The primary focus of this chapter will be on Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit. I will show how this autobiographical work provides a sustained reflection on what it takes to become a creative artist both from a historical perspective and in terms of an individual’s talents. For authorship in this work is considered not primarily as the making public of one’s own text or composition, as in the case of Rousseau, but rather as involving an intervention in an entire cultural domain. Dichtung und Wahrheit shows the childhood, youth, education, and early adulthood of the author as the phase that prepared him for reshaping the literary field in its entirety over the course of his life. Dichtung und Wahrheit thus presents the autobiographical account of the formative phase of its author’s life as the historically informed biography of an artist who happens to be the author of this biography.1
In Goethe’s move, of presenting his autobiography as if it were a biography, there is a decisive, even programmatic gesture of treating the self in a distanced, critical, and objective fashion, rather than in the inward-looking tradition practiced by confessional discourse, be that in its religious tradition or even in its decidedly secular adaptation, such as in Rousseau’s Confessions. For Goethe’s understanding and portrait of himself as an author who is a cultural innovator, neither subjection to a providential scheme provided by a positive religion nor the detailed focus on one’s own subjectivity with its valorization of authentic feeling rather than an externalizing approach to truth is acceptable. Ultimately Goethe’s rejection of the confessional mode involves an ethical position, an attitude toward the self, which is grounded in a thorough reconsideration of the roles and functions of religion and art both for the formation of an individual self, in terms of their educational, formative benefits, but also in terms of the historical potential of these domains in view of their respective claims to benefit a specific culture.
Too often Goethe’s autobiography and even Rousseau’s autobiography have been discussed as if they were to model an exemplary or prototypical self. I hope to have shown in the previous chapter that, in the case of Rousseau, though there are certainly claims that his autobiography provides new insights into some aspects of human nature, there is no attempt to present himself as representative of an everyman or an average citizen of his times. Quite to the contrary, he presents himself as an exceptional persona and an author in a position of sovereignty. Goethe’s authority and autonomy as an author is invested with a comparable degree of sovereignty, yet it is constructed in a totally different fashion. It is committed to a historical perspective, to conceiving of his own artistic potential and achievement in view of what was historically possible, which means a critical evaluation of a whole range of cultural domains in their specific settings.2 Before focusing on Goethe’s autobiography, and his portrait of his emergence as a cultural innovator, I shall focus on Goethe’s critical examination of the potential of art and religion for the formation of subjectivity. I shall first turn to his novel Wilhelm Meister, where Goethe thoroughly investigates the potential for the formation of subjectivity provided by the conventions of confessional discourse, and it is in this novel that we find a comparative assessment of the roles of religion and art. Whereas in Rousseau’s Émile there is almost no place for fiction and the arts, this is definitely not so for Wilhelm Meister, which could be considered the neo-humanist novel of education. In Wilhelm Meister a very particular relationship to art is crucial for the formation of the self. In fact, and this will be the focus of the following section, art takes over where religion—and not just institutionalized religion—falls short. Art alone can help the individual to transcend her or his own boundaries.
Wilhem Meisters Lehrjahre narrates a coming-of-age story as the eponymous hero’s gradual realizations of his limitations in making it in the world of the arts. Infatuated with a beautiful actress and the magic of the stage, Wilhelm tries to become an actor and not a businessman, as his father wishes. Ultimately, however, he has to come to terms with his limited talent, with the fact that he can always only act himself, always only impersonate a character he believes he is or he wants to be, never a character that is not part of his own narcissistic repertoire. Through the protagonist’s joining and following a wandering troupe of actors, the reader learns about many aspects of the theater as a changing cultural institution of the eighteenth century, ranging from the fickle fate of a wandering troupe of performers to the amateur ambitions at court and the high hopes invested in founding a permanent repertory theater. The protagonist, Wilhelm, learns through trial and error that he lacks the talent for acting: he can only act out his own narcissistic projections. Once he has gained that insight, he has to find one area where he can be useful. In the end he decides to become a physician. Wilhelm’s gradual, productive though painful realization that he should not become an actor and that his calling lies elsewhere, however, is not at all a critique of the arts or the institution of theater; quite to the contrary, it is through his engagement with the arts that he learns about his own limitations.
