[The Kinesthetics of Dance as an Theological Allegory for Immanence:]
Johann Gottfried Herder's Adrastea, II.9 [Introduction] (1801-02)
[translated from the German by Douglas B. Olds with assistance from ChatGPT]
Issue II.
Früchte aus den sogenannt goldnen Zeiten des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts ["Fruits from the so-called golden times of the eighteenth century"]
#9. Dance. Melodrama.
The most expressive allegory (Allegorie [qua imaging of immanence]) we know is humanity. The forces, inclinations, thoughts, and passions of the soul are not merely hinted at by their exterior, the body, but are revealed to the discerning (Verständigen) observer. Constantly, individuals bear the visible expression of what they are inside or wish to be, i.e., their character (Charakter), with them; but in every, especially passionate and unexpected moment, they also temporarily reveal what stirs within them. They are a walking painting of themselves, a mirror in which their spiritual vector inadvertently appears. Since feelings, drives, and affections are the more active part of our nature, which are only silently accompanied or guided by thoughts, and the former express themselves most powerfully through gestures, while language essentially only denotes thoughts and barely comments on feelings: thus, especially in passionate instances, the gesture disdainfully dismisses the word as alien and useless; an exclamation, an interjection is preferred. Nothing dilutes the emotion more than talking about it; with pretenders and deceivers, i.e., with posers and dissemblers, words often say the exact opposite of what the gaze conveys; or even if the gaze is deceitful, the whole heart often betrays itself – through a gesture.
One should indeed trust the natural mirror that eternal truth itself has set up for us! It cannot lie. Only look into it with a clear mind and an unbiased heart, not fleetingly, but attentively.
How powerful a gesture is! Convincing, stirring, lasting. When we think of someone absent, a [danced] gesture of theirs is the first thing that comes to mind, or rather they themselves characteristically in their gestures. Thus, moments of trust and love as well as revulsion and disgust are immortalized in us. Think of a person: as their image first comes to mind in gesture, so they are inscribed in your heart.
In both tender and fiery emotions, everything hinges on the gesture; often we even escape the word of the lips, as if it weakened or desecrated that inner expression. "Don't speak," we say; "give me your gaze, your hint, for the soul itself is inexpressible." In the most soulful expressions of theater, we hang on a gesture and gladly overlook the word. "Why," we ask, "is it necessary when the gesture says everything?"
But if the gesture dismisses words of emotion, won't it have another friend in nature to accompany it? It's music; tones naturally support the gesture. Not only do both rely on timing, on modulation; in gestures, in gait, in the eyes, in expression and action, movement and the measure of movement speak the most. Nothing, for example, disturbs us more than an uneven gait, a faltering false voice, etc., they throw us completely out of the rhythm of our soul.
But not just movement, tones are to one sense what gestures are to another, expression of the mobile nature, elastic oscillations, a direct language of the heart.
Like attracts like, one calls the other and takes it along. With the recurring gesture of the absent one, often even without words, the sound of their voice returns to us. In an enchanting posture, we wish it would turn into a tone. When, on the speaking stage, noble or gentle emotions rise to their highest, i.e., simplest height, they either lift themselves to tone or we painfully miss and lack the analogous tones that nature itself linked to them according to our feeling.
Among all the peoples of the earth, tones and gestures have been paired. The dances of the so-called savages are mimetic, whether they are war or peace, joy, mockery or love dances. Joy and love, the sweetest emotions of the human heart, are however the soul of the dance; even hate and mockery must, in it (e.g., in the war and mockery dances of the savages), if they are to be danceable, turn to joy.
And how the dance captures all natural humans! How it displays the inner and outer elasticity, the character! Hence the vast differences in national dances, which all aim at a single purpose and show a human figure. Under favorable climates, well-organized nations live and weave in these pleasures, in which the soul and body, rejoicing together, become one. Individuals forget burdens and whips when they jump on festival days. The future life to these natural humans is an ever-changing chain of dances of love and joy.
Have you ever seen human nature more alive than in a soulful dance? Does one of the so-called fine arts act more vividly, often dangerously vividly, on the heart of youth? There is grace in language, magic in tones and gestures.
It was, therefore, inevitable that every nation formed for joy and love would turn the spiritual bond between sounds and gestures into a kind of fine art, each in its own way. [S. Cahusac's "History of Dance Art," translated in the "Collection of Miscellaneous Writings" (Berlin, by Nicolai), in which Lucian's essay "On Dance", Vossius' "De poet. Graec.", the 23rd chapter of Meiners' "History of the Origins of Fine Arts in Greece", where one can also find further particulars on this subject.]
