Robert Weldon Whalen, Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin de Siecle Vienna . Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. Hardback, 339 pp. $25.00.

Sacred Spring is part travelogue, part intellectual history, part art and music criticism. Whalen’s thesis is that Viennese modernism, the source of so much of the intellectual history of the modern West, not only can but must be read as a religiously inspired movement.

To make his case, Whalen, the Carolyn G. and Sam H. McMahon Jr. Professor of History of Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, defines religion in brought terms.

Most of the figures he examines in the book, he admits, were not conventionally religious, though some worked their way to Judaism or Christianity. Invoking Edward Tyler, James Frazier, Abraham Heschel, Rudolf Otto, Karl Barth, and, most importantly, Paul Tillich, he defines religion as “the aspect of depth in the totality of the human spirit.”

Religion is “the spark that leaps between ‘is’ and ‘ought,’” the sense that this world must be judged by something that is not entirely apparent in this world. In this sense, fin de siecle Vienna was infused with a religious devotion to art.

Artists, composers, and writers in Vienna sought to construct art that responded to the intrusion of the “depth,” of the “real,” into everyday reality. The 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.

Modernism took shape in a well-defined group in specific political and cultural circumstances. Fin de siecle Vienna was born 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 began in 1848). But Rudolf’s suicide capped it, and filled the capital city with a sense of foreboding that defined the modernist mood. Playwright, critic, prophet of modernism, and latterly a convert to Catholicism, Hermann Bahr, claimed that Vienna was a nervous place. Everyone was on edge. With old political and cultural certainties eroding, anxiety - the strange duality of exhilaration and fear - set the dominant emotional tone.

During the late 1890s, Vienna’s Kunstlerhaus was riven by battles between progressives and conservatives. Though both wanted to sell their art, the progressives, clustered around 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 Kunstlerhaus , they seceded, forming their own school and setting up their own exhibits. Whalen takes his title, Sacred Spring, from the name of the journal founded by the Secession artists, Ver Sacrum.

The Secession included most of the important avant garde artists of the time. The cast of characters is the avant-garde of Vienna, which Whalen describes as “a very tight, incestuous, intimate circle.” All the members of the avant garde were men, all were young, all middle class, most all transplants from the sticks to the big city.

Whalen’s reference to incest is not entirely metaphorical. Painter Oskar Kokoschka had an affair with the enchanting Alma Mahler, widow of Gustav, who may have earlier had an affair with the painter Gustav Klimt and another with the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. A who’s-who of modernism apparently paraded through Alma’s bedroom.

Vienna was the suicide capital of Europe, yet simultaneously a city of remarkable vibrancy. This death-in-life gave the fin de siecle its particular aroma. Avant garde artists and composers were keen on the irrational, the bizarre and macabre, the uncanny world of omens and signs, and especially the irrationality of sex, particularly in combination with death.

In the wake of Otto Weininger’s 1903 Sexuality and Character , many concluded that sex was the key to everything, and that truth would be known through the feminine in particular. Only a particular sort of feminine counted, though.

The avant garde challenged the gender assumptions of the mid-nineteenth century in favor of a new image of woman. In contrast to her heavily encumbered Victorian forebears, the Viennese new woman eschewed ornament. She was willowy and billowy and boyish.

She was not only desirable, but desirably dangerous. Twice Whalen refers to Klimt’s Judith paintings. Judith shows a bejeweled and bare-breasted woman against a stylized golden landscape, her eyes closed in ecstasy, holding the bearded head of Holophernes. The example is well-chosen, for the frightening eroticism of the painting, evident also in the stark and often ugly nudes of Egon Schiele, captures the combination of fear and attraction that exemplified the intellectual life of Vienna and came to its most famous and lasting theoretical expression in Freud.

Vienna was infused with “decadence,” which Whalen describes various as the celebration of the decay of traditional standards, as the quest for ever-new sensations, as the desire to taste the bitter and sweet in every mouthful of life, and as the celebration of decay as such. What left the stench of death wafting through Vienna was, many intellectuals thought, the death of the bourgeois, autonomous, rationally choosing individual of liberalism.

Like the children of the 1960s, the Viennese avant garde discovered that the restrained dutiful liberalism of earlier generations was a charade. Some found an alternative politics and aesthetics in xenophobic fascism; others looked to the aesthetics of modernism for a cure. No one believed liberalism capable of resurrection.

Bourgeois art was as artificial and false as bourgeois politics, and the avant garde , led by architect Adolf Loos, launched an attack against ornamentation and artifice. Paint was a lie, obscuring the beauties of wood. Artists should aim at making the natural qualities of their materials emerge, refusing the temptation to pretty up nature with Victorian baubles. Kokoschka’s paintings seem to strip away the ornamentation of bodies themselves, exposing the agonized and disturbed souls beneath.

Art must also be true to its time, and many in progressive artists pressed for an aesthetic that would incorporate elements from modern technology. Modernist artists challenged the dualism of the functional and the artistic that was another hallmark of bourgeois aesthetics. At the Palais Stocklet, everything down to the doorknobs was designed by an artist. Modernist aesthetics aimed at honesty, transparency, simplicity, and at cultivating an aesthetic sensibility that pervaded all of life.

The religious element in the avant garde outlook is not always overt, but Whalen shows that the interest in the irrational frequently shaded off into interest in religion. For many in the avant garde , honest art would have a redemptive effect, exposing both aesthetic falsity and falsity as such.

Artists frequently saw themselves as redemptive figures. In a poster for Der Sturm, Kokoschka painted his head and bare torso. He had shaved his head in protest over the critical response to his paintings, and the self-portrait of the poster is completely bald. His lips are stretched in a grotesque smile, and he points, with a hand held in an attitude of benediction, at a wound in his side. He is altog e ther the crucified artist, despised and rejected of men.

Whalen makes it seem natural that a number of the avant garde later returned to traditional faiths. They had never really left religion behind, but only had dabbled in spiritualist esoterica before finding themselves.

One of the implications of Whalen’s book pertains to our understanding of “postmodernism.” Whalen shows that many of the obsessions of postmodern theory – the dissolution of the self, violence, the fluidity of human life, the “temporality of tradition,” uncertainties about language – were equally characteristic of Viennese modernism. Postmodernism emerges from Whalen’s book as modernism reborn, or “delayed modernism,” delayed for the better part of the twentieth century by the intervention of two world wars and one Cold War.

Whalen writes so jauntily that one can easily miss the depth of his research, which is evident from his frequent quotations from Viennese newspapers and German editions of the writers he discusses.

Wry asides spice up the book. Of Egon Schiele’s use of his sisters as nude models, Whalen writes, “Though there was no evidence of any sexual perversion, it certainly seemed to the neighbors, well, odd” (p. 234). Whalen has been a frequent visitor to Vienna, and his opening chapter evokes the “fairy tale city” of immigrants, coffee houses and illusions, with grace.

The book is repetitive. He tells the same stories in more than one place (Klimt’s Judiths are described on pages 80-81 and 207, and twice he tells us that Shiele’s The Family includes a child he never had). Frustratingly for a book that spends so much time describing paintings, it contains no pictures, and Whalen’s discussions of Mahler are so thorough that a CD could well accompany the book.

Despite these limitations, Whalen’s book helps make the case put forward by an increasing number of sociologists, historians, and theologians that, as he puts it, “the whole ‘modernization as secularization’ thesis may well be quite wrong . . . Not God but secularism has been the great myth of the modern age.”