Parsifal: A Theology After the Death of God

Wagner's Parsifal stands in a centuries-long tradition of religious musical works. As with all liturgical works, the chosen text for the work, here written by Wagner himself, is of tantamount importance in attempting an analysis of the theological dimension of the liturgy.

The Temptation of Sir Percival, 1894 by Arthur Hacker (Leeds Art Gallery)

The trouble with Parsifal is that it is a theologically exceedingly unorthodox text—and that is putting it mildly. Throughout the entire length of its text the supernatural intervention God is never evoked, and nor is the Resurrection even once mentioned either. In particular, Parsifal himself never once evokes the name of God throughout the text. Admittedly, the Resurrection is not depicted at the end of Bach St Matthew's Passion either, but the final chorus (wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder) at least solemnly implies it in a way that is entirely consistent with traditional liturgical practice for Easter.

The question becomes what has become of God in Wagner's Parsifal, and why he is never once evoked as the source of salvation. Even the final salvation in Parsifal is neither granted deus ex machina by a supernatural intervention of the grace of God, nor the miracle of the Resurrection, but comes of a humanistic enlightenment through an awakening of universal compassion for suffering of a kind more akin to the Buddhist concept of karuṇā. The final salvation in Parsifal can be read as the futility of appeals to the supernatural intervention of a God-King, salvation emerging only through a humanistic enlightenment to universal suffering. Until then the knights of the grail are left "waiting for Godot". At that point of enlightenment, Kundry says to Parsifal "though God and the world disown me, in you be cleansed of sin and redeemed!" It is precisely her seduction that leads Parsifal to his awakening in such a way as to represents a fundamental paradox, a paradox that runs through the theology of Parsifal.

Wagner's attitude towards God can be illuminated by passages in his writings elsewhere. The Wagner who completed Parsifal in 1882 calls God an "anthropomorphic metaphor" in a clear-cut simultaneous reference both to Feuerbach (God as anthropomorphism) and Schopenhauer (religion as metaphor), seemingly long after Schopenhauer had replaced Feuerbach in Wagner's affections:

“Knowest thou thy creator, world?” Thus exclaims the poet, who, out of the dictates of conceptual verbal-language had to express the inexpressible with an anthropomorphic metaphor in a misleadingly symbolic manner.

„Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?”—so ruft der Dichter, der aus Bedarf der begrifflichen Wort-Sprache mit Hilfe einer anthropomorphistischen Metapher etwas Unausdrückbares nur mißverständlich bezeichnen muß.

Wagner: Religion und Kunst (1880). Gesammelte Schriften X, p 250

In Art and Religion (1880), Wagner quotes Schiller's Ode to Joy only to say that this God is an anthropomorphic metaphor (anthropomorphistischen Metapher)

Wagner wrote Artwork of the Future (1849) in the same year as the Dresden uprising.
“Dedicated to Ludwig Feuerbach in grateful reverence”.
Image from original publication by Otto Wigland, Leipzig, 1850

In short, come Parsifal, the anthropomorphic personal God-King of traditional theology is already dead. Parsifal is religion for atheists. It is a theology after the Death of God, a concept that Nietzsche merely borrows off his old Meister, Richard Wagner. The question becomes, how, in Wagner's previous oeuvre leading up to Parsifal, this came about.

What has happened in Wagner is that the anthropomorphic God has been consumed in the flames of the "mighty fortress" of Valhalla at the climax of Götterdämmerung. For "a mighty fortress is our God"—"ein feste Burg ist unser Gott". Nor is this interpretation of Wagner at all original in that George Bernard Shaw already says this in his book The Perfect Wagnerite when he calls Wotan the Godhead. This might be considered alarming to religious conservatives, but there is good evidence for the remarkable insightfulness of Shaw's interpretation.

The main evidence that Wagner considered Wotan to be akin to the God of the Old Testament comes from Religion and Art (1880) where Wagner clearly states that he viewed the Abrahamic Yahweh Elohim as the God of war:

How, without this falling back to the Jewish spirituality and its placement on an equal footing to that of that of the pure Christian Gospel, would it have been possible up till the present day, to have elevated the claims of the church on the civilised world, whose people are armed to the teeth for the sake of their mutual annihilation, the prosperity of peace squandered, ready at the first sign of the warlord to systematically pounce into mauling one another? Obviously, it is not Jesus Christ, the Saviour, whom our military clergy praise as a paragon in front of the assembled battalions, before the beginning of the slaughter. Even if they name Him, they really mean: Jehovah, Yahweh or one of the Elohim, who hates all other gods other than himself, and who wants to be enchained to his beloved people.

The point that Wagner is making in The Ring is that to worship Yahweh Elohim is to worship the barbaric tribal war God of the Hebrew people. To do so is hardly any different to worshipping the barbaric German tribal war god, Wotan. Both Wotan and Yahweh Elohim are tribal gods of storms and war to whom animals were slaughtered in the hope of winning Him over to avenge the enemies of the tribe. Wagner is making reference to the fact that in Hebrew el is singular and elohim is the plural, making Yahweh Elohim the chief of the gods, in the plural. In The Ring, Wotan even takes on the guise of the wandering Jew who meets his Untergang, suggesting that the end of The Ring is both equally the demise of the Germanic as well as Jewish anthropomorphic God-King. If Wagner calls upon Jew and German to become "united and without difference", it would seem that the figures of Wotan and Yahweh are already by their essential nature "united and without difference".

If the Hebrew tribes slaughtered animals, and even sacrificed human beings, in the name of Yahweh Elohim to avenge the enemies of Israel (which can even be translated to mean "god fights"), then the Germanic peoples did the same in the name of Wotan. There are numerous references to human sacrifice in the Old Testament, and, in the New Testament, Christ becomes the ultimate ritual human sacrifice of the first-born (the Lamb of God), whose flesh (bread) is eaten and whose blood (wine) is drunk in the cannibalistic symbolic rituals of the Christian Mass. In Transformation Symbolism of the Mass, Carl Jung points out semiotic parallels between the ritual of the Mass and the Aztec “Teoqualo” (“god-eating”) with both exhibiting the same ritual pattern of human sacrifice and anthropophagy, which caused much consternation amongst the Spanish priests who first observed it.

