Postscript and Discussion to the Critique of Nathan Shield's Essay

As readers will already know, I have started a whole series of explanatory posts, the aim of which is to present the ideas crammed into my really long post analysing Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler in more manageable bite size portions of information.

So far I'd managed to do that, until yesterday's post critically examining an essay by Nathan Shields. I realised that it was far more sprawling and academic than I really wanted. Still that extensive quotation from Peter Longerich was just way too good not to use. I tried to trim the quote down but couldn't find a single phrase I could take out so I am not sure how to make it shorter. Instead I broke the quote up with commentary. Sorry, if the long quote is hardly a "bite sized" piece of information, but if you can manage to read through it, you'll get a lot out of it, especially when you can see how Longerich's line of argument is supported also by Sir Richard J. Evans and Professor Saul Friedländer.

I appreciate this blog isn't a peer reviewed print academic journal, so I try to compensate for the inevitable loss of credibility that comes from being an online self-published source with lengthy supportive quotes from major authorities and original primary source documents. It is all so readers can check the source documents to see if they are not being misused. It is something readers are strongly encouraged to do.

I also didn't really address the question raised by Shields on the philosophical and theological aspects of Parsifal. I have posts scattered through the blog on every major opera by Wagner, but Parsifal is one final major work I have yet to discuss. I promise that I will write that post at some time.

Some of the topics related to religion that Shields unsuccessfully grapples with have been dealt with in previous blog posts here:

Richard Wagner and the Divine Feminine: Wagner and Feminism

Gnosticism, Schopenhauer and The Ring of the Nibelungs

Wotan - the Wandering Jew - and his Untergang

Part of the issue here is the central theological question of the problem of evil, or theodicy. If the world is quintessentially about pain, suffering, and darkness, what does this say about the allegedly benevolent creator who would have made such a world? For Schopenhauer the force that drives genesis is just such a dark and blind drive. That raises questions about relations to Gnosticism and its view about the world being created by forces of darkness, not by a benevolent creator at all. This also brings it philosophically in line with Buddhism, the central tenet of which is that suffering is the most fundamental experience of existence. Glasenapp paraphrases Wagner well:

...the pure, unmixed Christianity is nothing other than a branch of noble Buddhism, which after its alternative Indian path found its way to the coast of the Mediterranean. 

My translation of Glasenapp, cited as coming from letter to Liszt, June 7, 1855, in Volume II of Liszt letters. 

That said, even late in his life Wagner was still talking favourably about socialism in 1880:

Still, one might even view . . . the present-day socialism as being a quite remarkable, seen from the side of our state society, as long as it and . . . vegetarians, animal rights activists, and moderationists, march in genuine and inner union. 

My translation. P.240 Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Band X. My Emphasis

Part of the problem I had with Shield's essay is that he really fails to grasp that the late Wagner is a synthesis of Feuerbachian socialist ideas and Schopenhauer. There is nothing unusual or contradictory about this at all. After all, it must be remembered that one of the reasons that Otto Rank fell out with Sigmund Freud was that Rank had the misfortune of being insightful enough to realise that his then master, Freud, had failed to say anything original that Schopenhauer had not already said before him. It was not long afterwards Rank was excommunicated from the Freud inner circle for daring to bring such inconvenient insights to light. After Wagner, there arose a whole school of twentieth century thought which blended socialist thought with psychoanalysis, the so-called Frankfurt School, with Adorno being its major representative. However, in his blend of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer, Wagner had already fully anticipated the Frankfurt School of thought.

The point here is that to approach Wagner from just a purely theological perspective, even if it deals with the Gnostic heresy, risks lapsing into another reactionary view that attempts to forcibly make Wagner comply with more conservative theological viewpoints.

I hope to write more on this later, when I discuss Parsifal.