[P. 213] “The Wonder in the Poet’s work is distinguished from the Wonder in religious Dogma by this: that it does not, like the latter, upheave the nature of things [i.e., it doesn’t posit the supernatural, miracles], but the rather makes it comprehensible to the Feeling [Wagner’s musical motifs].
The Judaeo-Christian Wonder tore the connexion of natural phenomena asunder, to allow the Divine Will to appear as standing over Nature. In it a broad connexus of things was by no means condensed in favour of their understanding by the instinctive Feeling, but this Wonder was employed entirely for its own sake alone; people demanded it, as the proof of a suprahuman power, from him who gave himself for divine, and in whom they refused to believe till before the bodily eyes of men he had shown himself the lord of Nature, i.e. the arbitrary subverter of the natural order of things. This Wonder was therefore claimed from him one did not hold for authentic in himself and his natural dealings, but whom one proposed to first believe when he should have achieved something unbelievable, something un-understandable. A fundamental denial of the Understanding [Feuerbach’s notion that religious faith takes the mind prisoner] was therefore the thing hypothecated in advance, … whereas an absolute Faith was the thing demanded by the wonder-doer, and granted by the wonder-getter.
Now, for the operation of its message, the poetising intellect has absolutely no concern with Faith [Fafner – Fear], but only with an understanding through the Feeling [What Wotan thought, Bruennhilde feels, and imparts to Siegfried]. It wants to display a great connexus of natural phenomena in an image swiftly understandable [Wagner’s musical motifs, as a substitute for lost religious faith], and this image must [P. 214] therefore be one answering to the phenomena in such a way that the instinctive Feeling may take it up without a struggle, not first be challenged to expound it: whereas the characteristic of the Dogmatic Wonder consists just in this, that, through the obvious impossibility of explaining it, it tyrannously subjugates the Understanding [i.e., takes Alberich and his Ring prisoner] despite the latter’s instinctive search for explanation … . The Dogmatic Wonder is therefore just as unfitted for Art, as the Poetic Wonder is the highest and most necessary product of the artist’s power of beholding and displaying.” [522W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 213-214]
Thus, in killing Fafner (fear), Siegfried seems to have freed the mind from the practical, egoistic drives which according to Feuerbach are not only the basis of man’s political life, but also of faith in the divine, in order to enjoy playing with the world aesthetically, as an observer, not a doer, in art. Mime’s suggestion to Alberich that Siegfried is likely to have taken from the Hoard merely children’s toys is unwittingly ironic: in point of fact Siegfried, by taking aesthetic possession of man’s hoard of forbidden knowledge, in order to draw inspiration from its horrors to sublimate them into art, will indeed transform this horror and woe into play, for as Wagner said, art is a profound form of play. And to dramatize this with the most artful subtlety Wagner calls upon several of the motifs evoking the Rhinedaughters’ song and dance in celebration of the pre-fallen Rhinegold in R.1, namely #12 (the Rhinegold) and #16 (the melody of their song and dance in celebration of the Rhinegold), as well as #59abc, which was their lament for the stolen Rhinegold heard in the finale of R.4.
These motival references to the Rhinedaughters and the pristine condition of the pre-Fall Rhinegold serve several dramatic purposes: they tell us of course that the ultimate destiny of the Ring is that it will be restored to the Rhinedaughters in the end, thereby ending the Ring curse, but more
