Religion in Essence and Manifestation

In van der Leeuw's Phänomenologie der Religion (1933), one finds few references to Husserl, but quite a number to Jaspers, Dilthey, and Eduard Spranger. Van der Leeuw was strongly influenced by the results of Gestaltpsychologie and Strukturpsychologie. Nevertheless, he remained a phenomenologist insofar as in his descriptions he respected the religious data and their peculiar intentionality. He pointed out the irreducibility of religious representations to social, psychological, or rational functions, and he rejected those naturalistic prejudices which seek to explain religion by something other than itself. For van der Leeuw, the main task of the phenomenology of religion is to illumine the inner structures of religious phenomena. He thought, wrongly, that he could reduce the totality of all religious phenomena to three Grundstrukturen: dynamism, animism, and deism. However, he was not interested in the history of religious structures. Here lies the most serious inadequacy of his approach, for even the most elevated religious expression (a mystical ecstasy, for example) presents itself through specific structures and cultural expressions which are historically conditioned (see below, p. 51). As a matter of fact, van der Leeuw never attempted a religious morphology or a genetical phenomenology of religion. But, again, such lacunae do not lessen the significance of his work. Even though his versatile genius did not allow him to complete and systematize a new religious hermeneutics, he was an enthusiastic pioneer.