Parsifal and Christianity

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Decadent and Offensive? Is it a Christian work? Chastity and Purity Redeeming the Redeemer Decadent and Offensive? conventional view of Wagner's last years might be as follows. He took as the basis for his last major work, the religion that had developed in the West over the preceding two millenia, and affirmed its truth. In the rejection of sexual love in favour of a Buddhistic compassion for all living things, burdened with existence (or with consciousness perhaps, or reason), his last hero found salvation for himself and for others. Put in these terms, Parsifal is dubious and decadent at best, downright offensive at worst.

Above: The prophecy is revealed to Amfortas as he prays before the Grail. Painting by Franz Stassen.

Is it a Christian work?

And if it is not a Christian work, as opposed to a work which is to a large extent about Christians (though remember, the Christ is never referred to by name) and their failings and eventual salvation, what is the significance of the celebration of the Eucharist in Act I, the prayers that can hardly be addressed to anyone but the Christian God, the point of Parsifal's baptising Kundry and telling her to have faith in the Redeemer, and much else besides?

n her Cambridge Handbook, Lucy Beckett speaks of the work's steadily maintained Christian frame of reference. This seems to miss the point that Wagner made right at the start of his essay, 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 mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal representation.
[Religion and Art, 1880, tr. W. Ashton Ellis.]

o despite Wagner's description of the work, for the benefit of King Ludwig, as a Christian parable it would be more accurate to say that he made use of the symbols of Christianity, together with some elements of Buddhist philosophy, to convey his own message. Indeed, as the author has shown in a separate article, as far as the second act is concerned, it might be more accurate to speak of a steadily maintained Buddhist frame of reference. We should also keep in mind that Wagner had an ambivalent relationship with Christianity; as a disciple of the atheist Schopenhauer, Wagner did not believe in God, although he told Cosima that he did believe in divinity (by which he probably meant 'o  Θεός ; see Religion and Art).

It is deeply significant that the second crucial moment in the opera takes place not on Easter Day but on Good Friday: on the day of the passion of Christ, not of his resurrection. Gurnemanz corrects Parsifal: it is a time for rejoicing, for the sacrifice of love that has already set men free. The spring of new life is here, as Parsifal himself comes to see and to proclaim to Kundry. The interpretation is not that of orthodox Christian doctrine and devotion, but it does express the significance that Wagner himself found in Christianity. The emphasis was on "the deed of free-willed suffering", not on the triumph of love which had overcome suffering: on "the love that springs from pity, and carries its compassion to the utmost breaking of self- will" which he claimed to have found in Schopenhauer's ethics, as he found it in Christianity. Schopenhauer, we know, points to the renunciation of the will- to-live; but mere renunciation, however unselfish, does not imply renewal, nor did Schopenhauer look for it.

Left: Bayreuth postcard showing Gurnemanz consecrating and anointing Parsifal on Good Friday (act three).

n his references to Christ, Wagner was concerned with Christ's act of selfless sacrifice: for him, Christ was the archetypal sinless sufferer. Since Wagner denied that Parsifal was a Christ figure, it is argued by Lucy Beckett that Gurnemanz' Du - Reiner! - Mitleidsvoll Duldender, heiltatvoll Wissender! is not addressed to Parsifal, but to Christ: this makes a profound difference. On the other hand, this may be Wagner's deliberate ambiguity.

 Thus it was promised to us

The figure of the sinless sufferer remains compelling; he was all that Wagner wanted of Christian tradition. But, if he is no more than this, what becomes of his relationship to Parsifal? Parsifal himself has suffered for Amfortas in the moment of temptation by Kundry; he has overcome the temptation and can now heal Amfortas' wound. If Christ has become simply the sinless sufferer, is it not possible, whatever the differences between them, to see a similarity, and thereby to see what happens as somewhat [sic] that happens not between man and God, to be spelt out in the language of traditional Christian doctrine, but between man and man -- a possibility that we may reveal to each other within the limits of the human condition?