The novel is divided into eight books. Whereas the first five narrate Wilhelm’s engagement with the theater, the last two books focus on Wilhelm’s departure from the theater and his entry into a secret society through which he learns to assume more responsibilities, to act as a mentor toward his natural son, to find his profession, and to choose a partner for his life. Book 6 stands out as a separate entity on its own. It is presented as a first-person narrative, which the protagonist is given to read just as he is about to recognize and come to terms with the limitations of his own aspirations in the theater. The author of this book is—by the time Wilhelm is given her autobiography—the deceased aunt of the woman he is to fall in love with and marry, a prominent member of the family with whom Wilhelm becomes increasingly intertwined. Her memoires, entitled “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” are presented to the protagonist as another means of realizing the limitations of a life that cannot extend beyond the limits of the self. The trajectory of the life of the beautiful soul provides a countermodel to Wilhelm’s education, to the extent that it is a life based on the withdrawal from the world, from an engagement with production, a life guided by the attempt to avoid error and risk.
The term beautiful soul (schöne Seele, belle âme) is a technical term and designates an ideal character type, a person in whom duty and inclination coincide. It becomes popular in England first through Shaftesbury’s and then Samuel Richardson’s concept of virtue; in France it is central to Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie, in Germany to Christoph Martin Wieland’s bildungsroman Agathon and to Friedrich Schiller’s notion of aesthetic education. Hegel finally puts an end to this ideal by criticizing the beautiful soul for preserving its virtue at the cost of utter inefficacy in the world.3 Goethe’s critique of the beautiful soul in Wilhelm Meister is not that different from the one in Hegel’s Phenomenology: The beautiful soul in Goethe’s bildungsroman manages to cultivate a self that finds contentment and inner peace by regularly withdrawing from the external constraints and distractions of society at court, as well as from religious society, even from her secret fellow believers, the Pietist Moravians. To a certain extent she takes the position that if she cannot control external circumstances, nor what happens to her body, she can at least control the state of her soul, her feelings. She compensates for the love objects she cannot obtain by loving the Invisible One.
What makes Goethe’s critique of the concept of the beautiful soul especially interesting is the fact that he joins the ethical concept of the beautiful soul to the cultural technique of self-observation as it has been developed by first-person singular confessional discourse and that he allows this ethical ideal to stand at a particular juncture of secularizing trends in eighteenth-century religious practices. For Goethe’s “Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele” can be read as a document of the attempt at spiritual growth and an ethics that does not succumb to the subjection to the available official religious doctrine, its liturgy and rituals. She, i.e., the author of the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” attempts to lead the life of a nonsectarian believer in a higher principle committed to cultivate her inner self, since she believes that this is the only thing she can control. Nevertheless, in spite of its departure from orthodoxy, the narrative also betrays the beautiful soul’s attempts to fit into certain prescribed patterns, which appear almost generically programmed by the confessional mode that seems to require a period of remorse followed by a conversion experience.
In the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” Goethe analyzes the limits of a purely subjective approach to religion and spirituality. Not only in her worldly life but also in her religious life the beautiful soul rejects all external forms. Initially attracted to the secret community of the Moravians, to their liturgy and forms, in the knowledge that she needs external mediation and images for her spirituality, once she joins them on a more regular basis she sees them as just as bigoted and intolerant as the orthodox church they repudiate. This becomes particularly apparent in the intolerance of that community toward the Court Preacher; only after his death do its members admit that though they might not have been on the same page doctrinally, he had nevertheless been a very good person. Goethe thus has his virtuous heroine realize the limitations of all kinds of religious communities, even—and to a certain extent especially—those that rely primarily on each individual’s experiential, subjective access to the divine, such as the Pietist community of the Moravians. In addition, toward the very end of the Confessions Goethe confronts his heroine with the limitations of her own subjective approach to spirituality via an encounter with art through an uncle of hers. This uncle is not an artist, but he is committed to integrating various art forms into his life, whether it be through the artful arrangement of his house or the cultivation of choral music and paintings. He even sends selected paintings to her. In these instances she has to realize art as a force that succeeds in pulling the individual outside of her or his usual habits to provide a concrete structure of how a gathered company spends time, to let a group enjoy the marvels of a well-trained and well-practiced multivoiced choir, and to respect artistic paintings as conscious choices rather than mere representational attempts.
