Indeed, Parsifal may be called Richard Wagner's great
confession of faith. He takes the legend of the Holy Grail, and uses it
to portray wonderfully and thrillingly the Christian truths of the
beauty, the glory, and the inspiring power of the Lord's Supper, and the
infinite meaning of the redeeming love of the Cross. He reveals in this
drama by poetry and music, and with a marvellous breadth and depth of
spiritual conception, this theme (in his own words): "The founder of the
Christian religion was not wise: He was divine. To believe in Him is to
imitate Him and to seek union with Him.... In consequence of His atoning
death, everything which lives and breathes may know itself redeemed....
Only love rooted in sympathy and expressed in action to the point of a
complete destruction of self-will, is Christian love." (Wagner's
Letters, 1880, pages 270, 365, 339.)
The criticism has sometimes been made that the basic religious idea of
Parsifal is Buddhistic rather than Christian; that it is taken directly
from the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who was perhaps as nearly a
Buddhist as was possible for an Occidental mind to be; that the
dominating idea in Parsifal is compassion as the essence of sanctity,
and that Wagner has merely clothed this fundamental Buddhistic idea with
the externals of Christian form and symbolism.
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