Though Wagner himself concurred with modern science in seeing the Biblical story of a creation by God as mere mythology, Wagner nonetheless identified original sin and the Fall with man’s acquisition of knowledge. [See 974W] The reason for that, surely, is that, as Feuerbach had often said, scientific knowledge based on an objective study of nature must necessarily obliterate the sway of gods over men’s hearts.
And, as always, we find Wagner equating the twilight of the gods, which is the inevitable consequence of advancement in scientific knowledge, with his somewhat idiosyncratic version of the anti-Semitic trope that Judaism was threatening to dominate the world. We must understand that by Judaism Wagner does not simply mean egoism, but rather, too great consciousness of the egoism which lies at the bottom of man’s religious longings, his metaphysical impulse to assert man’s transcendent value. It is, after all, Wotan’s too great consciousness of the debt he owes both the Giants and Alberich for building and securing the gods’ heavenly abode, Valhalla, which troubles Wotan throughout the Ring drama. In other words, Wagner feared that through the influence of both natural science and Judaism, which we may almost consider as identical in his mind, man would eventually subscribe to Alberich’s loveless, egoistic view that the only thing to be valued in life was self-aggrandizement, whether through acquisition of money and property, political power, or scientific and technological mastery of man and his world. Here again, in a passage previously cited only in part, Wagner takes his cue from Feuerbach:
[P. 271] “ … in truth he [the Jew] has no religion at all - merely the belief in certain promises of his god which in nowise extend to a life beyond this temporal life of his, as in every true religion, but simply to this present life on earth, whereon his race is certainly ensured dominion over all that lives and lives not. … the hardest calculation lies all cut and dried for him in an instinct shut against all ideality. A wonderful, unparalleled phenomenon: the plastic daemon of man’s [P. 272] downfall in triumphant surety … .” [1068W-{1-2/81} Know Thyself – 2nd Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 271-272]
Since Wagner ultimately came to believe that there was no point in trying to increase human happiness and social equality and fairness through political reforms and laws, because mankind was intrinsically and irrevocably subject to egoistic motives, he was forced to conclude that the Jews, upon whom he had projected his cynical realization of the egoistic foundation of human nature, would inevitably force the world to endorse and follow what he construed as their materialist philosophy. According to Feuerbach this materialist philosophy was the basis of what he described as a faux Christian spirituality masquerading as wholly autonomous from its roots in Judaism. In any case, the ever increasing influence of a science-based secularism, with which Wagner identified Judaism, would, he believed, spell the death of not only religious belief but of all that stems from it, such as the high value placed on compassion and love, moral idealism, refined idealist sentiment, and art for art’s sake, since within a scientific secular world dominated by the allegedly exclusively Jewish notion that everything must have a “use,” a profit, there could be no basis for higher spiritual aspiration. The terrible existential dilemma for Wagner here was that, while his intellectual conscience forced him to recognize the truth of the objective scientific understanding of man and nature, his heart could not abide this unbearable thought: that the good and the beautiful are as incommensurable with the truth as love in the Ring is incommensurable with the Ring’s power.
