[P. 92] (…) R. develops this subject further … , calling this God who dwells within us ‘the inborn antidote to the will’ … .” [917W-{6/11/78} CD Vol. II, p. 91-92]
Note also that, just as Wotan was at pains to produce a free hero and savior who would owe absolutely nothing to Wotan himself, owe nothing to God-the-Father, as it were, similarly Wagner wishes to disconnect Jesus, and by extension the creativity of geniuses (whose archetype or model Wagner has come to identify with Jesus), from the Old Testament Jewish creator god, God-the-Father, as if one could free oneself from one’s necessary preconditions.
Because the artistic genius always seemed to be either ahead of his time, or, what is the same thing, to exist independently of his time and historical context, because of the agelessness of his figuratively immortal works of art (which thus seemed autonomous from fate, in the sense of Erda’s knowledge of all that was, is, and will be), Wagner speculated that he must be inspired by a mysterious spiritual law entirely independent of the laws of nature and of history:
[P. 86] “If in a review of the course of history we go by nothing but its ruling laws of gravity, that pressure and counter-pressure which bring forth shapes akin to those the surface of the earth presents, the wellnigh sudden outcrop of over-topping mental heights must often make us ask upon what plan these minds were moulded. And then we are bound to presuppose a law quite other, concealed from eyes historical, ordaining the mysterious sequence of a spiritual life whose acts are guided by denial of the world and all its history. For we observe that the very points at which these minds make contact with their era and surroundings [as Siegfried apparently will soon do among the Gibichungs], become the starting points of errors and embarrassments in their own utterance: so that it is just the influences of Time, which involve them in a fate so tragical that precisely where the work of intellectual giants appears intelligible to their era, it proves of no account for the higher mental life; and only a later generation, arrived at knowledge through the very lead that remained unintelligible to the contemporaneous world, can seize the import of their [P. 87] revelations. Thus the seasonable, in the works of a great spirit, would also be the questionable.” [936W-{9/78} The Public In Time And Space: PW Vol. VI, p. 86-87]
After familiarizing himself with Schopenhauer’s philosophy during the fall of 1854, Wagner noted certain similarities between Schopenhauer’s writings on the egoistic “Will” – Kant’s thing-in-itself with a twist, of which Schopenhauer’s emphasis on music (i.e., creative artistic genius) and sexuality, as examples of the Will’s expression, were particularly exotic examples - and Wagner’s own prior writings on the almost supernatural power of music. But Wagner was having a hard time grasping how Schopenhauer’s egoistic Will, upon rising to consciousness of itself in the highest and most enlightened men, particularly in the form of unconscious artistic inspiration, could abrogate its own egoistic nature to attain redemption from itself (as Wotan wished to do):
[P. 280] [Speaking of “The blood of the Saviour … ,” Wagner said:] Divine we call it, and its source might dimly be approached in what we termed the human species’ bond of union, its aptitude for Conscious Suffering [for the sake of compassion, when understood from the moral standpoint, or art for art’s sake, understood from the aesthetic standpoint]. This faculty we can only regard as the last step reached by Nature in the ascending series of her fashionings; thenceforth she brings no new, no higher species to light, for in it she herself attains her unique freedom, the annulling of the internecine warfare of the Will. The hidden background [P. 281] of this Will,