To Wagner, however, Wotan and Yahweh Elohim are much the same thing, barbaric tribal gods to whom sacrifices had to be made to appease the terrifying God of wrath and storms. There are numerous examples of this savage and wrathful God in the Bible:

But I have been the Lord your God
ever since you came out of Egypt.
You shall acknowledge no God but me,
no Savior except me.
I cared for you in the wilderness,
in the land of burning heat.
When I fed them, they were satisfied;
when they were satisfied, they became proud;
then they forgot me.
So I will be like a lion to them,
like a leopard I will lurk by the path.
Like a bear robbed of her cubs,
I will attack them and rip them open;
like a lion I will devour them—
a wild animal will tear them apart. 

Hosea 13:4-9 

Like Wotan, Yahweh Elohim must be appeased, for otherwise the consequences will be catastrophic:

I will have no compassion,
even though he thrives among his brothers.
The people of Samaria must bear their guilt,
because they have rebelled against their God.
They will fall by the sword;
their little ones will be dashed to the ground,
their pregnant women ripped open.
You are destroyed, Israel,
because you are against me, against your helper. 

Hosea 13:14-16 

And again Yahweh is portrayed as wrathful and vengeful:

Therefore the Lord, the Lord Almighty,
the Mighty One of Israel, declares:
Ah! I will vent my wrath on my foes
and avenge myself on my enemies. 

Isaiah 1:24

Erhard S. Gerstenberger writes on p.151 of Theologies of the Old Testament:

Yahweh was not always God in Israel and at every social level. Rather, initially he belongs only to the storm and war gods like Baal, Anath, Hadad, Resheph and Chemosh.

Yahweh Elohim, God of storms and war, on his cloud-riding chariot of war. Yahweh is depicted with the symbol of a bird just as Wotan is depicted with his ravens.

So Wotan was originally the exact Germanic structural mythological analogue of the Hebrew God of storms and war, Yahweh Elohim. This is why, as a pacifist, Wagner objects vehemently in The Ring to the way religion is constantly used to sanctify war, and given that religion originates in the primitive sanctification of vengeance against the tribal enemies, he has a point. Not only that but the conservative order uses religion to sustain l'ancien regime to which people exist in an enslaved state, from which they are helpless to escape from. Götterdämmerung represents the end of enslavement to the religiously ordained ancient order of warring power structures.

Wotan or Odin is depicted like Yahweh with bird symbolism (ravens). Wotan's name meant "frenzy", as in frenzied "rage", but which also implied poetically possessed rapture and wisdom. Wut means "rage" in German, making Wotan the Wrathful One. Odin was also known as Gangleri or "wanderer".

At this point, someone is probably going to scream something to the effect that National Socialists theology also rejected the Old Testament on the basis of it being Jewish, and proclaim that Wagner was the source of this. In Nazi theology, the Bible was to be purged of the Old Testament, and claims about the "Aryan Jesus" were made, with the Germans replacing the Jews as the "chosen people". The trouble with this is that although much ink has been spilt over the topic of National Socialist theology and the ties between the Party and the German churches, no author specialising in this subject has ever once suggested that Nationalist Socialist theologians got their ideas off some nineteenth-century opera composer.

Wagner's reason for rejecting the wrathful God of the Old Testament differs markedly from National Socialist theology in that Wagner was driven principally by his pacifism to reject the wrathful war God of the Old Testament. By way of contrast, the National Socialist rejection of the Old Testament was driven entirely by racial anti-Semitism, and it furthermore did not reject the autocratic notion of an anthropomorphic God-King—something far too radically liberal for any extreme right-wing reactionary theology to ever consider seriously. The rejection of an anthropomorphic God-King in favour of pantheism is something that has a long history amongst liberal thinkers from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, who felt that the idea of an autocratic God-King ruling the world from his otherworldly throne merely sanctified the inherited dictatorships of the ancient regime, and it is in this liberal tradition that Wagner continues.

As for the notion that Wagner believed in the Aryan Jesus concept, that is emphatically refuted by this passage from Wagner’s Heldentum und Christentum:

The blood of the Saviour flowing from his head, from his wounds on the cross—who would commit such an outrage as to ask [frevelnd fragen] whether it might belong to the white or any other race? We should call that divine to approach the source, full of foreboding for what that which we referred to as constituting the unity of the human species, namely the capacity for conscious suffering.

Das Blut des Heilands, von seinem Haupte, aus seinen Wunden am Kreuze fliessend, - wer wollte frevelnd fragen, ob es der weissen oder welcher Race sonst angehörte? Wenn wir es göttlich nennen, so dürfte seinem Quelle ahnungsvoll einzig in dem, was wir als die Einheit der menschlichen Gattung ausmachend bezeichneten, zu nahen sein, nämlich in der Fähigkeit zu bewusstem Leiden.  

My translation and emphasis

Wagner makes it clear that in his interpretation, the humanistic Jesus represents the transcendence of ethnic divides, and that the notion of an "Aryan Jesus" is nothing less than an utter outrage. As usual, where the Aryan Jesus concept is claimed to have operatic origins, it is generally based on the fact that certain polemical authors insist on saying so, over and over again until it becomes The Truth. Never is any primary source material produced to substantiate it, and soon we find the wholesale replacement of evidence by brute repetition. Nor outside of this Nazi opera conspiracy literature do we find such ideas repeated, whether in innumerable studies of the relationship between the Party and Christianity, or in mainstream academic historiographies of the Dritte Reich.

...the Nazi rejection of the Old Testament cannot be used to demonstrate an antithesis to Christianity.... [T]he theology of the German-Christians, the group of pro-Nazi Protestants who, like the Nazis themselves, rejected the Old Testament and contended that Jesus was Aryan. 

