I. Introduction
Just as much of Western philosophy and theology over the last 200 years can be understood in terms of responses to Hegel, so much of Western music since the middle of the nineteenth century can be understood as a response to Wagner. Further, it has been widely acknowledged that Wagner’s art and thought have had repercussions in areas such as literature, theatre and film. Not so widely recognized is that although he was primarily a consummate composer, dramatist, and poet, he was also a theologian and a philosopher in his own right (Bell Reference Bell2020; Zöller Reference Zöller2018: 61). And whereas the secondary literature on Wagner rightly stresses his debt to Schopenhauer,Footnote 1 the abiding inspiration of Hegel on the composer throughout his adult life has not always received the attention it deserves.
Hegel and Wagner were both fascinated by history, and specifically the philosophy of history, and the death of Jesus of Nazareth and how this should be interpreted, especially regarding reconciliation and the question of ‘God’, was one of their central concerns. In this article I will examine how Hegel’s understanding of the death of Jesus developed and how his views influenced Wagner, focussing on his proposed opera Jesus of Nazareth and the Ring cycle.
II. Hegel’s early theological development
In October 1788 at the age of 18 Hegel entered the Evangelisches Stift, the protestant seminary in Tübingen. In the first two years he took the Magister in Philosophy (Harris Reference Harris1972: 72–88) as well as studying theology (Harris Reference Harris1972: 84) and this was followed by three years of theology (Harris Reference Harris1972: 88–96). In September 1793 he passed the church exam but rather than being ordained in the Lutheran Church he took up a post as a private tutor to a family in Berne (1793–97), the sort of work in which many young academics were engaged. In his private study time Hegel between 9 May and 24 July 1795 produced one of his first works, The Life of Jesus. This runs to seventy-one pages in the critical edition (GW 1: 207–78).Footnote 2 In bringing together elements from the four gospels, he accepts some matters uncritically. For example, he accepts that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (TE: 104; GW 1: 207), whereas many would now suggest Nazareth as being the more likely place for his birth. But other things he excludes, most notably the miracles,Footnote 3 including the virginal conception. Further, any ideas of Jesus’s death being sacrificial are absent (Brown Reference Brown1985: 86);Footnote 4 so, for example, the last supper narrative has a distinctly moralistic tone (TE: 153–57; GW 1: 264–67; Brown Reference Brown1985: 85). One of the most striking aspects of Hegel’s reconstruction is the abrupt ending: he writes of Jesus’s death, the anointing of his body, and burial, but nothing more (TE: 165; GW 1: 278), suggesting that Jesus is simply a figure of the remote past.
But Jesus is at least presented as an effective teacher, although he tends to be simply a mouthpiece for promoting Kantian ethics. So, Jesus addresses Nicodemus (compare John 3.3–15): ‘how can I expect you to believe […] my word when you don’t even hear the inner testimony of your own spirit, of the divine voice?’ (TE: 108; GW 1: 212). Hegel’s Jesus was setting out Kant’s categorical imperative: ‘To act only on principles that you can will to become universal laws among men, laws no less binding on you than on them—this is the fundamental law of morality, the sum and substance of all moral legislation and the sacred books of all peoples’ (TE: 115–16 (modified); GW 1: 221).Footnote 5 It is therefore understandable that he omitted the ‘golden rule’ (Matthew 7: 12) when drawing on the material from Matthew 7 (TE: 115; cf. 115–16 n.; GW 1: 220).Footnote 6 It can be said that Hegel presents a life of Jesus that coheres with Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason (Pinkard Reference Pinkard2000: 60).Footnote 7
That Hegel took such an approach is understandable from his letters. Here we learn that he had again taken up the study of Kantian philosophy and was critical of the ‘theological-Kantian’ approach of G. C. Storr,Footnote 8 who had argued for an orthodoxy based on Kant, who ‘had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith’ (CPR: Bxxx). However, in the isolation of Berne, Hegel was beginning to learn something of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre through Hölderlin, who, as well as reading Fichte (as early as August 1794), was attending his lectures in Jena.Footnote 9 In a letter to Schelling, Hegel writes that ‘[f]rom the Kantian system and its highest completion I expect a revolution in Germany’ and that part of this will be ‘the idea of God as the Absolute Self’. He clearly felt that he was out of touch with the latest developments and writes that he is resolved to undertake a study of the Wissenschaftslehre ‘during the summer’.Footnote 10 Therefore although Hegel was aware of the way Kant could be further developed, in his Life of Jesus he remained firmly within a Kantian framework.Footnote 11 In short he was holding to Kant’s critical philosophy that included these three elements: first, there is a gulf between ‘what is’ and all thought about it;Footnote 12 second, an abstract view of God; third, there can be no bridge or transition between what we call the finite and the infinite.
In January 1797 Hegel moved to Frankfurt to take up again a private tutor’s role, and soon he was to write very differently about the life and death of Jesus, and the Christian religion generally. This change can be seen in sections of the work popularly known as The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate and in Fragment of a System (1800). The former is a collection of around 20 fragments written between 1797 and 1800 (Harris Reference Harris1972: 521–23; Jaschke Reference Jaeschke2016: 77–84). The title Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal was given by the editor, Herman Nohl (Reference Nohl and Tübingen1907), and modelled on Herder’s Vom Geist des Christenthums. Nebst einigen Abhandlungen verwandten Inhalts (1798). The changes that can be discerned between The Life of Jesus (1795) and the fragments now found in Spirit of Christianity correspond to Hegel’s switch from the world of Mendelssohn, Lessing and Kant to the nascent Romanticism of Schleiermacher, Hölderlin, Fichte and Schelling (Kroner Reference Kroner and Knox1948: 8; cf. Reardon Reference Reardon1977: 12). Of these early romantics, the influence of Hölderlin was particularly important and he can be said to have ‘completely re-orientated Hegel’s intellectual direction’ (Pinkard Reference Pinkard2000: 80). Such early romantics influenced Hegel in his approach to mythology and epistemology, and this was ultimately to transform his understanding of the very nature of being, which in turn had a bearing on his new interpretation of the death of Jesus.
