The Rudolf Steiner Archive

14. Richard Wagner in the Light of Spiritual Science IV

[ 1 ] The deeper one delves into the works of Richard Wagner, the deeper one also delves into theosophical and mystical questions and the mysteries of life. It is extraordinarily significant that Richard Wagner, after having unfolded the entire prehistory of the European peoples in four stages in his Ring of the Nibelung, went on to create an eminently Christian drama—the work with which he actually concluded his life’s work: Parsifal. One must penetrate Wagner’s entire personality if one wishes to understand what actually lives within this Parsifal.

[ 2 ] For him, the figure of Jesus of Nazareth had been taking shape in his mind since the 1940s. He wanted—and fragments of it still exist—to write a play titled “Jesus of Nazareth,” a work in which the infinite love, as it works through Jesus of Nazareth for all humanity, was to be brought to life. That is what he wanted to create, but he never got beyond the basic ideas. He then drafted the play “The Victors” in the 1950s. From these dramas, we can see the depths of the worldview from which this poet’s intuitions were drawn.

[ 3 ] Let us briefly consider the plot of the drama The Victors: Ananda, a young man from a noble caste, is passionately loved by Prakriti, a Chandala girl—that is, a girl from a despised caste. He, however, renounces all sensual, earthly love and becomes a disciple of the Buddha. According to Wagner’s intention, the Chandala girl was supposed to have been a member of the Brahmin caste in a previous incarnation and, at that time, to have rejected the love of a Chandala youth with haughty contempt. Her karmic punishment is now to be reborn into the Chandala caste. Having worked her way to the point where she could renounce her love, she, too, becomes a disciple of the Buddha. You can see that Wagner had already grasped the karmic problem in all its depth when, in the mid-1850s, he set out to create a musical drama as profoundly serious as Die Sieger. All these ideas ultimately converged in his Parsifal. But at the same time, the Christ problem stands at the center of Parsifal.

[ 4 ] Medieval history reaches a pivotal point at the turn of the 12th to the 13th century. It was during this time that Wolfram von Eschenbach was active, having poetically adapted the mystery of Parzival from the deepest spiritual essence of the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, people who led spiritual lives were imbued with something that, in initiated circles, was called the exaltation of love. There were love poets and minnesingers both before and after this period. But there was a great difference between what was previously understood as worldly, sensual love and what later emerged in Christianity as purified, sanctified love. A significant monument to this turning point in spiritual life during the Middle Ages has been preserved for us in Hartmann von Au’s Der arme Heinrich (Poor Henry). This deeply spiritual poem is imbued with the spiritual teachings that the knights of the Crusades had brought back from the Orient. Let us imagine the plot of “Poor Henry”: A knight of Swabian descent, who had always fared well until then, is stricken with an incurable disease, “Miselsucht,” and can be freed from it only through the sacrificial death of a pure virgin. A virgin is found who is willing to sacrifice herself for him. Together they travel to Salerno in Italy to see a famous physician. Just as the maiden is about to be sacrificed, Heinrich refuses to accept the sacrifice at the last moment; the maiden remains alive, Heinrich subsequently recovers, and they are married.

[ 5 ] Here, then, we find once again the image of the pure virgin who sacrifices herself for a man who has hitherto lived only for sensual pleasures and is now saved through her. From the perspective of the Middle Ages, a mystery lies hidden here. The tradition of minnesang was attributed to an ancient movement that had emerged through the four successive stages of European cultural development, as depicted in the sagas presented by Richard Wagner in his tetralogy. In that era, love that stemmed solely from the sensual was viewed as something that needed to be overcome. Purified by the higher spiritual power of Christianity, the tradition of the minnesingers was to be reborn in a new form.

