“… man in relation to God denies his own knowledge, his own thoughts, that he may place them in God. Man gives up his personality; but in return, God, the almighty, infinite, unlimited being, is a person; he denies human dignity, the human ego; but in return God is to him a selfish, egotistical being, who in all things seeks only himself, his own honour, his own ends; he represents God as simply seeking the satisfaction of his own selfishness, while yet he frowns on that of every other being; his God is the very luxury of egoism.” [47F-EOC: p. 27]
Luxury suggests desires which are not needs but have the emotional impact of felt needs. Those who possess luxuries are said to possess more than they need, often at the expense of others’ needs. In Wagner’s following partial paraphrase of Feuerbach he draws an important parallel between luxury as something which men heartlessly, inhumanly, and egoistically desire to possess, a need unnatural because it is insatiable, and the Christian concept of the immaterial God, whom Wagner describes as the “sum of intellectual luxury,” who consumes man:
[P. 76] “Luxury is as heartless, inhuman, insatiable, and egoistic as the ‘need’ which called it forth, but which, with all its heaping-up and overreaching, it never more can still. For this need itself is no natural and therefore satisfiable one; by very reason that, being false, it has no true, essential antithesis in which it may be spent, consumed, and satisfied. (…) … it racks, devours, torments and burns, without an instant’s stilling; it leaves brain, heart and sense for ever vainly searching, and swallows up all gladness, mirth, and joy of life. For sake of one sole, and yet unreachable moment of refreshment, it squanders the toil and life-sweat of a thousand needy wanters; it lives upon the unstilled hunger of a thousand poor, though impotent to satiate its own for but the twinkling of an eye; it holds a whole world within the iron chains of despotism, without the power to momentarily break the golden chains of that arch-tyrant which it is unto itself. [Here we can’t help thinking of Alberich’s tyranny over the Nibelungs]And this fiend, … this need of Luxury … is sovereign of the world. It is the soul of that Industry which deadens men, to turn them to [P. 77] machines; the soul of our State which swears away men’s honour … ; the soul of our deistic Science, which hurls men down before an immaterial God [Wotan, viewed from the standpoint that he and the other gods of Valhalla are - thanks to Freia’s golden apples of sorrowless youth eternal - immaterial in the sense of not being subject to the laws of nature, the fate which Erda’s daughters the Norns spin], the product of the sum of intellectual luxury, for its consumption.” [421W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 76-77]
This grants us a special insight into the underlying similarity of Alberich’s and Wotan’s respective drives for power. Alberich’s power is concrete, wielded through man’s industry and learning, within the context of the real world, whereas the gods’ power is wielded over human psychology, and is therefore merely symbolic.
Returning now to Alberich’s last remark, that the coward, doomed to die by virtue of the Ring curse, will be fettered by fear and pine away as long as he lives, this is Wagner’s metaphor for the sickness of spirit engendered by religious man’s futile longing for transcendence, the ultimate expression of Alberich’s curse on the Ring. Religious man pines away because he cannot accept the fact of death and finitude, but is impelled to seek transcendent meaning where there is none. His fear of death, his inability to reconcile himself with his true, mortal nature, is the source not only of
