There exists in the shadowed corridors of twentieth-century thought a figure whose work remains curiously unexamined by those who chase after the fashionable philosophies of our declining age. Gerardus van der Leeuw, a Dutch theologian and phenomenologist who lived from 1890 to 1950, developed a method of understanding religion that stands as a quiet rebuke to the entire modern project—that grand enterprise of separation, reduction, and the cold dissection of living mysteries into dead facts.
One encounters in Van der Leeuw’s work something that readers familiar with Julius Evola or René Guénon will recognize immediately: a profound critique of modernity not as a political arrangement or economic system, but as a fundamental error in consciousness itself. Where Guénon spoke of the “reign of quantity” and Evola of the world of Tradition versus the modern world, Van der Leeuw identified the core pathology with surgical precision—the subject-object dichotomy, that seemingly innocent philosophical distinction which has, in fact, severed modern man from the very ground of meaning itself.
The Problem That Haunts Modernity
Consider for a moment the predicament of the modern scholar of religion. He approaches an ancient text, a primitive ritual, a mystical testimony, armed with his methods, his critical distance, his objectivity. He stands outside, looking in, measuring and classifying. But what if the very stance of standing outside, of maintaining that precious objectivity, makes genuine understanding impossible? What if the phenomena of religion—by their very nature—can only be grasped by one who participates in them?
This was Van der Leeuw’s radical insight. The primitive man who experiences the world as alive with mysterious forces, who feels himself bound to all things in a web of mystical participation, possesses a mode of consciousness that modern rationality has not transcended but rather lost.
“The primitive man who experiences the world as alive with mysterious forces, who feels himself bound to all things in a web of mystical participation, possesses a mode of consciousness that modern rationality has not transcended but rather lost.”
Drawing upon the work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Van der Leeuw argued that the so-called “primitive mentality”—with its mystical connections between disparate objects, its sense of participation in an organic unity—was not simply an evolutionary stage we have surpassed. Rather, it represents a deeper stratum of human consciousness that persists beneath the surface of modern rationality, a stratum that holds the key to understanding religion itself.
The Broadening of the Ego
Van der Leeuw proposed something that sounds almost dangerous to contemporary ears: that the scholar of religion must undergo a transformation of consciousness. He spoke of the “broadening of the ego,” a process through which the phenomenologist trains himself to experience and understand phenomena that would otherwise remain alien and incomprehensible.
The method sounds almost like an initiatic practice. Through daily engagement with religious phenomena, through a combination of introspection and empathic understanding, the ego of the investigator gradually expands. The modern researcher, trapped in his subject-object dichotomy, slowly learns to think and experience in what Van der Leeuw daringly called “a primitive way.” Which is to say, he learns to become more religious, to develop what Van der Leeuw termed a “mystical current” within himself.
This is where Van der Leeuw’s phenomenology crosses a threshold that makes academic methodologists nervous. For he was suggesting that understanding religion requires becoming, in some sense, religious. Not in adopting particular doctrines, but in reawakening that primitive structure of consciousness where subject and object have not yet been torn apart, where one experiences oneself as participating in a meaningful totality.
The Mystical Ground of Understanding
Van der Leeuw found in Max Scheler a kindred spirit. Scheler had identified “spirit” as that distinctively human capacity which allows us to rise above our immediate environment, to perceive objects as objects. Animals participate ecstatically in their surroundings; they are immersed, undifferentiated. Man alone achieves what Helmuth Plessner called an “eccentric position”—he can stand outside himself, observe himself as a subject facing a world of objects.
“Modern man suffers from a peculiar malady. He experiences his world as a collection of dead facts and useful artifacts. But beneath this cultivated consciousness, there persists a deep, ineradicable need to experience oneself as part of a meaningful whole—a besoin de participation that modernity cannot satisfy.”
But Scheler saw further. This same spirit that separates us from the world also contains within itself the capacity to transcend that separation. Religion represents precisely this victory over the subject-object split. The mystic demonstrates that the boundaries can dissolve, that one can enter into a formless unity where the modern dichotomy has been fundamentally overcome.
