SOURCE: "Schoenberg's aesthetic theology," in Schoenberg and the New Music, translated by Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 81-93.

I

In 'My Evolution' (1949), his draft of an inner biography, Schoenberg wrote: 'This is also the place to speak of the miraculous contributions of the subconscious. I am convinced that in the works of the great masters many miracles can be discovered, the extreme profundity and prophetic foresight of which seem superhuman.' Then, using a music example, Schoenberg demonstrates a latent connection between contrasting themes in the Op. 9 Chamber Symphony 'solely in order to illustrate the power behind the human mind, which produces miracles for which we do not deserve credit.'

Dubious though the thematic connection which Schoenberg thought he had discovered in his work decades later may seem, it is unusual and characteristic that the inspiration that he felt had been conferred on him did not consist of a theme, but rather of a connection between themes. The inspired idea, in the face of which Schoenberg felt moved to make use of the language of art religion, occurred unconsciously, remained initially latent and manifested itself in a relationship and not a substance. The idea which assumes concrete form in a work such as the Chamber Symphony is thus realised less in the musical shapes that make up the surface than in the tissue of relationships which, hidden beneath, connect the ideas with one another.

The principle on which the interconnection of themes in the Chamber Symphony is based is that of 'contrasting derivation'. It was formulated by Arnold Schmitz in 1923 with regard to Beethoven sonata movements. And the very fact that both Schmitz's analyses and those of Schoenberg contain certain questionable features, and yet were produced independently of each other, enables us to see them all the more clearly as the expression of a tendency characteristic of the time, which transcends their inherent differences: the tendency to regard hidden connections as being the most important and convincing ones.

Yet the most striking thing about the quotation from Schoenberg's 'My Evolution' is the seemingly self-evident manner with which, in one and the same sentence, there is talk of the workings of the 'subconscious' and of a 'miracle', with the result that categories taken from religion and from psychology or depth psychology inter-mingle as if they were interchangeable.

It would be completely unjustified to dismiss the word 'miracle' as being a mere metaphor lacking religious substance. In the essay 'Composition with Twelve Notes' from the year 1935 Schoenberg makes use of the language of aesthetic theology in a way which requires us to take him at his word, and with a seriousness and an insistence which prevent us from suspecting his manner of expressing himself of being pardonable pseudo-religious rhetoric:

To understand the very nature of creation one must acknowledge that there was no light before the Lord said: 'Let there be Light'. And since there was not yet light, the Lord's omniscience embraced a vision of it which only His omnipotence could call forth. We poor human beings, when we refer to one of the better minds among us as a creator, should never forget what a creator is in reality. A creator has a vision of something which has not existed before this vision. And a creator has the power to bring his vision to life, the power to realise it.

This mingling of religious and psychological categories, which irritates in the 1949 'My Evolution', reaches back in Schoenberg's thinking at least to the year 1911. In the essay 'Franz Liszt's Work and Being', 'faith', which Schoenberg contrasts sharply with mere 'conviction', moves close to 'instinctive life':

Liszt's importance lies in the one place where great men's importance can lie: in faith. Fanatical faith, of the kind that creates a radical distinction between normal men and those it impels. Normal men possess a conviction; great men are possessed by a faith.… But the work, the perfected work of the great artist, is produced, above all, by his instincts; and the sharper ear he has for what they say, the more immediate the expression he can give them, the greater his work is. That is exactly the relationship, or perhaps it is even more direct, between faith—faith independent of reason—and instinctive life.

The Romantic religion of art to which Schoenberg subscribed whole-heartedly—a religion of art which his opposite Stravinsky felt to be inadmissible and dishonest, as regards both religion and aesthetics—was rooted in an assumption which seemed as natural to nineteenth-century Protestant theology as it seems suspect to that of the twentieth century: the assumption that the substance of religion consisted in subjective emotion, which one could then interpret as the guarantee of religious truth, as in the case of Schleiermacher, or as the source of religious illusions, as in the case of Feuerbach, but which in any case formed the starting-point of both apologetics and polemics. Theology was—contrary to the name, which it continued to bear—anthropocentric.

