Quintilian was certainly sensitive to the spell of these archaic modes. His characterization of the style of the early Roman poet Ennius foreshadows in mood and imagery the Romantic champions of medieval poetry: ‘Let us worship him, as we do sacred groves, hallowed by age, where the grand old oak trees are perhaps not as beautiful as they are awe-inspiring’ (X.i.88). But such appreciation can lead to affectation when the attempt is made to tap these effects in a modern context. Seneca scornfully speaks of orators who want to ‘talk like the twelve tables’ (of the most ancient Roman laws). Here, as in Cicero, we see the limits of the transposition of a historical sequence into one of expressive possibilities.
The Sublime
This is the central problem to which the most influential of all ancient treatises on rhetoric addresses itself, the fragment known as Longinus On the Sublime. Ostensibly it is merely a monograph on one particular effect or mode of style, one of the stops the orator can pull out. But it soon becomes apparent that in the author’s eye this mode requires special treatment, for the ‘sublime’ is one of the most tricky effects in the orator’s armoury. One false step and it degenerates into the frigid or bombastic. The study of the great models of the past serves to show how these masters achieved the truly sublime without falling victim to bathos.
Homer is his favourite instance, but it is noteworthy that the treatise includes among its illustrations of true sublimity the account of the Jewish Lawgiver in Genesis: ‘God said – what? “Let there be light”, and there was light. “Let there be earth”, and there was earth’ (IX.10).
But such grandeur is not at everybody’s beck and call. Indeed, it cannot be achieved by a simple act of will. ‘Longinus’ comes out against the conception of oratory as a skill. Speech is expression and expression cannot be feigned. The true sublime is not a manufactured effect, it is, in his famous phrase, ‘the ring of the noble soul’ (IX.2). This stand in favour of an ‘expressionist’ theory of style secured for Longinus his mounting prestige after his rediscovery in the late Renaissance.
Denouncing Corruption
The preceding pages have shown how psychological reactions were used and rationalized in the schools of rhetoric, and to what extent they underlay the divisions between opposing camps of criticism. Reference to the visual arts in these debates is usually incidental, but such allusions as were made are not only illuminating in themselves but also served later critics to equate problems of style in ancient oratory with problems in the visual arts. That dread of corruption that goes with the classical was able to feed on the denunciation of Asianism all the more easily given the authority of an ancient author: it was Petronius…
E.H. Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive, Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art
II
I don’t like Verso’s edition. It looks like a memento rather than a manifesto. The old Moscow publishing house booklet which I read back in the late 1950s looked like it meant business. It was aimed at people who wanted to overthrow capitalism, and said so right away.
Hobsbawm says the proletariat is a failure and maintains that these days the prime countervailing force is environmentalism. Not the environmental movement, please note. The movement, which springs in part from utopian socialism, implies action and struggle. Hobsbawm seems to see environmentalism as prudently managed capitalism on a global scale, with social engineers nicely equipped with the appropriate degrees in charge.
Back in 1958 the American sociologist Lewis Feuer introduced his edition of the Manifesto, writing that the revolutionary intellectual of the ’30s has been replaced by the managerial intellectual of the ’50s, and with this change in social temper the philosophy of Karl Marx would be consigned by many persons to the museum of their youthful indiscretions. In 1998 these same managerial intellectuals want to manage the entire planet, and Hobsbawm, who had a few youthful indiscretions of his own, sees barbarism as the only alternative to such planetary supervision by credentialed, scientific professionals (presumably financed by George Soros and the Nature Conservancy).
So Verso’s is a manifesto without class struggle, without revolution.
Alexender Cockburn, A Colossal Wreck
III
Book 1, Chapter 1
8. War does Not consist of a Single Instantaneous Blow.
If War ended in a single solution, or a number of simultaneous ones, then naturally all the preparations for the same would have a tendency to the extreme, for an omission could not in any way be repaired; the utmost, then, that the world of reality could furnish as a guide for us would be the preparations of the enemy, as far as they are known to us; all the rest would fall into the domain of the abstract. But if the result is made up from several successive acts, then naturally that which precedes with all its phases may be taken as a measure for that which will follow, and in this manner the world of reality again takes the place of the abstract, and thus modifies the effort towards the extreme.
