Gods and the Numinous: As I noted in the first and third essays in this series, Rudolph Otto (1923/1950) offered an early account regarding the psychology of religion. He identified the numinous is an experience of something that is unbounded, very large, very powerful, completely unexpected, or simply filled with awe (“awe-ful”). Building on Otto’s account, Carl Jung (1938) suggested that we humans need to construct a barrier between ourselves and God—for a divine presence is among the most powerful sources of a numinous experience. Jung specifically proposed that this barrier in the Catholic Church is often found in the structure of the church itself. The rituals of the church and the dominant role played by the Catholic priest provided the Catholic acolyte with a buffer from the numinous presence of God. Members of the Catholic Church do not directly confront God; they engaged God through the intermediary of the church and priesthood.
Conversely, according to Jung, the Protestant Church had eliminated the church and priesthood as an intermediary, enabling members of the Protestant Church to “speak to” God directly. For Jung, this meant that the Protestants confronted the numinous without any “protection.” As a result, the Protestants had to find alternative entities to serve as an intermediary. For Jung, viewing the Protestant world of 1938, the authoritarian state might have served as the intermediary. Given that Protestantism was found primary in the Germanic countries of Europe, it is telling that Jung originally made this observation during the Terry Lectures that were given during imminent rise of the Third Reich in Germany.
God at Fault: It is also telling that other critical moments in human history have produced a profound interplay between a simulated God, the numinous and human psychology. For instance, James Gerry (2026) offers a powerful tale regarding the interplay between religious faith (including Lilly’s God of War) and a major numinous-laden experience in American history—this being the American Civil War. Gerry begins his remarkable novel with the following observation made by Eli, the protagonist in Gerry’s novel:
“On December 20th 1860, God was silent. But the newspapers were not. The late editions and the curbside hawkers who peddled them boldly shouted the news that we had most feared:
The Union is dissolved!
Our prayers that bitterness and wrath would be put aside had gone unanswered. Pleas that the land would be healed had been ignored.
Stunned, I wondered why God hadn’t answered my invocation for divine help. But it wasn’t just God. And it wouldn’t be just South Carolina. In a matter of weeks, six other Southern States would also fail to answer my prayers, and they too would secede from the Union.
‘I fear that war is coming,’ said my father, in a voice that was barely audible. ‘Our iniquities have separated us from the Lord, and he will not hear us. I despair that soon, just as the prophet foretold, our hands will be defiled with blood.’”
The protagonist, Eli, blames God for the impending disaster of a war that tears apart a nation. God is silent about the numinous-laden dissolution of the sacred American union. Why hadn’t God answered Eli’s invocation? If God is all-powerful and all-caring, then why was this display of bitterness and wrath allowed to be present. Why, in other words, was the absence of warfare (the “nothingness” of peace) replaced by the worst of all warfare, that between father and son, between brothers, and between two sectors of a once unified country? How do we make sense of the numinous of warfare which God has created? James Gerry has set the stage for a struggle between God and humankind, or at least between Humankind and religious faith.