The more mature and original a nation, the more its dances will be related to its language and customs; however, with modern commercial nations, i.e., nations that are no longer original but only a copy of others, the dances will be universal.
However, not all individuals are formed for joy and love; many are rough, cold, and joyless, to which the spirit of the dance must seem as a new element. Even the most spiritual of all, the Greeks, were not entirely susceptible to it, because with them everything concentrated itself on the mind, and the heart was left too much out.
Therefore, the dance of love could only have originated in the east, where tenderness and gentleness sprout from every bush. It was invented by the more intelligent Hindus, which, as spiritualized as they were, could not long retain it. They had to pass it on to the Persians, and these, in turn, to the Greeks. One should read what has been written about it, especially in Plutarch's piece on music, and on the effects and powers of melodies contained in the work titled "On the Education of Children."
The Romans had no spiritual dance art. Not that they couldn't dance, on the contrary, they were enthusiastic dancers, but it was only a hopping and twisting around without inner sensation, without the proper combination of sounds and gestures, without a spirit. The refinement, the development of the spirit, was the work of the Greeks, who also, without a doubt, introduced the dance art of the Greeks and Egyptians into Rome, the elegant part of which was called pantomime by the Romans, while the clumsy, crude part of the dance was called chorus.
However, how significant is the difference between the Greek chorus and the Roman pantomime! As is the case with everything Roman, the latter was only a rough caricature of the former. In Greece, dance art never became a separate thing; in Rome, on the other hand, it became a specific art, because every art has its childhood, its growth age, and its decay, and the pantomime is the age of growth of the Greek chorus, the final art of an over-ripe, decaying nation. Hence it also had its heyday under the Empire, where it even seems to have become the leading art.
However, just as this art, which was based on the connection of sounds and gestures, arose in the East, developed with the Greeks and reached its climax with the Romans, it then disappeared in the West for a long time, to reappear but differently.
If the dance of love is the beginning of every melodrama, if it originated in the East, if people from the Orient, especially those from the Hindu and Persian cultures, first made the spiritual bond of sounds and gestures into a fine art, then the Italians, who were in connection with the Romans, are to be thanked for having again given it to us, to all of Europe, but in a form that only modern nations can use.
Indeed, one cannot read Italian poetry without simultaneously hearing singing, playing, and acting. I believe that the first opera performers did nothing other than what every passionate Italian naturally does: they sang, played, and acted their roles at the same time. All Italians are natural singers, players, and actors; only the restrained North lacks all of this. When we hear Italian poetry, the gesturing, acting Italian also stands before our eyes.
Therefore, it was natural that the tones and gestures combined again, i.e., the melodrama, reappeared in Italy. It seems to have been the famous Ruggieri who, in 1600, reintroduced the ancient dance of love, the final element of all melodramas, in Rome, from which it spread throughout Italy.
However, even today, this dance art is not in its maturity but in its childhood; and Italy, Germany, France, and all modern nations are still busy with its first elements, with shaping it according to the spirit of the times. Only the English seem to have the true sense of it, and Shakespeare was the first modern poet. Not everything (Alles) can be expressed by dance, nor can every silent gesture, even if accompanied by music (Musik). Music (Musik), when paired with language and then supported by gestures, opens a new field for poetry (Dichtkunst). If dance can be introduced to this, well and good! But then let it work either by itself or led by singing choirs; song (Gesang) and dance in one person hinder each other...
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German Source: Adrastea, J. G. Herder
Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck
86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9
Deutschland
ISBN: 9783849627638
INTERPRETIVE NOTES on Herder’s Text:
The most expressive allegory (Allegorie [qua imaging of immanence]) we
know is humanity...
As contemporary theological reflection affirms, this immanence emerges
not only in the display of gestures but in the dance’s ability to transfigure
space into place. In the embrace of rhythm and movement, partner dance becomes
a form of spiritual tabernacling—a transformation of inert physicality into
covenantal presence, where heaven brushes earth through reciprocal
corporeality. In this space, dance renders visible the Shekinah of immanence,
not as abstract form, but as relational vitality.
...Nothing dilutes the emotion more than talking about it...
Dance thus embodies the theological claim that the body can speak truer
than doctrine, that kinesis—rather than cognitive formalism—conveys the soul's
witness. The partner’s gaze, pressure, or yielding sway becomes more than
expressive: it becomes sacramental, not in static rite but in dynamic
participation, echoing the perichoretic flow of divine relationality.
...But if the gesture dismisses words of emotion, won't it have another
friend in nature to accompany it? It's music...
