Wagner Explains Why Christian Art
Is So Morbid
This article first appeared in RENEWAL
VOL 13 NO3; DECEMBER 2006. It is reprinted here with the permission of the
publisher.
Richard Wagner was both a great
musician and a great proto-Odinist. In 1849 he wrote
a work called Die Kunst
und die Revolution, from which the extract below is taken. We reproduce it
here, not as an exercise in Christian-bashing, but because we believe a genius’
insights into aesthetic matters can and should provide for contemporary Odinist artists.
Christianity adjusts
the ills of an honourless, useless, and sorrowful existence of mankind on
earth, by the miraculous love of God; who had not-as the noble Greek
supposed—created man (sic) for a happy and self-conscious life upon this earth,
but had here imprisoned him in a loathsome dungeon: so as, in reward for the
self-contempt that poisoned him therein, to prepare him for a posthumous state
of endless comfort and inactive ecstasy. Man was therefore bound to remain in
this deepest and unmanliest degradation, and no
activity of the present life should he exercise; for this accursed life was, in
truth, the world of the devil, that is, of the senses; and by every action in
it he played into the devil’s hands. Therefore the poor wretch who, in the
enjoyment of his natural powers, made this life his own possession must suffer
after death the eternal torments of hell! Naught was required of mankind but
faith—that is to say, the confession of its miserable plight, and the giving up
of all spontaneous attempt to escape from out this
misery; for the undeserved Grace of
God was alone to set it free.
The historian knows
not surely that this was the view of the humble son of the Galilean carpenter;
who, looking on the misery of his fellow men, proclaimed that he had not come
to bring peace, but a sword into the world; whom we must love for the anger
with which he thundered forth against the hypocritical Pharisees who fawned
upon the power of Rome, so as the better to bind and heartlessly enslave the people;
and finally, who preached the reign of universal love—a love he never could
have enjoined on men whose duty it should be to despise their fellows and
themselves. The inquirer more clearly discerns the hand of the miraculously
converted Pharisee, Paul, and the zeal with which, in his conversion of the
heathen, he followed so successfully the monition: “Be ye wise as serpents”; he
may also estimate the deep and universal degradation of civilised mankind, and
see in this the historical soil from which the full-grown tree of finally
developed Christian dogma drew forth the sap and fed its fruit. But thus much
the candid artist perceives at the first glance: that neither was Christianity
art, nor could it ever bring forth from itself the true and living art.
The free Greek, who
set himself upon the pinnacle of Nature, could procreate art from very joy in
manhood: the Christian, who impartially cast aside both Nature and himself,
could only sacrifice to his God on the altar of renunciation; he durst not bring
his actions or his work as offering, but believed that he must seek His favour
by abstinence from all self-prompted venture. Art is the highest expression of
activity of a race that has developed its physical beauty in unison with itself
and Nature; and man must reap the highest joy from the world of sense, before
he can mould therefrom the implements of his art; for
from the world of sense alone can he derive so much the impulse to artistic
creation. The Christian, on the contrary, if he fain would create an artwork
that should correspond to his belief, must derive his impulse from the essence
of abstract spirit, from the grace of God, and therein find his tools. What,
then, could he take for aim? Surely not physical beauty mirrored in his eyes as
an incarnation of the devil? And how could pure spirit, at any time, give birth
to a something that could be cognized by the senses?
All pondering of this
problem is fruitless; the course of history shows too unmistakably the results
of these two opposite methods. Where the Greeks, for their edification,
gathered in the amphitheatre for the space of a few short hours full of the
deepest meaning, the Christian shut himself away in the lifelong imprisonment
of a cloister. In the one case, the Popular Assembly was the judge: in the
other the Inquisition; here the state developed to an honourable democracy:
there, to a hypocritical despotism.
Hypocrisy is the
salient feature, the peculiar characteristic, of every century of our own
Christian era, right down to our day; and indeed this vice has always stalked
abroad with more crying shamelessness, in direct proportion as mankind, in
spite of Christendom, has refreshed its vigour from its own unquenchable and
inner wellspring, and ripened toward the fulfilment of its true purpose. Nature
is so strong, so inexhaustible, in its regenerative resources, that no
conceivable violence could weaken its creative force. Into the ebbing veins of
the Roman world, there poured the blood of the fresh Germanic nations. Despite
the adoption of Christianity, a ceaseless thirst of doing, delight in bold
adventure, and unbounded self-reliance remained the native element of the new
masters of the world. But, as in the whole history of the Middle Ages we always
light upon one prominent factor, the warfare between worldly might and the
despotism of the Roman Church: so, when this new world sought for a form of
utterance, it could find it only in opposition to, and strife against, the
spirit of Christendom.
The art of Christian
Europe could never proclaim itself, like that of ancient Greece, as the
expression of a world attuned to harmony; for reason that its inmost being was
incurably and irreconcilably split up between the force of conscience and the
instinct of life, between the ideal and the reality. Like the order of chivalry
itself, the chivalric poetry of the Middle Ages, in attempting to heal this
severance, could, even amid its loftiest imagery, but bring to light the
falsehood of the reconciliation; the higher and the more proudly it soared on
high, so the more visibly gaped the abyss between the actual life and the
idealised existence, between the raw, passionate bearing of these knights in
physical life and their too delicate, etherealised behaviour in romance. For
the same reason did actual life, leaving the pristine, noble, and certainly not
ungraceful customs of the people, become corrupt and vicious; for it durst not
draw the nourishment for its art impulse from out of its own being, its joy in
itself, and its own physical demeanour; but was sent for all its spiritual
sustenance to Christianity, which wanted it off from the first taste of life’s
delight, as from a thing accursed. The poetry of chivalry was thus the
honourable hypocrisy of fanaticism, the parody of heroism: in place of Nature,
it offered a convention.
Only when the
enthusiasm of belief had smouldered down, when the Church openly proclaimed
herself as naught but a worldly despotism, appreciable by the senses, in
alliance with the no less material worldly absolutism of the temporal rule
which she had sacrificed: only then commenced the so-called renaissance of art.
That wherewith man (sic) had racked his brains so long he would fain now see
before him clad in body, like the Church itself in all its worldly pomp. But this
was only possible on condition that he opened his eyes once more, and restored
his sense to their rights. Yet when man (sic) took the objects on belief and
the revelations of fantasy and set them before his eyes in physical beauty, and
with the artist’s delight in that physical beauty—this was a complete denial of
the very essence of the Christian religion; and it was the deepest humiliation
to Christendom that the guidance to the art creations must be sought from the
pagan art of Greece. Nevertheless, the Church appropriated to herself this
newly roused art impulse, and did not blush to deck herself with the borrowed
plumes of paganism; thus trumpeting her own hypocrisy.
Worldly dominion,
however, had its share also in the revival of aft. After centuries of combat,
their power armed against all danger from below, the security of riches awoke
in the ruling classes the desire for more refined enjoyment of this wealth,
they took into their pat the arts whose lessons Greece had taught. “Free” art now swerved as handmaid to
these exalted masters, and, looking into the matter more closely, it is
difficult to decide who was the greater hypocrite: Louis XIV, when he sat and
heard the Grecian hate of tyrants, declaimed in polished verses from the boards
of his court theatre; or Corneille and Racine, when,
to win favour of their lord, they set in the mouths of their stage heroes the
warm words of freedom and political virtue, of ancient Greece and Rome.
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