The confrontation with the challenges of art, and art’s ability to draw the individual out of her enclosure is introduced just at the moment when the beautiful soul has realized the limitations of any kind of institutionalized religion in the context of the harsh and unfair judgment of the court preacher by the Moravians. The beautiful soul uses a remarkable formulation for how she takes a distance toward her own religious practices: “Auch ich mußte um diese Zeit das Puppenwerk aus den Händen legen, das mir durch diese Streitigkeiten gewissermassen in einem andern Lichte erschienen war” (I too had put away childish things [Puppenwerk] at this time, for these took on a different aspect for me during this period of troublesome conflict).4 The term Puppenwerk refers to the Moravian songs and images she had been fascinated with. By calling these vehicles of her devotional practice “toys” or “dolls,” she shows how what before had attracted her to this form of Pietist religious practice now appear as trivial or frivolous playthings.5
The potential of the domain of art for leading the individual beyond his or her self is introduced exactly at the moment when the beautiful soul is ready to lay aside those toys, which are merely props for the imagination. The encounter with art, first of all, makes the recipient leave the confines of his or her self by being challenged to come to terms with another’s spirit. When she first visits her uncle’s house to attend her sister’s wedding and sees his careful arrangement of the festivity, she comments: “But how much more satisfying it is to feel the spirit [Geist] of a higher culture, even though only a culture of the senses” (WM 245, translation modified; SW IX 776). It is noteworthy that here the term spirit refers to the thoughts, considerations, and choices of the person who has arranged the living quarters she is admiring. The notion of “spirit” here is comparable to the concept of “authorial intention” when one analyzes a specific text. To a certain degree, this spirit is also opposed to the Invisible One the beautiful soul tries to love and worship. For whereas the latter spirit remains caught between an unapproachable divinity and subjective projections, the former, the reigning spirit of a pleasant living arrangement, is very concrete and accessible through our senses.
The beautiful soul’s aesthetic appreciation of the choral performance is described in a highly interesting formulation: “Now for the first time, external things brought me back to myself, and I learnt to my great astonishment about the difference between the natural beauty of the song of the nightingale and a four-part alleluia from human throats” (WM 246, translation modified; SW IX 776). The beautiful soul’s aesthetic enjoyment produces two significant insights: She suddenly understands the difference between beauty in nature and beauty in art and that there is a self-reflexive dimension to aesthetic experience. Something external leads her back to her self; what she actually learns about herself does not become clear until the subsequent explanations by the uncle. However, already in the beautiful soul’s reaction we can glimpse the end of the eighteenth-century aesthetics of reception, an aesthetics that does not differentiate between beauty in art and beauty in nature.
In chapter 1 we have seen how the emergence of aesthetic experience as a universally available, anthropological constant can be traced back to the spiritual exercises of Pietist religious practice. In the concluding pages of Goethe’s “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” we can see Goethe’s critique of exactly this concept of aesthetic experience through the voice of the beautiful soul’s uncle. Why, one might wonder, should only beautiful art, not beautiful nature, possess the capacity of drawing the individual out of being confined to the self and the self’s wishful thinking and imagining? What the beautiful soul begins to glimpse in the distinction between the song of the nightingale and the performance of a choral composition is how artifacts allow the beholder another kind of understanding of what is distinctly human. Aesthetic experience is no longer to be left unquestioned as a particular subjective feeling, no further to be examined. Instead, the recipient is to engage with the external product, the work of art as a conscious, deliberate artifact:
“Noble souls like to see God’s hand in His creation; but why shouldn’t we give some consideration to the hands of his imitators?” He then drew my attention to some pictures that had not struck me particularly, and tried to make me understand that only the study of the history of art can give us a proper sense of the value and distinction of a work of art. One must first appreciate the burdensome aspects of technical labor that gifted artists have perfected over the centuries, in order for one to comprehend how it is possible for a creative genius to move freely and joyfully on a plane so high that it makes us dizzy.
