transformed by the Tarnhelm, like Alberich before him, into a serpent), who, in guarding Alberich’s Hoard, Tarnhelm, and Ring, will deny man direct access to all those truths which might overthrow the rule of the gods in men’s hearts.
Feuerbach lends support to this concept through his identification of God with the collective experience of historical man, particularly in his acquisition over time of that knowledge which eventually reaches critical mass in the Western World by producing self-consciously objective scientific inquiry. Here, for instance, Feuerbach tells us that what are regarded as attributes of divinity are really metaphors for the attributes of the human species itself, and that history shows that this collective humanity’s knowledge and will is unlimited, the proof being physical science and philosophy:
[P. 152] “All divine attributes … which make God God, are attributes of the species … . My knowledge, my will, is limited; but my limit is not the limit of another man, to say nothing of mankind; what is difficult to me is easy to another; what is impossible, inconceivable, to one age, is to the coming age conceivable and possible. My life is bound to a limited time; not so the life of humanity. The history of mankind consists of nothing else than a continuous and progressive conquest of limits, which at a given time pass for the limits of humanity, and [P. 153] therefore for absolute insurmountable limits. But the future always unveils the fact that the alleged limits of the species were only limits of individuals. The most striking proofs of this are presented by the history of philosophy and of physical science.” [105F-EOC: p. 152-153]
God then can be construed as the totality of perfections belonging to the entire human species, attributes which are disbursed in bits and pieces among real men, this perfection realizing itself in world history:
“[Feuerbach speaks:] … of the truth that man’s conception of God is the human individual’s conception of his own species, that God as the total of all realities or perfections is nothing other than the total of the attributes of the species – dispersed among men and realizing themselves in the course of world history – compendiously combined for the benefit of the limited individual. The domain of the natural sciences is, because of its quantitative size, completely beyond the capacity of the individual man to view and measure. (…) But what the individual man does not know and cannot do all of mankind together knows and can do. Thus, the divine knowledge that knows simultaneously every particular has its reality in the knowledge of the species.” [177F-PPF: p. 17]
I already cited Feuerbach’s remark that man’s invention of the concept of divine omnipotence is testimonial to man’s own desire to know everything, since man acknowledges the truth of Bacon’s assertion that knowledge is power. [See 308F] This power obtained by virtue of man’s gift of conscious thought (the Ring), through acquisition of knowledge of the world, is the power which the Rhinedaughters promised Alberich he could obtain by forging a Ring from the Rhinegold.
It is noteworthy that Feuerbach construed this gradual accumulation of worldly power through the advancement in human knowledge, making what once seemed impossible possible, as secular man’s substitute for the gods’ offer of immortality in the hereafter, a future of ever greater and greater power and wisdom for collective (but not the individual) man:
