recognising the Great? And if perchance we recognise it, we are taught by our barbarous civilisation to hate and persecute it, for it stands in the way of general progress. But the Highest – what should this world have to traffic with that? How can it be asked to venerate the sorrows of the Saviour? (…) … what ‘educated’ person gladly goes to church? – Before all, ‘Away with the Great!’
If the Great is disliked in our so-called wider field of vision, the Small grows more and more unknowable … , since smaller day by day; as our constantly-progressive Science shows by splitting up the [P. 119] atoms till she can see nothing at all, which she imagines to be lighting on the Great; so that it is precisely she who feeds the silliest superstition, through the philosophisms in her train. If our Science, the idol of the modern world, could yield our State-machinery but so much healthy human reason as to find a means against the starving of fellow-citizens out of work, for example, we might end by taking her as good exchange for a church-religion sunk to impotence.” [963W-{4/79} Shall We Hope?: PW Vol. VI, p. 118-119]
Wagner was particularly upset at science’s threat to the morality of compassion and self-sacrifice (and even to man’s natural instinct for love) which was, even according to Feuerbach, our best and most lasting legacy from the Christian tradition, because, according to Feuerbach, it had always existed independently of religion, which co-opted it. He noted that such an amoral approach to scientific inquiry would inevitably culminate in the degradation of man, something Feuerbach himself pointed out when he acknowledged that for the pagans man is commonplace, for the Christians exalted and divine:
“Unfortunately our review of human things has shown us Pity struck from off the laws of our Society, since even our medical institutes, pretending care for man, have become establishments for teaching ruthlessness, which naturally will be extended – for sake of ‘science’ – from animals to any human beings found defenseless against its experiments.” [983W-{10/79} Letter to E. von Weber ‘Against Vivisection’: PW Vol. VI, p. 201]
“ … quite apart from their value in the eyes of the world, in his sufferings and death man is able to recognise a blessed expiation; whereas the beast, without one ulterior thought of moral advantage, sacrifices itself wholly and purely to love and lealty – though this also is explained by our physiologists as a simple chemical reaction of certain elementary substances.” [988W-{10/79} Letter to E. von Weber ‘Against Vivisection’: PW Vol. VI, p. 207]
For Wagner, once society acquiesces in science’s explanation of mysterious love and creative genius as, figuratively speaking, merely a chemical reaction, a predictable phenomena which can be reduced to mundane physical causes, and therefore alterable and corruptible by physical means, all hope of finding transcendent meaning in life is lost forever. That is what is at stake if Alberich regains his lost Ring-power.
[T.2.1: D]
But Alberich remains troubled by what – given the premises of our interpretation – can only be regarded as a metaphysical threat. Suppose, he says, Bruennhilde were to urge Siegfried to restore
