Theology in a Century of Death

Abstract

In the fifth of a series of six Norton Lectures given at Harvard University in 1973 on the semantics of music called The Unanswered Question and recently broadcast on BBC 2, Leonard Bernstein said that ‘ours is a century of death, and Mahler is its prophet’. A history of the twentieth century must inevitably read as a catalogue of death and any authentic prophecy about the twentieth century must have the experience of death at its centre. Since 1914 the toll has mounted as cataclysm has been overtaken by self-inflicted cataclysm until the number of those killed during the last sixty years is no longer calculable. The optimism of the nineteenth century could be maintained until the First World War, but any attempt to perpetuate it after that has been a delusion. We can hardly be optimistic any longer about a civilization that is so self-destructive. The twentieth century experience as an experience of death has its true beginning not in 1900 but in 1914. The first fourteen years of this century were really a hangover from the bouyant bourgeois idealism of the last century. The authentic twentieth century experience was possible only after 1914. Since that first holocaust Europe and North America has moved from an initial optimism about its consequences (Lloyd George’s ‘land fit for heroes’) to disillusion, unemployment, depression and further destruction in 1939. Since 1945 we have had the initial optimism of the welfare state, followed by disillusion, unemployment, successive economic crises, followed by who knows what.Before 1914 there were a few precursors who, we can now see, gave intimations of what was to come. These prophets had already experienced the disintegration of bourgeois culture; Schnitzler, Karl Krauss, Thomas Mann in his early novels, Mahler. Others had even set about reconstructing our perception of reality, the cubist painters between 1907 and 1914, and Schönberg.