Such visible failure and a sense of lost moorings can be – for the individual as for society – not only a cause for concern but an exhausting emotional process. Where once there was an overriding explanation (however many troubles that brought), now there is only an overriding uncertainty and question. And we cannot unlearn our knowledge. Even someone who regrets their inability to connect with the faith that used to propel them cannot believe again simply in order to regain the propulsion. And as Europe learnt from philosophers such as John Locke, it is not possible to ‘force’ faith.7 Nevertheless, our societies go on, largely avoiding addressing these and other gaping questions or pretending that they do not matter.

In Germany, more than most societies, the loss of God did not have nothing to replace it. There, part of the purpose of religion – in particular the pursuit of truth and the knowledge that it should be pursued – continued in some form through the nation’s philosophy and culture. Yet this too crashed, even more spectacularly than the religion. From Ludwig Feuerbach and others Richard Wagner took the notion of art picking up from where religion had left off, in the belief that art could be more than a replacement for religion – it could be even better than religion. Not least because art could live without religion’s ‘encumbrances’. As Wagner put it at the start of his 1880 essay ‘Religion and Art’: ‘While the priest stakes everything on the religious allegories being accepted as matters of fact, the artist has no concern at all with such a thing, since he freely and openly gives out his work as his own invention.’ So Wagner professed to solve Arthur Schopenhauer’s great conundrum (in his ‘Dialogue on Religion’) of the tragedy of the priest who cannot admit that it is all metaphor.

For Wagner the role of art was to ‘save the spirit of religion’. What he attempted to speak to, in his music and essays, was the source of that other-worldly, subconscious voice that calls to us, asks questions and seeks answers. From Tannhäuser all the way through to Parsifal, his ambition and achievement created a kind of religion that could stand on its own and sustain itself. Perhaps more than any other composer he achieved that aim. Yet it was not enough, and it too foundered, of course. It failed to achieve a fully religious state for individuals – those who try to live their lives by the Wagnerian religion find themselves living very unhappy lives. And it failed more publicly because the whole world – whether justly or otherwise – could one day learn from Wagner himself that culture on its own cannot make anyone either happy or good.