RELIGION

A new Facebook friend had had a discussion with a friend from the anglican church, who had said:

The meaning of the word "religion" is:
To try to re-establish a connection with the Godhead; religere means to re-unite.

My thoughts about it got too long so I put it here instead of in the Facebook.

The word unite comes from the Latin uni-, which means one. So here you already have the Latin.  A frequent Latin word for unite is coniungo.

What you have to choose between is ligare and legere.

I think it was already during the first centuries that they had discussions about the word religion coming from ligare or legere.

Legere

I find it quite logical that it would come from legere because re + legere would mean to read something again (and again and again) and that is a method of getting knowledge. Of learning.

It also means to collect, to gather, to pull strings together.

Of course, when you want to learn something well you can read it over and over again. You re-read it and you collect knowledge. Re-reading becomes a method.

That is what you are doing in churches and temples, you read (or listen to someone else reading) it over and over again to imprint it in your subconscious mind. Stories, songs and prayers are constantly repeated.

That is, of course, a unification process. You are slowly unified with the contents of the text whatever it is about.

Think about that before you read criminal novels or ghost stories over and over again! Films do the same.

But what is actually ”legere”? If people cannot read. If only the priest can read?
What are you doing when you are reading?

You are taking in knowledge. Vibrations. Frequency patterns.

It doesn´t matter if you read from the book yourself or if you listen to someone else who is reading for you, while you are just listening.

Legere is just a way of taking in mental information and of being emotionally filled by it.

It is the repeated perception of a certain kind of knowledge. And that will transform your soul, your mind.

You collect what you read or listen to, you pick it up and it is your spiritual food.

Ligare

Other philosophers meant that religion would come from ligare, which means to bind.

That is also what you find in a normal dictionary.

And of course a priest can say that this will reunite you with the source of this knowledge.

But then he only talks about the effect of it – he does not talk about the method.

 He only values the result of this unknown method.

And if we believe him we will come to church and hope for the best..
How do you get united by binding?

The priest has the power because he is the one who knows how. But he doesn't say.

You should be bound to God and by God and I suspect that this translation was being spread by the priests who wanted to bind people.

I would mean that relegere is for the esoteric monks while religare is for the symbiosis of the bound people and the binding priests, who wanted to have this power over people.

Religare can also mean to unbind (to take away the ropes) so I suppose that this word could give the priests the power of both binding and unbinding people, to both God and the sins.

If you get bound to my church I will bind you to God and unbind you, release you from your sins.

In that case it would be a reflection of a pattern that is repeated over and over again, also today.

Idealists are inventing something and then the power people come and take over it and use it to get power and to be in control of people and they even change the meanings of the most important words. We can see it in our society also.

Ligare means to bind,  but if you bind two things together they will get united, of course. At least on the outside.

And if you read much about something you will get bound by it, bound by it's influence. It will shape you.

As philosophers had discussions about this almost 2000 years ago they were probably quarreling about it in Latin.

So the question can not be of just translating Latin in the right way. They knew Latin and still they did not agree!

They must have been two groups that looked at religion in different ways.
Maybe the esoteric ones and the exoteric ones.

The heart-people and the power-people.

The esoteric monks were rereading their scriptures in the monasteries to get united with God in their hearts..

And the priests were concerned about how to bind and rule the people with their ceremonies. A more extrovert binding?

A friend of mine, who is extremely interested in the Bible and especially in the prayer Pater Noster, told me that he had asked some chaplains about the word supersubstantialem in this prayer.

They answered that nobody knows.

So my friend believed that this Latin word was a totally unknown word that nobody in the whole world had ever heard.

When I told him that it is a very simple word, that every English person would understand, he got angry.

Instead of asking a chaplain he could have walked into any Italian pizzeria and asked.

They would all understand the meaning of the Latin word, but... maybe they would not understand the true meaning of the sentence if they do not think about such concepts as supersubstantial bread, which could be translated as spiritual bread or transcendental bread.

