“The ancient atheists, and even a great many theists both ancient and modern, have called fear the ground of religion … .” [196F-LER: p. 25]
But this fear which gives birth to the gods - who in the early human societies were the only known force which could intervene in man’s behalf, to help him escape danger and secure his happiness, both in heaven and on earth - ultimately expands beyond the fear of death, through the process of abstraction and the unlimited scope of the imagination, to embrace what Feuerbach describes as abstract fear in general, existential fear, fear of death as a philosophical problem:
“ … the religious imagination is not the free imagination of the artist, but has a practical egoistic purpose … . (…) This feeling of anxiety, of uncertainty, this fear of harm that always accompanies man, is the root of the religious imagination … .” [269F-LER: p. 196]
“When we explain religion by fear, we must … take into account not only the lowest form of fear, fear of one natural phenomenon or another, the fear that begins and ends with a storm at sea, a tempest, or an earthquake, in other words the fear that is circumscribed in time and space, but also the fear that is limited to no particular object, the perpetual, ever present fear which embraces every conceivable misfortune, in a word, the infinite fear of the human soul.” [319F-LER: p. 287]
Wagner, echoing Feuerbach’s remark below, tells us that the gods’ hold over man’s imagination is rooted in the gods’ power to save, especially the gods’ power to grant mortal man the divine gift of immortality:
“A God is essentially a being who fulfills man’s desires. And the most heartfelt desire, at least of those men whose desires are not curtailed by natural necessity, is the desire not to die, to live forever; this is indeed man’s highest and ultimate desire … .” [305F-LER: p. 269]
“He … says how much to be preferred are the ideas of the ancient world to those of the church today, whose power is rooted in the fear of death, or, rather, the life after death.” [944W-{10/10/78} CD Vol. II, p. 168]
These insights should aid us in grasping the full danger to the gods (i.e., the implications for religious belief) that Fafner’s threat represents. Since the gods (that is to say, man) can’t afford to consciously acknowledge that fear of death (Fafner) is the origin of Freia’s gift of immortality, i.e., can’t afford to admit that Fafner’s egoism is behind man’s involuntary creation of Freia and the other gods, fear must remain an unconscious source of inspiration for man’s belief in immortality and the gods, who by nature possess it, and who alone can confer it on mortals. The implication for religion, if the truth were consciously acknowledged that our corporeal animal life-instincts are the basis for our involuntary invention of gods and redemption in heaven, would be that what man seeks in an allegedly transcendent heaven is actually his own body and his own earth again, but sublimated into a seemingly spiritual form freed from the limiting conditions of earthly existence, through which our earth-needs are smuggled into our allegedly spiritual paradise, as Wagner put it:
“[The] act of denying the will [i.e., man’s natural motivation by egoism] is the true action of the saint: that it is ultimately accomplished only in a total end to individual consciousness – for there is no other consciousness except that which is personal and individual – was lost sight of