III. Hegel on mythology and epistemology
Regarding Hegel’s new appreciation of mythology and with it a new approach to epistemology, Hölderlin, and to a lesser extent Schelling, was a decisive influence. Already in the late Berne period Hegel’s new interest in mythology can be discerned, for in August 1796 he had composed a poem ‘Eleusis’ (dedicated to Hölderlin), the work referring to the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece (Werke 1: 230–33; GW 1: 399–402).Footnote 13 Harris asks: ‘One is left wondering just how soon the parallel between the mysteries of Eleusis and the miracle of Easter struck him’ (Reference Harris1972: 248). Then there is the intriguing reference to ‘a new mythology’ in the so-called ‘Oldest System Programme of German Idealism’. This was written in Hegel’s hand, but perhaps composed by Schelling or Hölderlin rather than Hegel himself,Footnote 14 and has been given a date of 1796 or 1797: ‘First of all I shall speak here of an Idea which, as far as I know, has never occurred to anyone—we must have a new mythology, but this mythology must be in the service of the Ideas, it must become a mythology of reason’ (Bowie Reference Bowie2003: 335).Footnote 15 The influence of Hölderlin intensified from January 1797 when both were living in Frankfurt. Schiller’s poem Die Götter Griechenland (Reference Brokoff and Luserke-Jaqui1788)Footnote 16 had earlier forced Hölderlin to deal with the question of a demystified nature (Safranski Reference Safranski2019: 72), and over the next few years he developed ideas that poetry ran on two levels: Schein and Grundton (‘appearance’ and ‘fundamental sense’).Footnote 17 One way of viewing Hegel’s development is that he came to see that his Life of Jesus was inadequate in failing to perceive the Grundton.
With this appreciation of myth also came an appreciation of mysticism, and again the early romantics were a decisive influence. But this was not the mysticism of the via moderna that influenced Luther and Calvin, and the later Hamann and Jacobi; such mysticism had to look beyond reason to discern deeper truths. Rather the mysticism that influenced the early romantics and subsequently Hegel was the hyperrationalism of Platonic mysticism (Beiser Reference Beiser2003: 63–64).Footnote 18
One fundamental consequence of this new appreciation of mythology and mysticism was an epistemological change. In The Life of Jesus Hegel could be said to adopt a Cartesian subject-object dichotomy, an approach to the study is the life of Jesus that had been developed during the Enlightenment and continues to this day. But with the influence of Hölderlin and others, Hegel now engaged in a self-involving approach and the key term he employed for this was ‘spirit’ (Geist). One of the earliest hints of this is in ‘Man kan den Zustand …’ (‘The state of Jewish culture …’) now found in Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, this fragment having been written sometime between the summer of 1799 and early 1800 (Harris Reference Harris1972: 522–23): ‘The hill and the eye which sees it are object and subject, but between the human and God, between spirit and spirit, there is no such cleft of objectivity and subjectivity; one is to the other an other only in that one recognizes the other; both are one’ (ETW: 265 (modified); Werke 1: 381; GW 2: 267). And so Hegel asks in ‘Das Wesen des Jesus …’ (‘The essence of Jesus …’): ‘How could anything but a spirit know a spirit?’ (ETW: 266 (modified); Werke 1: 382; GW 2: 269). This is immediately after quoting John 4.24 (‘God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth’).Footnote 19
IV. Hegel on thought and being
Hegel’s change in attitude regarding the death of Jesus cannot simply be accounted for by this new appreciation of myth, mysticism and ‘spirit’. Something more profound was going on and it comes down to his understanding of ‘being’. Whereas Kant had radically separated thought and being (note the gulf between ‘what is’ and all thought about it mentioned above), Hegel wished to bring them together. Spinoza had brought thought and being together and Hegel in his Differenzschrift (1801) assumed with Schelling and Hölderlin that, with Spinoza, one could presuppose their unity (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2006: 131). However, Hegel came to the view that although it may be right to bring together thought and being, one should not simply presuppose this connection. And so Hegel developed presuppositionless thought and one consequence of this was that the category of being harbours within itself the moment of negation (Houlgate Reference Houlgate2006: 44). The significant person who earlier brought together thought and being was Parmenides: ‘Thought and being are the same’ (Diels Reference Diels and W. Kranz1951: 231). However, as opposed to Hegel, Parmenides denies the negative when he declares: ‘what is there to be said and thought must needs be: for it is there for being, but nothing is not’ (Kirk, Raven and Schofield Reference Kirk, Raven and Schofield1983: 247; Diels 1951: 232). As Houlgate writes of Parmenides’s view: ‘True being is thus purely affirmative with no trace of negation or indeed change in it; it is “uncreated and imperishable”’ (Reference Houlgate2006: 43, quoting Kirk, Raven and Schofield Reference Kirk, Raven and Schofield1983: 248). Houlgate points out that the legacy of Parmenides can be found in Descartes’s view of God as the supremely perfect being or Kant’s view of God as the ens realissimum.Footnote 20 Hegel opposes this and, if he is right that being requires the negative, then when it comes to God’s being, Godself must be human and must die. And so we come to Hegel’s view of the death of God.