The thing that ”nobody knows” is about something else.

Nobody knows if the right translation should be daily bread or transcendental bread because it is originally the same word (epiousios). Hieronymus used both of them to be on the safe side when he translated.

But the Latin word supersubstantialem is not a difficult word.

That is a similar story. The priests answer something nonsensical that is not really right but also not really wrong. Just foggy.

So when your friend asked about the meaning of the word religion the priest did not say that it means to bind.

In his mind he went ahead and he responded to the end result of being bound: the union.

But without the method you will not get to the result, so why talk about it?
Why not put the focus on the legere, on the listening and reading (chanting. praying)?

Otherwise... how would you bind yourself? With the verb ligare you get also bound to the priest who is binding you.

Maybe he just took the ordinary explanation that we have in our dictionaries, that it simply comes from binding. And what you bind gets united.That's it!

But if it is so easy - why did the philosophers discuss it?Why did they have different opinions?

So, if you ask a priest about the meaning of a word, make sure that he understands what you mean with meaning.

And... maybe he just says something easy because he doesn't want to end up in discussions?

An example

Let's say that you are in Italy and you ask about the meaning of the word macchina.

The linguist says that it means machine.A normal guy says that it means car.

The PR-man (the priest of the car company) says that it means ”you can go anywhere you want and you will have full freedom”. 

It feels as if the two words are melting together and they just become two sides of the same coin.

Here I just follow my imagination....

Maybe.... maybe a long time ago there was an original word with the meaning of both reading, listening, taking in and binding, unifying.

And then the words have slipped apart, forming two new and different concepts.

Some people put the emphasis on the process of taking in the songs and they pronounced the word in one way, while others put the emphasis on the creating of safe bounds and also on how to use it on others.

And they pronounced it in another way.

Maybe someone knows....

Anyway....finally I would like to give five points to LEGERE but almost nothing to ligare.
Why?

Because according to a normal Latin-Swedish dictionary the word legere (to read, to collect) also has a poetic mening, which is "to take in someones breath in a kiss".
It means "getting filled with someone´s spirit".
The dictionary says "andedräkt", which is close to "ande" which is the same as "spirit". Spirare means to breathe, in Swedish "andas".
So the meaning with the rereading, the reading or listening over and over again, the "taking in" can be seen as a devotional service to God (or any spirit that you are focused on), it can be seen as a love affair between you and God where you get filled with the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, Spiritus Sanctus.

The idea of having a spiritual love affair with God was already common in India and probably not unknown to the early Romans.
If you change legere to ligare the whole divine love affair is lost.
The love affair becomes a marriage with bounds and rules and regulations.

If we look at different personality types we can say that here is a place for everyone:

LEGERE if you want to have a love affair with god, if you want to have your heart filled with divine ecstasy.
You follow your heart and you go with the wind and you end up where it takes you.

LIGARE if you want to have a safe and steady relation to God. Everything is bound in a perfect order!
You are bound by your promise to God and God is bound to take care of you and the priests bind what they can get hold of. A big union. You'd better stay inside!

So... was it maybe Tertullianus (a berber from Africa) who (around 200) transformed an original bhakti yoga into a hard and strict church that could become the instrument of power?
He wrote the basic Latin scripts for the church and he said it was about ligare, binding a union (that became a control system).
But one hundred years earlier Cicero meant that legere was the right word.

Bhakti yoga means the love of God, the real love from the heart.
The love that makes your soul ascend to heaven.

This legere (hearing, singing, reading, taking in) is your spiritual food that will fill your soul and eventually you will end up into the kiss (a spark of union) that fills your soul with the spirit of God (or whatever you focus on).
It can be said to be the same as falling in love. Clic!

Now it is not so difficult to understand the meaning of the word supersubstantialem in Pater Noster.
Supersubstantial bread, spiritual food, the inhaling or picking up of the spirit of God.

More about religion here:

RELIGION AND MUSIC