[ 6 ] If we want to understand what happened there, we must take all the factors into account in order to recall the character, the physiognomy, of that era. Only then can we understand what prompted Wagner to portray this legend. There was an ancient legend, a primordial tale, which we can find among the earliest Germanic peoples and, in a slightly different form, also in Italy and other countries. Let us clarify the basic outline of this legend: A man has come to know the joys of the world and now enters a kind of underground cave; there he meets a woman of extraordinary and enchanting allure. There he experiences certain joys of paradise; but then he is overcome by a longing for the upper world, and after some time he returns from the mountain. This is particularly clearly illustrated in the Tannhäuser legend. When we bring this legend to mind, we find in it a beautiful symbol of the ancient pursuit of love in the Germanic lands before that great turning point of which I have spoken: Human activity in the sensory world, the retreat into the joys of love in the old sense—which was thought to be embodied in the goddess Venus—and the distraction from activity in the external world through love as a kind of paradisiacal experience. —But in this form, the legend lacks a proper focal point. It contains nothing that offers us a glimpse toward the higher. It arose from the earlier worldview, from the previous conception of love. Later, in the early stages of Christianity’s spiritual shaping of love, people sought to shed light on earlier times and to highlight the contrast between this paradise and the Christian conception of paradise.

[ 7 ] If we want to understand Wagner, we must delve even deeper. We have examined our fifth root race. After the floods had engulfed Atlantis, the sub-races emerged one after another: the Proto-Indian, the Proto-Persian, then the Egyptian-Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean, then the Greek-Latin, and after the decline of Roman culture, our fifth sub-race emerged—the one in which we live today and which is of particular significance for Christian Europe. Not that Richard Wagner knew everything I have just said. But he had an absolutely certain sense of the state of the world under the fifth sub-race, and he perceived the entire task of the present as a religious one—a concept that even Theosophy could not express more aptly.

[ 8 ] You know that each of these “races” was inspired by great initiates and that the original inspiration for the fifth Atlantean race came from the so-called Proto-Semites. You know that when Atlantis was engulfed by the floods, those who emigrated and were spared from the race’s downfall were led by Manu, a divine guide, to Asia, to the Gobi Desert. From there, cultural influences spread first through India to the Near East, Persia, Assyria, and Egypt, and then to southern Europe, to Greece, Rome, and later to our regions.

[ 9 ] The first two Semitic cultural influences—namely, those that shaped the Indian and Proto-Persian races—can no longer be traced in history. However, when we consider the Chaldean-Egyptian subrace, we must acknowledge that a major Semitic influence took place there, from which the people of Israel derive their name. Christianity can be traced back to such a Semitic influence, which then extended into Greek-Latin culture. If we trace these cultural influences further, we find the Semitic-tinged influence of the Moorish peoples, who had invaded Spain, spread throughout Europe—an influence from which even Christian monks could not escape. Thus, the proto-Semitic impulse extends all the way to the fifth subrace. We can thus see how the primordial culture was influenced five times by this one great current.

[ 10 ] From the south comes a great spiritual current, which is met by another current that developed in the north through four stages of primordial culture, until the two currents converged. A worldly and naive people were influenced by the culture coming up from the south at the turn of the 12th to the 13th century. The influx of a new culture was experienced like a spiritual breeze. Wolfram von Eschenbach was entirely under the influence of this spiritual current.

[ 11 ] Nordic culture is symbolized by the legend of Tannhäuser, in which the impulse also comes from the south. Everywhere we find something we can describe as the Semitic impulse. But one thing was felt very strongly: that the Germanic race was the final link in a chain of development, that something entirely new was to come, that something quite different was being prepared for the fifth subrace—this is the higher mission of Christianity. At that time, a new form of Christianity was felt as a longing in the Germanic lands; a new Christianity was to be created, detached from what it had undergone in the south. Christianity was to be recreated in a purer form. During the Crusades, a conflict arose between Rome and Jerusalem. The Crusaders fought under the battle cries “Here, Rome!” and “Here, Jerusalem!” The former referred to Roman Christianity, which was now nothing more than a shell; the latter to a pure Christianity that they sought to restore and for which they saw Jerusalem as a spiritual center. This was the view of the great scholastics, and for Dante as well, in his Divine Comedy, Jerusalem was a center—though one to be sought more in a spiritual than in an external sense. Thus, the fifth subrace was perceived as a harbinger of the future. The old influences had ceased; something entirely new was to come,

