Themes of Broken Bonds: Struggle
Who are we striving with, and to what end?
Gustav Mahler was that type of intellectual utterly common in late Habsburg Vienna: a frustrated musician. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, as the old waltzes of Johann Strauss II were still echoing in the city’s cafes, Mahler gained fame not as a performer or composer, but as a conductor. His dramatic gesticulations propelled the Wiener Hofoper (Vienna Court Opera) to tremendous heights and were even featured in cartoon form.1 But Mahler was not satisfied to be known merely as a conductor. After all, Johann Sebastian Bach was a renowned organist in his day, but it was his compositions that leant him immortality, and Mahler desired nothing so much as immortality.
In those Viennese cafés, Mahler had met some of Europe’s leading intellectuals, including the father of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud. The Enlightenment philosophers had by this point given way to the Romantics, and Mahler lapped from the fountain of their genius. Like them, he began to conceive of life as a great conflict in which the individual must overcome. The scientist Charles Darwin was speaking of a natural struggle which would come to be known as “the survival of the fittest.” Karl Marx saw struggle between economic classes that would usher in a new utopia of human existence. It was under these circumstances that Mahler set pen to paper and wrote the score for his Second Symphony.
The first movement opens with a funeral march. In the undulating bass line, one can almost hear the laden steps of mourners walking behind a hearse, arriving in a rain sodden graveyard, questioning the meaning of a human life. At intervals, the march is interrupted by ethereal string passages meant to symbolize the heights of heaven to which man’s spirit is drawn. But each time, the march returns angrily as the individual is pictured shaking his fist in the face of God, demanding to know why evils such as death should take place under the sun. The struggle between the brass and string instruments depicts the struggle of man through life on this earth, always searching for answers, suspended between hope and despair.
No biblical episode held Mahler’s interest like that of the patriarch Jacob when he encountered an angel beside a river and wrestled with him until daybreak. Just when Jacob thought he had overcome, he received a simple touch upon the thigh which immobilized him. In that helpless state, he demanded a blessing, and the angel granted him the name Israel—“He that strives with God.”
One need not be a Viennese intellectual or Victorian scientist to realize that life is a struggle. Anyone who has been forced to commute during rush hour, raise a small child, find work in a changing economy, or weed a garden can vouch for that. But what are we primarily struggling against, and how does that struggle end? Those seem to me the key questions.
Marx said we were struggling against economic inequality. Darwin identified the struggle for genetic progress. But for Mahler as for his hero, the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the real struggle is not against nature or one’s fellow man, but against one’s self. The struggle to become a fully realized individual, unbound by society’s constraints, expressing one’s truest identity—this was the struggle that Mahler envisioned. His Second Symphony is called the “Resurrection Symphony,” but Mahler did not believe in physical resurrection. He was heavily influenced by the higher criticism of the Bible which had taken hold in the German speaking universities and, by extension, the Church.
So when, in the fifth movement of that symphony, Mahler’s music reaches its epic climax and the choir sings, “Everything is yours that you have desired, / Yours, what you have loved, what you have struggled for,” they are speaking of personal enlightenment. When they sing, “What was created must perish, / What has perished must rise again,” they are speaking of an intellectual struggle: man warring against himself. In this process of spiritual death and rebirth, man can say, “Arise, yes, you will arise from the dead, / My heart, in an instant! / What you have conquered / Will bear you to God.” Man creates his own path to the divine.
Perhaps you will forgive me, dear reader, if this does not exactly warm the cockles of my heart. I have lived too long and seen too much of this world to believe that what is essentially a trick of the mind can cure humanity’s ills, let alone grant me individual peace. Our sorrows are too deep and evil too extreme. Mahler spent his first movement demanding an answer from God in response to human suffering and death. He was far too easily satisfied.
