Between Dancing and Writing: The Practice of Religious Studies

Chapter 7: Under standing Religion and Dance

159 Understanding Religion and Dance For those who do not view religion as a kind of pious entertainment , but as the daily bread of the believer—as his constant confrontation with the powers [de Machten] which rule all life—it is obvious that even the approach to God or to the gods can, indeed must be a dance. — Gerardus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art There is evidence in van der Leeuw’s descriptions of the phenomenological method and in his accounts of dance that it was his interest in dance, at least in part, that impelled him to design a theory of religion and a phenomenological method for the study of it that would prove flexible enough to comprehend both historical appearances of dance in world religions and theological condemnations of dance as hostile to religion. Why van der Leeuw was interested in dance and religion is difficult to determine. His interest may have been stirred by his study of Egyptian and Greek religions.The pyramid texts he analyzed for his dissertation, for example, include descriptions of dance. He may have been struck by the admonitions to dance in the Hebrew Bible. An avid musician, he also adored Bach, whose song forms are often derived from dances; he played the organ in class for his chapter 7 students. Conversely, he may have attended a concert performed by Isadora Duncan, the American pioneer of modern dance, a sensation in Europe, who toured the Netherlands several times.1 He would not have found support for such interest among the members of his Dutch Reformed congregation.2 Regardless of its source, van der Leeuw’s interest in dance appears throughout his career, evolving in tandem with his braided approach to studying religion. As early as 1930 he published an essay in Dutch and soon thereafter in German, with the title, ‘In den hemel is enen dance’.3 He incorporated this essay into the first edition of his classic on religion and the arts, published in 1932 under the title Wegen en Grenzen, or “Paths and Boundaries.” It was one year later that he published his 700-page manifesto for the phenomenology of religion, Religion in Essence and Manifestation. This sequence alone suggests that van der Leeuw was working out his phenomenological method and his reflections on religion and the arts simultaneously. Subsequently, after more than a decade of researching, employing, and teaching the history of religions, theology, and his phenomenological method, van der Leeuw substantially reworked Wegen en Grenzen, publishing the new edition in 1948, two years before his death. In the same year he published his Sacramentstheologie. In this second edition of Wegen en Grenzen, dance assumes a more prominent role than earlier, appearing as the first of six arts whose relationship to religion he explores.4 Van der Leeuw even makes a case for why dance provides the paradigm for thinking about the relation of every other art to religion in general, and to Christianity in particular. How, then, does van der Leeuw’s braided approach to the study of religion and his theory of religion as a phenomenon support his willingness and ability to acknowledge dance as religion? The first step in answering this question is to lay out the definition of religion his phenomenological method guides him to generate, and then, in the latter part of this chapter and the two following, explore how this 160 Between Dancing and Writing conceptual net guides him in acknowledging and making sense of historical and theological accounts of religion. religion, defined What is religion? In the “Epilegomena” as well as in the body of Religion in Essence and Manifestation, van der Leeuw hazards his own perspectives on the “essence” of religion (as qualified above) based on his years of practicing phenomenology, moving across the landscape of human history, between historical studies and theological evaluations, between the manifold chaos of the given and the structural relations he evolves to net instances of religion. Simply, a phenomenon appears to him as religion when it appears as an expression of power.5 A text, icon, activity, art object, architectural design, musical composition, or other “sign” appears as religion in so far as it appears to congeal, conduct, catalyze, or concentrate an experience of change in human thought and/or action.6 Van der Leeuw’s dynamic method produces a dynamic definition. The kind of power whose expression...