Yet every War would necessarily resolve itself into a single solution, or a sum of simultaneous results, if all the means required for the struggle were raised at once, or could be at once raised; for as one adverse result necessarily diminishes the means, then if all the means have been applied in the first, a second cannot properly be supposed. All hostile acts which might follow would belong essentially to the first, and form, in reality only its duration.
But we have already seen that even in the preparation for War the real world steps into the place of mere abstract conception – a material standard into the place of the hypotheses of an extreme: that therefore in that way both parties, by the influence of the mutual reaction, remain below the line of extreme effort, and therefore all forces are not at once brought forward.
It lies also in the nature of these forces and their application that they cannot all be brought into activity at the same time. These forces are the armies actually on foot, the country, with its superficial extent and its population, and the allies.
In point of fact, the country, with its superficial area and the population, besides being the source of all military force, constitutes in itself an integral part of the efficient quantities in War, providing either the theatre of war or exercising a considerable influence on the same.
Now, it is possible to bring all the movable military forces of a country into operation at once, but not all fortresses, rivers, mountains, people, &. – in short, not the whole country, unless it is so small that it may be completely embraced by the first act of the War. Further, the co-operation of allies does not depend on the Will of the belligerents; and from the nature of the political relations of states to each other, this co-operation is frequently not afforded until after the War has commenced, or it may be increased to restore the balance of power.
That this part of the means of resistance, which cannot at once be brought into activity, in many cases, is a much greater part of the whole than might at first be supposed, and that it often restores the balance of power, seriously affected by the great force of the first decision, will be more fully shown hereafter. Here it is sufficient to show that a complete concentration of all available means in a moment of time is contradictory to the nature of War.
Now this, in itself, furnishes no ground for relaxing our efforts to accumulate strength to gain the first result, because an unfavourable issue is always a disadvantage to which no one would purposely expose himself, and also because the first decision, although not the only one, still will have the more influence on subsequent events, the greater it is in itself.
But the possibility of gaining a later result causes men to take refuge in that expectation, owing to the repugnance in the human mind to making excessive efforts; and therefore forces are not concentrated and measures are not taken for the first decision with that energy which would otherwise be used. Whatever one belligerent omits from weakness, becomes to the other a real objective ground for limiting his own efforts, and thus again, through this reciprocal action, extreme tendencies are brought down to efforts on a limited scale.
9. The Result in War is Never Absolute.
Lastly, even the final decision of a whole War is not always to be regarded as absolute. The conquered State often sees in it only a passing evil, which may be repaired in after times by means of political combinations. How much this must modify the degree of tension, and the vigour of the efforts made, is evident in itself.
10. The Probabilities of Real Life take the Place of the Conceptions of the Extreme and the Absolute.
In this manner, the whole act of War is removed from the rigorous law of forces exerted to the utmost. If the extreme is no longer to be apprehended, and no longer to be sought for, it is left to the judgment to determine the limits for the efforts to be made in place of it, and this can only be done on the data furnished by the facts of the real world by the laws of probability. Once the belligerents are no longer mere conceptions, but individual States and Governments, once the War is no longer an ideal, but a definite substantial procedure, then the reality will furnish the data to compute the unknown quantities which are required to be found.
From the character, the measures, the situation of the adversary, and the relations with which he is surrounded, each side will draw conclusions by the law of probability as to the designs of the other, and act accordingly.
11. The Political Object now Reappears.
Here the question which we had laid aside forces itself again into consideration (see No. 2), viz., the political object of the War. The law of the extreme, the view to disarm the adversary, to overthrow him, has hitherto to a certain extent usurped the place of this end or object. Just as this law loses its force, the political must again come forward. If the whole consideration is a calculation of probability based on definite persons and relations, then the political object, being the original motive, must be an essential factor in the product. The smaller the sacrifice we demand from our, the smaller, it may be expected, will be the means of resistance which he will employ; but the smaller his preparation, the smaller will ours require to be. Further, the smaller our political object, the less value shall we set upon it, and the more easily shall we be induced to give it up altogether.
Thus, therefore, the political object, as the original motive of the War, will be the standard for determining both the aim of the military force and also the amount of effort to be made. This it cannot be in itself, but it is so in relation to both the belligerent States, because we are concerned with realities, not with mere abstractions. One and the same political object may produce totally different effects upon different people, or even upon the same people at different times; we can, therefore, only admit the political object as the measure, by considering it in its effects upon those masses which it is to move, and consequently the nature of those masses also comes into consideration. It is easy to see that thus the result may be very different according as these masses are animated with a spirit which will infuse vigour into the action or otherwise. It is quite possible for such a state of feeling to exist between two States that a very trifling political motive for War may produce an effect quite disproportionate – in fact, a perfect explosion.