(WM 248; SW IX 780)
It is noteworthy how the uncle deliberately shifts an admiration of God’s intelligent design to the respect and admiration to be gained by studying artworks within the context of the history of artistic techniques and crafts and within the history of art. What is gained from this well-informed and educated approach to art is an appreciation of artistic genius and innovation to be gotten only by realizing how individual art works, if executed by a genius, will work with the available tradition in order to subsume and change it. For when the artistic genius moves freely and serenely on the summits of what is artistically possible, the artistic genius no longer takes cues from the available paradigm of a specific period style but intervenes in it unpredictably, freely, but also in such a manner that any subsequent art needs to take into account the aesthetic innovation achieved by this intervention. In admiring and truly appreciating a work of art, the beholder then admires what the human spirit at its best is capable of.
The concluding pages of the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” promote a clear argument that art should take the place of religion. Not just the institution of a particular creed is doomed to fail but also the individual who is rational, sensitive, optimistic, and committed to spirituality as a principle beyond the self and self-interest. The reason: religion degenerates either into dogma/irrational occultism if codified or into an empty abstraction—it does not solve the problem of mediation and alterity in a productive way, i.e., how to relate to an other as other, how to love an other as other and imperfect, how to accept error and imperfection, how to take risks, how to desire and to sustain desire. By contrast, the engagement with art as a schooled dilettante, that is, as somebody who can appreciate the stylistic and technical choices of a work of art, trains one to pay attention to the particular instant, to take responsibility for one’s environment as something made, to see the human being as the maker responsible for her or his fate as a being who can actively intervene and shape the historically available options, to focus on the present, here and now.
Whereas Goethe’s bildungsroman deals with the limits of religion as opposed to art in the case of the confessions of a beautiful soul, his autobiography reexamines the role and function of religion in a much larger historical context. Goethe treats in great detail his relationship toward the belief in a personal God, his relationship to organized church services, sermons, to the Catholic Church’s position with regard to the sacraments, as well as his relationship with a more abstract concept of divinity, sacrifice, and the demonic. In addition, he considers his relationship to the Bible, especially the Pentateuch in the context of his desire to learn Yiddish and study Hebrew, while in another book he reflects on Luther’s Bible as a literary, cultural treasure.6 In what follows I shall not attempt to provide a comprehensive analysis of Goethe’s relationship to the many aspects of religion, rather I shall isolate and discuss only a few of the twenty books of Poetry and Truth in terms of their treatment of the emergence of a radically innovative author, in which key aspects of religion play an important but not exclusive role in that they enable the mature narrator Goethe to show how the young Goethe could find a critical distance to the reigning educational and literary paradigms in order to develop his own exploration of human culture and creativity.7
The books I have chosen to focus on have been selected in terms of how they allow the reader to trace key stages in Goethe’s presentation of the discovery of his own mission as an artist, author, and discourse innovator. Thus, in book 4, Goethe reflects on how the historical Bible scholarship encouraged by Robert Lowth’s lectures on the Bible from the mid-eighteenth century provided him with a means of gaining his own critical understanding of the nature of religious belief in relationship to sacred scripture and official dogma.8 It also shows the adolescent boy discovering and pursuing his own interests and intellectual development apart from the already rich offerings arranged by his father. In the two middle books, 10 and 11, religion plays a less prominent role. These books deal with Goethe’s time in Alsace. However Goethe provides a summary of his dissertation, which dealt with the relationship between church and state, which he wrote at the conclusion of his legal studies in Strasbourg. The work was not published, and there is no manuscript extant. This media-technological aspect, namely the contrast between a printed, reproducible work and a unique manuscript or live performance, is what leads to the key question of these two central books: The issue of how to understand the role of the artist and of art apart from the individual written works he may or may not leave behind. For the final section of this chapter on Goethe’s autobiographical account of his emergence as a discourse innovator, I shall focus on books 14, 15, and 16 and show how he uses the figure of the prophet as a way to examine the relationship of a cultural innovator to his contemporary culture. Here we shall see that Goethe examines in particular the question of how the artist who sees himself on a mission must find a way to preserve the integrity of his enterprise. We have already seen that for Goethe turning away from the world in the manner of Rousseau or the Beautiful Soul is not an option. These books trace the way he finds an answer, guided by his discovery of Spinoza.