No man can conquer himself, for in that very moment when he has overcome what he used to be, he requires a further progression so that he can conquer what he is in the present. When is the self authentic enough? When is identity sufficiently expressed? What if my truest self is a horrific racist? No, I do not possess the power to conquer myself—not when I cannot even know for sure what it would look like to win.
More to the point, I refuse to let God off that easily. For if he exists, then there are only two possibilities: either he is unable to prevent evil, in which case he is not all-powerful and there is something else at least as powerful as him out there, or he is able to prevent evil but chooses not to do so. If the first, he is wrong to claim the title of God. If the second, he is wrong to claim the title of good.
The person who aims to conquer his or herself attempts the impossible. Equally so, a person who attempt to conquer mankind. Yet, each of these individuals has set their sights too low. They have yet to approach the really fundamental things of life. For the struggle to which man is called is the struggle with God.
This is the struggle that Mahler and so many others have refused to wage. Why? Because their reason does not allow it. They would rather create a God of their own imaginings—a safe God, a reasonable God. Having lost the germ of their faith, they pray that the husk can sustain them. But he who eats only the husk will also die in the end. He feasts on the phantom remains and calls himself full, but the only difference between him and the man with nothing is that the man with nothing is honest about it.
Mahler would have done better to teach himself the Danish language, for then he could have read the works of Søren Kierkegaard, specifically one called Fear and Trembling. In it, Kierkegaard surveyed the philosophical landscape of his day, two generations before Mahler dined upon the fruits of the Enlightenment. Like Mahler, Kierkegaard was fascinated by the stories of the ancient patriarchs, but he grasped what Mahler could not: the struggle of Jacob means nothing unless it is against God himself.
“They shall all be remembered, but everyone was great in proportion to the magnitude of what he strove with. For he who strove with the world became great by conquering the world, and he who strove with himself became greater by conquering himself; but he who strove with God became greater than all.”2
The one who struggles with God as flesh against flesh is the one who knows the incarnate Son of God. More importantly, such a person is known by him and called by his name. They know that our flesh matters, and thus resurrection must truly be resurrection. Not only the wounds done to our soul must be redeemed, but also those to our bodies. And the only thing which has the power to overcome the problem of evil and justify the sufferings of the saints is the hope unlooked for, the miracle inconceivable: the resurrection of the dead. As Mahler writes,
“Tremble no more!
Prepare yourself to live!
O Sorrow, all-penetrating!
I have been wrested away from you!
O Death, all-conquering!
Now you are conquered!”3
So close and yet so far was Gustav Mahler from the revelation he sought! For I am not the one who creates the wings on which I will be carried to heaven, as Mahler suggests in the very next lines. We do not possess the strength to make demands of heaven…except for one. We can make the demand of Jacob: that the Lord will bless us. That he, the Almighty one, will overcome on our behalf.
When I pray to God, I demand only resurrection. I demand it because he has promised it to me, and if he fails to deliver, I call him a liar or a nothing. But by the faith of the ancients, I believe he will raise me.
This was, essentially, the debate between Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus in their literary duel of 1524-5. For they were both forced to stare into the depths of the problem of evil, and while Erasmus hid in the comforting arms of uncertainty, Luther chose to wrestle. He would not allow the Almighty to go until he granted him a new name: the name of Christ himself.
If this kind of existential struggle is the type of thing you appreciate, then rest assured, you will find plenty of it in my forthcoming novels, Broken Bonds and Face to Face.
Click here to pre-order Broken Bonds for delivery on November 12.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. Trans. Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Books, 1985. 50.
Mahler, Gustav. Second Symphony, Fifth Movement.
comforting arms of uncertainty? this seems off. catholics insist on uncertainty to preserve the true character of hope. luther wrestled because he didnt want to have to hope. he wanted a knowledge a certainty that obviated hope. as a catholic convert from protestantism, i can say for me at least learning to hope is the most uncomfortable movement because it only is exercised in a bad situation one of uncertainty or unlikely success even. thus luther appears to be the one seeking false and vain comforts.