The political object will be so much the more the standard of aim and effort, and have more influence in itself, the more the masses are indifferent, the less that any mutual feeling of hostility prevails in the two States from other causes, and therefore there are cases where the political object almost alone will be decisive.
If the aim of the military action is an equivalent for the political object, that action will in general diminish as the political object diminishes, and in a greater degree the more the political object dominates. Thus it is explained how, without any contradiction in itself, there may be Wars of all degrees of importance and energy, from a War of extermination down to the mere use of an army of observation. This, however, leads to a question of another kind which we have hereafter to develop and answer.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War
IV
Whether the present treatise has lived up to the above-mentioned demands for an examination of the foundations of politics, the author will not attempt to answer by himself. In the face of its proposal to close the commercial state in the same fashion that the juridical state is closed, and of the decisive means to this end – the elimination of world currency and its replacement by national currencies – it is quite clear that no state that does not have to accept this proposal will want to do so, and that such a state will not have the promised advantages of this measure; that the proposal would thus be undecided upon, and, therefore, would never be carried out, since whatever men cannot decide upon comes to be considered impossible of execution. The grounds for this unwillingness, well-thought out or not, will be that Europe has, in the field of commerce, great advantages over the rest of the world; that it takes the resources and products of the rest of the world for itself, to an extent far greater than what its own resources and products could provide; that each European state, no matter how unfavorable may be its balance of trade with the other European states, nevertheless derives some advantage from this common exploitation of the rest of the world, and never gives up the hope that it can swing the balance of trade in its favor and thus derive a still greater advantage from the present arrangement. All these advantages it would surely have to forsake if it were to step out of the great European community of commerce. In order to do away with this ground for unwillingness, it must be demonstrated that a relationship like that of Europe with the rest of the world, which is not founded upon right and equity, cannot possibly endure. This demonstration lies outside the limits of my present task. But even if it were carried out, someone could still say to me: “Until now, at least, this relationship has endured – the submission of the colonies to the mother countries has endured, the slave-trade has endured – and we shall not see any of them come to an end in our own lifetime. For as long as they last, then, let us take advantage of them; the era in which these things are to be abolished can work out for itself how to set things aright. The men of that time can try to see if they can profit in some way from your ideas. We can have no desire for your goal, and therefore have no need for any advice as to how to achieve it.” I admit that I have no answer to this.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Closed Commercial State
V
Comme la plupart des guerres, surtout mondiales, celle-ci ne s’est pas déroulée comme prévu; elle nous a déjà fourni beaucoup de surprises. J’en ai dénombré dix principales.
La première a été l’irruption de la guerre elle-même en Europe, une vraie guerre entre deux Etats, événement inoui pour un continent qui se croyait installé dans la paix perpétuelle.
La deuxième, ce sont les deux adversaires que cette guerre met en présence : les États-Unis et la Russie. Depuis plus d’une décennie, la Chine était désignée par l’Amérique comme son ennemi principal.
Troisième surprise : la résistance militaire de l’Ukraine.
La quatrième surprise a été la résistance économique de la Russie.
Cinquième surprise : l’effondrement de toute volonté européenne.
La sixième surprise de la guerre aura été le surgissement du Royaume-Uni en roquet antirusse et en mouche du coche de l’OTAN.
[U]ne septième surprise, également protestante, annexe à la fébrilité britannique, en Europe du Nord. Norvège et Danemark sont des relais militaires tout à fait importants des États-Unis, tandis que la Finlande et la Suède, en adhérant à l’OTAN, révèlent un intérêt nouveau pour la guerre, dont nous verrons qu’il préexistait à l’invasion russe de l’Ukraine.
La huitième surprise est la plus… surprenante. Elle est venue des États-Unis, la puissance militaire dominante.
Après une lente montée, l’inquiétude s’est officiellement économique de la guerre a fait croître l’hostilité à l’Occident dans le monde en développement, parce que celui-ci souffre des sanctions.
La dixième et dernière surprise est en train de se matérialiser. C’est la défaite de l’Occident. On s’étonnera d’une telle affirmation alors que la guerre n’est pas terminée.
