Wagner has noted here, by the way, his thesis that music is the product not of the conscious will but of the involuntary unconscious, which we have identified with Bruennhilde.
Our following extracts trace the influence of Feuerbach’s notion that when religious faith, religion as conceptual thought, is dying out in the face of man’s scientific advancement in knowledge, man’s religious longing for transcendence lives on, minus its intellectual or conceptual component, in music (just as Wotan’s Valhallan ideal lives on in his daughter Bruennhilde, the muse for Siegfried’s secular art).
“ … only where … the distinction between the divine [Wotan] and human being [Siegfried] is abolished, … is religion made a mere matter of feeling, or conversely, feeling the chief point in religion. The last refuge of theology [Wotan and the Valhallan gods] therefore is feeling [Bruennhilde]. God is renounced by the understanding; he has no longer the dignity of a real object, of a reality which imposes itself on the understanding [Alberich’s threat to expose the gods as mortal egoists just like him has forced Wotan to “go under,” by repressing this unbearable thought, his hoard of objective knowledge, into his unconscious mind Bruennhilde, who sublimates it into feeling, i.e., music]; hence he is transferred to feeling; in feeling his existence is thought to be secure. And doubtless this is the safest refuge; for to make feeling the essence of religion is nothing else than to make feeling the essence of God. And as certainly as I exist, so certainly does my feeling exist; and as certainly as my feeling exists, so certainly does my God exist.” [145F-EOC: p. 283]
“What would man be without feeling? It is the musical power in man. But what would man be without music? Just as man has a musical faculty and feels an inward necessity to breathe out his feelings in song; so, by a like necessity, he in religious sighs and tears streams forth the nature of feeling as an objective, divine nature.” [65F-EOC: p. 63]
“Fortunately, despite his servitude to theology, Luther found, outside of religion or theology, antidotes to the power of sin, hell, the devil or, what amounts to the same thing, the divine wrath. In a Latin letter to L. Senfel he writes that music, too, gives man what otherwise only theology can bestow, namely, a tranquil and serene mind, that the Devil, the author of all cares and emotional disturbances [say, Alberich and his curse, and Erda’s knowledge, both of which wane before Wotan’s Will, Bruennhilde], takes flight at the sound of music as he does at the word of theology.” [321F-LER: p. 291]
And here we find Wagner in his last years (interestingly, long, long after he claimed he had renounced Feuerbach altogether in preference for Schopenhauer’s philosophy) paraphrasing Feuerbach with considerable poetic flair on the subject of music as heir to religious faith:
“Yet another Hope might quicken once more in me, if only I could see it stirring in the breasts of others. It comes not from without. Men of science persuade us that Copernicus reduced the ancient Church-belief to ruins with his planetary system, since it robbed God Almighty of his heavenly seat. (…) The god within the human breast, of whose transcendent being our great Mystics were so certain sure, that god who needs no heavenly-home demonstrable by science, has given the parsons more ado. For us Germans had he become our inmost own: but our Professors have done him many a harm … . Yet this approachless god of ours had begotten much within us, and when at last he