V. Hegel on the death of God
It is at the very end of his 1802 work Faith and Knowledge that Hegel first explicitly writes of the death of God. In this work Hegel discusses the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte, all of whom have ‘recast the dogmatism of being into the dogmatism of thinking, the metaphysic of objectivity into the metaphysic of subjectivity’ (FK: 189; Werke 2: 430) and finds them wanting. The key problem in their work is that the finite and infinite are opposed: ‘They make infinity into an absolute principle, so that it becomes infected by its opposition to finitude’ (FK: 190; Werke 2: 431). So, for example, Kant ‘always and everywhere recognizes that Reason, as the dimensionless activity, as pure concept of infinitude is held fast in its opposition to the finite’ (FK: 81; Werke 2: 318). Hegel’s way forward is that ‘[i]n [truly philosophical] cognition, infinity as this negative significance of the Absolute is conditioned by the positive Idea that being is strictly nothing outside of the infinite, or apart from the Ego and thought. Both being and thought are one’ (FK: 190; Werke 2: 431). Hegel then engages in a word play on ‘infinite’ in the final paragraph of the work. He writes that ‘pure concept or infinity as the abyss of nothingness in which all being is engulfed, must signify the infinite grief […] purely as a moment of the supreme Idea, and no more than a moment’ (FK: 190; Werke 2: 432). This is the ‘speculative Good Friday’, which has come about since the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason (Jaeschke Reference Jaeschke, Stewart and Hodgson1990: 131). ‘Formerly, the infinite grief only existed historically in the formative process of culture. It existed as the feeling that “God himself is dead (Gott selbst ist tot)”, upon which the religion of more recent times rests’ (FK: 190; Werke 2: 432). Hegel here quotes the Lutheran hymn of Johann Rist ‘O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid’ (‘O Great Woe, O Heart’s Pain’):Footnote 21 ‘Gott selbst liegt tot’ (‘God Himself lies dead’). The nature of this ‘infinite grief’ is not entirely clear. According to Beiser, ‘the death of Christ fills the Christian with “infinite grief” because God has withdrawn from the world by forsaking his only begotten son’ (Reference Beiser2005: 138). This may be reading too much into Hegel’s text. The only clue Hegel offers is by quoting Pascal, who expressed the ‘same feeling […] in so to speak sheerly empirical form: “la nature est telle qu’elle marque partout un Dieu perdu et dans l’homme et hors de l’homme” [Nature is such that it signifies everywhere a lost God both within and outside man]’ (FK: 190; Werke 2: 432).Footnote 22 The opposition between finitude and infinitude is then overcome by reestablishing the ‘speculative Good Friday’:
[It is necessary to] re-establish for philosophy the Idea of absolute freedom and along with it the absolute Passion, the speculative Good Friday in place of the historic (historisch) Good Friday. Good Friday must be speculatively re-established in the whole truth and harshness of its God-forsakenness. (FK: 191; Werke 2: 432)
The next time Hegel discusses the ‘death of God’ is in the Phenomenology (1807). This will prove important when we turn to Wagner, since there is some evidence that he read the work. In the third part of Chapter 7 Hegel writes of ‘manifest religion’ and in ¶784, where he discusses the death of Christ, there is a word play on ‘Begreiffen’/‘Ergreiffen’ which, as I will later suggest, is reflected in a significant letter of Wagner letter to Ludwig II of Bavaria. Hegel writes:
Comprehension (Begreiffen) is, therefore, for that self-consciousness not a grasping of this [concept] which knows superseded natural existence to be universal and therefore reconciled with itself; but rather a grasping (Ergreiffen) of the imaginative idea, that by bringing to pass its own externalisation, in its historical incarnation and death, the divine Being has been reconciled with its [natural] existence. The grasping (Ergreiffen) of this idea now expresses more definitely what was previously called the spiritual resurrection in this same context, i.e. the coming into existence of God’s individual self-consciousness as a universal self-consciousness, or as the religious community. The death of the divine [Human], as death, is abstract negativity, the immediate result of the movement which ends only in natural universality. Death loses its natural meaning in spiritual self-consciousness, i.e. it comes to be its just stated [concept]; death becomes transfigured from its immediate meaning, viz. the non-being of this particular individual, into the universality of the Spirit who dwells in His community, dies in it every day, and is daily resurrected. (PhSM: 475, ¶784; GW 9: 418; Werke 3: 570–71)Footnote 23
In the next section (¶785) Hegel then takes up an idea he had earlier introduced of the death of God (¶¶753, 763) and quotes again that line from Johann Rist’s passion hymn. We shall later see how Hegel’s logic is taken up by Wagner in that with the death of God as the death of Christ (or Brünnhilde) there is a ‘resurrection as Spirit’ (PhSM: 471, ¶779; GW 9: 415; Werke 3: 566), such Spirit being at work within human hearts and within the community.
The hymn of Rist is quoted again in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827) and expresses more clearly how he understands the death of God:
‘God himself is dead’, it says in a Lutheran hymn, expressing an awareness that the human, the finite, the fragile, the weak, the negative are themselves a moment of the divine, that they are within God himself, that finitude, negativity, otherness are not outside of God and do not, as otherness, hinder unity with God. Otherness, the negative, is known to be a moment of the divine nature itself. This involves the highest idea of spirit. (LPhR: 3: 326; VPhR 3: 249–50)
Sometimes Hegel suggests that Christ is the revealer rather than the accomplisher of reconciliation and redemption (cf. Hodgson Reference Hodgson2005, 172):
The ground of redemption […] is not a capricious accident, or merely a particular deed and happening, but rather is true and consummating. […] It is not the history of a single individual; rather it is God who accomplishes it—i.e., it is the intuition that is the universal history which has being in and for itself. (LPhR 3: 128; VPhR 3: 64)
However, Hegel’s intention in emphasizing the revealing aspect of Christ’s work may be simply to avoid the traditional idea of ‘satisfaction’ which he elsewhere rejects or reinterprets. He rejects the idea that Christ’s sacrificial death ‘offers occasion for representing God as a tyrant who demands sacrifice’ (LPhR 3: 220; VPhR 3: 151). Instead, ‘God cannot be satisfied by something else, only by himself’ (LPhR 3: 219; VPhR 3: 150). The death of Christ is the death of God and as such does achieve reconciliation.