Richard Steigmann-Gall: The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 p11

Many pastors joined the German Christian Movement, which wanted to deepen the spiritual renewal into a liturgical and theological one—banning the Old Testament and expurgating the New of Jewish influence, and excluding Jewish converts from Protestant ministry. 

Nicholas Stargardt: The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-45 (Introduction) 

One of Bach's most famous cantatas is based on the Lutheran hymn "ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", or "a mighty fortress is our God".

Martin Luther's chorale "ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" was often called the "Battle Hymn of the Reformation"

In Götterdämmerung, that mighty fortress is the castle of Valhalla. That is why when Valhalla goes up in flames, so too does Yahweh Elohim. It represents the end of the dominion over the world of the archaic wrathful tribal God of war, storms and vengeance—one who uses deceit to lead humanity into war. Yet this objection to religion is as relevant to us today as ever given that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all claim to worship the same Abrahamic Wotan of storms and war. Whether it be a George Bush, a Netanyahu, a Vladimir Putin, or a Bin Laden, they each sanctimoniously beat their tribal war drums and cry out for blood vengeance in the name of the same Abrahamic God of war, quite irrespective of whether they know this Wotan by the name of God, Allah, Yahweh Elohim, or Bog. In place of Yahweh and Wotan sending out their iconic birds we have mechanised warbirds of every kind that strike like thunder out of the blue. Human sacrifices in the name of the war God of a kind described in the Bible have also been revived by some adherents with beheadings similar in gruesomeness to the ritual sacrifices of the Aztecs who cut the beating hearts out of their sacrificial victims.

The rejection of the Abrahamic war God, in favour of a humanistic Jesus who teaches salvation through universal compassion, constitutes a quintessential expression of Wagner's pacifism. Götterdämmerung is a celebration of the apocalyptic downfall of the dominion over the world of the God of war over humanity in a way that expresses a yearning for peace, and freedom from the endless sanctification of war by organised religions that demand endless blood sacrifice to the Abrahamic Wotan—something that remains as relevant today as it was in Wagner's own day.

This is why come Parsifal, there is precious little pleading to the God-King to grant salvation. The chariot riding tribal war God has gone up in flames along with Valhalla. The "mighty fortress" is no more. The wrathful anthropomorphic God-King is dead. That is why there can be no supernatural salvation through the divine intervention of a God-King—nor even a supernatural Resurrection. Salvation comes from a humanistic source, through compassion. And for Wagner, Jesus is human, and the salvation of Christ, a humanistic salvation through the universal awakening of compassion for the suffering of our fellow humanity. Jesus and the anguish He experiences during his crucifixion become humanistic symbols of universal suffering and awakening to the need for compassion. Indeed, even the Koran acknowledges Jesus as the Prophet of Love.

Matthias Grünewald's graphic depiction of the suffering of Christ on the cross

This is also why Parsifal begins with a scene in which Parsifal foolishly kills a swan. That partly reflects Wagner's animal rights views, but moreover, the swan is a symbol of peace. Parsifal is the fool because he violently trespasses against the peace using brutal and primitive violence without the slightest compassion towards the suffering of sentient beings. It reflects Wagner's acceptance of Schopenhauer's message that all forms of war and violence against sentient creatures shows a fundamental lack of compassion and humanity.

Parsifal and the swan

It is little surprise that right-wingers cry foul and try to get rid of Wagner by telling us that he is history's original Nazi, the archetypal poster-boy for the far right who glorifies war. With the fairy tale that Wagner is actually one of them, all of these inconveniently radical left-wing pacifist-socialist provocations inherent to Wagner's thought conveniently get swept out of the way, and neatly deleted from the discourse in order to make room for the most belligerent possible fascist ideologies. It is entirely wishful thinking on their behalf, likewise with all of the quite bizarre Occult Reich fantasies the far right have projected onto Parsifal over the years, rampant fantasies born of a total lack of understanding of the complex strains of philosophy that run through the work. While it is true that theosophy similarly blends Eastern philosophical themes with Gnostic ones, Alfred Rosenberg, a member of the theosophical Thule Society—where many an early Nazi Party member congregated, and around which much bizarre Occult Reich speculation still centres—has curiously nothing whatsoever to say about Wagner's Parsifal in his Myth of the Twentieth Century.

As for literature examining National Socialist theology and the complicity of the German churches with the regime, I have carefully examined the burgeoning literature on the subject, including Daniel Goldhagen, John Cornwell, Richard Steigmann-Gall, Ericksen & Heschel, Derek Hastings, Guenter Lewy, Karp & Köhler, Rainer Brendel, Karlheinz Deschner, Anthony Sciolino, David Cymet, Christopher J. Probst, Uriel Tal, Paul C. Hinlicky, Peter Longerich, Gabriel Wilensky, and Matthew Hockenos. Not a single one of these authors has uncovered even the slightest shred of evidence to support the grossly speculative allegation of a direct influence of Wagner's Parsifal on Nazi theology of a kind found in kitschy Occult Reich books. Parsifal contains a theology that is liberal and unorthodox to such extremes that it is hardly surprising to find reactionaries branding it a Satanist conspiracy far worse than conventional atheism. Reactionaries have always asserted that pantheism is "worse than atheism"—as a sanctimoniously deified atheism it can only be the naughty work of the devil.

