Christina Leary - Divinity of Life

September 11th, 2017
Christina Leary - Divinity of Life
Today in class as we were reading Van Der Leeuw we talked about this idea of the religious man and how, for the religious man, every world is sacred as opposed to chaos. Everything happens for a reason, your time will come, there are no such things as coincidences — those are the phrases that, to me, come from this religious worldview.  This reminded me of a quote from one of my favorite authors, Jack Kerouac, when he says “boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.” Jack Kerouac by loose definitions was a religious man, or at least he had a religious worldview. His actions might not have shown it but his mind did. I can make sense of Van Der Leeuw by rereading my Jack Kerouac books especially the quotes from Van Der Leeuw that we looked at in class today.
The first quote was, “Only when divine reality appears to us as an image can it mean something to us, does it have power over us. We know divine reality only as a ‘symbol,’ that is, we know it only when it coincides with the represented reality of the image, when it has taken form in our reality.” p. 307. Life is holy, that is how I read this quote. There are some others things one would have to believe to arrive at this conclusion one being that God or the divine has to play a part or role in this world, he cannot be the creator who does not interact with the world anymore. Another belief is that human beings have freedom and that there are no coincidences. I think there still exists more but I’m not quite sure what they are. Still the most important being that the divine interacts with the world and the only way to do this is as a symbol, through art, dance, music, etc. Art or beauty is the divine coming to us in their form.  

The next quote we talked about was “pictorial representation is a holy action precisely because there stands before the eyes of the first reality a second, which, in spite of its connection to the first, is a different one. It is just this peculiarity of being “other” that makes representation a religious action...Whoever sees himself in a mirror sees himself and yet another; sees another and yet sees himself...One discovers one’s self in the other, the other in one’s self” p.161. This quote told me that interaction with this symbols or representations is  necessary for sense making of ourselves but also the rest of the world and what lies beyond it. If we understand ourselves through others then our interactions with them are important, every moment is precious. It also asserts that although they are connected they are incommensurable. This is perhaps why it is so hard to say what art or beauty is because we cannot measure it through human standards. Art dances with the divine so there are no real units of measurement to tells its value. The only way to measure it is to look at how it helps us understand better ourselves or the world. Or does it just make us feel something? Does true art makes us feel or experience the divine? Or is that bar too high? Can the divine be experienced through very simple art and also grand art?

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