to listen carefully, in the sense of listening to what the gods have to say to us. Thus, “true religio is moderate, it is an absolute openness to the divine happenings in the world, a subtle attentive listening to its signs and a life directed towards it and organized in its function” (Kerényi, 1972, p. 127). In the Roman universe, it was common to consult the oracle, precisely so as not to disregard what the gods had to say. In this case, the term neglegere was used for lack of care or negligence, the opposite of relegere, not to neglect the will of the gods.

On this issue, Azevedo comments: it seems to us that the term religio, as a scrupulous observance of the rite, as a constant zeal in relation to the gods, concerned the acts of everyday life; everyday life which, in turn, should be shaped by this constant concern for the gods. Perhaps this characteristic explains why, initially, religio was an ordinary term of the Roman word; therefore, it seems to us that all acts were part of the scope of religio (Azevedo, 2010, p. 92).

However, the term religio underwent some modifications and the sense in which we understand religion today no longer has such a strong link with this Roman understanding. For Dubuisson, religio “could only be the first and very specialized meaning of a formerly ordinary Latin word that remained so until the first Christian thinkers took hold of it and favored its exceptional destiny” (Dubuisson, 1998, p. 41).

In this way, paraphrasing Azevedo (2010, p. 92), the term religio was picked up by early Christianity, especially by the thinkers Tertuliano, Lactâncio and Agostinho. However, it was first necessary to detach it from its original meaning and find a form that better fit with Christian precepts or with the ‘true religion’, as they called themselves. Thus, Dubuisson explains to us that “to the extent that true religion is addressed to the one true God, the only divinity, religion tends to value this bond that links (religare) man to God according to the famous etymology proposed by Lactantius” (Dubuisson , 1998, p. 44).

It is from the pen of Lactantius that religio begins to lose its sense of relegere, breaking with the Roman bond of paganism, with the worship of the gods, and starts to be understood as religare, reinforcing the belief in a single God and, at the same time, marking the strengthening of Christianity that goes from a philosophical system to the official religion of the Roman Empire. “With this, Lactâncio states that religion does not consist of well thought-out practices such as Cicero proposed for Roman religion, but rather the bond of piety through which we are linked to God” (Azevedo, 2010, p. 94).

The establishment of the Christian design as the ‘true religion’ places pagan practices in an awkward situation. Lactantius begins to accuse such practices of being superstitious and all those who still remain in them are not truly serving the one God. With the passage of the term religio to the meaning of religare, the notion of a careful and scrupulous perception or listening to the gods is lost, being replaced by a relationship of total dependence on a creator God .

The religare concept gains even greater strength in the writings of Augustine of Hippo, who, as a charismatic and extremely influential figure, would exert a considerable presence in Christian thought. Augustine designates religio as a submission to the love of God, as the need to reconnect with God that was lost due to original sin, that is, a reconnection. This view accords with Augustine’s own understanding of the question of grace.

For the Bishop of Hippo, grace was totally independent of man’s will or behavior and was exclusively the will of God manifesting itself (Cf. Augustine, 2011). Thus, the meaning attributed to understanding religion comes from these two conceptual bases: relegere and religare. Although the terms apparently denote an opposition or competition, Derrida argues that it is possible to speak of a common basis, or rather, a meeting point between the semantic sources. The author explains that both relegere and religare present “an insistent connection that binds, above all, to itself. It is really a meeting, a re-union, a re-collection” (Derrida, 2000, p. 54).

In Azevedo’s considerations, it is possible to notice that the author goes a little further and tries to close the issue in a very punctual way, stating that: when we hear the term religio we must have in mind more than a reconciliation between the two possible etymological origins; it is a matter of complementarity: the scrupulous observance of worship, religious practice, and the bonds of piety and love that unite men to the only god (Azevedo, 2010, p. 95).

After considering the concept of religion, it is possible to go back into Jung’s thinking and clarify his perception of the religious phenomenon and its implications in his model of psychology.

Relegere and Numinoso: Means for a Psychology of Religion

The best definition of the concept of religion in Jung’s thought is found in the introduction to the work Psychology and Religion, in which he links the term relegere to the considerations of the theologian Rudolf Otto in The Sacred. According to the author: “Religion is – as the Latin word religere says – an accurate and conscientious observation of what Rudolf Otto rightly called “numinous”, that is, an existence or a dynamic effect not caused by an arbitrary act” (OC , v. XI/1, p. 19, § 6).

Religion is highlighted as a careful observation of phenomena and supernatural forces that permeate the objective world. Jung also resorts to this definition in some letters, where he reports that: “According to ancient opinion, the word religio comes from religere and not from the term religare. The first word means ‘to consider or observe carefully’. This derivation gives religio the correct empirical basis, that is, the religious conduct of life” (Letters, v. III, p. 227).

Both in the complete works and in the letters there seems to be an error regarding the spelling of the term relegere. Jung uses the word religere, which does not exist in Latin, to refer to the same meaning of the term relegere coined by Cicero in the work, De Natura Deorum (The Nature of…