However, it is not the business of a historian to subject the roots of religion in subjective emotion to theological criticism for which he is not qualified. What matters is to recognise that the art religion which spread in the aesthetics, and particularly in the popular aesthetics, of the nineteenth century was a variant of the religion of emotion which was considered to be legitimate theology by Protestantism of the time. Dogmatism, the decline of which seemed inexorable, was replaced by philosophy of religion, and this finally turned into psychology of religion. Thus it is not surprising that the basis of art religion changed progressively from Wackenroder's emotional devotion via Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the will to Sigmund Freud's psychology of the instincts, which was adopted by Schoenberg.

If as a result of this the proximity of 'faith' and 'instinctive life' in Schoenberg's thinking is capable of being interpreted in the context of the history of ideas, then the aesthetically decisive factor lies in the conviction that the idea of a musical work, in which a composer's 'instinctive life' manifests itself, consists primarily of relationships, and indeed of relationships which in essence remain latent. In Schoenberg's thinking there is a configuration of three factors: faith, to which reason cannot attain; the urge which emanates from the expressive need of the subconscious; and the expression of a musical work idea less in terms of themes than in terms of thematic relationships which are not capable of being perceived directly and which, precisely for that reason, seem all the more convincing. The configuration proves difficult to explicate inasmuch as to concentrate on one of the factors to the detriment of the others—be it the theological, the psychological or the aesthetic, compositional—technical component—would be one-sided, inadequate or heavy-handed.

The extent to which the aesthetic categories of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are secularised theological concepts has never been underestimated. As a result, the fact that the reverse of the consecration of the profane, which one calls art religion, is a deconsecration of the sacred, led to a situation where the various interpretations of the phenomenon veered from one extreme to the other. Because of its legal origins, the term 'secularisation' was associated with the idea of taking other people's property; but this did not stop the view that the acquisition was illegitimate from being countered by the opposing view that the transformation was legitimate because it was a historically necessary formal change. While on the one hand the art religion of the nineteenth century could be suspected of investing the musical expression of earthly and sometimes all-too-human emotions with a metaphysical dignity which was a mere aesthetic illusion, on the other hand Richard Wagner claimed, in commenting on Parsifal, nothing less than that the substance of religion, which had petrified in the form of ecclesiastical Christianity, should be saved and incorporated by art as the living manifestation of the spirit of the age.

A belief in origins which considers the primary ownership of a thing to be the only legitimate one is the antithesis of a philosophy of history aimed at the future which adheres to the possibility that the real substance, or at least the part relevant to the present, which lies concealed in theological ideas and concepts, can be brought out into the open by translation into the realms of aesthetics, psychology or politics; and that this secularisation does not represent an illegitimate appropriation, but the fulfilment of a promise contained in the religious categories. To translate them into another language is to establish their true meaning.

Yet Schoenberg's texts cannot be interpreted unequivocally in either way, and, in any case, it is probable that similar formulations from the turn of the century have to be assessed differently from those of the last few decades. Whether Schoenberg, like Freud, conceived of psychological categories as being the roots of religious ones, or whether he simply regarded the subconscious as a place where religion manifests itself without being psychologically reducible must remain in the balance, at least for the time being.

In general one can interpret the process that one calls secularisation in at least four ways: first, as the questionable appropriation and transformation of theological substance; secondly, as historical evolution, to which as a historian one already accords a claim to validity, without openly coming to a conclusion, in that one concedes continuity to the process—and in the language of historians that virtually amounts to historical legitimacy; thirdly, as a structural analogy in which the direction of the transfer—for example, between depth psychology and theology—remains just as open to question as does its legality; and fourthly, as a metaphorical interpretation, the substantiality of which depends on how close to the truth one considers an 'unreal', poetic language to be.

To apply the various schemes of interpretation available in hermeneutics to Schoenberg's art-religious confessions would not be impossible, though it would be like going for a walk in a labyrinth, the exit of which is very difficult to find indeed.

II

Schoenberg's output consists to roughly equal extents of vocal and of instrumental works. Yet his aesthetic theory—sometimes at odds with his compositional practice—is one-sidedly determined by instrumental music. Schoenberg's claim, in his essay on 'The Relationship to the Text', that, when composing a song, he permitted himself to be led solely by the initial sound of the poem, turns out to be all the more revealing in the context of the history of ideas on account of the fact that an analysis of the George songs proves it to be blatantly untrue. However implausible the idea may seem, faced with a work like Erwartung, that in the period of early atonality the text was merely a means of building large-scale forms without the support of tonality, it does tally with the fact that dodecaphony, the primary function of which Schoenberg considered to be the purely musical foundation of larger forms, at first formed the basis, on the whole, of instrumental works.

