Parsifal as Will and IdeaAuthor(s): Edmund J. DehnertSource: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Jun., 1960), pp. 511-520Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/428118Accessed: 27/07/2010 15:02

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Blackwell Publishing and The American Society for Aesthetics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

http://www.jstor.org

PARSIFAL AS WILL AND IDEA

EDMUND J. DEHNERT

In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems are presented to us as if growing out of one another spontaneously ... The inner biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a secondary place. And yet it is precisely this inner biography that explains for us most things.1

Contemporary musical theorists, from the later editions of Hanslick's Vom musikalisch Schonen to the schools of Salzer and Schenker, tend to dwell on organic explanations of music, neglecting or even denying the expressive, ethical, or metaphysical denotations and connotations that occupied the serious specu- lations of musicians since Damon. Moreover, stylistic tendencies are explained by a kind of Hegelian historical approach wherein one epoch begins as the anti- thesis of a preceding one, developing or often exaggerating what the older style neglected, and finally is brought together with the original thesis in a synthesis which is at once a culmination and the stimulation of a new style. Galilei's attack on counterpoint and the developments through homophony and tonality to the tonal polyphony of J. S. Bach can serve as a ready example. Yet each composer was a living man, with a character and convictions which were not set aside when he wrote. And what he wrote need not be a polemic for one to assume that traces of a temperament and a philosophy are at least covertly in the substratum of the art work.

Certainly the personality and ideological commitments of an artist must be borne in mind. But to essay an explanation of the works of, let us say, Chopin or Schumann, exclusively from the standpoint of psychological bent is likely to prove more rhapsodical than empirically demonstrable. Yet these composers cannot be explained as mere cogs in the wheel of stylistic evolution. They are influenced by their contemporaries and predecessors but not determined by them; on the other hand, they can write autobiographically morose or joyous works or produce their happiest pieces surrounded by misery.

To find the threads of a philosophical commitment in one work is not an impossible task. However, if one is dealing with absolute music the most likely conclusion is that the premises and conclusions are nearly unprovable. Where a text is involved, demonstrable arguments can be formulated with considerably more ease. But to conclude that these deductions are necessarily the composer's life convictions is a step that must be taken cautiously. In the case of Wagner there is considerable reason for one to try to make this step. Being as much involved in ideological harangues as he was in evolving musical styles, he left voluminous writings in support of various aesthetic, political, and religious views. The problem at hand is this: to determine in the light of these and from the work itself what were the ideological and metaphysical allegiances

1Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (N. Y., 1954), p. 2.

511

512 EDMUND J. DEHNERT

that stirred Wagner's Parsifal. In what sense did Wagner "fall sobbing at the foot of the Cross"?

Overtly, countless Christian references appear in Parsifal. Direct biblical parallels occur to the Last Supper in the Feast of Act I, others in the origin of the lance, the washing of Parsifal's feet, and indeed his appearance in the bearded guise of Christ in the last Act. Liturgical symbolism is evident in the words from the Canon of the Mass in Act I, Kundry's baptism in Act III, and the benedic- tion elevations of the Grail Cup in the first and final acts. Christian legend ap- pears in the derivation of the Grail from the cup of the Last Supper, and of the lance from that used by Longinus on Calvary. Other apocryphal traces are found in Kundry's covert association with the one who laughed at the crucifixion and was condemned to wander the world until the day of final redemption. Monastic detachment is suggested by the Knights of the Grail and Kundry's "dienen, dienen" of the third act. Even the stories of the Good Samaritan and Lazarus might be deduced from Gurnemanz' reproaches of Parsifal for stand- ing by idly in the presence of Amfortas' sufferings in Act I and the coming back to life of Titurel in the final scene.2

However, the Grail appears in heathen legend as an unending source of food and drink. In the medievel evolution of the Arthurian literature this notion be- came associated with the legend of Joseph of Arimathea and the Blood from Christ's wound.3 In fact, the whole background of the Parsifal legend and Wagner's piecing together of the details developed through Crestien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach is an intermingling of Paganism and Christianity.4

But even musically the opera borrows from Christian sources. The chantlike prelude bears striking similarity to a Gregorian antiphon:5

"Alma Redemptoris Mater": Hermannus Contractus (d. 1054).:

II I I al a I I U

Al- ma Re-demp-to-ris Ma- ter

Parsifal (m. 1- 6): Sehr Langsam

2The full score of Parsifal published by Broude Brothers notes on page 1026: "In der ersten Fassung der Dichtung stand hier: Titurel erhebt sich segnend im Sarge. Dieser Vorgang blieb nach des Meisters Anweisung unausgefiihrt." (In the first setting of the poem there stood here: Titurel raises himself up making the sign of the cross in the coffin. This incident, ac- cording to the master's direction, was not carried out.)

