the horrors of Wotan’s hoard of dangerous knowledge into the glory of inspired art, in which man’s religious longing lives on, freed from its conceptual burdens.
So Wotan, by leaving Bruennhilde asleep on a mountaintop protected by Loge’s veil of self-deception, has left as a legacy for Siegfried what Feuerbach described as the essence of religion, its feeling or music, when Wotan as a God, as a concept, has had to pass away in the face of the rise of objective, secular thought and scientific knowledge. This is the ever increasing hoard of knowledge which Wotan, while wandering the earth (Wagner’s metaphor for historical man’s collective experience of the earth, i.e., Erda), has accumulated:
“ … only where … the distinction between the divine and human being is abolished, … is religion made a mere matter of feeling, or conversely, feeling the chief point in religion. The last refuge of theology therefore is feeling [Wotan’s repression of his unbearable hoard of objective knowledge into his unconscious mind Bruennhilde, who transmutes it into musical feeling]. God is renounced by the understanding [the gods of Valhalla are predestined to destruction by Alberich’s knowledge of the truth]; he has no longer the dignity of a real object, of a reality which imposes itself on the understanding [Wotan must leave the world, hoping that the love Siegfried and Bruennhilde share will redeem the world]; hence he is transferred to feeling; in feeling his existence is thought to be secure [What Wotan thought, Bruennhilde felt.]. And doubtless this is the safest refuge; for to make feeling the essence of religion is nothing else than to make feeling the essence of God. And as certainly as I exist, so certainly does my feeling exist; and as certainly as my feeling exists, so certainly does my God exist.” [145F-EOC: p. 283]
[P. 10] “ … God is pure, [P. 11] unlimited, free Feeling. (…) … incapable of comprehending the spiritual grandeur of feeling, thou art terrified before the religious atheism of thy heart. By this fear thou destroyest the unity of thy feeling with itself, in imagining to thyself an objective being distinct from thy feeling, and thus necessarily sinking back into the old questions and doubts – is there a God or not? – questions and doubts which vanish, nay, are impossible, where feeling is defined as the essence of religion.” [43F-EOC: p. 10-11]
“This timid crowd [the religious community of faith] can no longer erect temples or cathedrals, so now the only temple left for God is a chamber of the heart.” [26F-TDI: p. 192]
“What would man be without feeling? It is the musical power in man. But what would man be without music? Just as man has a musical faculty and feels an inward necessity to breathe out his feelings in song; so, by a like necessity, he in religious sighs and tears streams forth the nature of feeling as an objective, divine nature.” [65F-EOC: p. 63] [See also 41F]
“What … is it which acts on thee when thou art affected by melody? (…) What else than the voice of thy own heart?” [42F-EOC: p. 9]
“God the father [Wotan] is I, God the son [Siegfried] Thou. The I is understanding [Wotan’s hoard of objective knowledge], the Thou love [Siegfried will only feel what Wotan thought, thanks to Bruennhilde’s love]. But love with understanding and understanding with love [Bruennhilde, who converts Wotan’s thought into feeling, the musical motifs of the Ring, for Siegfried] is mind, and mind is … the total man.” [69F-EOC: p. 67] [See also 70F]
