Sacred and Profane Beauty

Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art by Gerardus van der Leeuw, translated by David E Green, 340 pages

In his masterful phenomenological analysis of the relationship between religion and art, van der Leeuw begins from the premise that religion is inherently totalizing - "Give all you have to the poor and follow me."  The religious impulse, therefore, is to subordinate everything to religion and to discard what cannot be subordinated.  The aesthetic impulse, as with the political, scientific, ethical, and philosophical impulses, demands an autonomous sphere within which it can develop and thrive on its own terms.  The result was the gradual fracturing of the primitive unity in which all aspects of human life - work, play, art, religion - were intimately intertwined.  Although modern man cannot recapture that unity, in van der Leeuw's eyes a renewed respect for the primal religious character of art will contribute to a regeneration of popular art and the end of "the idea that music must be treated as though it were meant only for connoisseurs in the concert hall and, according to which, paintings are dealt with as though they had to be preserved in a museum".

The analysis of art in Sacred and Profane Beauty begins with dance, the "art of beautiful motion", identified here as the primal art from which the other arts - drama, poetry, the visual arts, architecture, and music - emerge.  For van der Leeuw, the "path from art to theology and from theology to art" follows the sacred quest of art to make present the image of God through movement and form.