There is far worse to come in Wagner for ideological reactionaries. God dies at the hands of a woman. Strong sympathy for women's rights was an essential part of the Young Germany movement. In Götterdämmerung, as the mighty fortress of Valhalla goes up in flames, it also represents the end of a patriarchal theocratic order ruled over by an almighty masculine God-King, an order used by the theocratic religious order to sanctify the brutal subjugation of women to patriarchy. The worst part for right-wingers is that the end of Siegfried makes it clear that the flames of Brünnhilde's love in which Valhalla is consumed have incandescently erotic connotations to them. These are her words at the end of Siegfried as she passionately embraces the newfound blindingly intense human sexuality of her now mortal body, as the rebellious warrior maiden threatens to devour him:

Divine peace floods me in waves;
chastest light blazes in the embers:
the wisdom of heaven storms away from me,
chased away by the ecstasy of love!If I am now yours?
Siegfried, Siegfried, do you not see me?
As my eyes devour you, are you not blinded?
As my arms enfold you, are you not set ablaze by me?
As my blood storms like a sea towards you in surges, do you not feel it, the raging fire?
Siegfried, are you not terrified, do you not fear this wild, raging woman?

Oh childlike hero!
Oh sublime boy!
You magnificent feat of foolish treasure!
Laughing, I must love you, laughing may I go blind;
laughing let us go to ruin, laughing let us perish!
Farewell, Valhalla's glittering world!
Let your proud fortness fall to dust!
Farewell, resplendent pomp of the gods!
May your end be blissful, immortal race!You Norns, let snap your runes of rope!Twilight of the gods, let your darkness descend!
Night of annihilation, may your mists descend!
Siegfried's star now shines upon me: he is mine forever, my inheritance and property, one and all: radiant love,
laughing death!

Göttliche Ruhe rast mir in Wogen;
keuschestes Licht lodert in Gluten:
himmlisches Wissen stürmt mir dahin,
Jauchzen der Liebe jagt es davon!
Ob jetzt ich dein?
Siegfried! Siegfried!
Siehst du mich nicht?
Wie mein Blick dich verzehrt,
erblindest du nicht?
Wie mein Arm dich preßt,
entbrennst du mir nicht?
Wie in Strömen mein Blut entgegen dir stürmt,
das wilde Feuer, fühlst du es nicht?
Fürchtest du, Siegfried,
fürchtest du nicht das wild wütende Weib?

O kindischer Held!
O herrlicher Knabe!
Du hehrster Taten
töriger Hort!
Lachend muss ich dich lieben,
lachend will ich erblinden,
lachend lass uns verderben
lachend zu Grunde gehn!
Fahr' hin, Walhalls
leuchtende Welt!
Zerfall in Staub
deine stolze Burg!
Leb' wohl, prangende
Götterpracht!
End' in Wonne,
du ewig Geschlecht!
Zerreisst, ihr Nornen,
das Runenseil!
Götterdämm'rung,
dunkle herauf!
Nacht der Vernichtung,
neble herein! -
Mir strahlt zur Stunde
Siegfrieds Stern;
er ist mir ewig,
ist mir immer,
Erb' und Eigen,
ein' und all':
leuchtende Liebe,
lachender Tod!

Siegfried: Act III; Scene III (my own translation)

To cut rather bluntly through Wagner's long-winded Victorian euphemisms: "fuck the gods, I'd rather die than go without sex". With it, Brünnhilde embraces the liberating feminine sexuality of her newly mortal body, even at the cost of her divine immortality. Note that the burning power of sexuality is a naturalistic-humanistic force, that becomes Brünnhilde's one-and-all (ein' und all' in the sense of Ἓν καὶ Πᾶν). Wagner's female characters, to this very day, remain some of the most defiantly feminist upstarts to have ever appeared in all of world literature, heroes who live and die in the battle-cry of the storm.

At the end of Götterdämmerung, God dies by being consumed in the explosively erotic flames of the liberating and empowering force of feminine sexuality. When Brünnhilde tosses her torch into the mighty fortress of Valhalla, God dies at the hands of a woman. It is such an ignoble end to God, and, of the patriarchy He "eternally" rules over, that it should rightfully have right-wingers screaming afresh with ever more hysterically trumped up accusations against Wagner of both nazism and satanism.

This is why when Nietzsche, a Wagner disciple, comes to write of the Death of God he writes resentfully that "God is dead—we have murdered Him". The whole process of the slow killing of God was one that was first started with the furious Spinozastreit ("Spinoza controversies", out of which the phrase "nihilism" first emerged in philosophical discourse) surrounding the Jena school, with Hegel being that school's most famous pupil. Around the time the so-called Spinozastreit began, Hegel's teacher, Fichte, found himself embroiled in heated controversy after having been "accused" of being a Spinozan, and thus by implication an atheist. So when Hegel joined others in the generation after Fichte in one by one to coming out of the closet to openly declared themselves a Spinozan, as far as everyone was concerned that was understood as an open declaration of an allegiance to atheism, in the form of the rejection of an anthropomorphic personal God-King and His eternal dictatorship over the universe. Even Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, approves of Spinozan pantheism, calling it a "sexed-up atheism":

Pantheists don't believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. 

Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion, p.39

In calling God a "poetic synonym", Dawkins is paraphrasing the exact same position as Wagner in calling God a poet's "anthropomorphic metaphor". That is why the towering inferno of Valhalla collapses into the nature leitmotifs characterising the Rhine with its swimming maidens at the conclusion of Götterdämmerung, as the anthropomorphic world-monarch is leitmotivically liquidated into the One and All (Ἓν καὶ Πᾶν) of Nature.

When one after another, thinkers came out openly after the Spinoza controversies to declare themselves Spinozans, after the radical Jewish philosopher, it was universally understood to be an endorsement of atheism, whose "pantheism" Richard Dawkins calls a "sexed-up atheism"

What is missing from Dawkin's account of pantheism is its socio-political ramifications in that it dethrones God from His dictatorial position on a place up high ruling over the world from a supernatural netherworld. Pantheism thus implies the undermining of the political power of imposed authoritarian religious organisations and the religiously sanctified rule of inherited monarchs, by throwing the position of God into a church inseparable from Nature. That is why Spinoza is one of the original political radicals of philosophy.

In England, the pantheist thinker, Jacob Böhme, a philosopher from just a generation before Spinoza, had a strong follower amongst Republicans. Böhm was regarded by Hegel as the father of Continental Philosophy. The English Republican “Bœhmenists” ("Behmenists") took issue with the Newtonian worldview in which a theocratic God-King issued his Laws of Nature from over and above the world, whereas Böhme’s view of the world was based on an emergentist philosophy of Nature that was self-organising and self-determining in a way more in harmony with Republicanism. Böhm appealed to the British Republicans precisely because emergentism rejected Newton’s ideas of externally imposed eternal laws decreed by a God-King to which the universe had to obsequiously submit. Pantheism effectively suggested that the notion of the absolute rule of a God-King governing Nature from outside the world was an anthropomorphism to justify theocracy and autocracy. Not surprisingly Newton supported the reestablishment of the British monarchy, and was intensely hostile to the pantheism of the Bœhmenists. Other famous British Bœhmenists included William Blake, but also Charles Darwin's grandfather.

The famous poem, The Tyger, by William Blake can be interpreted as a reflection of Jacob Böhme's influence:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Rather than see Nature as view in in a picturesque manner that portrays it as virtuous, beautiful and harmonious, it sees the power of Nature as a cauldron of dark, angry, and rapacious forces. If the world were created by a force that is pure good, how can such dark forces exist within it? 

It could be argued that Darwin's naturalistic emergentist view of the "origin of species", forged out of a dark struggle for existence, driven by the "blind watchmaker" of a Blind Will struggling for survival, as opposed to humans being subjects instantaneously created by a goodly otherworldly God-King, reflects his grandfather's Bœhmenist influence, with Dawkins being the latest successor of this British tradition.

“Either you are a Spinozist or you are not a philosopher at all”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

As for Feuerbach, he was a just pupil of Hegel, and took this pantheistic naturalistic lineage of German thought to the next stage. When Wagner calls the notion of a personal God an anthropomorphic poetic metaphor, he is just paraphrasing Feuerbach. It was Feuerbach who said that instead of man being created in the image of God, it was Man who created god in his own anthropomorphic image. As for Feuerbach's successor, Karl Marx, he merely applied emergentism to the concept of history and society evolving out of another agonising struggle for Being: class struggle.

However, Nietzsche also talks of David Strauss. Strauss was another of the Young Hegelians, alongside Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Ludwig Engels, and Constantin Frantz. Strauss pioneered the scientific-archaeological historiographic approach to the bible and Abrahamic Middle Eastern mythology, something which is also known as "low Christology" when applied to the New Testament. It simply researches Jesus as just another archaeological figure without regard to mythological claims to imperial divinity, which the Romans had already beaten those in the Middle East to by declaring the Emperor Augustus divine. Contemporaries were so horrified by Strauss's book The Life of Jesus, that the Earl of Shaftesbury responded to the 1846 English translation of the book by calling it "the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell".

The Life of Jesus by the Young Hegelian thinker, David Strauss, was called "the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell"

So what we see in Wagner is a continuation of the spirit of the Young Germany movement intermingled with that of the Young Hegelians like Feuerbach and Strauss. Come Nietzsche, who is ultimately little more than a minor footnote to the history of German philosophy, the murder of God was already a done deed. The old anthropomorphic God-King had long ago been dethroned, and gone up in the Young Hegelian flames of Nietzsche's old Meister's Götterdämmerung.

Schopenhauer is often thought of as an oddity who fails to fit into the mainstream of German thought of this era. However, nothing could be farther from the truth. Whether it be Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, Fichte, Schlegel, or Schopenhauer, all of these thinkers are today more fruitfully read, as Frederick Beiser does, as so many variations on the same neo-Kantian and Spinozan theme:

[The Romantic Idealists'] absolute was like Spinoza's substance because it was that which has a self-sufficient essence or existence. For the same reasons as Spinoza, they insisted that the absolute has to be nothing less than the universe as a whole. 

It is this Spinozist context, then, that defines the general meaning of the term 'absolute' among the romantics. Though it has religious and mystical associations, the term usually meant nothing more than the universe as a whole. Hence its cognates were sometimes 'the universe' (das Universum), 'the one and all' (Hen kai pan [Ἓν καὶ Πᾶν]) or, more simply, 'being' (Seyn). 

Of course, the romantics had a much more specific conception of the absolute than simply the universe simpliciter. Their conception could he summarised in three theses. The first thesis is straightforward monism: that the universe consists in not a plurality of substances but a single substance; in other words, the only independent and self-sufficient thing is the universe itself. The second thesis is a version of vitalism: that the single universal substance is an organism, which is in a constant process of growth and development. The third thesis is a form of rationalism: that this process of development has a purpose, or conforms to some form, archetype, or idea. Putting these theses together, absolute idealism is the doctrine that everything is a part of the single universal organism, or that everything conforms to, or is an appearance of, its purpose, design, or idea. 

Clearly, these are distinct theses. It is possible to he a monist and not a vitalist: one might hold, with Spinoza, that the universe is static and eternal. Conversely, it is also possible to be a vitalist and not a monist: one might maintain, with Leibniz, that there are a plurality of substances that consist in living force. It is even possible to be a vitalist and monist but not a rationalist: one might claim, with Schopenhauer, that the universe consists in a single irrational will struggling for power. What is distinctive of absolute idealism is its synthesis of monism, vitalism, and rationalism: it is a monistic vitalism or a vitalistic monism; or it is a monistic rationalism or a rationalistic monism. 

According to this interpretation, one distinctive trait of absolute idealism—what makes it a species of idealism in general—is its monism, its thesis that there is one and only one being that has an independent existence and essence. It is important to add that this monism opposes not only pluralism, the doctrine that there are many beings having an independent existence and essence, but also, more specifically, dualism, the doctrine that there are two kinds of substance, the mental and the physical, the ideal and the real. It is this latter point that Schelling, Novalis, Hegel, and Schlegel emphasize as central to their idealism. They explain that absolute idealism consists in the doctrine that the opposition between the real and the ideal, the mental and the physical, disappears in the absolute, which is a single reality. 