Thus the fact that instrumental music, particularly in the form of a discourse based on musical logic, represented what Schoenberg considered to be 'real' music is doubtless connected with the influence of Schopenhauer's metaphysics of absolute music, a metaphysics which, transmitted by Wagner and Nietzsche, had around 1900 become the aesthetics of all German composers from Strauss and Mahler to Schoenberg and Pfitzner. Yet if one is not afraid of a hypothesis for which there is no tangible documentary evidence, one can also reconstruct a link back to the time around 1800, which, even though Schoenberg may not have been aware of it, makes his aesthetics appear more comprehensible.

The 'vision' which, in Schoenberg's words, characterises a musical 'creation' that may be referred to as such without arrogance or blasphemy is the outline of a distinct world of one's own. Mahler, for example, spoke of a 'world' constructed by a symphony 'with all the technical means at one's disposal'. That music is 'a world of its own' was however the fundamental idea with which, in 1799, Ludwig Tieck, in his Phantasien über die Kunst, founded the Romantic metaphysics of music, which was in essence an aesthetic of instrumental music, or, to be more precise, an aesthetic of the symphony as the paradigm of large-scale instrumental music. That aesthetic theology, which was centred on the concept of musical creativity, believed it had found its proper subject in instrumental and not in vocal music was by no means an accident, as can be shown by a short digression into the history of ideas.

The claim that man, God's likeness, is an 'alter deus' as a poet and only as a poet, who does not imitate but creates, had been advanced as early as 1561 by Julius Caesar Scaliger, the compiler of Renaissance poetics. But the idea, as Hans Blumenberg pointed out, first acquired philosophical substance and historical importance in the eighteenth century, when it combined with Leibniz's idea of the possible worlds to form a configuration from which emanated the idea, crucial to modern poetics, that a poet is the creator of another, that is, of a possible world. Johann Jakob Breitinger's Critische Dichtkunst of 1740, as Oskar Walzel realised, puts 'Leibniz's idea of the possible worlds to aesthetic use'.

But the concept of the creative formed an exclusive antithesis to the traditional imitative principle moulded by Aristotelian philosophy. Planning a world of one's own could not be reconciled with imitating nature as it is—be it the empirical appearance or the metaphysical essence of nature.

Yet vocal music—to return to the starting-point of the argument—had since the sixteenth century been declared to be the imitation of that which was expressed by the text. Instrumental music without a text, the content of which remained imprecise as long as it did not regress to primitive tone painting, seemed both to the sixteenth-century humanist and to the eighteenth-century encyclopaedist to be an inferior kind of vocal music, to say nothing of more negative ways of describing it.

But from 1800 onwards there is a gradual change in the order of precedence of the genres. If for thousands of years the lack of a text had been regarded as a deficiency in music defined in principle by harmony, rhythm and language, then this was reversed in the writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Eduard Hanslick, where the text appears as an 'extra musical' addition to a tonal art whose 'real' being manifested itself in 'pure' instrumental music. Yet there is, it seems, a close and direct connection between the change of paradigms in music aesthetics from vocal to instrumental music, and the transition from the imitative principle to the idea of the creative. If vocal music in general remains an imitation formally dependent on a text or on the contents of a text, then instrumental music, inasmuch as it aspires to the heights of the symphonic style, can be understood as the construction of a world of its own. In the symphony the composer adopts a claim which had previously been made for the poet: the claim that a poet, as opposed to a painter or a sculptor, does not imitate the real world but founds a possible one. (Scaliger spoke of 'condere' as opposed to 'narrare'.)

But if one acknowledges the connection which existed between the emancipation of instrumental music and the use in music aesthetics of the poetological idea of the creative, then it becomes clear why it was instrumental music, which had liberated itself from poetry, that Tieck called 'poetic'. Poetry, understood in the sense in which Breitinger had formulated it, was the paradigm of the generation of a personal, possible world; and music became 'poetic' in advancing a similar claim and substantiating it convincingly in works such as Beethoven's symphonies and Bach's fugues—which Goethe felt to be a musical symbol of a possible world prior to the creation of the real world.