Book 4 of Poetry and Truth is set in Frankfurt and treats the early adolescent years of Goethe’s education at home, which was—according to his father’s hopes—ultimately geared toward a career in law, administration, or diplomacy. Distrusting the efficacy of schools, Goethe’s father took great care to expose his son to a very broad curriculum through private tutorials, taught by both specialists and dilettantes covering their fields and hobbies, ranging from mathematics and training in foreign languages, drawing and music, the cultivation of silkworms and the study of papal history, to fencing, horseback riding, and an acquaintance with various crafts and influential men in the city of Frankfurt. The book ends with a recapitulation of the father’s goals for his son, and the narrator’s explanation that whereas he did not yet have a clear trajectory for his own wishes, not even a clear idea of what exactly he wanted to do, he had decided he wanted to reap the laurels that had been braided to honor the poet. With this conclusion to the book the reader is lead to wonder what in the youth’s education directs him to the goal of becoming a poet rather than a lawyer.
Although somewhat peripheral to the curriculum provided by Goethe’s father, in this book there is some attention given to literary concerns by the young Goethe. It is furthermore telling that all that concerns literary activities is somewhat related to religion and the Bible. Thus the narrator points out that among the then favored literary topics were adaptations of biblical tales. He mentions Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s ability to endow biblical figures with sentiment and tenderness and Friedrich Carl von Moser’s retelling of the story of Daniel as a tale that left a great impression on him during that phase of his life. In line with this fashion, the fourteen-year-old Goethe turned to the story of Joseph, an extremely talented young man, with whom he identified. He dictated his version of the Joseph story to an aide of his father’s.9 There is also a brief mention of how the young Goethe began to memorize, write down, and collect the sermons that were given by a new pastor. Yet, the narrator adds, the youth eventually got tired of this activity once he noticed that, in spite of the didactic aspirations of the minister, these sermons did not provide him with a deeper understanding of the Bible, nor with a freer understanding of Christian teachings. It is in this context, in the context of how the young Goethe managed to depart from the educational offerings surrounding him and glimpse what he wanted to aspire to in contrast to received wisdom and contemporary fashion that we must read the long narrative about the Old Testament patriarchs, interspersed by speculations about the nature of religion and belief, a narrative that has puzzled many readers of Poetry and Truth.
The narrative digest of the Pentateuch is not presented as yet another attempt to retell biblical stories; instead, it is to illustrate a particular use of the Bible. The narration is from the mature Goethe who looks back with a distinctly historical perspective. He marks the young Goethe’s interest and access to the Bible as a fascination with an archaic, strange culture, with a privileged site for the understanding of the nature of religion, and a superb resource for anthropological speculation. He shows how the young Goethe had access to a Bible that was not the Bible of religious edification, not Holy Scripture, but also not the Bible of Luther’s translation that by the end of the eighteenth century was to become enthroned as a text of a national, cultural heritage and a highly esteemed literary resource. The young Goethe’s study of the Bible as depicted in book 4 is not part of his father’s curriculum, nor is it part of religious instruction. The interest stems entirely from the boy, who is initially motivated by curiosity and attraction to what he perceives as a strange, unfamiliar living culture. On his strolls through Frankfurt he was intrigued by the Jewish ghetto, by people who looked as if they were from a different time and place, by the hospitality of those in whose homes he had been received, by their language and customs, and by their pretty daughters. Knowing some spoken Yiddish, the boy wanted to learn to write Yiddish, which made him request Hebrew lessons under the pretext of wanting to study the Bible in the original. This marks his interest in the Bible as secular, rooted in his contemporary worldly surroundings; it also marks it as a decidedly exogamous interest.
