In the following passages Wagner further develops this notion of secular art, and particularly music, as an alternative to the self-destructive nihilism inspired by religious man’s despair at the failure of faith in the face of the modern world:
[P. 378] “Just as with my ‘Siegfried,’ the force of my desire had borne me to the fount of the Eternal Human; so now, when I found this desire cut off by Modern Life from all appeasement, and saw afresh that the sole redemption lay in flight from out this life, in casting-off its claims on me by self-destruction, did I come to the fount of every modern rendering of such a situation – to Jesus of Nazareth the Man.
(…) When I considered the epoch and the general life-conditions in [P. 379] which so loving and so love-athirst a soul, as that of Jesus, unfolded itself, nothing seemed to me more natural than that this solitary One – who, fronted with a materialism (Sinnlichkeit) so honourless, so hollow, and so pitiful as that of the Roman world, and still more of the world subjected to the Romans, could not demolish it and build upon its wrack an order answering to his soul’s desire – should straightway long from out that world, from out the wider world at large, towards a better land Beyond, -- toward Death. Since I saw the modern world of nowadays a prey to worthlessness akin to that which then surrounded Jesus, so did I now recognise this longing, in correspondence with the characteristics of our present state of things, as in truth deep-rooted in man’s sentient nature [in other words, man’s longing for transcendence of the real world is the outgrowth of instinctive animal impulses like desire and fear, which are the product of the real world and ultimately long only to restore it, whatever man’s imagination may tell him to the contrary], which yearns from out an evil and dishonoured world-of-sense (Sinnlichkeit) towards a nobler reality that shall answer to his nature purified. (…) But the actual destruction of the outer, visible bonds of that honourless materialism, is the duty which devolves on us, as the healthy proclamation of a stress [Noth?] turned heretofore toward self-destruction.” [580W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 378-379]
[P. 8] “… I had already sketched, finally completed, the poem of my ‘Ring des Nibelungen.’ With this conception I had unconsciously admitted to [P. 9] myself the truth about things human. Here everything is tragic through and through, and the Will, that fain would shape a world according to its wish, at last can reach no greater satisfaction than the breaking of itself in dignified annulment. [Wotan, in other words, gives up as futile his quest to redeem himself, i.e., redeem man, from his true, egoistic nature.] It was the time when I returned entirely and exclusively to my artistic plans, and thus, acknowledging Life’s earnestness with all my heart, withdrew to where alone can ‘gladsomeness’ abide.” [i.e., withdrew to the subjective consolation of pure feeling, the refuge of the unconscious mind, in music, which knows nothing of man’s conceptual, existential dilemma, the irresolvability of the conflict between truth and the illusion that man has transcendent value] [694W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 8-9]
[P. 304] “I had reached the age of 36 [in 1849, when Wagner was emancipating himself from traditional romantic opera and embarking on the creation of the Ring and his other revolutionarymusic-dramas] before I divined the true reason for my creative impulse: until then I had regarded art as the end and life as a means to that end. But I made this discovery too late [i.e., Wagner had become too conscious of the truth], with the result that my new instinct for life was bound to end in tragedy. By taking a broader view of today’s world, we can further see that
