And here we have Wagner’s paraphrases of all that Feuerbach has said in our extracts above:
“Men of science persuade us that Copernicus reduced the ancient Church-belief to ruins with his planetary system, since it robbed God Almighty of his heavenly seat. (…) The god within the human breast, of whose transcendent being our great Mystics were so certain sure, that god who needs no heavenly-home demonstrable by science, has given the parsons more ado. For us Germans had he become our inmost own: but our Professors [scientists’ objective knowledge] have done him many a harm … . Yet this approachless god of ours had begotten much within us, and when at last he [Wotan] had to vanish, he left us – in eternal memory of him – Music [Bruennhilde].” [999W-{12/25/79} Introduction to the Year 1880: PW Vol. VI, p. 34]
[P. 29] “ … the hopelessly materialistic, industrially commonplace, entirely un-Goded aspect of the modern world is debitable to the … eagerness of the common practical understanding to construe religious Dogma by laws of cause-and-effect deduced from the phenomena of natural and social life, and to fling aside whatever rebelled against that mode of explanation as a reasonless chimera. (…)
But does this mean that Religion itself has ceased? –
No, no! It lives, but only at its primal source and sole true dwelling-place, within the deepest, holiest inner chamber of the Individual; there whither never yet has surged a conflict of the rationalist [Alberich] and supranaturalist [the alleged god Wotan], the Clergy and the State. For this is the essence of true [P. 30] Religion: that, away from the cheating show of the daytide world, it shines in the night of man’s inmost heart, with a light quite other than the world-sun’s light, and visible nowhence save from out that depth.
(…) Profoundest knowledge teaches us that only in the inner chamber of our heart, in nowise from the world presented to us without, can true assuagement come to us.” [705W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 28-30]
And in our final extract below, Wagner effectively explains why Wotan has left music, Bruennhilde, within the protective ring of Loge’s fire, the veil of Wahn produced through the cunning of man’s artistic imagination, to be woken solely by the music-dramatist Siegfried, in whom Wotan has found rebirth, Siegfried, who in his inspired music-drama will confer on us our “last religion”:
[P. 34] “Our Music he [“the Devil”] shall not thus deal with; for still it is the living god within our bosom. Let us guard it therefore, and ward off all profaning hands. … in it resides our final hope of life itself.
There is something special in our German Music, ay, something divine. (…) We alone know ‘Music’ as herself, and to us she gives the power of all regeneration and new-birth; but only while we hold her holy. (…) [P. 35] … it wakes in us no little pain, to see the downfall of our musical affairs so utterly unheeded; for so our last religion melts away in jugglery. (…) [We:] … put out thereby the last light [Bruennhilde] the German God [Wotan] had left in us to find our way back to him!“ [1000W-{12/25/79} Introduction to the Year 1880: PW Vol. VI, p. 34-35]
