“At lunch a recollection of Aeschylus’ chorus (the female hare and the eagle) causes him [Wagner] to remark on the nobility of this outlook, and he feels it was things like this that might have led to accusations of blasphemy against Aeschylus, this connection between holiness and Nature was probably at the bottom of the Eleusinian mysteries.” [993W-{11/14/79} CD Vol. II, p. 395]
And Alberich, who affirms Mother Nature’s objective reality, all that was, is, and will be, is –through his proxy and son Hagen – not only the agent through whom the gods will meet the inevitable end foretold by Erda. Alberich also, in venging himself upon the gods for usurping his (the truth’s) power, will punish religious man for the sin of world-renunciation, by restoring Mother Nature’s rightful claims:
“To reason alone belongs the great work of the resurrection and restoration of all things and beings – universal redemption and reconciliation. Not even the unreasoning animal, the speechless plant, the unsentient stone, shall be excluded from the universal festival.” [152F-EOC: p. 287]
We recognize a foreshadowing of Wagner’s conception of Alberich as Mother Nature’s agent of vengeance against man’s denial of her rights, in Feuerbach’s following description of the God who stands above the mediator (the savior) as the cold understanding and fate (i.e., Erda’s knowledge, spun by the Norns into their rope of fate) which stands above the heart and the Olympian (or Valhallan) gods:
“God above the mediator is nothing else but the cold understanding above the heart [Alberich, who has renounced love for the sake of the power of knowledge], like Fate above the Olympian gods.” [72F-EOC: p. 75]
The day will come, both Feuerbach and Wagner declare, when mortal man will finally recognize himself as the formerly unwitting author of that ideal of the imagination which we call divinity, and take responsibility for himself, casting off his belief in the protection of the gods, and renouncing his hope that redemption from man’s earthly coils is to be found in the gods’ heavenly abode. Here, for instance, we have one of Wagner’s innumerable meditations on the inevitable consequence of scientific inquiry, that no belief in God will be possible in a future scientific world in which all things are explained as natural:
“Take Goethe, who held Christ for problematical, but the good God for wholly proven, albeit retaining the liberty to discover the latter in Nature after his own fashion; which led to all manner of physical assays and experiments, whose continued pursuit was bound, in turn, to lead the present reigning human intellect to the result that there’s no God whatever, but only ‘Force and Matter.’ “ [1046W-{11/80} What Boots This Knowledge – First Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 256]
