Norns], whereas the pagan god [Alberich] is bound by natural necessity … . (…) For the only real barrier to human desires is nature.” [288F-LER: p. 233]
“The natural man [Alberich] remains at home because he finds it agreeable, because he is perfectly satisfied; religion which commences with a discontent, a disunion, forsakes its home and travels far [think here of Wotan as the Wanderer, who futilely seeks knowledge of how he might redeem the gods from the fate Erda foretold], but only to feel the more vividly in the distance the happiness of home [Wotan can’t escape and eventually resigns himself to his fate].” [112F-EOC: p. 181]
And here Wagner confirms his Feuerbachian view that religion is, in essence, world-denial:
[P. 23] “Religion, of its very essence, is radically divergent from the State. (…) Its basis is a feeling of the unblessedness of human being, of the State’s profound inadequacy to still the purely-human need. Its inmost kernel is denial of the world – [P. 24] … and struggle for redemption from it, prepared-for by renunciation, attained by Faith.” [701W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 23-24]
Wotan’s sin against Mother Nature, understood as a product of Alberich’s sin against himself (i.e., since Alberich’s Ring gave birth to Valhalla), can be construed in another way, as exceeding and overreaching the limits of Alberich’s natural egoism. Natural human egoism Feuerbach regarded as essential, inevitable, and necessary, but religious man’s sin of reaching for the impossible to satisfy infinite desires and assuage infinite fear he regarded as unnatural, a sin which greatly exceeded that of normal egoistic striving:
“Believers and atheists are agreed in seeking the useful and in shunning the harmful. (…) … the true difference between religion and atheism is the difference between infinite egoism and finite egoism.” [329F-LER: p. 307]
“For if a being’s worthiness to be worshiped, hence his divine dignity, depends solely on his relation to human welfare, if only a being beneficial and useful to man is divine, then the ground of divinity is to be sought solely in human egoism, which relates everything to itself and evaluates it solely in accordance with this relationship. (…) I find fault with religion only where the egoism it reflects is utterly base, as in teleology, where religion turns the relation that an object, and nature in particular, has to man, into the very essence of that object, and of nature, and where for that very reason religion takes an unboundedly egoistic, contemptuous attitude toward nature; or where, as in the Christian belief in miracles and immortality, it is an unnatural, supernatural, and chimerical egoism, exceeding the limits of necessary, natural egoism.” [204F-LER: p. 62]
“The only difference between the wishes without which there is no religion or God and the wishes without which there is no mankind, without which man is not man, is that religion has wishes that can be fulfilled only in the imagination, in faith, whereas man as man, the man who replaces religion with culture, reason, science and replaces heaven by earth, has desires that do not exceed the limits of nature and reason and whose realization lies within the realm of natural possibility.” [296F-LER: p. 249]