Beiser: German Idealism—The Struggle Against Subjectivism. Chapter: The Meaning of Absolute Idealism

The difference between the various Romantic philosophers is thus immeasurably more subtle than is often stated. Schopenhauer, in particular, has a notorious habit of spouting bombastic rhetoric to the effect that he alone is startlingly original, and thus intellectually utterly uninfluenced by his contemporaries. Too many people uncritically take Schopenhauer's bold claims to extraordinary originality at literal face value, even if only to dismiss him as an eccentric oddball and outsider. In actual fact, the difference between Schopenhauer and his contemporaries such as Schelling, Hölderlin, Hegel, Fichte, Novalis, and Schlegel is a far more nuanced one of emphasis and expression. Despite Beiser's understandable insistence on emphasising the rationalist aspects of Hegel and Schelling, there are innumerable passages where there is an equally striking emphasis on the dark, irrational, stormy and Romantic aspects of the universe and of Being, most especially so in Schelling, but also in Hegel. Likewise, there remains a residual element of Kantian or Spinozan rationalism in Schopenhauer's system of thought, and it is more than a touch reductivistic and polemical to simply dismiss him as an unbridled irrationalist.

With this it becomes easier to see how there is a pantheistic emergentism implicit to Schopenhauer. The emergence of a life wrought out of the struggles and conflicts inherent to Nature being the fundamental source of suffering born of the Primal Will. The most Schopenhauerian words are thus given by Wagner to Parsifal himself:

O alas this day of supreme sorrows!
Should I now conceive of all that blooms,
that breathes, lives and lives anew
as only mourning—woe!—and weeping? 

O wehe, des höchsten Schmerzentags!
Da sollte, wähn' ich, was da blüht,
was atmet, lebt und wiederlebt,
nur trauern, ach! und weinen?

Parsifal: Act III

I have translated "Schmerzen" as sorrow because whereas in English, Christ with the crown of thorns is referred to the "man of sorrows", in German he is the "Schmerzensmann" (man of pain). Yet that pain and sorrow is something that pervades the metaphysical essence of the dark forces of Nature, and with it the entirety of Being. And that is precisely how Schopenhauer thought of the Primal Will.

As with his metaphysics, there is much in Schopenhauer that demonstrates similarities and parallels with his contemporaries with respect to his views on religion.

The sublime founder of Christianity had necessarily to adapt and accommodate himself, partly consciously, partly, it may be, unconsciously, to [this Jewish doctrine of faith]; and so Christianity is composed of two very heterogeneous elements. Of these I should like to call the purely ethical element preferably, indeed exclusively, the Christian, and to distinguish it from the Jewish dogmatism with which it is found. If, as has often been feared, and especially at the present time, that excellent and salutary religion should completely decline, then I would look for the reason for this simply in the fact that it does not consist of one simple element, but of two originally heterogeneous elements, brought into combination only by means of world events. In such a case, dissolution would necessarily result through the break-up of these elements, which arises from their different relationship and reaction to the advanced spirit

Schopenhauer: Book 1 of The World as Will and Representation §68

You can see how in Parsifal, Wagner accepts the ethical humanistic element of Christianity, while rejecting the dogmatic theist elements of the Old Testament, which he regards as being largely an inessential historical vestige of metaphorical and poetic significance only:

The doctrine of original sin (affirmation of the will) and of salvation (denial of the will) is really the great truth which constitutes the kernel of Christianity, while the rest is in the main only clothing and covering, or something accessory. Accordingly, we should interpret Jesus Christ always in the universal, as the symbol or personification of the denial of the will-to-live, but not in the individual, whether according to his mythical history in the Gospels, or according to the probably true history lying at the root thereof. For neither the one nor the other will easily satisfy us entirely. It is merely the vehicle of that first interpretation for the people, who always demand something founded on fact.

Schopenhauer: Book 1 of The World as Will and Representation §70

Schopenhauer says quite openly in The World as Will and Representation that he interprets the salvation of the New Testament as a humanistic and worldly salvation, and as not one granted deus ex machina from a supernatural intervention bequeathed from without by a supramundane anthropomorphic potentate:

While the Old Testament made the world and man the work of a God, the New saw itself compelled to represent that God as becoming man, in order to teach that holiness and salvation from the misery of this world can come only from the world itself.

Schopenhauer: Book 1 of The World as Will and Representation §59

In terms of how Schopenhauer sees divinities as being created by man in our anthropomorphic image, he is hardly any different to Feuerbach:

Man creates for himself in his own image demons, gods, and saints; then to these must be incessantly offered sacrifices, prayers, temple decorations, vows and their fulfilment, pilgrimages, salutations, adornment of images and so on.

Schopenhauer: Book 1 of The World as Will and Representation §58

Schopenhauer flagrantly denies that ethical action is dependent on these mythical images and deities:

...believers nevertheless consider the ethical significance of conduct and its myth to be quite inseparable, indeed as positively one, and regard every attack on the myth as an attack on right and virtue. This reaches such lengths that, in monotheistic nations, atheism or godlessness has become the synonym for absence of all morality.

Schopenhauer: Book 1 of The World as Will and Representation, footnote 180

Everything one finds in Parsifal is strongly in keeping with Schopenhauer. Salvation comes from an ethical action that is first and foremost an absolute self-denial in favour of a humanistic compassion (karuṇā) towards other, placing the needs and suffering of others before one's own. It is about recognition of the metaphysical basis of those dark and blind animalistic-vitalistic urges and desires that subconsciously drive us in a way that more than anticipates the psychoanalytic movement which gave birth to Freud, Jung, Adler, and Rank. Yet these primal urges form the foundation of all possibility of cognition—rather than being bequeathed of a detached rational faculty, knowledge emerges from the power and passion that attaches itself to Nature—thus giving us a potential for a knowledge and wisdom that yields insight into the suffering of other sentient beings both animal and human, a suffering that itself emerges of the struggle and conflict inherent to Nature itself. Acceptance of this line of thought hardly represents Wagner's volte-face rejection of Feuerbach that it is often shamelessly misrepresented as being. Indeed, many of the things Schopenhauer says about religion might well have come straight from Feuerbach's pen. The change in Wagner is thus an immeasurably more nuanced one of philosophical emphasis and expression than what facile polemicists would have us believe.