There are other occasions when Hegel affirms that Christ accomplishes reconciliation such as in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, where he declares that Christ as human ‘suffered, sacrificed himself’, and in him
this conversion of His other-being [natural finitude] into spirit, and the necessity of the pain in the renunciation of naturalness is witnessed; but this pain, the pain of feeling that God Himself is dead, is the starting point of holiness and of elevation to God. Thus what must come to pass in the subject—this progress, this conversion of the finite—is known as implicitly accomplished (vollbracht) in Christ. (LHPh 3: 5; VGPh 3: 89)Footnote 24
Therefore without Christ’s death there would be no ‘conversion of the finite’ and so his death does accomplish something.
The final work I consider where Hegel expresses his understanding of the death of Christ and its consequences is the Philosophy of History (and again there is the idea that the death of Christ does accomplish reconciliation). This is a work that Wagner read and two passages are important for understanding how Hegel’s understanding of the death of Christ may have influenced Wagner:
Christ dies; only as dead, is he exalted to Heaven and sits at the right hand of God; only thus is he Spirit. He himself says: ‘When I am no longer with you, the Spirit will guide you into all truth.’ [John 16:13] Not till the Feast of Pentecost were the apostles filled with the Holy Ghost. (LPhH: 325; Werke 12: 393)
Then a couple of pages later he writes:
[O]nly after the death of Christ could the Spirit come upon his friends; that only then were they able to conceive the true idea of God, namely, that in Christ the human is redeemed and reconciled: for in him the idea of eternal truth is recognised, the essence of the human acknowledged to be Spirit, and the fact proclaimed that only by stripping himself of his finiteness (Endlichkeit entäuβert) and surrendering himself to pure self-consciousness, does he attain the truth. (LPhH: 328; Werke 12: 397)
Hegel does not mention the resurrection here probably because he does not consider it a material event like the crucifixion, as Hodgson explains:
The resurrection of Christ is as essential to Christian faith as the crucifixion, Hegel avers. But it is not a material event like the crucifixion. It is more like an interpretive perspective on the crucifixion, indeed on the whole of the life of Christ, a perspective that arises with the community of faith and is based on the spiritual experience of the community rather than on historical evidence or proofs. (2005: 175)
A similar understanding of the resurrection can be found in two artworks of Wagner, where he is strongly influenced by Hegel: his proposed opera Jesus of Nazareth and the Ring cycle.
VI. Hegel’s influence on Richard Wagner
Like Hegel, Richard Wagner (1813–83) was fascinated with history and historical works are well represented in his private libraries in Dresden and Bayreuth. He also had a fascination for philosophy, and this was probably first nurtured through his uncle, Adolf Wagner (1774–1835). Adolf had studied at the Leipzig Thomana and then in 1792 registered in the theology faculty of the University, although his interests focussed on classics and philosophy, especially German philosophy. In 1798 he went to Jena for a year of study where he attended Fichte’s lectures, but we do not know whether he attended Schelling’s (in Jena 1798–1803).Footnote 25 Although he left before Hegel’s arrival in Jena in January 1801, one can say that he was nevertheless ‘influenced above all by Hegel’.Footnote 26 Richard Wagner may also have received Hegelian ideas from his uncle’s friend, Christian Hermann Weisse. This much neglected philosopher and theologian had studied under Hegel and in 1829 two books appeared, one concerning the current state of philosophy in relation to Hegel’s system and the other a translation of Aristotle ‘on the soul’ (de anima) and ‘on the world’ (de mundo, wrongly attributed to Aristotle).Footnote 27 Then in 1830 his System of Aesthetics appeared which, although holding to a Hegelian method, did not entirely hold to the Hegelian teaching.Footnote 28 Wagner was enthralled with Weisse when he met him at his uncle’s home and, no doubt, this encouraged him later to study Hegel: ‘I had listened to a conversation between these two men about philosophy and philosophers, which impressed me very deeply’ (My Life: 54; Mein Leben 1: 62).
Wagner attended Weisse’s lectures on aesthetics when he was a student at the University of Leipzig but gives the impression of having had little interest in them. In his autobiography he writes: ‘Two or three times […] I attended lectures on aesthetics given by one of the younger professors, a man named Weiss’ (My Life: 54; Mein Leben 1: 62). One wonders whether Wagner is underplaying the role of Weisse in his intellectual development by saying that he attended only two or three lectures and I even wonder whether the misspelling of his name is deliberate! Wagner was in the habit of minimizing the influence of his teachers, wishing to present himself as self-taught, like Siegfried of the Ring cycle. The same pattern is found regarding his musical education and shortly after discussing Weisse there is a further misspelling, and again one wonders whether this is deliberate, this time his teacher in musical composition: ‘Weinlich’ (My Life: 54; Mein Leben 1: 62).Footnote 29 Later in his autobiography Wagner writes that his first attempts with philosophy ‘had been a complete failure’. ‘None of the Leipzig professors had been able to hold my attention with their lectures on basic philosophy and logic’ (My Life: 429; Mein Leben 1: 442).
