What resurrection?

Published in the Fidelio Post, 12 December 2025.

The nineteenth century threw the philosophical foundations of the Western world into chaos. It presented it with a dilemma that is, to this day, yet to be solved: how to reconcile passions and reason in a coherent way that might be both meaningful and sustainable. Gustav Mahler represents a key figure in this context. He was obviously aware of the difficulty that his generation was facing, and desperately tried to find a solution through his music and his practice. He was a man of contrasts, the last figure who tried to reconcile passions and rationalism, romanticism and classicism, creation and interpretation. Most of what happened after him had to be one or the other: classicism evolved into intellectualism, romanticism into unbridled individualism, which eventually led to authoritarianism. The intellectuals became the custodians of high culture; ordinary people, meanwhile, fought for a common language. The modern left was born. The right had always been there. What we keep calling classical music is the legacy of an attempt – arguably a pointless one – to establish an unassailable practice that has, at least since Beethoven, been constantly developing.

So great was the progress of science toward the end of the century that few seriously believed the future could be anything other than a triumphal showcase of technological prowess. Technology was the practical consequence of the Enlightenment. How can a rational being not refuse religion and all that nonsense and cherish the phenomenal improvements to life that progress brings about? Excitement soon evolved into intoxication. Then, in 1905 – Mahler was at the peak of his fame – Albert Einstein, applying geometrical discoveries made by some eminent predecessors, showed the world that the truth of classical physics was only really true the moment we agreed to look at it from a specific angle. Panic ensued. The discovery of an inherent relativism in even the most unassailable of truths – the one supported by mathematics – caused a jolt from which the positivist mind has not yet recovered. After the short parenthesis of the eighteenth century, the apotheosis of Apollonian rationality, also known as classicism, the Artist, frustrated with the stylish and formally immaculate constraints of classicism, took a sharp turn to go back two thousand years to a pre-Socratic Dionysian approach to creativity. The romantic generation nosedived into this mission, oblivious to the fact that nihilism was the natural end to their journey, particularly since the assets of rationality were gaining ground at a formidable pace. Just not in the arts.

Mahler was Jewish, but like most Jews who are celebrated for their contribution to humanity and civilisation, he achieved greatness by escaping from the Jewish religious and intellectual tradition. He is joined by an eminent group of people: Spinoza, Heine, Mendelssohn, Kafka, Freud, Trotsky, Wittgenstein, Proust — the list is too long. Perhaps most originally, however, Mahler decided to do something even more daring: he converted to Christianity. He did it in order to be accepted by a community that was broadly opposed to Jewish emancipation. And the Jews were indeed emancipating. The diaspora was making an even greater contribution to the health of fin-de-siècle societies, not because of their Jewishness, but rather for their desire to overcome it, to dissipate it into the community. What could not be predicted, though, was that, as emancipation gained ground, the very society these Jews wanted to be part of quickly disintegrated. The Jews became the eminent victims of the destruction of European civilisation precisely because of their fateful attempt to join it at the wrong time. If up to the twentieth century the Jews were united by the common belief in their faith, since the tragedy of the Holocaust they have only been able to find unity in anti-Semitism, in the hatred shown by others towards them for reasons that the very haters cannot logically articulate. It is a pretty messy matter.

Mahler did something which should really inspire us all, though. He looked beyond religion, beyond rationality, and beyond the passions. He took the very common human experience of death and showed that salvation in Heaven, the crucial tenet of Christianity, cannot dispel the fears that we all humans are bound to experience until we die. Life is not just about thought; it is about passions as well. The real resurrection is in this world, as his Jewish roots suggested to him. The real resurrection the human spirit needs is one of values. We need to go beyond the Western attempt that, since the time of Socrates, seeks to subordinate the passions to an agenda which, under the banner of rational progress, only estranges humans from themselves. With the wings that we have conquered for ourselves, we must soar above our traditions and our prejudices; we must have the courage to look God straight in the eyes and perhaps realise that we were, in fact, looking only for ourselves.