8Arthur C. L. Brown, The Origin of the Grail Legend (Cambridge, Mass., 1943), pp. 120, 135, 366-7; and Ernest Newman, The Wagner Operas (N. Y., 1949), pp. 654 and 660.

4 Newman, The Wagner Operas, pp. 640-662. 5 "Alma Redemptoris Mater" transcribed from the Gregorian notation in Liber Usualis, ed.

Benedictines of Solesmes (Tournai, Belgium, 1956), p. 273.

PARSIFAL AS WILL AND IDEA 513

That it is in a low register, unaccompanied, and non-metrical lends strong support to this thesis.

The symphonic-dramatic tendencies of the nineteenth century were felt in Church music in the works of Berlioz and Liszt. This revived interest in Gregorian Chant and polyphony is evident in Liszt's essay "On the Church Music of the Future" (1834). And this is expressed in chant borrowings in the opening fugue theme and the solo tenor part of the "Pater Noster" of his Christus :6

Ave Maria:

A- ve Ma-ri- a gra-ti- a ple- na

Christus (fugue theme) I ,.Ji

- 1 I . I I I I > I

J A' . -

* TA I - I b

W .,

This echoes the cantus firmus writing of Christian composers since the be- ginnings of part song. Is it mere coincidence that both composers use Marian hymns? Christus and Parsifal were associated in at least one evening in these composers' lives, when Liszt played his Christus and Wagner read the un- scored dramatic sketch of Parsifal.7 And despite the one-time complaint of Wagner against Liszt's "latest Ave Maria" there is a correspondence in general shapes and in the emphasis on a minor second in each theme.8 There is not enough evidence here to place Wagner in the camp of Liszt's "Church Music of the Future." But we can read Paul Bekker concluding that:

Wagner makes of art a religion-the purified religion of a future humanity that only such religion and such art can call into being. The tragedy of life in the natural order shall not be abolished, but the poet-priest shall exalt it by revealing to the initiate a new and purified life-impulse. Such is the promise for which is exacted the price of faith-faith in the miracle of the stage.9

In contrast to this idea of a "second New Testament" Ernest Newman writes that Wagner's reversion to "a faith that he has long ago abandoned need not be taken too seriously: had Nietzsche been a finer-fingered psychologist than he was he would have seen that Wagner was not writing Parsifal because he had turned Christian but that the artist in him had become Christian-minded be- cause of his growing absorption in Parsifal."10 David Irvine, on the other hand,

6 "Ave Maria" transcribed from the Liber Usualis, p. 1861. 7 Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner (N. Y., 1946), vol. IV, p. 379. 8 Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, IV, 396. 9Paul Bekker, Richard Wagner, His Life in His Work, trans. M. M. Bozman (London,

1936), p. 471. 10 Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, IV, 543-544.

514 EDMUND J. DEHNERT

sees in Titurel's death a symbolic breaking of the power of the Roman Church and the victory of a supra-Christianity based on a Schopenhauerian meta- physics." He conveniently avoids making any note of Wagner's original plan to revive Titurel at the end. Leon Stein calls Parsifal "the fifth opera of the 'Ring'," an attempt to identify Christianity with "the Gods of Teutonic legend, to recast the creed, not as a universal religion, but as a belief to be under- stood only 'Germanly'.'12 John F. Runciman denounces the opera as immoral, "... a kind of Germanized metaphysical Buddhism. Schopenhauer, not Christ, is the hero.'13

The disparate conclusions of these authorities suggest that the Schopenhauer- ian, Buddhistic, Christian knot may never be untangled. But a glance at the phil- osophic background of Wagner's romanticism may ease the task. Each of these philosophies found a place in Wagner's thought. In his essay "Beethoven" he refers directly to "The World as Will and Idea."14 A letter to Liszt, of June 7, 1855, reveals how the two religions were associated by him: "Brahmin doctrine, more particularly in its crowning transfigurement by Buddhism... (influenced early Christian teaching) ... Present day research has conclusively shown that pure and unadulterated Christianity is... a branch of Buddhism." Further in this letter is a key to how he fused Schopenhauer, Buddha, and Christ through what he saw as a common element-Pessimism:

In the earliest Christianity we can still see plain traces of complete denial of the will to life, and a longing for the foundering of the world, i.e., for the cessation of existence.'

