“It is not to Christian faith, not to Christian love (i.e., love limited by faith); no! it is to doubt of Christian faith, to the victory of religious scepticism, to free-thinkers, to heretics, that we owe tolerance, freedom of opinion. It was the heretics, persecuted by the Christian Church, who alone fought for freedom of conscience.” [171F-EOC: p. 323]
[P. 209] “Religion arises solely in the night of ignorance, in times of misery, helplessness, and rudimentary culture, when for this very reason the imagination overshadows all man’s other powers, where man entertains the wildest and most extravagant ideas. Yet it also springs from man’s need of light, of culture … ; it is indeed the first, still crude and vulgar form of human culture … . Everything which later became a field of independent human activity, of culture, was originally an aspect of religion: all the arts, all the sciences, or rather, the first beginnings, the [P. 210] first elements – for as soon as an art or science achieves a high state of development, it ceases to be religion – were originally the concern of religion and its representatives, the priests.” [278F-LER: p. 209-210]
“If the faith of the present day no longer produces such flagrant deeds of horror [i.e., the oppression of heretics, as in the Catholic Church’s Inquisition], this is due only to the fact that the faith of this age is not an uncompromising, living faith, but a sceptical, eclectic, unbelieving faith, curtailed and maimed by the power of art and science.” [170F-EOC: p. 323]
[V.2.2: H]
Having reached the nub of his existential dilemma, Wotan now offers full disclosure, explaining in remarkable detail both why the gods can only find redemption from Alberich’s curse in the allegedly spontaneous actions of a hero freed from the gods’ authority, and why Wotan has become convinced that such a hero is a mere figment of his imagination, an impossibility invented by his artistic fancy out of desperation to find a ground of transcendent meaning which the inevitability of Alberich’s victory over the gods (the historically necessary decline of religious faith) has rendered futile. Here, Wotan’s spiritual impotence, which neither he nor Fricka could ever admit to themselves consciously, much less publicly, is on full display to his unconscious mind Bruennhilde:
Wotan: (muted: #19:) Troubled, I brooded in turn how to wrest the ring from my foe (:#19): (muted: #26a) one of the giants, whose work I rewarded (#26a) with gold that was cursed, Fafner broods on the hoard for which he killed his brother. (#5voc:; #19 harmony:) From him I must wrest the ring (:#5 voc; #19 harmony), which I paid him once as tribute: (#28:) having treated with him, I cannot meet him; fatally weakened, my courage would fail me (:#28). (#21) (bitterly) These are the bonds that hold me in thrall: (#21) I, lord of treaties, am now a slave to those treaties. ([[ #83ab: ]]; #57:) One man alone could do what I myself may not: a hero I never stooped to help; who, unknown to the god and free of his favours, all unwitting, without his bidding, by his own need