Tieck's metaphysics of instrumental music were adapted by Schopenhauer, and Schopenhauer's philosophy was in turn adapted by Schoenberg. It is hardly possible to deny that the aesthetic theology implied or encapsulated therein, the conjunction of the concept of the creative and that of large-scale instrumental music, had a far-reaching influence on Schoenberg's thinking, with the result that in spite of the oblique relationship between aesthetic theory and compositional practice—a practice in which there can be no talk of instrumental music ranking lower or of a secondary role for the texts—we must expect to find traces of metaphysical dogma.

III

It would not be an exaggeration to call early atonality, which Schoenberg embarked upon with 'fear and trembling' and in full awareness of an irrevocable quality which was difficult to bear, a state of emergency in the precise sense that a state of emergency is the opposite of a state of affairs in which the law prevails. Yet the emancipation of the dissonance, which was not so much a qualitative leap logically resulting from what had gone before as an arbitrary act, was not at all the mere abolition of an old law and the introduction of a new one. The critics who raised a hue and cry about anarchy did indeed touch upon an essential aspect of the process, the significance of which they vaguely perceived, even though their aesthetic judgment failed to assess it correctly.

The concept of the state of emergency means that Schoenberg claimed that the suspension of the existing musical order, which he accomplished in the final movement of Op. 10, defined a historical state whose advent would turn out to be irrevocable, no matter how one looked at it. Schoenberg took a decision whose seriousness—and the fact is nothing short of self-evident—no one at the time who was musically competent could afford to disregard. Before embarking on an interpretation of history which concerned itself with continuity and discontinuity, one would first of all have to find a reason for the fact that even bitter opponents perceived Schoenberg's decision to be an act of incalculable significance, an event which, even a decade and a half later, could only be circumvented, so it was thought, by countering it with an equally abrupt decision in favour of neoclassicism, the supposedly necessary next step, with which Schoenberg's expressionist atonality was so to speak to be relegated to a past which was of no concern to the present.

To say that Schoenberg owed to the resounding success of the Gurrelieder a reputation which could not simply be destroyed by claiming that Opp. 10 and 11 were insignificant sectarian aberrations is of course true to a certain extent, though it does not explain everything. One of the reasons why the transition to atonality was taken seriously at all, that is, in the sense of a catastrophe, was, apart from the respect which was Schoenberg's due, a mode of thought no doubt typical of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the tendency, which ran counter to the dominant belief in progress, to look upon approaching events as being both the road to impending disaster and unavoidable.

Yet the fact remains—and to have to admit this is rather difficult for a historian—that it is, strictly speaking, im-possible to give a reason for Schoenberg's decision of 1907. Those who speak of historical necessity, of the dictates of the historical moment which Schoenberg obeyed, make the event appear more harmless than it actually was. The suspension of the existing order, the proclamation of the musical state of emergency, was an act of violence. And thus the theories with which Schoenberg attempted to justify the emancipation of the dissonance are characterised by a helplessness which prevents us from taking them at their word as being motives for compositional decisions. The same holds true, a decade and a half later, for the step to 'composition with twelve notes related only to one another'. Dodecaphony did not acquire the power which caused it to spread irresistibly, even if with some delay, on account of the arguments on which it was based. The reasons for its validity were always rather weak, both in the case of Schoenberg, and later in that of Adorno, who mistrusted it anyway. And even the works in which it manifested itself were, considering its subsequent influence, evidently not the decisive factor, despite their undoubted quality. Either, as in the case of Berg, the technique was unmistakably of secondary importance, one means amongst many with which Berg took precautionary measures within the works themselves. Or, as in the case of Webern, it produced a conflict between latent structure and expressive gesture which led to an open controversy in Webern reception. Or again, as in Schoenberg's late works, dodecaphony remained one of several possibilities, the common and all-embracing principle of which was developing variation.

Apart from this, the attempt to explain in terms of the philosophy of history Schoenberg's power to take decisions, that is, to interpret the diktat of the individual as that of history, is questionable inasmuch as the concept of the 'one' history which the philosophy of history assumes to exist is doubtful and may be suspected of being a myth. What really happens are histories—in the plural: at different places and under diverging circumstances. 'History' in the singular is a fiction.

But insofar as neither a diktat of history, nor the unavoidable logic of apologetic arguments, nor even the compelling evidence that we are dealing with technical preconditions to which important works owe their aesthetic life, is able to provide truthful reasons for the steps to atonality and dodecaphony, then the problem of authority, which arose nonetheless in the case of the one decision as in that of the other, comes to the fore with the clarity it requires, even if a solution is at present hardly in sight.

