reality is reality, that an image is a living being. But this being lives only in the imagination … .” [262F-LER: p. 183]
“ … the religious imagination is not the free imagination of the artist, but has a practical egoistic purpose, or in other words, … the religious imagination is rooted in the feeling of dependency and attaches chiefly to objects that arouse it. (…) This feeling of anxiety, of uncertainty, this fear of harm that always accompanies man, is the root of the religious imagination … .” [269F-LER: p. 196]
“The object of religion … is not the thauma, the wonder [which we experience in secular art, as described by Feuerbach in the previous extract, 269F], but the oneiar, the blessing, i.e., the god as an object not of astonishment, but of fear and hope; he is worshiped, he is the object of a cult, not because of those attributes that arouse astonishment and admiration, but because of those that establish and preserve human existence [Fafner, as man’s invulnerable instinct of self-preservation], that appeal to man’s sense of dependency.” [202F-LER: p. 47]
Wagner paraphrases this Feuerbachian argument point by point, and what is more remarkable, in writings completed many years after Wagner had proclaimed himself freed by Schopenhauer from adherence to Feuerbach’s optimistic, materialist philosophy, in 1854. Witness Wagner’s following stunningly revealing letter to King Ludwig II, which is essentially an elaboration of Feuerbach’s argument as presented in the four extracts quoted above:
[P. 33] “Yet an irrecusable yearning to turn his [“… the great, the truly noble man …”] back completely on this world [Wotan’s despairing expression of his desire to end it all which will be the climax of his confession to Bruennhilde] must necessarily surge up within his breast were there not for him – as for the common man who lives away a life of constant care [i.e., fear] – a certain distraction, a periodical turning-aside from that world’s-earnestness [existential fear] which else is ever present to his thoughts. What for the common man is entertainment and amusement, must be forthcoming for him as well, but in the noble form befitting him; and that which renders possible this turning aside, this noble illusion, must again be a work of that man-redeeming Wahn [illusion] which spreads its wonders wherever the individual’s normal mode of view can help itself no farther. But in this instance the Wahn must be entirely candid; it must confess itself in advance for an illusion, if it is to be willingly embraced by the man who really longs for distraction and illusion in the high and earnest sense I mean. The fancy-picture brought before him must never afford a loophole for re-summoning the earnestness of Life through any possible dispute about its actuality and provable foundation upon fact, as religious Dogma does: no, it must exercise its specific virtue through its very setting of the conscious Wahn in place of the reality. This office is fulfilled by Art; and in conclusion I therefore point my highly-loved young friend [King Ludwig II] to Art, as the kindly Life-saviour who does not really and wholly lead us out beyond this life [i.e., unlike religion, art does not promise man immortality or supernatural transcendence], but, within it, lifts us up above it and shows it as itself a game of play; a game that, take it ne’er so terrible and earnest an appearance [as in Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde of all that he fears and abhors in his own life], yet here again is shown us as a mere Wahn-picture, as which it comforts us and wafts us from the common truth of our distress (Noth). The work of noblest Art will be given a glad admittance by my friend, the work that, treading on the footprints of Life’s earnestness [the existential fear which is the basis for religious faith and its fear of the truth], shall soothingly dissolve reality into
