Siegfried & Evil Jesus
Fafner, by Johan Egerkrans Lections: The Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost , AD 2026 A Homily: Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great. Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig came very close to converting to Christianity. Many of his friends had. But on the brink of Baptism—and having undergone a powerful spiritual experience at a Yom Kippur—he chose not to enter the Church, because, he said, the Christian soul is forever divided between Siegfried and Christ. And that always stuck with me. For any non-Central Europeans out there, Siegfried is the dragon-slayer, the great Germanic hero of the epic Nibelungenlied, and of Wagner’s magnum opus Ring Cycle. For Rosenzweig, Siegfried represents the national, the mythic, the realm of earthly power—whereas Christ is the antithesis of this. Christ comes to us “from the outs...