The authority which Schoenberg claimed for himself and which his contemporaries also accorded him through the tone they assumed, both in their polemics and in their apologias, was rooted in the emphatic awareness of a calling based on the feeling of being a tool. One would not want to deny the obvious fact that Schoenberg's interpretation of himself was determined by a concept of genius which was of Romantic origin, though this is not a sufficient explanation. It is far more the case that the moral pathos which marks Schoenberg's musical poetics, and even technical statements such as those about musical prose—a pathos which was completely foreign to the nineteenth-century concept of genius—bears unmistakably prophetic traits, in the original, authentic sense, that is, that prophecy is directed less at the future and at its impending calamities than at the present and its corrupt depravity. Schoenberg, from a position of extreme vulnerability, is continually sitting in judgment over his contemporaries, whose artistic shortcomings he deciphers as moral ones in an essay such as 'Opinion or Insight?' of 1925.

The fact that anarchical and law-giving tendencies or instincts conflicted in Schoenberg's thinking, forming a complicated configuration which forces one to read him twice if one wishes to understand him, has never been underestimated, and for this reason the phrase 'conservative revolutionary' seemed appropriate. An attempt to uncover the common root from which both the rebellious and the dictatorial traits emanated cannot content itself with pointing to the stereotype of revolutionary dialectics, in which there is a transition or sudden reversal from the one to the other. Rather, the state of emergency which Schoenberg induced with atonality, and the renewed state of legality which he hoped to constitute by means of dodecaphony, were similar in character, in that their substance consisted in an act of decision and not in a systematic web of argument or historical derivation. Schoenberg, if one is not afraid of applying the notorious phrase to him, was a musical decisionist.

The concept of an authority which is prophetic and moral, which judges and which simply decides and does not engage in argument, is so unusual in aesthetics, however, that at first one involuntarily feels that the religious pathos—despite the tradition which sees an artistic genius as a homo a deo excitatus—has been assumed illegitimately. The claim that only theological language can enable one to deal with Schoenberg's irritating decisionism in an appropriate manner is in fact based on nothing but the observation that the other languages taken over by aesthetics have failed when faced with this phenomenon. The striking contrast between the compelling fact of Schoenberg's authority and the weakness and in-adequacy of compositional-technical or historical-philosophical explanations forces one to have recourse to theological categories, which do at least make some kind of orientation possible. One may then continue to argue endlessly about their logical status—about whether they are legitimate or illegitimate examples of secularisation, whether they are structural analogies without claims to historical origins and continuity, or whether they are merely metaphors whose sole function consists in maintaining the awareness of an unresolved problem.

IV

The analyses of Classical and Romantic works which Schoenberg published and the commentaries which he added to them are based on an unusual concept of tradition which cannot be properly understood as the adherence to an agreed position, nor as the reconstruction of an original state of affairs, nor as the redefinition and appropriation of the ideas of others. Schoenberg offended generally accepted opinion when interpreting the works of others hardly less than when planning his own. He did not think seriously about the possibility or impossibility of understanding the past as it really was; historical authenticity was of little interest to him. The charge that his method of analysis was nothing more than a reflection of his own ideas and problems in the works of others he would rightly have considered narrow-minded and rejected accordingly.

The aesthetics of reception, which in the past few decades have become the scholarly fashion, have made art historians aware of a problem which conveys a feeling of the unfathomable: the problem that the meaning of a work which has come down to us from the past cannot be classified with sufficient exactitude and clarity as the intention of the author or as the embodiment of its contemporaries' views, nor as the result or even the quintessence of reception history, nor yet as an objective substance inherent in the object itself which is independent of the history of its genesis or influence.

An author does not need to know what he is doing; and that he is a privileged interpreter of his own works is a view which was long ago consigned to the scrapheap of outmoded prejudices, with the result that one almost feels provoked to resurrect it a little. The views of contemporaries prove to be a doubtful court of appeal, for what was put in words almost always seems narrow and biased, and the special kind of empathy which contemporaries have and which later generations do not have was either not expressed at all or only expressed inadequately. The documents of reception history are either few and far between and inconsequential, or, if many of them have come down to us, paint a confusing picture; and they seldom permit the abstraction of a result in which inner connections are perceivable, even in the case of unrestrained dialectical interpretation. And finally the idea that a work has an objective, clearly defined meaning per se which reception more or less approaches, independent of its author's intentions and the perceptions of the audience, is, as 'substantialism', suspected of being metaphysical. (Of course, the empiricists' premiss that metaphysics are a priori unscientific is itself unscientific because it is dogmatic.)