Indeed, in the theology of dance, music is not simply an accompaniment
but a pneumatological carrier. Where gesture reveals the soul’s contour, music
is its breath. Partner dance synchronizes breath, heartbeat, and proprioception
into a kind of shared pulse—what Durkheim called 'collective effervescence,'
but what the theology of shalom recognizes as covenantal joy.
...Among all the peoples of the earth, tones and gestures have been
paired...
In such pairings, the human body—formed in gravity and autonomic urge—is
not merely expressing emotion but co-creating sacred memory. The planting step,
drawn from zydeco’s agricultural ritual origins, symbolically prepares the soil
for eschatological growth. Such embodied acts confirm that human movement, far
from being secular, can cultivate the soul's readiness for divine fecundity.
...Under favorable climates, well-organized nations live and weave in
these pleasures...
Herder’s insight here converges with a theology of grace-infused
physicality: as dance enacts grace's generosity through somatic joy, it aligns
the chthonic (earth-bound) body with a pneumatological yearning. Not as escape,
but as embodied anticipation. In this sense, dance choreographs eschatology. It
attests to a world being made whole, not by force or ideology, but by rhythm, touch,
and relationality.
...Does one of the so-called fine arts act more vividly, often
dangerously vividly, on the heart of youth?
This danger is not simply one of erotic license, as pietistic suspicion
has held, but of spiritual ignition. Dance brings the body into theological
literacy. It becomes a rehearsal of kingdom ethics, a school of loyalty,
gratitude, and chivalry. A misstep is forgiven in the next sequence—an echo of
divine grace.
...The more mature and original a nation, the more its dances will be
related to its language and customs...
[So too with theology. Dance is not an ornamental overlay to social system
but a source of knowing from the ground. It aligns with Dante’s double movement
of intellect and speech—only here it is the kinesthetic that teaches. To follow
and to lead is to enact a kind of sacred dialectic: of being known, of giving
and receiving presence, of acknowledging otherness not as threat but as gift.
...However, even today, this dance art is not in its maturity but in its
childhood...
Yet it is precisely in its improvisational infancy that modern partner
dance discloses the Spirit’s agency. As a practice of shared freedom structured
by trust, it resists automation, commodification, surveillance toward
algorithmic predictability. It is thus one of the last frontiers of analog
grace in a digital world, where conation rather than code governs connection.
...Not everything (Alles) can be expressed by dance...
Still,
what cannot be expressed by words or concepts might yet be danced—except the
commercial and the brand. Dance
overcomes the false dualisms—matter/spirit, male/female, creator/creature—by
moving through them in grace. In this movement, incarnational theology becomes
flesh again, not in doctrinal assertion but in spiral and helix, in pulse, in
sacred sway, reel, and stomp. Herder's vision of embodied allegory thus finds
its contemporary renewal not in melodrama, but in the eschatological
improvisation of shared motion toward the divine
COMMENTARY [1]
Herder’s meditation on dance in Adrastea offers a vivid allegory for a non-totalizing, phenomenological historicism: one rooted not in abstract schemas or doctrinal systems, but in the immanent, expressive body as bearer of spiritual and cultural truth. Gesture, for Herder, precedes language as the primal mode of self-revelation; it is where the inner life of a people or person emerges unfiltered, in rhythm, movement, and tone—what he calls the “walking painting” of the soul. Such a view challenges both Enlightenment historicism’s fixation on disembodied causality and post-Enlightenment declensions into deterministic or aestheticized narratives. Instead, Herder recovers a covenantal metaphysics of history—where the spiritual bond of tones and gestures across time and place braids an archive of shared human expression. This is not progress as accumulation or abstraction, but as lived conation—expressed through dance, ritual, and song, each a grounding of embodied participation in divine immanence. Historicism here is not collapsed, but transfigured into a poietic science of presence and renewal.
However, what for Herder is gesture’s precedence over formalist Dramatik—prior even to language—may be reoriented through dance’s eschatological focus and its training for immanence: a Bildung of embodied metaphors and shared modes. Dance unfolds not merely as a prelude to language but as a deepening of it—attuned to rhythm, erotic responsiveness, and covenantal presence in musical embrace. Its ontology is grounded in reproductive eros, yet not confined to it—fulfilled, rather, in the Song of Songs' garden of renewal, where gesture and intimacy become liturgies of eschatological poiesis.
In the fusion of movement and music, dance becomes a mirror
of relational truth. As the theater of a loving couple, it “cannot lie”: the
rhythm of the hips grounds the gestures of the lips; the choreography of the
body unfolds in trust and agreement. Earth’s generative rhythms join with song
and gesture to meet the eschaton—not as escape, but as fulfillment.