[ 12 ] A new upheaval in world culture began. It was merely an attempt to establish “true” Christianity, but from this shell one was to extract the core of genuine Christianity. At the turn of the Middle Ages, people sensed something coming to an end—the cessation of something they had regarded as a blessing—and at the same time, they sensed something emerging in their longing for the new. All of this lived on in Wolfram von Eschenbach.

[ 13 ] Now consider the new era. Imagine this feeling, revived at a time when decline had set in, and you will find something of what lived within Richard Wagner. By then, much of what had previously been perceived as the decline of the race had come to pass. From the beginning of his conscious life, Richard Wagner felt this element of decline particularly vividly. For him, there were many signs that the decline was underway and that a new formation must take place. The chaos that surrounds us today in so many respects, the way in which the lower classes in our time are more withering away than living, the misery of the great European masses, whose spiritual life remains in darkness and who are cut off from all education—no one felt this more deeply than Richard Wagner, and that is why he became a revolutionary in 1848. We must not imagine Wagner as an ordinary revolutionary, but rather understand him in this way: the thought weighed heavily on his soul—that it is in our hands today to play a part, either in accelerating the decline, turning the wheel downward, or guiding it upward. The revolution of 1848 was for him merely an external opportunity.

[ 14 ] If we view all of this in this light, we will understand how Richard Wagner arrived at his ideas about the races, as he expresses them in his prose writings. In his essay “Religion and Art,” he says something to the following effect: Over there in Asia, among the Indian people, we find something of the original power of the Aryan race. There lives on something of the lofty power of spiritual life, but only for an elite—for the Brahmin caste. The lower castes are excluded from this teaching, but within the Brahmin caste a high spiritual level has been attained, which is an expression of the primordial culture. “If we look from there toward the north,” Richard Wagner says, “we find a naive race that has itself gone through four stages of development—a people who love to hunt, and one must imagine that, as hunters, they took pleasure in killing their enemies.” - For Wagner, the joy in killing living beings is a symptom of decadence. It is a profound, occult fact that life and death are strangely connected to humanity’s development toward the higher, purer, and spiritual. Everything humanity accomplishes in terms of torment and the destruction of life robs its soul of spiritual power. One may think what one will about individual cultural phenomena—any destruction of life is linked to the stripping away of spiritual powers. Therefore, those who walk the “dark path” must, by very nature, destroy life. This is expressed, for example, in the novel Flita by Mabel Collins. It is the story of a practitioner of black magic who destroys unborn life because she needs it for her reprehensible powers. There is a profound connection between life, death, and human development. This is a lesson that peoples had to learn and experience. It was a different matter when, during a certain historical period, killing was carried out naively; at that time, people discovered through killing the power that lay within them—the ancient Germanic hunter-gatherer peoples found themselves in this situation.

[ 15 ] But now, with the advent of Christianity, things changed. Christian doctrine forbids killing; killing is a sin. This is the origin of the view that led Wagner to strict vegetarianism. For him, a diet that includes meat became a sign of a race’s decline, and he identified the transition to a diet that no longer tempts people to kill as the only path to progress.

[ 16 ] The sense that a new impetus was needed also prompted Wagner to comment on the influence of Judaism on contemporary culture. Wagner was not an anti-Semite in the senseless, hateful sense that one encounters today, but he felt that Judaism had outlived its role, that Semitic influences on our culture were bound to fade, and that something new had to take their place. Hence his call for renewal. This is connected to how he viewed our present race. He told himself: We must distinguish between racial development and spiritual development. — This distinction must be made if one is to understand development at all.

