threat of ‘Hell’ has remained the Church’s vital hold upon men’s souls, from whom the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ has moved farther and farther away. The Last Judgment: a prophecy here big with solace, there terrible! No element of ghastly hatefulness and loathly awe, but was pressed into the service of the Church with sickening artifice, to give the terrified imagination a foretaste of that place of everlasting doom where the myths of each religion besmirched with belief in the torments of Hell were assembled in most hideous parody.” [1025W-{6-8/80}Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 219-220]
[1026W-{6-8/80}Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 223-224]
[P. 223] {FEUER} “Through the art of Tone did the Christian Lyric thus firstbecome itself an art: the music of the Church was sung to the words of the abstract dogma; in its effect however, it dissolved those words and the ideas they fixed, to the point of their vanishing out of sight; and hence it rendered nothing to the enraptured Feeling save their pure emotional content.
{FEUER} Speaking strictly, the only art that fully corresponds with theChristian belief is Music; even as the only music which, now at least, we can place on the same footing as the other arts, is an exclusive product of Christianity. In its development, alone among the fine arts, no share was borne by re-awaking Antique Art, whose tone-effects have almost passed beyond our ken: wherefore also we regard it as the youngest of the arts, and the most capable of endless evolution and appliance. (…) In this sense, having seen the Lyric compelled to resolve the form of words to a shape of tones, we must recognise that Music reveals the inmost essence of the Christian religion with definition unapproached; wherefore we may figure it as bearing the same relation to Religion which that picture of Raphael’s has shown us borne by the Child-of-god to the virgin Mother: for, as pure Form of a divine content freed from all abstractions, we may regard it as a world-redeeming incarnation of the divine dogma of the nullity of the phenomenal world itself. Even the painter’s most ideal shape remains conditioned by the dogma’s terms, and when we gaze upon her likeness, that sublimely virginal Mother of God lifts us up above the miracle’s [P. 224] irrationality only by making it appear as wellnigh impossible. Here we have: ‘That signifies.’ But Music says: ‘That is,’ – for she stops all strife between reason and feeling, and that by a tone-shape completely removed from the world of appearances, not to be compared with anything physical, but usurping our heart as by act of Grace.
{FEUER} This lofty property of Music’s enabled her at last to quite divorceherself from the reasoned word; and the noblest music completed this divorce in measure as religious Dogma became the toy of Jesuitic casuistry or rationalistic pettifogging. (…) Only her final severance from the decaying Church could enable the art of Tone to save the noblest heritage of the Christian idea in its purity of over-worldly reformation … .” [1026W-{6-8/80}Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 223-224]
[1027W-{6-8/80}Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 225]
[P. 225] {anti-FEUER/NIET} “This doctrine of man’s sinfulness, which forms the
