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see Him Himself on the Cross; / it looks up to man redeemed, / who feels freed from the burden of sin and terror, / made clean and whole through God’s loving sacrifice. / Now grasses and flowers in the meadow know / that today the foot of man will not tread them down, / but that, as God with divine patience / pitied him and suffered for him, / so man today in devout grace / will spare them with soft tread.” Nature is redeemed by humanity as man was through the death of Christ. At the heart of this ecological theology is the motif of redemptive compassion, around which Wagner weaves a semantic fabric of Christian symbolism (the Fall of Man, Grail, spear, Communion), Buddhist ideas (salvation in nirvana instead of eternal life) and Schopenhauerian philosophy (salvation through denial of the will, especially (insatiable) erotic desire).
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