  Lucy Beckett pointed out, Parsifal displaced the Buddhist drama Die Sieger from Wagner's plan of work. In part at least, because the ideas that he had developed in relation to the two stories had converged into one conceptual web. In Die Sieger, a chaste young man called Ananda receives into the future Buddha's community a beautiful girl called Prakriti, who has passionately loved him; but the Buddha persuades him to renounce her. The Buddha reveals that in an earlier incarnation, Prakriti had rejected, with mocking laughter, the love of a young man. In the last act of Die Sieger the future Buddha shows compassion for Prakriti and for the first time admits a woman into what had been an all-male religious community. One of the last sentences that Wagner wrote in February 1883 was the following: It is a beautiful feature of the legend, that shows the Victoriously Perfect at last determined to admit the woman. Prakriti and her laughter became yet another element in the complex character of Kundry, who at the end of Parsifal enters, apparently for the first time, the "Synagogue of the Grail", as Wagner called his Grail Temple.

agner's description of Kundry and her situation is also at odds with Christian teaching: as a result of her pitiless laughter, Kundry has been cursed and is unable to repent until the curse is lifted; yet the Christian churches teach that the door of forgiveness is always open to those who will repent. Nor does Wagner affirm life: no sooner is Kundry freed from her curse than she dies.

Wagner can't accept the fullness of Christian doctrine and (in spite of Nietzsche's polemic [in Der Fall Wagner where he saw Wagner "sinking, helpless and broken, before the Christian cross"]) the affirmation of life that it might have made possible.

Chastity and Purity

For Parsifal is a work of perfidy, of vindictiveness, of a secret attempt to poison the presuppositions of life -- a bad work. The preaching of chastity remains an incitement to anti-nature; I despise everyone who does not experience Parsifal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics.

Have you noticed ... that Wagner's heroines never have children? - They can't. - The despair with which Wagner tackled the problem of having Siegfried born at all shows how modern his feelings were at this point. - Siegfried "emancipates woman" - but without any hope of progeny. - One fact, finally, which leaves us dumbfounded: Parsifal is the father of Lohengrin. How did he do it? - Must one remember at this point that "chastity works miracles"? - Wagnerus dixit princeps in castitate auctoritas. (Said by Wagner, the foremost authority on chastity.)

nd, one might note, Wagner's Titurel can hardly have been chaste, since Amfortas is his son and heir, and Herzeleide was (possibly) his daughter. But Wagner's text makes a clear distinction between purity (Reinheit) and chastity (Keuschheit); not least, with Kundry's cruel, rhetorical question to the magician Klingsor, Bist du Keusch? Obviously he is chaste, since he has castrated himself: but Klingsor is far from pure. Klingsor is not the only character in the drama to be confused about this issue: Kundry seeks to regain her purity by robbing Parsifal of his chastity, and the Grail Knights are celibate except when the Grail permits them to marry (and even then, it doesn't always work out). Here too there is a connection with Die Sieger, in which Prakriti had to accept chastity (in other words, like Alberich she had to reject sexual love) before she could be united with Ananda in the community of the Buddha. It is clear that Wagner had considerable difficulty in accepting Schopenhauer's view that sexual love was just a trick played on us by the Will, in order to perpetuate the species. Yet in the long scene between Parsifal and Kundry towards the end of the second act of the drama, there seems to be a contest between sexual love ('έρως or amor) and brotherly love or loving- kindness ('αγάπη or caritas). As Dieter Borchmeyer pointed out (in Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre), the victory of caritas is shown (at the second climax of the drama) in Parsifal's brotherly kiss on Kundry's brow, a victory over the erotic or amorous kiss that Kundry had placed on his lips (at the first climax of the drama). Schopenhauer wrote [On the Basis of Morality, §18] that loving- kindness (like the other principal virtue, justice) flows from compassion. (See also The World as Will and Representation, part one, §67.)

Right: Bayreuth postcard showing Parsifal as new Grail King, elevating the radiant Grail (act three).

Redeeming the Redeemer

agner's drama has a Christian (or at least, religious; and if not religious, spiritual) dimension. Firstly since, like many of Wagner's earlier operas, it is concerned with redemption and redemptive sacrifice, and secondly there is a focus on compassion and self-sacrificing love. These themes are found in other religions, of course, and appear in a Christian context only because Wagner (with a predominantly Christian audience in mind) chose (mainly) Christian symbols, which religion would have us believe in their literal sense, with which to reveal his deep and hidden truth. Many commentators have tried to make a coherently Christian interpretation of Parsifal and given up in despair; it is a collection of vivid material without coherence, concludes James Mark; the work is made inconsistent, concludes Lucy Beckett, by a tension between irreconcilable pagan and Christian elements. It must be concluded that we must look not to Christian theology but elsewhere for a coherent interpretation of Parsifal as a consistent work.