As far as we know it was about fifteen years later that Wagner started to read Hegel. According to the painter Friedrich Pecht, Wagner was reading the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) sometime in the period 1846–47, and he relates this story:
One day when I called on him I found him burning with passion for Hegel’s Phenomenology, which he was just studying, and which, he told me with typical extravagance, was the best book ever printed. To prove it he read me a passage which had particularly impressed him. Since I did not entirely follow it, I asked him to read it again, upon which neither of us could understand it. He read it a third time and a fourth, until in the end we both looked at one another and burst out laughing. And that was the end of phenomenology. (Pecht Reference Pecht1894: 1: 294: Otto Reference Otto1990: 90)Footnote 30
But it was not the ‘end of Phenomenology’ for Wagner and later I point to one of his possible allusions to the work. Around the same time he read a much more accessible work, Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Wagner used the second edition of 1840, the only work of modern philosophy in Wagner’s personal library in Dresden, and he dates the first reading to 1847 (Brown Book: 94; Braunes Buch: 111). He writes:
For my introduction to the philosophy of Hegel I chose his Philosophy of History. Much of this impressed me, and it appeared as if I would gain admittance to the inner sanctum by this route. The more incomprehensible I found many of the most sweeping and speculative sentences of this tremendously famous intellect, who had been commended to me as the keystone of philosophic understanding, the more I felt impelled to get to the bottom of what was termed ‘the absolute’ and everything connected with it. (My Life: 429–30; Mein Leben 1: 442)
Although Wagner’s autobiography is not always entirely accurate, I have consulted his copy Hegel’s Philosophy of History and am convinced it was read, although there are only two markings. (But Wagner rarely marked his books and I will come to a striking exception shortly.) In addition to the Phenomenology and Philosophy of History he may also have read the Aesthetics, and if he did not he must have learned about Hegel’s ideas through some other meansFootnote 31 since the essays he wrote in his exile in Zürich so clearly reflect Hegel’s Aesthetics (Bujić Reference Bujić1988: 51–52) not to mention the close correspondence between the two thinkers on Greek literature (Foster Reference Foster2010). Wagner would be naturally drawn to Hegel on account of the exalted place he gives artFootnote 32 but he clearly appropriates Hegel to suit his own artistic agenda.Footnote 33 In addition to all this, one should add that even if Wagner never read a single word of the philosopher, Hegel was in the very air he breathed. I am not claiming that Wagner understood all the subtleties of Hegel’s philosophy but there is sufficient evidence that he had a feel for all the essentials of his thought.
VII. Wagner’s interest in theology
As well as these philosophical interests, Wagner was fascinated with theology. In addition to Hegel, Luther was one of his abiding passions and a vast range of literature was to inform his theological outlook—whether that be Greek tragedy, Goethe, medieval literature or the essays of Lessing. His theological interests can be perceived in all his stage works of the so-called ‘Wagnerian canon’. For example, the first three operas concern the hope of redemption of a man through the love of a woman. In the first two of these operas (Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser) the man is redeemed; in the third, a heavenly figure, Lohengrin, a knight of the holy grail, longs to become fully human through the love of a woman (Elsa), but she fails to redeem him.
After completing Lohengrin Wagner worked on his next proposed opera Siegfried’s Death that, after some significant changes, eventually became the Twilight of the Gods (the fourth opera of the Ring cycle). Wagner completed the libretto of Siegfried’s Death in the Autumn of 1848. In this original version the hero Siegfried dies to atone for the sins of the Gods. Then in early 1849 he turned his attention to an opera Jesus of Nazareth in five acts. The fact that the opera was to be in five acts may speak for Wagner’s sense that he was dealing with ‘history’ (his only other five-act opera was Rienzi, based on events in fourteenth-century Rome). To prepare for the opera he read with some care through his New Testament in Luther’s translation, marking it extensively; it is in fact the most heavily marked of all his books that I have consulted. And among the markings are Roman numerals placed in the margin, these indicating for which of the five acts of his proposed opera these verses were relevant.