[ 17 ] We were all once incarnated in the Atlantean race; but while the souls have continued to evolve and ascend, the race has fallen into decadence. Yet every ascent is linked to a descent. For every soul that refines itself, there is one that sinks. There is a difference between the soul within the racial body and the racial body itself. The more a person becomes like the race—the more he loves what is temporal, transitory, and connected to the characteristics of his race—the more he is part of the race’s decline. The more he frees himself, elevating himself above racial characteristics, the more the soul has the opportunity to incarnate at a higher level. A spirit such as Wagner’s, which distinguishes between the development of the soul and the development of the race, cannot possibly be anti-Semitic. He knows that it is not the souls that have played out their roles, but rather that the races have fulfilled their tasks in the great course of world history. This is what Wagner repeatedly expresses in his writings when he speaks of “Semitism.” Wagner senses decline—the decline of the races—and the necessity of the ascent of the souls. Medieval souls such as Wolfram von Eschenbach or Hartmann von Aue also sensed this necessity.

[ 18 ] Let us return once more to the legend of Poor Henry. We must examine a little more deeply what it means that Poor Henry is healed by a pure virgin. Henry’s illness stems from the fact that he initially lived in the sensory realm; his “I” was born out of his race, out of that which is sensually active in this epoch. This “I,” born out of the sensually active, becomes ill when the call goes out to it—to humanity—to develop more highly. The soul becomes ill because it connects with that which is meant to live only within the race. This is characterized by the way love is expressed in a worldly manner. Now, higher love is to develop out of the lower love that lives within the race. What lives within the race must be redeemed by something higher—by the higher, pure love that sacrifices itself for the striving human soul, by what Goethe calls the “Eternal Feminine,” which draws us upward.

[ 19 ] You know—as I have explained many times before—that the masculine and the feminine live within every human being, and that because they are separated, the sensual intermingles with them. Salvation through the “Eternal Feminine” means that the sensual is overcome. This is also depicted in “Tristan and Isolde.” For Wolfram von Eschenbach, as for Richard Wagner, the historical embodiment of this overcoming is Parsifal; he is the representative of the new Christianity. Parsifal becomes King of the Holy Grail by redeeming that which previously suffered under the bondage of the sensual, and by introducing a new principle of love into the world.

[ 20 ] What is the basis of Parsifal? What does the Holy Grail mean? The legend, which we see emerge around the middle of the Middle Ages, tells us that the Holy Grail is the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea then collected the blood that flowed from the wound of Christ Jesus. This cup and the lance that had inflicted that wound were carried aloft by angels and kept suspended in the air until Titurel came along, who built a castle on Mount Montsalvat—that is, the Mountain of Salvation—where this cup was kept as a sanctuary of the spiritual knighthood. Twelve knights are gathered to serve the Holy Grail. It has the power to ward off death from these knights and to give them what they need to guide their souls toward the spiritual realm. The mere sight of it continually renews their spiritual strength.

[ 21 ] Now we can turn immediately to the form Richard Wagner gave to the Parsifal legend. It is essentially the same as the one we already find in Wolfram von Eschenbach. On the one hand, we have the Grail Temple with its knights; on the other, Klingsor’s enchanted castle with his knights, who are the true enemies of the knights of the Grail. Two forms of Christianity are set against one another here: one is represented by the knights of the Grail, the other by Klingsor and his knights. Klingsor is the one who mutilated himself so as not to succumb to sensuality. Yet he has not overcome desire; he has merely made it impossible to satisfy it. Thus he still lives in the realm of sensuality. Enchantresses serve him. Kundry is the true seductress in this realm. She draws everything that comes to Klingsor toward the sensual side, toward that which should belong to the past. Klingsor personifies medieval Christianity, which has become ascetic—a Christianity that has killed sensuality but not, at the same time, desire; it does not save one from the seductive power of sensual love, which is personified in Kundry. Something higher was seen in the power of renunciation inherent in higher spirituality, which does not suppress sensuality through coercion but, through higher spiritual insight, ennobles this sensuality and rises into the realm of purified love. Amfortas and the Knights of the Grail strive for this, but until then it had not been possible to create this realm. It did not succeed. As long as the proper spiritual power was not present, Amfortas was bound to succumb to Kundry’s seduction; the higher disposition within Amfortas falls victim to the lower disposition, Klingsor.

