15 - Gerardus van der Leeuw

Summary

Religion in Essence and Manifestation, translation J. E. Turner

Gerardus van der Leeuw (b. 1890; d. 1950) studied theology and Egyptology. In 1916, he became a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church and in 1918 he was appointed to the chair of General History of Religion and History of Theological Doctrine in Groningen (The Netherlands). Van der Leeuw is the author of some 80 books, almost 800 articles and 400 book reviews, but his lasting reputation is built on his contributions to the phenomenology of religion, as witnessed in his massive handbook Religion in Essence and Manifestation (originally written and first published in 1933 in German under the title Phänomenologie der Religion). A substantially revised version of this seminal treatise was published posthumously in 1956. Ultimately, van der Leeuw's phenomenology is a theological project; Christianity is assigned a particular position in his book and the last chapter of the main text ends on a religious note.

The notion of power is a cornerstone of van der Leeuw's understanding of religion; the first chapters of his Religion in Essence and Manifestation provide a discussion of power as the key to “the object of religion” (i.e., its primal agency as perceived by religious people). In the first chapter, van der Leeuw briefly touches on “magic”, where he rejects sweeping identifications of “magic” with potency. Even though “Magic is certainly manifested in power” and “Power may be employed in magic”, “to employ power […] is not in itself to act magically” (van der Leeuw 1986: 25).