G. W. F. Hegel and Richard Wagner on the Death of Jesus Christ

Abstract Hegel’s early work The Life of Jesus ( Das Leben Jesu ) of 1795 presents Jesus as a teacher of Kantian morality and ends abruptly with his death, anointing of his body, and burial, such that Jesus could appear to be merely a figure of the remote past. However, within a few years Hegel’s view of the death of Jesus was to change radically. Writing of his death in terms of the ‘death of God’, this individual is transformed into the universality of Spirit who dwells in the community. This paper examines how this fundamental change in Hegel’s thought came about, how Hegel’s mature understanding of the death of Jesus was appropriated by Richard Wagner in his proposed opera Jesus of Nazareth, and how this ‘death of God’ became the model for the death of Brünnhilde in the Ring cycle. For both Hegel and Wagner, the death of Christ can only be understood as a self-involving enterprise, the bringing together of the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’. Further, Wagner largely shares Hegel’s immanent understanding of God, although under other influences he can affirm the idea of a transcendent God or a transcendent world.