Then in April 1849 he produced prose sketches for the opera that come in three parts, and the order of composition was probably as follows (Bell Reference Bell2017: 263–64). First, he wrote out verses from the New Testament, which he considered important for the opera, using a separate sheet for each act. Secondly, he wrote the outline of the opera. Thirdly, he composed a sophisticated theological commentary, reflecting the thought of several theologians, but principally Hegel. I offer one example:
So Jesus brushed aside the House of David: through Adam had he sprung from God, and therefore all human beings were his brothers: not through an earthly kinghood could he ransom them from misery, but only through fulfilment of the supreme divine vocation he had recognised, in which God changed himself to a human being to bring himself to the consciousness of all through this one human who first had recognised Him in himself: the wretchedest, the greatest sufferers, must be his earliest chosen; through them must knowledge pass into the world. (PW 8: 298 (modified); SSD 11: 285)
Wagner’s ideas here reflect what is found, for example, in the Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God (cf. Borchmeyer Reference Borchmeyer1983: 247):
That humanity knows God implies, in accord with the essence of community, a communal knowledge; that is to say, humanity knows God only insofar as God knows godself in humanity. This knowledge is God’s self-consciousness, but it is at the same time a knowledge of God on the part of humanity; and this knowledge of God by humanity is the knowledge of humanity by God. The spirit of humanity—to know God—is simply God’s spirit itself. (LPEG: 126; Werke 17: 480)
A series of dramatic events prevented Wagner from making progress on the opera. In May 1849 he was one of the leaders of the revolution in Dresden. The revolution failed and he was lucky to escape Dresden and avoid being arrested. Others were not so lucky such as the conductor and fellow revolutionary August Röckel. He was sentenced to death, but this was commuted to imprisonment. Röckel was not released until 1862, so spent thirteen years in prison, two of them in solitary confinement. On fleeing Dresden, Wagner may have taken with him the Jesus sketches (cf. SB 21: 455). He managed to reach Weimar (via Chemnitz and Altenburg) where he was given invaluable help by Franz Liszt (Walker Reference Walker1989: 113–19), and, according to his autobiography, discussed with him and Liszt’s partner, Princess Carolyne von Sayn Wittgenstein, the proposed opera Jesus of Nazareth (My Life: 413; Mein Leben 1: 425). Both Liszt and his partner had a keen interest in theology and Carolyne was to become a prolific writer on matters of Church and theology; however, both had reservations about Wagner’s planned opera, as he explains:
[O]ne afternoon there was a lively discussion resulting from my description of the draft for a tragedy to be entitled Jesus von Nazareth, during which I saw Liszt lapse into doubtful silence, while the Princess protested vigorously against any plan to bring such material onto the stage. (My Life: 413; Mein Leben 1: 425)
We know that at some point Wagner lent the sketches to Carolyne and it may even have been on this occasion. Unfortunately, Wagner never saw the sketches again. Considering herself a devout and fervent Roman CatholicFootnote 34 (although she was not entirely orthodox)Footnote 35 Carolyne thoroughly disapproved of the idea of an opera on Jesus of Nazareth. Repeated attempts were made to recover the sketches. In 1865 Ludwig II, having become Wagner’s patron the previous year and now being anxious that the manuscript should be recovered, wrote twice to composer (KB 1:108, 206) and then turned to Cosima von Bülow, daughter of Liszt and future wife of Wagner, telling her that he longed to see the sketches (letter of 26 January 1866 in Schad Reference Schad1996: 133). Later that year Cosima summed up the situation for Ludwig (letter of 11 September 1866):
Jesus of Nazareth is locked up in the Altenburg in Weimar, belongs to Princess [Carolyne von] Wittgenstein, and she intends to return from Rome to Germany, to sort out her papers, so she can pass on the manuscript to me for you my treasured friend; but she has not yet done this! (Schad Reference Schad1996: 259)
In January 1869 Wagner himself tried to recover the sketchesFootnote 36 but his efforts also proved to be in vain. He died in 1883, and then Caroline in 1887; and it was in that year that the sketches saw the light of day as Wagner’s son Siegfried arranged for their publication (the sketches run to fifty-six pages in the English translation). The only music we know he composed for the opera was a short passage of just eleven bars of music, these being discovered on the back of a sheet from a Lohengrin score,Footnote 37 and the link to this opera may be significant. Jesus of Nazareth, if it ever materialized, would probably have the style of Lohengrin with large choruses, often offering a commentary on the events unfolding (cf. the role of the chorales in Bach’s St Matthew and St John Passions).
VIII. Wagner’s essays on opera and drama
Although Jesus of Nazareth was never completed, the ideas in the sketches did not go to waste and ended up in an unexpected place: on the stage of the Ring cycle. The Ring cycle came into being because Wagner realized Siegfried’s Death needed to be prefaced by three other operas and the work was eventually completed in 1874. Other than composing some musical sketches for Siegfried’s Death in 1850, Wagner did not work on the Ring until May 1851. Instead he wrote essays, thrashing out his thoughts on what an ‘artwork of the future’ should be. In these essays the death of Jesus does occasionally feature. Art of Revolution (1849) closes by praising ‘the two sublimest teachers of humankind: Jesus, who suffered for all human beings; and Apollo, who raised them to their joyous dignity’ (PW 1: 65 (modified); GSD 3: 41). His essay of 1850–51 (Opera and Drama) is critical of Christianity for its ‘rigid dogma’ (starren Dogma) (PW 2: 166; GSD 4:4 2) but concerning the essence of the Christian myth itself, he is generally more positive as in these comments: ‘The enthralling power of the Christian myth consists in its portrayal of a transfiguration (Verklärung) through Death’ (PW 2: 159; GSD 4: 36). However, in another essay (A Communication to my Friends, 1851–52), he explains why he had to give up on the Jesus opera. Although Jesus offered ‘a wondrous appearance (Erscheinung)’, Wagner had to distinguish between ‘the symbolic Christ’ and the one ‘existing at a certain time and amid definite surroundings’ (PW 1: 378; GSD 4: 331). This distinction explains what he writes a couple of pages later about ‘the contradictory nature of the subject matter’, this being one reason why he gave up on the Jesus project (the other one being the ‘impossibility of bringing this work […] to a public hearing’) (PW 1: 380; GSD 4: 332).
Wagner here touches a fundamental issue that Hegel addresses. Knowing Jesus historically is knowing him only as he ‘appears’ to the ‘understanding’ (Verstand). True knowledge of Jesus can only come with ‘reason’ (Vernunft). ‘Vernunft knows the dialectical inner truth of objects, whereas Verstand knows objects in the form of differences which present themselves empirically as one-after-another characteristics connected in outward space and time by a mere “also”’ (Yerkes Reference Yerkes1983: 145).Footnote 38 Hence presenting Jesus of Nazareth in a historical five Act opera fails to penetrate the meaning of the Christ event as a revelation of God who is spirit.
Wagner’s way forward was to present in the Ring cycle a redeemer who belongs to the world of myth alone and not history. Already in Siegfried’s Death the death of Siegfried was to atone for the sins of the Gods; but in the final Ring the key redeemer figure is Brünnhilde. Although Wagner knew of the historical roots of these figures (Sigibert and Brunichild), his Siegfried and Brünnhilde were mythical figures forged by a bringing together of a vast range of sources (Bell Reference Bell2020). To some extent Brünnhilde’s death is modelled on that of the Jesus of the proposed opera, which in turn is modelled on Hegel’s understanding of the death of Christ. This is just one instance of how material from the Jesus sketches fed into the Ring cycle.
