Viennese Faults
Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna
by Robert Weldon Whalen
Eerdmans, 2007
(339 pages, $25.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Peter J. Leithart
Part travelogue, part intellectual history, part art and music criticism, Sacred Spring argues that Viennese modernism, the source of so much of the intellectual history of the contemporary West, cannot be understood as a secular movement. Its writers and artists were not materialists, nor did they think the world consists only of what can be known by the senses.
On the contrary, early modernism makes sense only when we acknowledge its religious inspiration and aspirations. Most of the figures Robert Whalen examines in the book, he admits, were not conventionally religious, though some worked their way to Judaism or Christianity. To make his case, Whalen, a professor of history at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, defines religion in broad terms as “the aspect of depth in the totality of the human spirit.”
Artists, composers, and writers in Vienna sought to produce art that responded to the intrusion of the “depth,” of the “real,” into everyday reality. This sacralization of art went hand in hand with the sacralization of the artist, who was conceived by many artists and theorists as a prophetic and sometimes a Christic figure.
Nervous Modernism
Modernism took shape in a well-defined group in specific political and cultural circumstances. According to Whalen, a vertiginous sense of reality’s depths began at a specific moment, on the night of January 29–30, 1889, when Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, shot his mistress, Mary Vetsera, and then killed himself at the royal hunting lodge of Mayerling on the outskirts of Vienna.
The empire had been declining throughout Franz Josef’s blood-bathed reign, which had begun in 1848. Vienna was the suicide capital of Europe, yet simultaneously a city of remarkable vibrancy. A simultaneous feeling of vitality and decay, of death-in-life, imprinted a particular character on the fin de siècle. Avant-garde artists and composers were keen on the irrational, the bizarre and macabre, the uncanny world of omens and signs, and especially the unpredictable power of sex, particularly in combination with death.
Rudolf’s suicide capped it, and filled the capital city with a sense of nervous foreboding that defined the modernist mood.
Modernism’s impulses were channeled by various artistic groups and institutions. During the late 1890s, Vienna’s Künstlerhaus was riven by battles between progressives and conservatives. Though both wanted to sell their art, the progressives, clustered around the painter Gustav Klimt, were also intent on using art for the prophetic purpose of challenging bourgeois sensibilities and values.
When the progressives failed to elect one of their own number to a chair at the Künstlerhaus, they seceded, forming their own school and setting up their own exhibits. Whalen takes his title, Sacred Spring, from the name of the journal they founded, Ver Sacrum.
Peter J. Leithart is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and the president of Trinity House Institute for Biblical, Liturgical & Cultural Studies in Birmingham, Alabama. His many books include Defending Constantine (InterVarsity), Between Babel and Beast (Cascade), and, most recently, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Baylor University Press). His weblog can be found at www.leithart.com. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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