Mais cette défaite est une certitude parce que l’Occident s’autodétruit plutôt qu’il n’est attaqué par la Russie. Essayons d’avoir une vision géopolitique: la Russie, en réalité, n’est pas le problème principal. Trop vaste pour une population décroissante, elle serait bien incapable de prendre le contrôle de la planète et ne le désire nullement ; c’est une puissance normale dont l’évolution n’a rien de mystérieux. Aucune crise russe ne déstabilise l’équilibre mondial. C’est bien une crise occidentale et plus spécifiquement américaine, terminale, qui met en péril l’équilibre de la planète. Ses vagues les plus périphériques sont allées buter sur un môle de résistance russe, sur un État-nation classique et conservateur.
Emmanuel Todd, La Défaite de l’Occident
VI
And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,
And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.
Revelation 12:7-8
VII
1. The complete works of Machiavelli were printed for the last time in Italy in 1554, and the last unexpurgated Decameron in 1557; after 1560, the publisher Giolito stopped printing even Petrarch. This marked the beginning of bowdlerised editions of poetry, novellas and romances. Even painters ran up against the ecclesiastical censorship.
Venice resisted more than anywhere else, but in the end Italian authors and works (by Bruno, Campanella, Vanini and Galileo) were printed without any cuts only in Germany, France and Holland. With the ecclesiastical reaction that culminated in the condemnation of Galileo the Italian Renaissance came to an end even among the intellectuals.
2. In a booklet on Ouvriers et Patrons [Workers and Bosses] (a work that was awarded a prize in 1906 by the Parisian Academy of Moral and Political Sciences), reference is made to the reply given by a French Catholic worker to the person who put to him the objection that, according to the words of Jesus as quoted by one of the Evangelists, there must always be rich and poor – ‘Well, let’s leave at least a couple of poor so Jesus won’t be wrong.’
3. A critical-literary examination of the papal encyclicals. Ninety per cent of them consist of a mish-mash of vague, generic quotations whose aim seems to be establish on each and every occasion the continuity of ecclesiastical doctrine from the Gospels down to the current time. The Vatican must keep a formidable file of quotations on all arguments, so when an encyclical has to be compiled, a start is made by measuring out the necessary doses – so many quotations from the Gospels, so many from the Fathers of the Church, so many from previous encyclicals. The impression one gets is of great coldness.
Antonio Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks
VIII
“The Method I take to do this, is not yet very usual; for instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmetick I have long aimed at) to express my self in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men, to the Consider- ation of others.”
William Petty, Political Arithmetick
IX
Journalist: What role does Catholic culture have today?
Althusser: Oh… it has a giant role. In my view, today social revolution or a profound social change depends on the alliance between Catholics (I am not saying the church, though the church can also be part of it), the Catholics of the world, all religions of the world, and communists.
April 1980 appearance on the Italian Radio Television (RAI) program Multimedia Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
X
It was very hard not to be swept away by the Occupy movement, which established itself in New York’s Zuccotti Park last September and soon spread to Oakland, Calif., Chicago, London and Madrid. And indeed most people didn’t resist its allure. Leninists threw aside their Marxist primers on party organization and drained the full anarchist cocktail.
The Occupiers seemed to have a complicated way of communicating with each other — finger gestures were important. And as with all movements involving consensus, everything took a very long time. Was there perhaps a leader, a small leadership group, sequestered somewhere among the tents and clutter? It was impossible to say and at that point, somewhat disloyal to pose the question. Cynicism about Occupy was not a popular commodity. But new movements always need a measure of cynicism dumped on them. An Occupy gathering was like being in church. Questions of organization were obliterated by the strength of the basic message — we are the 99 percent; they are the 1 percent. It was probably the most successful slogan since “peace, land, bread.”
The Occupy Wall Street assembly in Zuccotti Park soon developed its own cultural mores, drumming included. Like many onlookers, I asked myself, “Where the hell was the plan?” But I held my tongue. I had no particular better idea and for a CounterPuncher of mature years to start laying down the program seemed cocky. But, deep down, I felt that Occupy, with all its fancy talk, all its endless speechifying, was riding for a fall…I do think it’s incumbent on those veteran radicals who wrote hundreds of articles more for proclaiming a religious conversion to give a proper account of themselves, otherwise it will all happen all over again.”