Romanticism generally has a Platonic aura. And by going to this philosopher we can uncover reasons why Schopenhauer developed as he did a philosophy so attractive for Wagner. In Plato's Seventh Letter to some Sicilian friends he writes of the impossibility for verbal discourse ever to give direct knowledge of the forms, the highest objects of the pure intellect. Language can tell one only what essences and indeed what the whole real world outside of the mind are like and not what they are. Dialectical discourse and metaphors can help one approach this knowledge but this is the limit of language. Two thousand years later, Kant doubted our sense impressions of external reality and so ranked discursive reasoning, in fields where there is no sense experience, at the top of the hierarchy of human knowledge. Music, in his Critique of Aesthetic Judge- ment, because it is non-verbal and forever bound to sense impressions, he ranked as the lowest art form.16 However, Post-Kantians were left with the dilemma that the "res in se," the objective thing outside of the mind, exists, but that according to Kant, its nature is unknowable. Schopenhauer, in one school that developed, tried to determine just what this "res" is. Hence he developed

' David Irvine, 'Parsifal' and Wagner's Christianity (London, 1899), pp. 125-129, pp. 349- 351.

Leon Stein, The Racial Thinking of Wagner (N. Y., 1950), p. 102. 8 John F. Runciman, Old Scores and New Readings (London, 1901), p. 216.

14 Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. W. A. Ellis, vol. V (London, 1897), pp. 81-82. 16 Quoted by Stein, op. cit., pp. 95-96. 16 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (London, 1914), pp. 217-220.

PARSIFAL AS WILL AND IDEA 515

his doctrine that the visible world is the idea or representation of what is es- sential, the appetite for being.17 By an ingenious insertion of Plato's view of language into the Kantian dilemma, he arrived at an explanation of music, a non-conceptual "language," which elevates it to the top of the art hierarchy as the direct manifestation of the Will, the original Platonic world of forms.18 Non-musical arts are copies of the Platonic Idea, but music becomes an im- personal symbolism with a content of ideas going straight to the inner reality, expressing it in a language which reason cannot understand. The stage action in Wagner's music drama corresponds to the copies of the Platonic Idea, while the orchestra is a direct manifestation of the Will. The whole role of accompani- ment in Romanticism is traceable to this metaphysical conception. It operates as a descriptive psychological commentary, even contradicting what is ap- parent on the stage. Tristan und Isolde is the best example of this. All through the "Day" sections of the last act, and especially in the "Custom" exchanges of the pair in Act I, the orchestra tells the story that fate or the Will is weaving. Isolde may be asking for chivalrous treatment due to a princess and Tristan may be devoted to his king, but the yearning and sorrowing going on in the orchestral commentary deny this unreal world. However, in Act II stage and orchestra tell the same story. The "Night" of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is the world of Platonic forms. He writes in Ein glicklicher Abend:

What music expresses is eternal, infinite, and real; it does not express the passion, love, or longing of such and such an occasion, but passion, love, and longing in itself; and this it presents in that unlimited variety of motivations which is the exclusive and particular characteristic of music, foreign and inexpressible to any other language.

His views of orchestral language and gesture as developed in Opera and Drama follow this same theme.

In many ways the ethical structure of Parsifal parallels the Schopenhauerian metaphysics of the Will to live. For in this Will are included all desires, strivings, impulses, and tendencies; and these in turn are all manifestations of dissatisfac- tion and pain. Withdrawal from the world of this Will, which offers no peace, is the basic answer that Schopenhauer offers to life.19 And he correctly traced a similar metaphysics in Buddhism's doctrine of purgation from all bodily long- ings and ultimate release in Nirvana,20 not extinction, but the natural and inevitable result of the conquest of all craving.2' One must identify with pas- sionless unchanging reality, not in a heaven, but on Earth before death.

Klingsor's magic garden parallels this world of desire. Ernest Newman quotes Wagner as saying that "Klingsor was the incarnation of the characteristic evil that brought Christianity into the world."22 It is striking that all the cravings for earthly pleasures that appear in Parsifal bring pain and death.