You can now also appreciate why Parsifal, when he first arrives on the scene in Act I, is a brute and a fool in killing the swan. He has the rational skill to hunt and kill the swan for his own selfish fulfilment, but lacks the higher wisdom to empathise with the suffering of other sentient beings. Wagner had by this time become something of an anti-vivisectionists, and the Bayreuther Blätter is filled with this sort of animal liberationist rhetoric. 

For some, the swing from Feuerbach to Schopenhauer represented Wagner's political shift from far left to far right. It is perfectly admittedly true that Schopenhauer condemned the 1848 pro-democracy uprising as being little more than a brutal eruption of the primal Will:

The conservative Schopenhauer was reported as saying that Robert Blum, one of the leaders of the rebellion, should have been hanged and not shot, and his loud, heartfelt support for Prince Alfred C. F. Windischgratz for restoring order drew a rebuke even from aristocratic officers who dined with him at the Englischer Hof. Schopenhauer, however, despite his fear and his opposition to the democratic forces, escaped the upset of 1848, minus only some books and his opera glasses. He gained, moreover, far more than he lost. The failure of the revolutionary years of 1848 and 1849 helped to shape a culture and social mood more receptive to his philosophy. For Schopenhauer, as with many others, the Hegelian faith in inevitable social progress to the type of state in which genuine, concrete human freedom would blossom was reconceptualized by the materialists among the Young Hegelians, and promised to deliver a dream. But this proved to be a pipe dream. The true content of European history, the philosopher told Frauenstadt, is nothing but a "brawl", a series of cat-fights. When there seems to be progress, there is always a counterbalancing retrogression and a relapse into barbarism. This was what the brawls of 1848 made clear. But even if, the philosopher continued, history would ultimately deliver a heaven on earth, this could not bring any consolation to those who suffered along the way and were now deep in their graves. "The human race", Schopenhauer said at another time in his resolute pessimism, "is at once determined by their nature to misery and ruin. If, however, injustice and need would be put to an end through the state, what would occur would be a type of sluggard's life. Humans would fight among themselves out of boredom, falling upon one another, or overpopulation would exterminate them through starvation". Human oppression and exploitation were not mere functions of inhumane social conditions; not a landlord, factory owner, or king that made life miserable—it was king will and redemption was only possible by its denial. 

David E. Cartwright: Schopenhauer: A Biography. From Chapter The Sovereign Canaille

Yet Wagner had been an active participant in that pro-democracy revolution. Mark Berry informs us that:

Wagner probably ordered hand-grenades; he certainly served on the barricades and acted as look-out, observing street-fighting from the Kreuzkirche tower, whilst engaging in animated politico-philosophical discussion. 

The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia entry under Dresden uprising (May 1849).

So the question becomes one of whether the move towards Schopenhauer can be simplistically understood as a black-and-white volte-face swing from one extreme to the other, an about-face turn from revolutionary left to reactionary right. Given the usual hysteria that accompanies anything associated with Wagner, for many simpletons, this will be a cut and dry matter. However, it should come as little surprise to discover that it is hardly that simple, for Wagner continues to express his sympathy for socialism long after the 1848 revolution ended in failure, even late into his life around the time of writing Parsifal. The following passage, for example, dates from 1880, after he had completed the libretto to Parsifal, around about the time he was completing the orchestration to the score:

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.

Art and Religion, 1880. My translation. From p240 Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Band X. My Emphasis

Towards the end of his life, Wagner still spoke highly favourably about socialism (“Sozialismus”)
From Religion and Art, 1880

This can only mean one thing, and that is that Parsifal cannot be seen as the penitent expression of a former anti-religious left-wing democratic socialist revolutionary who in old age metamorphoses into a pious right-wing proto-Nazi reactionary. Nor should it be forgotten that for all of his political conservatism, there is much in Schopenhauer's attitude to religion which even today would be considered to belong on the extreme far end of liberal theology. For most mainstream and conservative theologians, Schopenhauer would be little more than a blasphemous liberal theology of the most outrageous variety, a phony conservative who regarded Christ's crucifixion as being of poetico-symbolic value only, while dismissing literal Faith in the miracle of the Resurrection, and rejecting a personal God as a mythical anthropomorphic vestige from an irrelevant and archaic Old Testament.

Nor should it be forgotten that Sigmund Freud, too, was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer. Like Schopenhauer before him, Freud was likewise something of a political conservative, despite his adoption of Schopenhauer's atheism. Yet, in general, Freud's unfortunate enduring popularity amongst literary criticism circles—despite it being largely discredited by modern psychiatry, feminism, and by the scandalous revelations of the dismissal of memories of child sexual abuse to little more than infantile fantasy—is precisely due to his dismissive attitude towards religion, an attitude that is largely an appropriation of ideas already found in Schopenhauer, and which were further elaborated on by another political reactionary after him, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's grossly reactionary and classist attitude to socialism was so aggressive that he dismissed socialism as being little more than the expression of a "chandala slave mentality", one that glorified the ignoble gutter mindset of the poor and downtrodden.

What this goes to show is that socio-political orientations are hardly black and white, since political conservatives like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Freud can still nurture attitudes to key matters like religion, which in our brutally reactionary neoliberal and religious fundamentalist age would still be regarded as radically left-wing. One can have an attitude to one issue that is liberal while one's attitude to another issue might remain highly reactionary. Human beings are not black and white caricatures: everyone exists along a continuum of shades of grey. One can even be a complex mishmash of both, like a cow spotted in black and white all at the one and same time.

