feeling. In other words, no matter how much worldly baggage the religious man jettisons in order to purify his religion of any conceptual contradictions which could undermine faith, even if religion finally seeks refuge in mere feeling, and not only in fiction, one can always trace this process back to man’s original egoistic religious impulse, his fear of death, and fear of truth. Some time after Wagner had turned against Feuerbach’s atheistic, materialist philosophy, in favor of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic (i.e., world-renouncing) yet spiritual brand of atheism, he complained that Feuerbach traced all religious impulse back to egoism, but in the same breath admitted that religion and its purified expression as art is merely Wahn, self-deception:
“Whosoever thinks he has said the last word on the essence of the Christian faith when he styles it an attempted satisfaction of the most unbounded egoism, a kind of contract wherein the beneficiary is to obtain eternal, never-ending bliss on condition of abstinence [or ‘renunciation’ – Entsagung] and free-willed suffering in this relatively brief and fleeting life, he certainly has defined therewith the sort of notion alone accessible to unshaken human egoism, but nothing even distantly resembling the Wahn-transfigured concept proper to the actual practiser of free-willed suffering and renunciation. Through voluntary suffering and renunciation, on the contrary, man’s egoism is already practically upheaved, and he who chooses them, let his object be whate’er you please, is thereby raised already above all notions bound by Time and Space; for no longer can he seek a happiness that lies in Time and Space, e’en were they figured as eternal and immeasurable.” [703W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 25]
Wagner’s Freudian slip, his perhaps unwitting admission that he is contradicting himself in asserting that religious faith or art can transcend egoism, can be found both in his acknowledgment that this allegedly transcendent Christian faith is “Wahn-transfigured,” i.e., a sort of higher illusion or self-deception, and also in the reluctant caution he expresses in the proviso: “… and he who chooses them [i.e., “… voluntary suffering and renunciation …”], let his object be whate’er you please, is thereby raised already above all notions bounds by Time and Space … .” Thanks to Feuerbach’s teaching, Wagner is obviously dubious about his own new conviction, developed under Schopenhauer’s influence, that religious faith or art can somehow void the contract man makes with his own egoistic motives.
However, Wagner, following Feuerbach’s lead, felt he had solved the problem of purging artistic creation of all egoistic impulse, all practical will to power, by resorting to music, the art most divorced from concepts and images, which Wagner, paraphrasing Feuerbach, describes as the inner chamber of the heart:
This timid crowd [men of religious faith striving to preserve it in the context of the modern and ever more secular, skeptical world] can no longer erect temples or cathedrals, so now the only temple left for God is a chamber of the heart.” [26F-TDI: p. 192]
[P. 29] “… the hopelessly materialistic, industrially commonplace, entirely un-Goded aspect of the modern world [Alberich’s objective world] is debitable to the counter eagerness of the common practical understanding to construe religious Dogma [belief in the gods of Valhalla] by laws of cause-and-effect deduced from the phenomena of natural and social life, and to fling aside whatever rebelled against that mode of explanation as a reasonless chimera. (…)
But does this mean that Religion itself has ceased? –
