And so, this redemption by love through unconscious artistic inspiration, which we have just witnessed, is about as close as Wagner comes to positing a miraculous event, or the supernatural, in the Ring, aside from the seemingly obvious instances of magic which, in any case, we can best construe as metaphors for more mundane, natural phenomena. This love Siegfried and Bruennhilde share is, after all, the best answer Wotan can come up with to Alberich’s threat, and it is according to his own words the means for redemption of gods and world. In a sense their love, Siegfried’s unconscious artistic inspiration by his muse, is even on a higher plane than conventional religious belief in supernatural gods. And yet, eventually, they will betray this love, just as collective, historical, religious man (Wotan) ultimately betrayed his faith by gathering a hoard of knowledge of the world (Erda) in the course of time, which undermined his faith.
And this leaves us with a classic Wagnerian conundrum. A subject of constant interest is whether or not Wagner was a true believer in God, in the transcendent realm of spirit, or whether he was merely a pantheist masquerading from time to time as a Christian or Buddhist for his art’s sake, or even worse (from the standpoint of religious folk), an atheist and materialist. There are of course other philosophical possibilities I haven’t mentioned. But this is a natural question for Wagner’s admirers and detractors to ask, considering that Wagner openly espoused only two major philosophies during his lifetime, the first being Feuerbach’s openly proclaimed materialism and atheism, with its provocative critique of religious man’s psychology (which exposed the mundane motives which inspired man to involuntarily and unconsciously invent religion, with its supernatural gods). The second was the self-avowed atheist Schopenhauer’s far more spiritual philosophy, in which, like his mentor Kant, Schopenhauer seems to have tried to smuggle the divine, the mysterious, the transcendent, back into a world of matter and energy and immutable natural laws, a world in which Schopenhauer nonetheless admitted (like Feuerbach) that there is no free will, no God (or gods, i.e., no supernatural creator or agent who intervenes in the affairs of men through miracles), no immortality, and no literal heaven of redemption from our earthly coils. Schopenhauer, like Wagner, seems to have found heaven within man’s deepest self, and for Wagner, our best guides to that deepest realm of peace were the greatest of philosophers (like Schopenhauer), and most especially inspired secular artists.
In any case, a brief survey of some of Wagner’s most profound thoughts about the process of unconscious artistic inspiration - which is the closest parallel to what the Christians believe transpires in their redemption, and restoration of lost paradise, which Wagner could imagine - might help provide us an answer, and help explain why this highest bliss could be betrayed by its very authors, Siegfried and Bruennhilde, in the course of Twilight of the Gods. The main point to remember is that by virtue of falling heir to Wotan’s daughter Bruennhilde, man’s collective unconscious, who is the muse for Siegfried’s redemptive art, Siegfried the individual artist has fallen heir to the primal religious Folk’s (i.e., early man’s) creative spirit, which produced the first alleged revelations from the gods. It follows from Wagner’s Feuerbach-inspired hypotheses that just as man’s original religions were produced unconsciously and involuntarily among collective humanity through what we might describe as a collective dream, so the individual artist of modern times, if he is truly authentic, is inspired to create his artwork by the same impulse, and to this degree is the guardian of man’s religious spirit in modern, secular times.