Here, the divine image is not abstracted but embodied:
braided by the kinesthetics of eternity through the earthbound cadences of eros
and fidelity. The vivifying embrace of music—dance’s anatomical poietic third
partner of context and situs—brings the divine intimately closer. In dance’s
sacred choreography, bodily gesture becomes sacrament: a restorative and
expansive human set of collective rhythms aligned with eternal grace, attuning
creation to its covenantal renewal in the pair bonding, where the Golden Rule
is kinesthetically trained for immanence and peripatetic coursings.
Theology in Motion: Perichoresis the Immanent Kinesthesis of Grace
This Commentary proposes dance as a theological medium of
immanence, eschatological trust, and embodied grace. Drawing from Johann
Gottfried Herder’s Adrastea
and biblical prototypes such as David and Simeon, it frames dance not as
aesthetic display but as proprioceptive revelation—an enactment of covenantal
being. Partner dance, in particular, resists disembodied abstraction and
technological reduction by restoring rhythm, mutuality, and ethical attunement
through the flesh. Theologically, dance manifests perichoresis: the dynamic
interrelationality of divine and human motion, where improvisation within
structure becomes a sacrament of trust and responsive care. As the “glossolalia
of the body,” dance opens liturgy to Pentecostal renewal, rupturing procedural
religiosity and rehearsing the eschaton in kinesthetic poiesis. In this
movement theology, grace is not merely received but learned through motion—re-covenanted
with each step, in rhythm with creation’s call and the Spirit’s pulse.
If, as Johann Gottfried Herder proposed, the dance of love was born in
the East and reached a dramatic culmination in European melodrama, then sacred
history itself confirms such a sun’s progress of divine movement. In 2 Samuel 6,
David dances before the Ark of the Covenant with unguarded joy, transfiguring
royal authority into ecstatic praise. Within the womb of Mary—the new ark—John
the Baptist leaps in recognition of the Messiah (Luke 2). These are not merely
echoes across Testaments, but inaugurations of an eschatological art already in
liturgical motion: a rhythm of grace where sex, space, and power are
restructured not by domination, but through embodied trust, responsive joy, and
mutual submission. The dance becomes the grammar of immanence that resists
lingering traces of hegemony. Movement is the theological kinaesthetic of ethical
life before God and with neighbor. Peripatetic investigation and accountability.
I. Kinesthetics as Allegory of Soul
Herder’s Adrastea discovers that the most expressive allegory of
soul-force is not the word or the image, but the body in motion. Herder saw the
human essence in passionate movement that resists lust’s nature—not merely in symbolic
terms but directly revelatory of virtue aligned with the Golden Rule. This is
not a mimetic expression or Kantian sublimity in awe (Kant who never married),
but an unmediated unveiling of being. Dance becomes a non-representational
poiesis: the body itself bearing witness to a character of will oriented toward
another. In this way, dance is not epistemic, egoistic but ontological and
relational. It is not mastery of meaning but of the unspoken enacted in time
and flesh—the allegory of God’s immanence in the Song of Songs with the very
rhythms of creaturely relation mediated by song, the more rustic the more danceable
(see elsewhere on zydeco).
II. Covenant Rhythms and Biblical
Precedents
The Davidic dance before the ark and Simeon’s invocation in the Temple
(Luke 2) are scriptural proleptics of this embodied joy. These acts of
covenantal recognition are not performative displays but liturgical
anticipations. They point toward a world re-ordered by divine presence—not by
spectacle or proof, but by mutual response, humility, and expectation. The
dance is prophetic not because it predicts, but because it prepares and
witnesses to Christ arrived (two partners plus the musical players [Matthew 18:20]).
It listens before it leads; it moves in anticipation of the back-lead, the
grace initiating from the divine partnership whose tempo is faithful, though
never choreographed.
These biblical dances are not outbursts of isolated piety. They are
structured improvisations, aligned with the moment and the Other, drawing their
theological signification from the partnerhood they enact: God and humans
moving in time, that of eschatological reconciling.
III. Dance Against Algorithm: Movement
Theology of Resistance
Modernity threatens this relational dance with digitized performances,
algorithmic choreography, and procedural affect. Here, Herder’s insight becomes
urgent. He saw opera and pantomime as devolved forms of the ancient sacred
drama—but theology must go further earthward: dance survives in modernity not as
spectacle but as resistance. Unlike AI-generated gesture, true human dance
cannot be mechanized. It is almost instantaneously responsive. It reveals
vulnerability, mutuality, and the irreducible presence of another. Theology
thus affirms that dance—partnered, improvisational, trust-laden—is a
metaphysical defiance of digitized disembodiment and ontological capture. Off
the dance floor, the dancer reads the room to discern and resist what is
hardened and hardening.
