Gerardus van der Leeuw was one of the first to attempt a
rapprochement between theology and the arts, and his influence
continues to be felt in what is now a burgeoning field. Sacred and
Profane is the fullest expression of his pursuit of a theological
aesthetics, surveying religion's relationship to all the arts --
dance, drama, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and
music. This edition makes this seminal work, first published in
Dutch in 1932, newly available. A new foreword by Diane
Apostolos-Cappadona analyzes the continuing relevance of van der
Leeuw's thought.
Van der Leeuw's impassioned and brilliant investigation of the
relationship between the holy and the beautiful is founded upon the
conviction that for too long the religious have failed to seriously
contemplate the beautiful, associating it as they do with the
kingdom of sensuality and impermanence. Similarly it has been alien
to literati and aesthetes to reflect upon the holy, for they choose
to consider this physical world to be permanent, and therefore to
be glorified through beauty alone. In truth, as van der Leeuw
undertakes to show in Sacred and Profane Beauty, the holy has never
been absent from the arts, and the arts have never been
unresponsive to the holy. Whether one considers the Homeric epics,
the dancing Sivas and Vedic poems, the sacred wall paintings of
ancient Egypt, the primitive mask, or the range of sacred arts
developed out of Latin and Byzantine Christianity, primordial
creation in the arts was always directed toward the symbolization
and interpretation of the holy. The fact that in our day this
original connection is obscured and the artistic impulse is more
generally regarded as whollyindividualistic and autonomous does not
contradict van der Leeuw's thesis; indeed, the breakdown of the
unity of the holy and the arts is central to his thesis.
Van der Leeuw was the rare thinker who combined profundity of
insight, grace of style, and a willingness to take daring
intellectual chances. In Sacred and Profane, he describes each of
the arts in its original unity with the religious and then analyzes
its historical disjunction and alienation. After a penetrating
investigation of the structural elements within the arts which
illumines a crucial dimension of the religious experience, van der
Leeuw points toward the reemergence of an appropriate theological
aesthetics on which a reunification of the arts could be founded.
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