579 - Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy In Art

Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy In Art
By Gerardus van der Leeuw
357 pp. New York, Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1963. $6.50.

More often than not, the promotional statement on the jacket tends to exaggerate the value and quality of the book. In the case of the present book, however, readers can forget their skepticism and read the jacket with profit. We are told that the present volume, first published in 1932, was revised shortly before the author's death in 1950, and was prepared for publication by his colleague, Dr. E. L. Smelik, who deserves our thanks. While this reviewer cannot read Dutch, the translation

580 - Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy In Art

seems to be very clear and good. Readers are strongly advised to read the helpful "Preface" by Professor Mircea Eliade who knew van der Leeuw both as a person and as a scholar.

The author, late Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Groningen, Holland, was also a theologian and a philosopher. And besides, as Eliade reminds us, van der Leeuw was "a poet, a musician, a man of the Church, and after the liberation of Holland for some time served his country as Minister of Education." However, in spite of his competence in many areas of learning, van der Leeuw was first and foremost a "phenomenologist," preoccupied with the systematic discussion of "what appears." In his own words:

Where history asks, "How did it happen?," phenomenology asks, "How do I understand it?"; where philosophy examines truth and reality, phenomenology contents itself with the date without examining them further with respect to their content of truth or reality. We do not intend to pursue causal relationships, but rather to search for comprehensive associations. Further, we do not intend to investigate the truth behind the appearance, but we shall try to understand the phenomena themselves in their simple existence (pp. 5-6).

Thus, the present volume may be characterized as a phenomenological study of the relationship between art and religion, or between beauty and holiness. The forms of art discussed here are the dance (which incidentally is the "original art," according to van der Leeuw), drama, rhetoric, the fine arts, architecture, and music. As in his other writings, the author in this book uses the two categories of "primitive" and "modern" not as designations of intellectual levels but as descriptions of two kinds of structures. His thesis is that there was a period when art and religion were almost equated. In the primitive world, "song was prayer; drama was divine performance; dance was cult." In other words, the primitive man saw life as concentric circles, and not as a series of separated planes, as the modern man sees it.

In the course of time, according to van der Leeuw, the unity of various dimensions of life was lost, whereby "science, art, religion, each has been specialized by its own circle for its own circle." The modern man is not capable of finding himself in several circles simultaneously as his primitive cousins did. "When we dance, we do not pray; when we pray, we do not dance. And when we work, we can neither dance nor pray." Inevitably, each art form freed itself from its "primitive" or "religious" state and established its own independence, too. This resulted in the impoverishment of both art and religion. For example, modern theology has forgotten the Biblical insight that God is movement. "It is the curse of theology always to forget that God is love, that is movement. The dance reminds us of it" (p. 74).

581 - Sacred and Profane Baeuty: The Holy In Art

Van der Leeuw, however, goes far beyond phenomenological descriptions in his book. He depicts the theological significance of each art, depending heavily on his "sacramental" principle. Then, in the last section of the book, the author attempts to construct a "Theological Aesthetics." He sincerely hopes that there are some Christians who have learned, "through the manifestation of their Lord, to love the whole manifest world. And he hopes that there are servants of beauty who are conscious of a holiness which is more than beauty. "Perhaps," he says, "there are men on both sides who have not bent their knees before Baal, the Baal of a self-made Christianity or a self-made art, but who can kneel before God, always and everywhere" (p. xii). This book deserves to be read again and again.

Joseph M. Kitagawa
The University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois