Brady DeHoust -- "Magic" and the Spirit

After reading van der Leeuw’s section on architecture, one bit stood out to me in particular. I refer to the part where he proclaims that temples no longer exist, since a temple is a home for God, and God cannot be contained in a mere building. Thus, churches and synagogues and mosques and the like tend to be only places of prayer and meeting, though it preserves something of the those of a place of holiness.

This claim that the temple no longer exists calls to mind I Corinthians 3:16, in which the Apostle Paul reminds the Corinthians, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s spirit lives in you?” Fear not, this post is not leading into “bodybuilding as architecture” (though that might be a topic for Paul Chung). But I am curious as to how van der Leeuw might respond to that idea or take it into account, how it might fit into his overall phenomenology. The sense I get from this book is that he view religion and spirituality through a slightly more anthropological lense. That is, my impression is that van der Leeuw would be more concerned with the mythological, psychological, and cultural implications of such a theology than with the metaphysics and spirituality of it. Regardless, I think that the ideas can be considered together on the same plane. Van der Leeuw suggests that the way we do art and religion are fundamentally interconnected, and mutually impact culture and spirituality; I say that the way we do religion is fundamentally connected to our relationship with God Himself and the literal spiritual/metaphysical realities thus entailed (as opposed to the somewhat foggy, nebulous conception of spirituality as “magic” which van der Leeuw seems to espouse). Thus, all is interconnected. But what is the ultimate reality of the thing?

Personally the way I understand it is this: van der Leeuw’s spirituality of “magic” is at heart a form of cultural/rhetorical power. “Magic” in the purely spiritual sense does not seem to be the heart of van der Leeuw’s views throughout the book, but rather the idea that religion is a form of praxis with inherent symbolic power to shape individuals and societies. Each section of the book thus far has chronicled the development of an art form from its rawest primitive form in which symbolic power resonated from religious roots to engage in a reciprocal sculpting of individual, society, and art in the image of religion, to its contemporary form in which one force or another has generally divorced the art from its direct communion with religion while failing to strip it of its inherent symbolic (i.e. religious/magical) power.

Thus, when van der Leeuw says that the temple no longer exists, he is referring to the symbolic, religious, culturally powerful idea of the temple as the house of G/god, aside from the actual spiritual/metaphysical reality of whether God ever did or does have a home. Now, we being humans, finite and mundane, we are indeed affected by the religious/symbolic/magical powers, and it affects the way we relate to the divine spiritual reality (God). Poetry, dance, and architecture all impact our finite being and our relation to the infinite. However, this is distinct from the ontological spiritual reality. The cultural temple may be dead, replaced by a house of prayer, but the temple as the house of God lives on. The anthropologist may suggest that the temple fell out of fashion in the ninth century or some such. The theologian may yet equally claim that the temple became obsolete the moment Christ died and the veil was torn, yet lives on in the bodies of the Christian, while acknowledging the power of architecture to help live that reality and ingrain it in the social structures present on earth. Hence, the “magic” is still there, but is not spiritually preeminent.