7 Henry Aiken, Age of Ideology (N. Y., 1956), pp. 98-104. 18 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp

(N. Y. 1950, 9th ed.), vol. I, pp. 335-342. "Aiken, op. cit., p. 102. 20 E. A. Burtt, ed. The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha (N. Y., 1955), p. 19.

Ibid., p. 85. 2 Newman, Life of Richard Wagner, IV, p. 603.

516 EDMUND J. DEHNERT

By succumbing to the desires and delights of the garden Amfortas receives his wound and the knights of the flower maidens fall from their once holy state. In Act III Amfortas' desire for death and consequent refusal to perform his quasi-priestly office have caused the craving for the Grail's feast throughout Monsalvat. And this need for beholding the Grail has killed Titurel and aged the knights of the Grail, once they are forced to satisfy their bodily needs with ordinary food. Klingsor was able to build his garden when, torn between desire to be a knight and his lusts, he desperately unmanned himself. And the whole source of evil is his desire to possess both the Grail and the lance. In contrast, the Grail knights are celibate, eat only the food of the Grail and wish for only one thing: to fight holy wars. But the desire to help others to achieve salvation is the only one allowed to a Buddhist.23 And it is basic to Schopenhauer's system. If Parsifal is Wagner's "supreme song of love and pity for this lamentable ill-constructed universe,"24 its metaphysical basis is closer to Schopenhauer and Buddha than to Christianity.

For Schopenhauer, all individuals are merely manifestations of the one Will; there is no real metaphysical base for a "principium individuationis."25 A man distinguishes between his personal will and the wills of other men only be- cause there is only one representation of the Will to Live which he can consider subjectively: his own. The consequent distinction between disparate wills is founded only on an illusion in subjective perception. Buddha too disregards this principle in that "salvation consists in leaving behind the separate, fearful, self-centered individual that in his finitude he now finds himself to be, and becoming one with the universal and absolute reality-leaving behind the realm of the unstable, transitory, and illusory, and becoming identified with the ultimate and eternal ground of all that exists."26

In his essay "Against Vivisection" Wagner proves his own esteem for the Schopenhauer ethic:

In our days it required the instruction of a philosopher (Schopenhauer) who fought with dogged ruthlessness against all cant and pretence, to prove the pity deeply-seated in the human breast the only true foundation of morality.7

Gurnemanz' reproach of Parsifal for killing the swan recalls another passage from this essay:

... the mystery of the world unveiled itself as a ruthless tearing into pieces, to be re- stored to restful unity by nothing save compassion. His pity for each breathing creature ... redeemed the sage from all the ceaseless change of suffering existences, which he himself must pass until his last emancipation. Thus... (he mourned) the beast, whose pain he saw without knowing it capable of redemption through pity.8

Certainly compassion is not foreign to Christian doctrine, but it is the root of the two systems of complete abnegation. There is a fundamental distinction

2 M. Anesaki, History of Japanese Religion (London, 1930), pp. 53-54. 24Newman, op. cit., p. 619.

Aiken, op. cit., pp. 104-113. Burtt, op. cit., p. 16.

' Prose Works, VI, p. 197. Prose Works, VI, p. 202.

PARSIFAL AS WILL AND IDEA 517

between the abnegation taught by Christ and that of these conceptions of reality where a personal God is denied.

But the crucial test for these correspondences occurs at the moment of Kundry's kiss. For, metaphysical explanations aside, on this hinges the defeat of Klingsor and the destruction of the garden, Parsifal's realization of his guilt in not aiding Amfortas, and his own identification with Amfortas. Here the "guileless fool" is either to fall a slave to lustful desires or dismiss them in his compassion for the wounded man. But Schopenhauer has already explained it:

It is this compassion alone which is the real basis of all voluntary justice and all genuine loving-kindness. Only so far as an action springs therefrom, has it moral value; and all conduct that proceeds from any other motive whatever has none. When once compassion is stirred within me, by another's pain, then his weal and woe go straight to my heart, exactly in the same way, if not always to the same degree, as otherwise I feel only my own. Conse- quently the difference between myself and him is no longer an absolute one.29

Certainly a Christian concept of guilt would have to be stretched to ex- plain Parsifal's lament over his "murder" of his mother and despair over the damnation he deserves for ignoring the Saviour's pain in Amfortas. At best, his sorrow over his ignorance is feasible in Christian terms. But the sudden revela- tion of all these through the pain that is at once Amfortas' and Parsifal's finds no immediate explanation. Only a Schopenhauerian view can neatly justify a verdict of guilt for fleeing to the World of Ideas, to "childish and wild ex- ploits"30 instead of grasping the essence of reality through Mitleid in the first act:

Repentance never proceeds from a change of the will (which is impossible), but from a change of knowledge.8

And the identification through this pain wrought by succombing to lust is simply the awareness that Amfortas and Parsifal are separate ideas of the same Will. What easier explanation can be found than the notion that an "intuitive perception" breaks through "the veil of delusion, the 'principium individuationis,' and reveals the identity of the ego with the non-ego..., his very self in another appearance form."32 And this is the Schopenhauerian ethic.