Alexander Cockburn, Epitaph to a Dead Movement
XI
We do not suggest that the Rockefellers’ opponents are in any way inferior psychologically to the Rockefeller machine — to the Brookings Institution crowd, the Trilateraloids, the majority of the notorious New York Council on Foreign Relations. Like Brzezinski, like Noam Chomsky, George Ball, Irving Brown, and so forth, relative to the typical U.S. conservative of the Barry Goldwater or Jesse Helms type, the typical representative and agent of the Lower Manhattan crowd has the psychological toughness of á poisonous jellyfish left on the sunny beach by the outgoing tide. A relatively small degree of purely verbal stress is usually sufficient to evoke from them a public exhibition of a disassociative reaction, or, in common parlance, “a freakout.” This we have seen, and experimentally tested, on numerous occasions. A simply straightforward question, premised on identifying well-documented, relevant facts, merely because it departs from the implicit agreement between such figures and the corrupt majority of the Washington or New York City “journalists’ corps,” is usually sufficient to cause the abrupt closing of the press conference, or to produce from the figure on the podium a fair simulation of the Wild Man of Borneo devouring a live chicken for the edification of the carnival public’s nobler instincts.’ The increasingly familiar “freakouts,” the plunges into the most hysterical, outrageous lying or editorial blood-cries by the New York Times, typify the acute emotional instability of those circles generally.
Lyndon LaRouche
XII
“In so far as their practical moral philosophy is concerned the Jesuits were not at all worse than other monks or Catholic priests, on the contrary, they were superior to them; in any case, more consistent, bolder, and perspicacious. The Jesuits represented a militant organization, strictly centralized, aggressive, and dangerous not only to enemies but also to allies. In his psychology and method of action the Jesuit of the “heroic” period distinguished himself from an average priest as the warrior of a church from its shopkeeper. We have no reason to idealize either one or the other. But it is altogether unworthy to look upon a fanatic warrior with the eyes of an obtuse and slothful shopkeeper.”
Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours
XIII
“Let him try if any words can give him the taste of a pine-apple, and make him have the true idea of the relish of that celebrated delicious fruit.”
John Locke, Of the Abuse of Words
XIV
Interviewer: Forgive me if I insist, engineer Bordiga, compared to other previous reactionary movements, you are not willing to recognize that there were elements of novelty, originality and danger in fascism?
Bordiga: Fascism had its own original characteristics. It was immediately interpreted in two ways: one was that Fascism relied on the agrarian and landed bourgeoisie, which was socially represented by real estate; the other was that it relied on large-scale modern industry, which was growing as a result of a fact that happened in all the nations of the world. Gramsci’s interpretation seemed to advocate the thesis of fascism as an agrarian fact. We, on the other hand, considered fascism an industrial and modern fact, in a certain sense even democratic. Fascism was an attempt to give an original function, in Italian society, to the middle and small bourgeoisie: artisans, professionals, students, all these half-classes that we heartily despise from the height of our pure classism.
From Fragments of an Interview with Amadeo Bordiga
XV
The noble Mexican population, having become Catholic under the merciless terror of the Spanish invaders, would show that they have remained “primitive” by not being terrified and horrified of death.
These peoples are, however, the heirs of a civilization misunderstood by Christians then and now and transmitted from ancient communism. Insipid modern individualism can only be flabbergasted by it, especially in this dull text where we read that graves are unmarked and that dishes are prepared even for those dead who no one remembers. True “unknown dead,” not because a sluggish, demagogic rhetoric says so but through the powerful simplicity of a life which is of the species and for the species, eternal like nature and not like a stupid swarm of souls wandering in the “beyond” for whose development the experiences of the dead, the living, and the as yet unborn are valid, in an historical sequence whose unfolding is not mourning but joy in all the moments of the material cycle….
In communism, which has not yet happened but which remains a scientific certainty, the identity of the individual and his fate with their species is re-won, after destroying within it all the limits of family, race, and nation. This victory puts an end to all fear of personal death and with it every cult of the living and the dead, society being organized for the first time around well-being and joy and the reduction of sorrow, suffering, and sacrifice to a rational minimum, removing every mysterious and sinister character from the harmonious course of the succession of generations, a natural condition of the prosperity of the species.