It seems then that Schoenberg shared none of the opposing convictions in the controversy sketched above, but rather that he took his bearings tacitly from a concept of tradition which is far removed from presentday thinking and whose essence can most nearly be elucidated by looking at the theological source contained in the aesthetic transformation, albeit in concealed form.

If one is not afraid of crude simplification one may assume that there is a distinction which is as self-evident in theology as it is initially disconcerting in aesthetics: the distinction between the meaning that a tradition or a work conveys and the substance on which it is based.

The belief that the revelation on Mount Sinai did not put into words a distinct, clearly defined meaning, but that 'meaning' is a category which first constitutes itself in the countless refracted forms in which revelation discloses itself to the human mind—in other words, that an undivided other world of meaning manifests itself in a divided real world of meaning—belonged, as Gershom Scholem has shown, to the fundamental principles of Torah exegesis in Jewish mysticism of the Middle Ages and the early Modern Age. Revelation is not in itself a comprehensible message, but becomes one only in the reflections which it experiences in human consciousness. And there is no limit to their number.

The changes which aesthetic 'substantialism' (let us not abandon the concept as such) experiences when it is subjected to a theologically-based interpretation are far-reaching. On the one hand, instead of a hard and fast meaning which reception may or may not elucidate, one assumes that there is merely a possibility of meaning which can be updated in various directions. But on the other hand—and this circumvents a dilemma of reception aesthetics—the substratum on which the constitution of meaning is based is not conceived of as a dead letter which only reception can fill with life borrowed from the subject, but appears as an energy which imbues all forms of appropriation.

The mystical exegesis of revelation and the concept of tradition in modern reception aesthetics—which, it is true, do not seem to be aware of the theological implications or structural analogies—share the fundamental assumption that meaning handed down from the past can be experienced only via a third party, and not directly. The Utopian dream of a congeniality which provides direct access to it turns out to be an illusion, the reason being an inadequate model, that of a message between subjects engaged in conversation. Furthermore it belongs to the realm of mystical dialectics to accord the same validity to interpretations which are obviously incompatible simply because no one can know whether or not an exegesis unacceptable under certain circumstances will, under quite different premisses, turn out to be true in the near or distant future. And finally the fact that in the case of equally valid but conflicting interpretations we are still dealing with interpretations of one and the same thing forces us to assume the presence of a substance in which is rooted the identity of the object, which in extreme versions of reception aesthetics is on the point of dissolving into thin air; of a substance which can only consist of the mere letter of the text or over and above that in an energy effective therein, though not in an unalterable sense, if, that is, one is prepared to accept the assumptions that form the common feature of the mystical exegesis of a text and modern reception aesthetics.

That the idea of a primaeval energy, which only constitutes itself as meaning or a message in a multitude of refractions, could be turned from theological to aesthetic use was only possible because Schoenberg, in the analysis of the works of others as in the design of his own, proceeded from the concept of a formal idea whose essence lies beyond the real tonal forms and the connections created between them. In order not to understand Schoenberg too quickly, and that means, wrongly, one has to become aware of the fact that his method of analysis, if pursued to its logical conclusion, dissolves musical works into a system of relationships in which—contrary to hidebound prejudice—not even interval structures form a clear, unalterable substance. What holds a movement together from within is intangible and cannot be written down, for—to put it in its ideal form—it is an embodiment of relationships between variants or manifestations of thematic material which can be divided into an unlimited number of constituent parts and whose every feature can be varied.

But if one now allows that it is on the one hand not enough to speak solely of relationships and of connections which as it were are suspended in thin air, and that the substance, in which the inner unity is founded, cannot on the other hand be pinned down, then there remains only a single solution: that Schoenberg presupposed as a foundation an energy which, as we have seen, he determined in theological-aesthetic terms when at one and the same time stating that it emanated from the 'subconscious' and that it was brought about by a 'miracle'. The idea of tradition on which his analyses of Classical and Romantic works were tacitly based thus belongs to the same theological-aesthetic configuration in which ideas about 'belief and 'instinctive life', about the latent character of what is structurally important, and about the primacy of the tissue of relationships over the fashioning of forms were also rooted and where they found the place which permits their significance as part of the systematic coherence of Schoenberg's thinking to become clearly apparent.