This is the heart of Van der Leeuw’s phenomenology: all religion, at its deepest level, is mysticism. Every religious impulse springs from and aims toward mystical participation in the Divine. The primitive tribesman performing his ritual and the medieval mystic in her cell are engaged in fundamentally the same enterprise—the overcoming of separation, the return to participation, the healing of the wound that modernity has made into its founding principle.
Join our Telegram channel!
Want our newest articles delivered directly every day? Join the channel for effortless updates!
Join Now →The Theological Turn
Van der Leeuw’s method leads inevitably to what his critics called a “theological turn.” For if understanding requires participation, and if participation means entering into that mystical current where subject and object merge, then the phenomenologist is not standing at some neutral, objective distance from his material. He is engaged in a spiritual practice that has God as both its condition and its goal.
Van der Leeuw stated this with admirable directness: God is the precondition of all understanding. The more one understands, the more one realizes that the ground of understanding lies not within oneself but in an Other who understands us from beyond the limit of our comprehension.
To the modern academic ear, this sounds like the abandonment of scholarship for theology. But Van der Leeuw would respond that the modern academic stance—that carefully maintained objectivity—is itself a theological position, merely an unconscious one. It assumes that man can be the measure, that the separated subject can know the world through its own power. Van der Leeuw suggests this is not merely methodologically inadequate but spiritually false.
The Price of Modernity
Running through all of Van der Leeuw’s work is a profound sense that modernity has purchased its vaunted rationality at a terrible cost. We have gained the ability to manipulate objects, to explain mechanisms, to reduce complexities to simplicities. But we have lost the capacity for that mystical participation which alone makes life meaningful.
Modern man suffers from a peculiar malady. He experiences his world as a collection of dead facts and useful artifacts. But beneath this cultivated consciousness, there persists what Van der Leeuw called a besoin de participation—a deep, ineradicable need to experience oneself as part of a meaningful whole.
The mystics, both ancient and modern, show us another way. The seventeenth-century quietists Van der Leeuw studied—Jean de Labadie, Madame Guyon, Gerhard Tersteegen—all sought through ascetic practices what Van der Leeuw called the “loss of the ego.” They understood that the subject-object dichotomy is overcome not through adding something to consciousness but through subtracting—through the systematic dismantling of that separate self which insists on its own autonomous existence.
A Key to Deeper Mysteries
Those who have followed the trail of Tradition through the twentieth century—who have read Guénon on metaphysical principles, Evola on the world of Tradition—will find in Van der Leeuw a complementary voice. He approached from the direction of phenomenology rather than esotericism, but he arrived at strikingly similar conclusions.
All these thinkers recognized that modernity represents a fundamental transformation in consciousness itself. The modern world is characterized not by what it affirms but by what it denies—the possibility of genuine participation in a transcendent order of meaning, the reality of modes of knowing that transcend the subject-object dichotomy.
Van der Leeuw’s contribution was to show how this denial plays out specifically in the study of religion. The modern scholar approaches religion as an object to be explained, reduced to psychological needs or social functions. But religion, properly understood, is precisely that dimension of human experience where such reductions fail, where the subject-object dichotomy is overcome, where participation in transcendent meaning becomes actual.
The Unfinished Work
Van der Leeuw died in 1950, his work incomplete. The world he analyzed has become more thoroughly modernized in the decades since. Yet the need he identified persists. It manifests in the hunger for authenticity, in the search for meaning, in the various spiritual movements that proliferate in the wasteland of modern secularity.
Van der Leeuw offers not a complete solution but a crucial diagnosis and a suggestive direction. He reminds us that the primitive consciousness we imagine ourselves to have transcended may represent a mode of participation we desperately need to recover. He shows us that the mystics are demonstrating the possibility of overcoming the fundamental split in consciousness that defines modern existence.
And he invites us—those of us who sense that modernity has taken a wrong turn somewhere—to undertake the work of broadening the ego, of cultivating that mystical current that still flows beneath the surface of modern consciousness, of learning once again to participate in the meaningful totality that encompasses both subject and object.
The mysteries remain. They always do. But Van der Leeuw suggests they remain accessible, if only we are willing to undergo the transformation necessary to perceive them—the broadening of consciousness, the cultivation of the mystical current, the patient work of learning to participate once again in the living unity that our separation has obscured but not destroyed.