Amadeo Bordiga, “In Janitzio Death is not Scary”
XVI
In Old English Wyrd is a power that weaves destinies: Rhyme Poem 70 me pœt Wyrd gewaf, “Wyrd wove that for me”; Guthac 1350 f. prag…wefen wyrdstafum,”the time woven on Wyrd’s loom.” Later the Wyrds appear as a group, as in Chaucer, “the Werdys that we clepyn Destine” (Legend of Good Women, Hypermnestra 19), and most famously as the Weird Sisters in Macbeth.
The word has a significant etymology. It is related to German werden, “become,” “come about.” But in Latin the same verb means “to turn,” uertere; and in Vedic the middle form vártate has both senses, “turns” or “comes about,” “turns out” in such and such a way; the participle vrttá– means “turned, elapsed, happened.” This close semantic connection between turning and eventuating is surely relevant to the image of the goddesses’ spindle that spins round as it twists the loose wool into a firm thread. In various languages the word for spindle or spindle-whorl is derived from the same verbal root: Sanskrit vartana or vartula, Old Church Slavonic vreteno, Middle High German wirtel, Welsh gwerthyd. In the visionary cosmology of Plato’s Republic (616c-17d) the planetary spheres, or rather hemispheres, are nested spindle-whorls on the great spindle of Ananke, and the three Moirai guide their revolutions. Perhaps the circling waters of Uro’s well were also conceived as an analogue of destiny: Plutarch in his Life of Caesar (19. 8) records that German holy women prophesied by observing river edies and taking indications from circling currents.
Martin West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth
XVII
The Bosnian Crisis is significant therefore not simply because more than any other crisis it started Europe’s fatal descent into the maelstrom, but even more because it involved the last serious attempt to turn European policies around by reviving its previous spirit and ethos, and the attempt not merely failed miserably, but confirmed and accelerated the trend it was meant to reverse.
As a result, Austria-Hungary was bound to conclude that it must do something drastic to change a system that was slowly but surely strangling it. In 1914 as in 1809, it waited too long. Not every reckless gamble is irrational; it may be rational to choose one form of death over another-and, as has been observed, Austria-Hungary committed suicide not out of fear of death, but out of fear of the hangman. The hangman was not a particular enemy power, but the international system.
Paul W. Schroeder, Stealing Horses to Great Applause
XVIII
All the lexical terms studied in the immediately preceding chapters have been concerned with a central notion–that of religion. How can we define, by means of the Indo-European vocabulary, what we understand by “religion”?
One fact can be established immediately: there is no term of common Indo-European for “religion.” Even in the historical period there are a number of Indo-European languages which lack such a term, which is not surprising. For it lies in the nature of this notion not to lend itself to a single and lasting expression.
If it is true that religion is an institution, this institution is nevertheless not separated from other institutions or outside them. It was not possible to evolve a clear conception of what religion is or to devise a term for it until it was clearly delimited and had a distinct domain, so that it was possible to know what belonged to it and what was foreign to it. Now in the civilizations which we are studying everything is imbued with religion, everything is a sign of, a factor in, or the reflection of, divine forces. Thus outside special confraternities no need was felt for a specific term to designate the complex of cults and beliefs, and this is why to denote “religion” we find only terms which appear as separate and independent creations. It is not even certain that we understand them in their true and proper meaning. When we translate as “religion” the Sanskrit word dharma ‘rule’ or the Old Slavic vera ‘belief’, are we not committing the error of extrapolation? We shall examine only two terms, one from Greek and the other from Latin, which can pass for equivalents of our word “religion.”
The Greek word thrēskeia denotes properly both cult and piety. It has a curious history in Greek itself. According to Van Herten thrēskeia was applied only to foreign cults; whereas in fact, in the Augustan period, the word may designate every cult, whether indigenous or foreign.
We now come to the second term, which is infinitely more important in every respect: this is the Latin religio, which remains, in all western languages, the sole and constant word, for which no equivalent or substitute has been able to establish itself.
What does religio mean? The question has been discussed since ancient times and even then scholars were unable to agree. Modern scholars remain no less divided. Opinions waver between two alternatives each of which is favored from time to time and finds new supporters, but no final decision has been reached. One of these alternatives is represented by Cicero, who, in a text quoted later on attaches religio to legere ‘gather, collect’, and the other by Lactantius and Tertullian, who explain religio by ligare ‘to bind’. Modem writers are still divided between legere and ligare.
Emile Benveniste, Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society