The way in which Goethe describes the attitude and pedagogical approach of his Hebrew instructor furthermore supports this decidedly external, non-orthodox approach to the Bible. For he makes the point that his private teacher, the rector of a grammar school, was an older eccentric, utterly independent, highly critical and sarcastic scholar, whose only persistent source of reading material was Lucian. This feature, which the narrator actually mentions twice, highlights the external, exogamous approach to the study of the Bible. For Lucian, the Syrian satirist from the second century, was not only famous for having written what came to be considered the first novel in Western literature but also for his decidedly critical and pagan perspective on Christianity. With this teacher at his side, Goethe makes some progress in learning Hebrew, but very soon drops the study of the ancient language in favor of an engagement with the content of the Bible. Goethe mentions that already in a prior phase of reading the Bible he had been struck by all the contradictions of the tradition with what is real and what is possible. He decided to focus exclusively on the Old Testament and turn to the literal translation of the Bible by Sebastian Schmidt. Initially his teacher briefly tried to bring him back to the study of language. But ultimately the teacher was amused and supportive of the boy’s interests and directed him to the great historical translation and study of the Bible by Lowth as well as Lowth’s German translation:
The original text, thanks to the great efforts of the German theologians, had been improved through translation. The varying opinions were cited and then an attempt was made to reconcile them in a way that allowed the Book’s dignity, the fundamentals of religion, and human reason to exist next to each other on more or less equal terms. He would then point to that repository whenever, toward the end of the lesson, I would register my customary doubts. I would fetch a volume, he would bid me read while he paged through his Lucian, and when I made my comments about the Bible, his only answer to my sagacity was the usual laughter. … A person may turn in any direction he pleases, and undertake anything whatever, yet he will always return to the path that nature has once and for all laid out for him. That was the case with me too in the present instance. My efforts with the language and content of the Holy Scriptures resulted at last in the awakening of my imagination to a more vivid conception of that beautiful and celebrated land along with its surroundings and neighborhoods, as well as of the peoples and events that have made this patch of earth glorious for millennia.
(PT 105; SW XIV 142–43)
With this contextualization of his approach to the Bible, by making it clear that he approached the Bible not within the context of religious instruction, Goethe also makes it clear that he approached it more as a compendium of heterogeneous, archeological, and anthropological documents out of which he then could fabricate in those serene hours when he would read around in the translation of Lowth’s text his own view onto the beautiful land and its surroundings, which has been praised by so many peoples for thousands of years. In that respect, it becomes obvious why the Luther Bible would not have been the right text. And indeed, historically, during the mid-century, the Luther Bible was by far not the only, uncontested translation of the sacred text, and it was not yet the document of a national heritage, which it only became toward the end of the eighteenth century. Instead of a sacred text, or the treasured source of a cultural heritage, the Bible of the mid-eighteenth century, and the one Goethe chooses to make central to that book of his autobiography, was a richly commented Bible, full of philological, archeological, and historical scholarship, more like a heterogeneous palimpsest than a unified literary document. It was this Bible that provided him with the opportunity to speculate about the nature and evolution of religious belief.10
Goethe’s narrative about the Old Testament patriarchs in book 4 of his autobiography can be considered a well-thought-out contribution toward those Enlightenment debates on religion that argued over the role and function of the Bible or sacred texts in general and over the acceptability of claims that exceeded the grasp of human reason. A key distinction in those debates was the one between natural and revealed religion. In the early eighteenth century that distinction primarily designated the difference between religions that emerged naturally amidst human civilizations and those religions that relied on the authority of a sacred, divinely inspired text. In the later eighteenth century, beginning with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s writings on theology and culminating in Hegel’s view of the world-historical function of religion, the status of revealed religions changes and is no longer primarily tied to claims of revelation. By then it is frequently called “positive religion” and characterized by its ability to provide a unity and identity to a people, such as in the case of the Israelites who conceived of themselves as the chosen people, subject to one common God, one common lawgiver.11 Whereas the Lessing of “The Education of the Human Race” as well as Hegel conceive of the role of revealed religions (especially Judaism and Christianity) as crucial elements in mankind’s ethical development, Goethe’s account is not tied to this kind of a teleological scheme. Nevertheless, Goethe’s distinction between natural and revealed religion clearly belongs to the later eighteenth-century approaches in the sense that he does not simply condemn revealed religion in the vein of deist criticism, nor does he launch an attempt at rationally or theologically justifying the nature of revealed or positive religion. Instead, as I shall show, his approach combines psychological, anthropological, and media-theoretical approaches when he considers the difference between revealed and natural religion as ultimately resting on the distinction between religious belief in an emphatic sense and a mere conviction or certainty.
Goethe’s narrative commences with the expulsion from paradise, man’s loss of a resting place due to a desire for knowledge, which leads to instability and an increase in faculties as well as errors. The great flood and the destruction of the tower of Babel are narrated as the result of angry, annoyed Elohim. This phase marks for Goethe the stage of natural religion. Throughout this part, the term for the divinity is the plural noun. The status of religion changes once primitive humanity begins to differentiate between agriculture, hunting, and herding cultures. According to Goethe, it is the insecure, nomadic lifestyle of the herders that requires a different relationship to the divinity, seeking a more stable, secure reassurance. The belief in a special kind of providence, the trust in a god who provides in a particular fashion to a select group of human beings, families or tribes, is what according to Goethe then makes for the transition to the revealed religion of the Israelites, who find this relationship modeled in the belief of their patriarchs.