In Wagner's case, every bit of evidence points to him adopting the more liberal and radical aspects of Schopenhauer's thought without jettisoning the socialist and liberal overall political orientation from his Feuerbachian period. Indeed, there remains a strong argument to be made to the effect that Wagner powerfully anticipated much of the Frankfurt School's later blend of Freudian psychoanalytic thought with Marxian socialist thought. Only where the likes of Adorno in the Frankfurt School blended Marx with Freud, Wagner blended Feuerbachian socialism with Schopenhauerian proto-psychoanalysis. Wagner suggests that salvation from the seemingly bottomless pit of human bestial monstrousness—lupus homini lupus est—cannot come from political reform alone since as long as a subconscious primal drive (the Will in Schopenhauer and the Id in Freud) towards blindly self-centred greed remains a quintessentially unreformed fundamental of human psychology, capitalism ("greed is good") will always triumph.

Unfortunately, the very mention of Wagner's name leads with monotonous predictability to some hysterical polemicist screeching of something to the effect that his later interest in Schopenhauer is definitive proof of Wagner's adoption of a reactionary proto-fascist orientation, one that represents a total about-face from his revolutionary years—an abrupt "turn" from black to white, from extreme left to extreme right. For these tedious hysterics everything must be painted in black and white propagandist and polemical terms, where all possibility of nuanced shades of grey represent a complete impossibility. 

If there is a vestige of traditional Christian theology left in Parsifal, it hardly takes a conventional form. For a start, it is not only a theology without an anthropomorphic and dictatorial God-King, but a theology without a Resurrection either. However, the latter is nothing unusual, since in early forms of Gnostic Christianity there was no story of the Resurrection, and the myth ended with the crucifixion and transfiguration of Christ through divestment of his earthly body. There is in Wagner, arguably an inherent element of a return to such early forms of Christian mythology, although it must necessarily be mentioned that Wagner never showed overt interest in early Gnostic forms of Christianity however remarkably tantalizing their parallels to Wagner's thoughts might be. For an exceptionally well-researched study of this subject, I can highly recommend Derrick Everett's website.

That is why there is more than likely a great deal of truth to the idea that the brotherhood of the knights of the Holy Grail in Parsifal may be a reference to the Gnostic Cathars. There is reference to "die sündige Welt" (the sinful world) in Parsifal in such a way as to imply that the world by its essential nature is fundamentally evil, which means that the world cannot have been created by an all-powerful benevolent creator, just as the Cathars believed. The world-creating force is thus not God, but a dark and evil force. Evil and suffering are the most basic conditions of the world, which is, of course, a fundamental idea in Schopenhauer, an idea inherited from Buddhism. Salvation from evil comes not as a gift bequeathed deus ex machina to the subjects from an authoritarian God-King from without the world, but from awakening from within to the evil and suffering that is the most fundamental sine qua non of the world, and the compassion, or karuṇā in Buddhism, which is awakened by that metaphysical insight becomes the source of salvation—also the most fundamental of all ideas in Buddhism, and which Wagner transforms into the most fundamental tenet of Christianity too. Or as we have already seen Schopenhauer say: "salvation from the misery of this world can come only from the world itself". Nor can salvation in Parsifal come from without, for the anthropomorphic God-King is already dead, the "feste Burg" that is God has been consumed in the flames of Götterdämmerung.

Of further interest is that the source of suffering, taking the symbolic form of the wound of Amfortas, is both inflicted by the spear, and at the same time healed by it. Likewise, Kundry's erotic kiss of seduction is both the source of delusion and enlightenment. There is a principle of non-duality between the source of suffering and salvation from it. This is also found in Buddhism in the form of the principle of the oneness of the source of delusion and enlightenment:

...delusion and enlightenment are, though different in aspect, one and the same in their essential nature. A bad cause or influence gives rise to delusion, and a good cause or influence, to enlightenment. Delusion and enlightenment are two different workings, but both arise from the essential nature of life.

From the Nichiren Library

Implicit to Wagner is the rejection of the dualism traditionally found in most mainstream Abrahamic theologies (good vs evil, the worldly vs the otherworldly, flesh vs spirit, human vs divine etc). Since, in marked contrast to Hegel, non-dualism is a far more poorly developed theme running through the core structure of Schopenhauerian thought, it is certainly possible to also ask if Wagner's rejection of dualism represents the enduring influence of Hegel on Wagnerian thought. Hegelian thought is fundamentally Heraclitean and pre-Socratic in rejecting dualism: "the way up and the way down are one and the same". I have elsewhere debunked the dated interpretation of Hegel as epitomising a triadic manner of thinking (constituting synthesis-antithesis-synthesis). On the contrary, in Hegel's dialectics, paradox is a fundamental characteristic of truth and Being (Seyn) where there is no resolution of the paradox into a third "synthesis". An integral part of this paradox is that of pantheism itself as an atheistic theology, a paradox that lies at the very heart of the theology of Parsifal.

It is thus that with a more nuanced understanding of Wagner that we find a remarkable blend of Western and Eastern thought, and with it a cogent critique of the insidious Wotanism implicit to the archaic anthropomorphic God-King common to mainstream Christianity, Judaism and Islam, with its phallocentric worship of a patriarchal and anthropomorphic God-Führer, who sanctifies war and oppresses women along with all of humanity in maintaining the primitive patriarchy of enslavement to the ancient regime. The proto-Marxian socialism of Feuerbach, and the proto-psychoanalytic voluntarism of Schopenhauer do not constitute contradictions that negate one another, but form essential moments within the total structure of Wagnerian dialectical thought, both equally fundamental as the other in such a way as to strongly anticipate the Frankfurt School of thought. With it, we can understand how there is a continuum of thought running through his Feuerbachian and Schopenhauerian periods, with Wagner forming a continuous relationship with the intellectual background of the Romantic idealism of his age that gave birth to the socialism of Feuerbach and Marx.