Consider Wagner's characterization of Parsifal as a pure, simple fool. To explain this in Christian terms one might suggest that, as the instrument of Amfortas' and Kundry's redemption and of the victory of Monsalvat, he sym- bolizes Christ, the Redeemer of the world who shouldered man's guilt and broke the forces of Hell. But what of the naivete of Wagner's hero, raised ignorant of the world of good and evil, who left home and unwittingly caused his mother's lonely death, who unknowingly killed a swan sacred to Monsalvat, who had not the wit to ask the fateful question that would have ended things in Act One? Here the parallel fails; for the Christ of Gethsemane had full knowledge of the causes and consequences of His choice. However, as a simple boy with no knowledge of good or evil, who, in fact, makes almost no personal act of will,

2 Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality, Trans. A. B. Bullock (N. Y., 1915), p. 170. ' R. Wagner, Parsifal (libretto), trans. H. and F. Corder (N. Y., n.d.), p. 31. a Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea, p. 382. a Bullock's interpretation of Mitleid in his introduction to The Basis of Morality, p. xi.

518 EDMUND J. DEHNERT

Parsifal is the ideal Schopenhauerian redeemer, one in whom the subjective will is negated and who, therefore, destroys the evil of the world, the con- flicting representations of the One Will to Live.

Nor is the contemplative existence at Monsalvat foreign to Schopenhauer's system. For by renouncing the garden of desires and ultimately extinguishing individual desires release is attained through asceticism.33 This coincides neatly with the third of Buddha's Four Noble Truths: the possibility of release through reaching a passionless state.34

It is significant that Wagner once planned to introduce Parsifal into Tristan und Isolde, which is thoroughly Schopenhauerian in its theme of release from Day, the illusory world, into Night, the world of reality:

His (Wagner's) melancholy broodings in the 1850's upon the innate tragedy of the cosmos had been both clarified and intensified by his reading of Schopenhauer at that time. The result of it all, as he himself tells us, was that the attempt to find "an ecstatic expression of the profoundest elements" in this philosophy "generated in me the conception of a Tristan and Isolde."5

Parsifal had been in Wagner's mind since the summer of 1845, a decade be- fore Tristan.36 Moreover, Amfortas is for him "Tristan of the third act, only immeasurably intensified."37 Truly, Wagner's whole idea of Christianity was closely associated with Schopenhauer's system:

It was reserved for a master-mind ... to light this more than thousand-years' confusion ... of Christendom: that the unsatisfied thinker at last can set firm foot again on a soil of genuine Ethics, we owe to ... Arthur Schopenhauer.8

Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde, Schopenhauer, and Buddha all course through the stream of Wagner's philosophy of compassion.39 The Tristan und Isolde that Nietzsche heralded as evidence of overfulness of life and the Dionysian triumph of German art gave birth to the Parsifal he rejected.40

However, the case of Parsifal is not as clear cut as might appear thus far:

Legend has it that Nietzsche, the pagan, broke with Wagner because in Parsifal he turned Christian.... Cosima had helped to inspire this opera. When Billow had finally divorced her, after she had given birth to three of Wagner's children, she turned Protestant; but she did not take religion lightly, and her cast of mind helped to suggest another way of salvation to Wagner, when the theme of redemption seemed all but exhausted by his previous music dramas: there was yet Christianity, and Wagner wrote Parsifal.1

In Act III we hear a non-Schopenhauerian Amfortas plead to his father who "dost behold the Saviour's self... Cry thou my words to Him: 'Redeemer!

"Aiken, op. cit., p. 105. Burtt, op. cit., pp. 28-29.

86 Newman, The Wagner Operas, p. 190. 86 Newman, The Wagner Operas, p. 664n. 87 Bekker, op. cit., p. 480. 88 Wagner, "What Boots This Knowledge?" Prose Works, VI, p. 256. 89 Newman, op. cit., pp. 665-666. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (London, 1924), pp. 43-45. ' Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche (N. Y., 1956), p. 42.