IX. The death of Christ and the death of Brünnhilde
It was noted earlier how Hegel in his mature thought presents the death of Christ: this is the death of God that results in the giving of spirit. The same pattern is found in Wagner’s Jesus sketches. He wisely places the death of Jesus off-stage, and this is what he notes in the outline for the close of the drama:
[Peter] teaches [Judas] to understand the sacrificial death of Jesus now being suffered: this death is his apotheosis, and not the signs and marvels which Judas had expected of him.—Darkening of the heavens—thunder and lightning.—Judas’ despair—the Disciples’ loathing of him: Pharisees appear, seeking Judas: he casts away the money he had had from them, and rushes out as if demented. Earthquake. Tales of horror—women and folk bewailing:—Priests: The veil of the temple is rent in twain. Interpretation of this event by Peter. Peter: ‘Fear not the terrors of this storm, we know they are a witness unto love!’—John and the two Marys return from the crucifixion: ‘He hath fulfilled’.—Peter feels himself inspired with the Holy Spirit: in high enthusiasm he proclaims the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise: his words give strength and inspiration to all; he addresses the people,—whoever hears him, presses forward to demand baptism (reception into the community). –The end.— (PW 8: 297; SSD 11: 284)
Reflecting Hegel’s understanding of the death of Jesus we have here the crucifixion followed immediately by the giving of the spirit. Both Hegel and Wagner telescope Good Friday (the death of Christ) and Pentecost (the giving of the spirit). Although in the work of Luke-Acts these events are separated by fifty days, John’s Gospel brings them closer together, and Hegel and Wagner may well be influenced by John, not only in this point but in many others.Footnote 39 So John 19:30 tells of Jesus’s last words ‘It is finished’ (cf. ‘He hath fulfilled’ from the close of the Jesus sketches) followed by the words ‘Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit’. Exegetes are divided as to whether John is here referring to the giving of the spirit and to my knowledge neither Hegel nor Wagner make any explicit appeal to John 19:30 to establish a connection between his death and the immediate giving of the spirit.Footnote 40 But Hegel does write of the significance of Pentecost, as we have seen in Philosophy of History, and likewise Wagner alludes to the day of Pentecost in the close of the Jesus sketches, referring to Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2: 14–36), and the baptisms that followed on that day (Acts 2: 38–41).
So how is this ending of the Jesus sketches developed in the Ring cycle? The figure of Christ is represented by the Valkyrie, Brünnhilde. Being the daughter of two gods, Wotan and Erda, she is divine. But at the end of the second opera in the Ring cycle, The Valkyrie, she is emptied of her divinity and can be said to become fully human. A case could possibly be made that this ‘incarnation’, this emptying, is, as Hegel writes, ‘a divestment (Entäußerung) of itself such that it still is in this divestment’ (LPhR 3: 124; VPhR 3: 59).Footnote 41 However, the way the drama develops suggests that she does in fact lose her divinity, but recovers it towards the end of Siegfried’s Death,Footnote 42 and offers her life as a redemptive sacrifice. As Wagner revised this opera the focus of the redemptive death moved from Siegfried to Brünnhilde and the opera was renamed Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung), and the Gods that experience this ‘twilight’ are those of the Pantheon, namely Wotan, Fricka, Freia, Donner and Froh.
For Hegel, Christ’s death, viewed historically, ‘is consistent with his life and teaching in the sense that it is the consequence of his religious radicalism and revolutionary attitude towards the established orders’ (Hodgson Reference Hodgson2005: 170). A similar view is found also in Wagner’s Jesus of Nazareth sketches, where Jesus challenges the religious authorities, and preaches the centrality of love over law. Likewise in the Ring cycle, Brünnhilde’s death is the natural consequence of her placing the highest value on love rather than law.Footnote 43 Viewed religiously, the death of Christ for both Hegel and Wagner is the ‘death of God’. And just as Christ voluntarily gave his life to atone for the sins of the world, so Brünnhilde in the Ring cycle works ‘the deed that redeems the world’ (Spencer Reference Spencer, Spencer and Millington2000: 258; GSD 6: 156).
Wagner clearly thought he was making a theological step forward in the Ring, based on his views on gender. Wagner sent his Ring libretto to his fellow revolutionary August Röckel in prison. Röckel had various questions about the libretto and Wagner answered them in a long letter to him on 25/26 January 1854.Footnote 44 One of the points Wagner makes is this:
Not even Siegfried (man alone) is the complete ‘human being’: he is merely the half, only with Brünnhilde does he become the redeemer; one alone cannot do everything; many are needed, and a suffering self-immolating woman finally becomes the true, conscious redeemer: for it is love which is really ‘the eternal feminine’ itself. (SL: 307 (modified); SB 6: 68)Footnote 45
So only with the death of man and women can there be atonement. As I understand it, in the final version of the Ring Brünnhilde encompasses Siegfried in her personhood and dies as God. Her death is the death of God of which Hegel writes. And just as Jesus’s spirit is given to the community after his death, so Brünnhilde’s spirit fills the cosmos, represented by the musical theme ‘the glorification of Brunnhilde’, the very final leitmotif heard in the opera.Footnote 46
X. Understanding the death of Christ as a self-involving enterprise
Wagner and Hegel have different emphases when discussing the death of Christ but in many ways they share the view that the death of Christ cannot be understood simply as an event in history and that its significance can only be grasped by a self-involving enterprise, the bringing together of the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’. Hegel’s way of analysing this is to see the inadequacy of the ‘understanding’ (Verstand) in relation to the ‘representation’ of the death of the Christ. When representation coincides (zusammentrifft) with Verstand, properties are placed side by side (Enz I: 50, §20; Werke 8: 73) such as ‘the rose is red, and also odorous, and also prickly’ (Yerkes Reference Yerkes1983: 81; cf. Enz I: 58, §24Z1; Werke 8: 83). The rose is only known ‘in-and-for-itself’ in its ‘concept’ (Begriff) by Vernunft (Yerkes Reference Yerkes1983: 80). This can be related to ‘faith’ by holding that genuine faith is spiritual and exists in the spirit: ‘the faith of the community rests solely on reason itself, on the Spirit’ (LPhR 3: 150; VPhR 3: 85). Such genuine faith ‘is not merely a question of faith as belief in [what happened at this] time and in this external history, but rather of faith that this man was the Son of God’ (LPhR 3: 226–27; VPhR 3: 157). The ‘sensible content’ becomes something quite different: ‘The object has been completely transformed from something that exists sensibly and empirically into something divine, into what is essentially the highest moment of God himself’ (LPhR 3: 227; VPhR 3: 157).
