[P. 34] that Wahn wherein itself in turn, this serious reality, at last seems nothing else to us but Wahn: and in his most rapt beholding of this wondrous Wahn-play (Wahnspiel) there will return to him the indicible dream-picture of the holiest revelation [in other words, secular art offers man a new religion unencumbered by the fatal flaws of religious faith], … that same divine dream-picture which the disputes of sects and churches had made ever more incognisable to him, and which, as wellnigh unintelligible Dogma, could only end in his dismay. The nothingness of the world, here it is harmless, frank, avowed as though in smiling [as Wotan will glory, in Erda’s presence, in his – religious faith’s - own downfall, since he lives on reborn in the art which Siegfried, the secular music-dramatist, and his muse of inspiration, Bruennhilde, will produce, which will redeem man from Alberich’s curse of consciousness]; for our willing purpose to deceive ourselves [which Wotan admitted to Bruennhilde in his confession] has led us on to recognise the world’s real state without a shadow of illusion [Wotan’s confession of the unbearable truth]. –
(…) Will my friend in sympathy understand me, when I confess that first upon this path have I regained full consciousness of Art’s serenity.” [708W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 33-34]
And here Wagner provides us a more succinct version of his Feuerbachian meditation on the redemptive potentiality of secular art, which adds a point highly relevant to our current discussion, that religion has sought art’s aid, i.e., effectively sought redemption from its vulnerability, its false claim to the truth (the Ring), which is echoed precisely in Wotan’s longing for a hero freed from the gods’ vulnerabilities who can redeem the gods:
“One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognising the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentation. Whilst the priest stakes everything on the religious allegories being accepted as matters of fact, the artist has no concern at all with such a thing, since he freely and openly gives out his work as his own invention. But Religion has sunk into an artificial life, when she finds herself compelled to keep on adding to the edifice of her dogmatic symbols, and thus conceals the one divinely True in her beneath an ever growing heap of incredibilities commended to belief. Feeling this, she has always sought the aid of Art … .” [1019W-{6-8/80} Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 213]
It is noteworthy that it was only after Wotan confessed to Bruennhilde (unconsciously, of course) that he had been deceiving himself and others, and that he abhorred his own motives (because Alberich had forced Wotan to recognize his own motives were no higher than Alberich’s egoistic quest for power), that the possibility of redemption through the free hero Siegfried was attained. Wagner expresses this insight in the following remark recorded by Cosima:
“He says there are certain things human beings have been able to express only in symbols,and the church has committed the crime of consolidating these and forcing them on us as realities through persecution; it is permissible for art to use these symbols, but in a free spirit and not in the rigid forms imposed by the church; since art is a profound form of play, it frees these symbols of all the accretions the human craving for power [#19>#20a] has attached to them.” [1012W-{4/27/80}CD Vol. II, p. 470] [See also 1048W]