[ 22 ] Thus, the Parsifal legend presents us with two contrasting phenomena: on the one hand, Christianity, which has become ascetic but, through the suppression of sensuality, has nevertheless failed to attain higher, spiritual knowledge; and on the other hand, the representatives of the spiritual knighthood, who, however, continue to fall victim to Klingsor’s seduction as long as the Savior has not appeared to defeat Klingsor. Amfortas is wounded, loses the Holy Lance to Klingsor, and must guard the Grail as a king afflicted by pain. Thus, higher Christianity, too, languishes and suffers. Through suffering, it must guard the true secrets—the mysteries of Christianity—which are connected to the Holy Grail, until a Savior appears in a new form—and this Savior is embodied in Parsifal. Parsifal must first learn his lessons; he undergoes the trials; then he purifies himself and rises to that spiritual power, to the feeling of the great unity of all being. Once again, unconsciously, Richard Wagner presents us with profound, occult truths in Parsifal. First, Parsifal passes through the stage where he learns compassion—compassion for our elder brothers, the animals. In his impetuous drive toward knighthood, he had abandoned his mother, Herzeleide, who died of grief; he had fought and killed the beast. As he gazed at the beast’s dying eyes, he felt what it means to kill. This is the first stage of his purification.

[ 23 ] The second stage consists of his learning to overcome desire without having to externally destroy the organs of sensual desire. He first reaches the Holy Grail, but does not yet recognize his task. He comes to know it by receiving the initiation of life. He seemingly succumbs to Kundry’s temptation, but he passes the test. At the very moment when he might yield to temptation, he breaks free from the power of desire; a new, pure love shines within him like the rising sun. There flashes forth what we had already seen arise in Götterdämmerung. “Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria virgine,” born of the Spirit through the Virgin—this is the higher power of love, which is born from a soul not steeped in sensuality, a power that purifies, cleanses, and ennobles all souls. Man must awaken within himself such a soul, one that does not kill the sensory organs but rather ennobles all that is sensual, for from the virginal substance the “I,” the Christ, is born. Christ is born in Parsifal. A higher, virginal power stands in opposition to the seductive Kundry. Kundry—that feminine principle which drags the human “I” down into the sphere of the sexual—must be overcome. In Kundry, we are confronted with the incarnation of that which, as the opposite sex, has dragged humanity down. Kundry has existed before as Herodias, who demanded the head of John the Baptist. She has existed in a manner similar to Ahasver—as a figure who cannot find peace, who seeks her sole salvation everywhere in sensual love.

[ 24 ] Liberation from sensual love is what Richard Wagner unconsciously revealed to us in his Parsifal. We see how this idea winds its way through his work. Already in The Flying Dutchman, he is led by the intuitive power of his being to the same problem: a man wandering the seas is redeemed from his long wanderings through the sacrifice of a maiden. It is also the problem of Tannhäuser. Wagner portrayed the Singers’ Contest at Wartburg as the struggle between the singer of the old, sensual love, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Wolfram von Eschenbach, who represents the power of renewed, spiritual Christianity. In this legend of the Singers’ Contest at Wartburg Castle, it is precisely Heinrich von Ofterdingen who calls upon Master Klingsor of Hungary for help. But both are defeated by the power that radiates from Wolfram von Eschenbach. We now understand Tristan more deeply because we know that what is at stake is not the destruction of love, but the clarification and purification of the love that lives within him.