PARSIFAL AS WILL AND IDEA 519

Give to my son release!' ,,42 This cannot be reconciled to the atheistic metaphys- ics of Schopenhauer. But it seems that this same metaphysics is required to ex- plain the crux of Act II. Nor does Buddhism call for a Redeemer in heaven, a personal God. However, the resurrection of Titurel that Wagner once had in his stage directions fitted the Buddhist notion of rebirth for further purgation from desires. Christianity has no need for an earthly Monsalvat without death.

Logically, Parsifal is not completely consistent with any one of these systems. One may explain the Christian symbolism in the work by this passage from "Religion and Art":

One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognising the figurative value of the mystic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentations.

The somewhat altered symbolisms are matters of surface similarity. And, of course, Wagner's earlier works are paralleled or even consummated in this opera.44 But is Bayreuth his temple and Parsifal his testament?

We can read Wagner railing against "the degenerate Roman Church."45 And he even traces Schopenhauer's denial of Will in Christ's Incarnation.46 How- ever, it is to be noted that in a parallel passage from World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer is speaking of a symbolic representation of denial of the Will, whereas Wagner seems to lay no stress on the symbolism but rather talks of the "birth of God" as though he believed this to be a fact but was taking issue with the Church's expounding of the doctrine. On the other hand, his idea of the Eucharist, whose "proper meaning is only expressed in the ordinance of periodic fasts, and (whose) strict observance is reserved for a few religious orders,"47 finds perfect expression in Parsifal. And, indeed, Schopenhauer's idea of Christian symbolism fits here too. But when Wagner writes that the founder of the Christian religion was divine,48 we cannot read this into Schopen- hauer.

The work and the man remain an enigma: a fusion of Christianity, Buddhism, and Schopenhauerian Pessimism. There are common elements in the systems but there are contradictions in the way in which Wagner adopts them. Certainly in some points the ethical and symbolic structure of Parsifal agrees with what Christians hold. The misery of the fallen Amfortas could mean the Christian idea of suffering due to sin or Schopenhauer's concept of life as nothing but a vale of tears. Neither the Christian, Buddhist, nor Schopenhauerian needs a metaphysical system to recognize evil in the world. However, Christianity does not deny the value of life or announce that all desires are evil. For Schopen- hauer, evil is no problem because there is no good to contradict it; in this

2 Libretto, p. 41. 'Prose Works, VI, p. 213.

Bekker, op. cit., pp. 477-8. 46 Wagner, "What Boots This Knowledge?" Prose Works, VI, p. 257.

-- , "Religion and Art," Prose Works, VI, p. 218. 47 Ibid., pp. 231-232. 48 Wagner, "Religion and Art," p. 214.

520 EDMUND J. DEHNERT

system a metaphysical problem occurs only if a personal God is introduced into reality. Without Amfortas' allusion in the last act the ethical structure of Parsifal would have no problem.

A Christian explanation of evil as a privation of the Good and of a culpable act as one deprived of the harmonious relation to the moral law dictated by reason does not fit Parsifal in Act II. For in Christian ethics ignorance of the law is an excuse, especially when it is of the "Pure Fool" variety.49 Christian abnegation does not consist in a Buddhistic or Schopenhauerian withdrawal from all willing and desiring, but rather in a subordination of human will to the Divine and in the continual choice of what is higher in the hierarchy of moral values. Neither the will of St. Peter nor that of St. Paul could be at ease in Monsalvat. The essence of Christian asceticism lies far more in affirmation than in negation; it involves renunciation of what leads away from the Highest Object of the will and not the denial of all desire.

Though we might discover certain sympathies with Christian asceticism in Wagner, his prose works of the same period as Parsifal indicate that oriental and non-Christian ideals are more favorable to him. He has no place for re- ligion except in terms of a symbolism that overlies "truth." Wagner's last struggle with the theme of redemption remains a riddle. If he were simply "sobbing at the foot of the Cross" we would not find Schopenhauer there with him; if he were ridding Christianity of the false God that David Irvine sees in it,50 we would not hear Amfortas' prayer. Whether this is redemption of man by man or of man by God is unanswerable. Philosophically, Parsifal's ethical structure appears to be a contradiction in terms.

49 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia, q. 48, 5 and 6. o Irvine, op. cit., pp. 415-416.