In coming to appreciate the significance of Christ’s death, Wagner is not as systematic as Hegel but much of what he writes coheres with Hegel. In his 1880 essay Religion and Art, he argues that describing Christ crucified as a ‘symbol’ does not do justice to the enormity of the event. Instead, it must be seen as a ‘direct copy’ (wirkliches Abbild) of the divine (PW 6: 217; GSD 10: 215). The self-involving nature of Christ’s death is expressed in his 1879 open letter against vivisection (many of these ideas are found in the libretto of Parsifal):
The monstrous guilt of all this life a divine and sinless being took upon himself, and expiated with his agony and death. Through this atonement (Sühnungstod) all that breathes and lives should know itself redeemed, so soon as it was grasped (begriffen wurde) as pattern and example to be followed. (PW 6: 203; GSD 10: 202)
This bringing together of the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ is also found in his letter to Ludwig of 14 April 1865. Just as Hegel has a word play on ‘Begreiffen’ (‘comprehension’) and ‘Ergreiffen’ (‘grasping’) in the section on the death of Christ in the Phenomenology, so Wagner plays on the verbs ‘begreiffen’ (‘to understand’) and ‘ergreiffen’ (‘to take hold of’) in this letter, and this could offer some fresh confirmation that Wagner had read this work. So he tells Ludwig:
Today is Good Friday again!—O, blessèd day! Most deeply portentous day in the world! Day of redemption! God’s suffering!! Who can grasp the enormity of it? And yet, this same ineffable mystery—is it not the most familiar of humankind’s secrets? God, the Creator,—he must remain totally unintelligible to the world:—God, the loving teacher, is dearly belovèd, but not understood:—but the God who suffers (Gott der Leidende), His name is inscribed in our hearts in letters of fire; all the obstinacy of existence is washed away by our immense pain (ungeheure Schmerz) at seeing God suffering (Gott im Leiden zu sehen)! The teaching which we could not take in (Die Lehre, die wir nicht begreiffen), it now takes hold of us (sie ergreift jetzt uns): God within us,—the world has been overcome (überwunden)! Who created it? An idle question! Who overcame it? God within our hearts,—God whom we comprehend in the deepest anguish of fellow-suffering (der im tiefsten Schmerz des Mitgefühles begriffene Gott)! (SL: 641–42 (modified); KB: 1: 82)
XI. Hegel and Wagner on the question of ‘God’
One of the consequences of the ‘death of God’ for Hegel is that God is no longer remote and transcendent but rather is near and immanent God, and dwells in human hearts. This goes against much of what is presented in the bible, where God is so often presented as a monarch and an absolute monarch at that. Macquarrie writes that according to Hegel,
from the beginning, that is to say, from all eternity, spirit, in accordance with its nature, has been going forth into the other, has been manifesting itself in the realm of the finite. So if we conceive of God as the absolute Monarch containing in himself all power and being, then such a God has never existed. In Hegel’s words, ‘The absolute being must from the start have implicitly sacrificed itself’. (1992: 220)Footnote 47
Wagner largely shares Hegel’s understanding of God as immanent, although he does not always exclude the idea of a transcendent GodFootnote 48 or a transcendent world.Footnote 49 Some have labelled Wagner an ‘atheist’ (e.g. Gregor-Dellin Reference Gregor-Dellin2005: 743; Köhler Reference Köhler and Spencer2003: 560). One could possibly come to this conclusion based on Cosima’s diary entry (CD: 20 September 1879): ‘R[ichard] says, “I do not believe in God, but in the divine, which is revealed in Jesus without sin”’. But since Wagner on other occasions affirmed his belief in the God who suffers (as in the letter to Ludwig), his statement is unlikely to indicate a simple atheism; it is more likely that he is questioning the ‘creator God’ or the God of the Old Testament. With his predominantly immanent view of God, Wagner would probably endorse Hegel’s view that Christian faith is the self-consciousness of God in humanity.Footnote 50 For both Hegel and Wagner this is rooted in the ‘death of God’, which has revolutionized the understanding of God’s very nature. Hegel says: ‘Death is love itself; in it absolute love is envisaged. The identity of the divine and the human means that God is at home with himself in humanity, in the finite, and in [its] death this finitude is itself a determination of God’ (LPhR 3: 220; VPhR 3: 150). And this is a message that is not only found in Wagner’s Jesus of Nazareth sketches but also one that resounds at the close of Twilight of the Gods.Footnote 51
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