Another instance in which Scruton underestimates my allegorical reading of the Ring while nonetheless drawing on aspects of it to make his case, is in his admission in the following extracts that Wagner’s Ring achieves, as an inspired secular work of art, the redemption of dying religious faith (which could no longer be sustained in the face of our advancement in scientific knowledge), as religion’s heir, which restores the “feeling” of the sacred, while ignoring the fact that I’ve demonstrated that this is the Ring’s plot. In my interpretation, Wagner dramatizes his Ring’s historical status as the secular heir to lost religious faith in Wotan’s (as ruler of the gods, the representative of religious belief) making Siegfried the artist-hero his heir in Siegfried Act Three Scene One:
”That is the real question that troubled Wagner, the question of life in a post-religious world.” [P. 211]
“… Wagner … recognized that modern people, having lost their faith in the divine order, need another route to meaning than that once offered by religion. This is what The Ring aims to provide: a vision of the ideal, achieved with no help from the gods, a vision in which art takes the place of religion in expressing and fulfilling our deepest spiritual impulses.” [P. 8]
“This highly personal idea of the sacred is Wagner’s great contribution to the understanding of the human condition. He saw the experience of the sacred as fundamental to consciousness, more basic than the religious ideas that are built from it, and destined to survive the extinction of all religion. We self-conscious beings have learned to understand the world scientifically, to grasp the laws of nature and to see that the explanations offered by religion are as empty as its promises. Our gods have died, and the story of their death is one of the many sub-plots of The Ring. The gods are killed by the very thing that created them: the world’s consciousness that erupted in us, and whose implacable demands are displayed in the encounter between the Rhine-daughters and Alberich.” [P. 270-271]
“From the perspective granted by self-consciousness, Kant argued, I see myself as the free originator of my own actions. But I also see myself from the outside, as one object among others, a part of nature, bound by the law of cause and effect. I am both a free subject and a determined object, and this defines the deep paradox of the human condition.” [P. 16]
“But the consciousness that killed the gods did not remove the sacred dimension from our experience. As well as the scientific view of things, consciousness brings into being the self and its freedom. And these in turn bring about another way of seeing the world than the way of science. (…) The moment of free commitment, the moment when I am fully myself in an act of self-giving - this has no place in the temporal order as science conceives it. And yet it is the moment that justifies my life … .” [P. 271]
“… nobody has matched Wagner in the attempt to vindicate this experience, to show that it is not illusory, even if it is the origin of illusions, and to present our ventures in love and sacrifice as the true goal to which the experience trends. Grasping this is the most important step in understanding The Ring.” [P. 271]