These virtues make dance a parable of the beatific. It is not the
overwhelming Kantian elevation of reason by chaos, but the biblical encounter
of flesh with grace—a mirror of the beatific vision in movement, partial yet
real, entangled yet distinct.
IV. The Eschatological Vector of Partner
Dance
Partner dance uniquely embodies the theological structure of covenant. It
is not static unity but dynamic reciprocity. It involves lead and follow,
initiation and response, deformalized improvisation under a musical firmament. The rhythm of
perichoresis—Trinitarian circumincession—becomes kinesthetically enacted in the
give-and-take of dancers who neither absorb nor oppose each other, but move as
one in the song without erasure. In this way, dance rehearses and witnesses the
eschaton.
This movement of mutual submission also carries ethical gravity. Rhythmic
entrainment—learning the tempo of another, adjusting midstream, repenting of and forgiving the misstep with a wink or briefest
eyeroll—is nothing less than the embodied ethic of grace. The floor becomes a
training ground for covenantal freedom: not the freedom of disconnection, but
of responsive belonging.
V. Dance as Glossolalic Flesh:
Pentecostal Renewal
Dance, especially in its most unscripted types, functions as a
glossolalia of the body. Where words fail or are ritualized into dead rites and
rituals, the body recollects as it re-members. Pentecost, traditionally
associated with tongues of fire and new speech, may also be seen in the
convulsion of movement—a divine choreography where fragmented bodies rejoin in
communal ecstasy—joy increasingly contained from ostentation. The Spirit does
not only speak but moves through proprioception—like quantum channels opening
and shutting in fractal instants. Dance opens the grand channel between new heaven
and new earth. It breaks the tyranny of procedural Christianity on the old
earth and its abstract cognition by revealing the primacy of rhythm, touch, and
shared vulnerability lost since birth. Grace may no longer be spectated but
joined, co-moved.
VI. Tabernacle of Gesture:
Poetic-Sacramental Movement
Herder’s final observation—that not everything can be expressed in
dance—may be inverted. Perhaps what cannot be said must be danced. For
theology, this inversion is a gift.[2] When dogma calcifies or proclamation
dominates, dance offers a poiesis of renewal. It is not nostalgic pageantry nor
disembodied expression, but the tracing of eschatological promise in the actual
terrain of limbs, time, and weight. Which will endure, not dissolve into a specious
eternity.
Dance is thus a kind of tabernacle: a mobile sanctuary of motile testing
where the Spirit convenes presence in rhythm and flesh, and gauges what must be
added to the ontogenetic mix. In kinetic sacrament, bodies transgress dualisms.
They are no longer soul or body, matter or meaning, but relational
gestalts—temples in motion. Partner dance becomes a theological journey,
training participants not in performance but in attentiveness, responsibility,
and joy.
Conclusion: Movement as Theological Mode
To theologize movement is to return theology to its ground: not ideas
about God in separate heaven, but life with God on earth. Movement precedes
concept as the Shema (Deut. 6:4-9 announces); it is the primordial dynamic of
relationality begun by the traditioned announcement in the ear and sequenced by
the anatomized soul. Genesis does not begin with stasis or repose or sabbath
from some other era but with divine breath and the hovering Spirit. To dance,
then, is not to mimic divinity but to participate in it—kinesthetically,
covenantally, eschatologically. Movement is not a vehicle for meaning; it is
its immanent energy. It takes to the dancefloor and moves outward
eschatologically, negentropically thence.
Thus, the theology of dance concludes not with an elevated abstraction,
but with a descent into the very motion of grace: felt, shared, trained, and
offered. Every step is a summons to mutuality. Every rhythm is a resistance to
isolation. Every dip and turn is an eschatological trust. In dance, God is recollected not by an idea to be
grasped, but as a partner to be joined—in the improvisational, reconciling,
ever-becoming flow of love.
NOTES
[1] October 25, 2025 Update adapted from my "The Collapse of Historicism and the Apocatastatic Opening of Humanity: Vindicating Herder After the Epochal Demise of Simulated Ends" In the iconoclast's descending (Blog, October 22, 2025) https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-collapse-of-historicism-and.html
[2] See my "The Aesthetics of Inversion: Cannon-Marshaling Neutralized by the Canon of the Life-Giving Spirit: A New Year's Musical Parable of Church and State." In Crying in the Wilderness of Mammon. (Blog, December 30, 2025). https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-cannon-marshaling-ode-reversed-by.html