[ 25 ] From Schopenhauer’s negation of the will, Richard Wagner soared toward a reversal and purification of the will into the higher spheres. Wagner even expressed this purification in a drama where it seemingly does not appear at all: Die Meistersinger. You can find it, so to speak, between the lines in the purification of Hans Sachs from the temptation he feels toward Eva to win her for himself. This is not so much in the text itself as in the music; when you listen to the music of Die Meistersinger, you sense something of this purification.

[ 26 ] All of this came together for Richard Wagner in his Parsifal. He looked back to the primordial Brahmanic ideal. With melancholy and pain, he saw the signs of decay in the present race. And through his art, he sought to create a new impulse. The redemption of the race through a new spiritual content—that was what he sought to convey in his festival. It was in this spirit that Nietzsche, as long as he was aligned with Wagner, wrote about Dionysian art. He sensed that something alive in the festival reflected a renewal of the mystery plays of ancient Greece. The “Dionysia” of Aeschylus and Sophocles, which take us back to the dawn of the fourth sub-race, were a factor that contributed to the emergence of the cultural current of the fifth sub-race. In the depths of the mystery temples of Dionysus, one sensed this redemption of humanity. It was only in the European countries that what had taken place in the mystery temples at that time came to light. We stand before a Dionysus who incarnates himself in matter, who celebrates his resurrection and his ascension within the human being. In the mystery temples, the Greek initiate sensed the god who had descended. There was a touch of melancholy in these Greek mysteries when it was spoken of that in the future the god would rise again in human hearts. And in Norse mythology, the initiates—the Druids—spoke of the twilight of the gods, from which a new generation would emerge. Christianity was foretold in the ancient mysteries of the Drotten and the Druids. Richard Wagner saw the time approaching when Christianity—which had developed within the fourth subrace and ascended into the fifth—must be fulfilled, and when this Christianity would speak its very own language. Now those who have believed are to become seers once more.

[ 27 ] Richard Wagner experienced the pulse of the Earth’s evolution, as did Edouard Schur, who, drawing on this impulse, reconstructed the ancient mystery drama of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Thus, the Bayreuth event reveals to us the convergence of two cultural currents: the revival of the Greek mysteries and a new Christianity. This is how Richard Wagner perceived it, and so did those around him, and Edouard Schure also perceived this art as a first prelude to the reunification of what had once been separated. In the original drama [of Eleusis], religion, art, and science were united as one until they split apart. Art went its own way—Aeschylus, Sophocles—while religion and science went their own separate ways. Three currents, running side by side, thus grew out of the common root of the Greek mysteries. Each of these currents could only flourish by first going its own way. The age found a special religious expression for the soul, an artistic one for the senses, and a scientific one for reason. This was inevitable, for perfection could only be achieved if human beings could develop each of these faculties to their fullest bloom by following separate paths. Religion, when elevated to the heights of the Christian worldview, is ready to reunite with art and science. Poetry, painting, the plastic arts, and music will only reach their zenith when they reunite with true religion. And science, which only reached its full development in modern times, has in truth provided the impetus for the unification of these three currents.

[ 28 ] Now, through Richard Wagner—who was among the first to sense the impulse toward a new union of art, science, and religion—this union has been presented as a new gift to humanity. He sensed that Christianity is called upon to reunite what was once separated, and he embodied this in the character of his Parsifal. How the great resounding of a new culture rings in our ears in that Good Friday magic, into which Wagner poured his Good Friday mood. He recognized that the development of the soul and the development of the race must follow different paths; that it is necessary to uplift and redeem the souls; that the resurrection of the souls must be brought about, despite the tragic fate of being bound to the body of the race—to that which is in decline. Richard Wagner sought, through his work in Bayreuth, to let the world resound with tones that point toward a new future. At least a small portion of humanity should listen to those sounds of the future. It is a living, artistic apocalypse that Wagner proclaimed to his time, as a true prophet who knew that a new era must soon dawn—an era to which he wished to point. Thus his life’s work comes to a close:

[ 29 ] I will tell you the visions that have appeared to me, and the time will come when they will come true.