Thus Abraham stands out in terms of his unwavering trust in God’s promises and blind obedience to God’s commands to banish the mother of his first son or sacrifice his second son. In this context it is quite interesting how the narrative about Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac and God’s intervention at the last minute is radically dedramatized in Goethe’s narrative. It is presented in a neutral, extremely brief statement, which is preceded by a long anthropological excursus on the provenance of sacrificial rites. According to Goethe, practices involving human sacrifice can be traced back to primitive martial customs of revenge; they are not originally or primarily part of religious ceremonies. It is within this narrative about Abraham that the narrator interrupts himself and calls attention to the transition from a natural to a revealed religion:
If a natural, universal religion was to emerge and a particular, revealed religion develop from it, then probably the lands most suitable for that were the ones which have engaged our imagination up to now, with their customs and type of people. At any rate, nowhere else in the world do we find the emergence of anything similarly favorable and promising. Even natural religion, assuming that it arises earlier in the human spirit, must be predicated on considerable delicacy of sentiment, for it involves the belief in a universal Providence directing the whole world order. A particular religion, that is, one revealed by the gods to this or that nation, is associated with belief in a particular Providence promised by the Divine Being to certain favored men, families, tribes, and nations. This religion hardly seems to develop from within human beings. It requires transmittal, tradition, and surety from time immemorial.
(PT 109, translation modified; SW XIV 148–49)
Natural religion in this passage is the trust in a general providential order, whereas revealed religion makes specific claims of how a particular set of humans, families, tribes, or peoples is favored. According to Goethe, the general belief in providence is generated by the human psyche on its own. It seems to be almost analogous to an optimistic, confident outlook, which is fostered in opportune, serene circumstances. The belief in the specific destiny of a specific people or tribe however, cannot, according to Goethe, be generated by the human psyche alone. It needs an external source and authority. A similar distinction between natural and revealed religion can already be found in the immensely popular mid-eighteenth-century Zedlers Universallexikon, albeit in Zedler’s case this distinction is undertaken from a decidedly Christian perspective. According to Zedler natural religion is only sufficient for a prelapsarian world. Fallen man needs an assurance of mercy, love, and forgiveness that issues from a source that is beyond man’s own mental powers.12 Goethe seems to share this critical take vis-à-vis natural religion. However, according to Goethe, natural religion does not become insufficient with the Fall but rather with a certain cultural differentiation. And while Zedler advocates the necessity of revealed religion in its specific Christian instantiation, Goethe does not define revealed religion in terms of the divine intervention, promise, or law. Rather he keeps his formulation very vague and characterizes “revealed religion” as the effect of a fortuitous and highly complex textual, genealogical, and legal corpus, which draws its authority not from a supernatural source but from its textual complexity, its pragmatic tradition, and its antiquity: “This religion hardly seems to develop from within human beings. It requires transmittal, tradition, and surety from time immemorial.” (“Diese scheint sich schwer aus dem Innern des Menschen zu entwickeln. Sie verlangt Überlieferung, Herkommen, Bürgschaft aus uralter Zeit.”)
To a certain extent then natural religion can be indeed praised or criticized as a purely human product, a projection of human hopes and fears. There is no teleological development in which religion holds a providential place, but there is a point in the development of different cultures when natural religion looses its efficacy or value, when it no longer satisfies the psychological need of providing a source of trust and reassurance, and there is a point as well when the belief in revealed religion fails to fulfill its function. On the one had, the obsolescence of revealed religion is not part of a larger teleological frame narrative, such as, for instance for Lessing in his “Education of the Human Race,” where Christianity provides a more universal and more self-directed form of ethics than Judaism and where Christianity, at the present point in time in which the writer is situated, is to be superseded by a newer kind of a purely formal ethics. On the other hand, Goethe makes the firm point that once the belief in a positive religion has been lost, this loss is irretrievable. It marks a point of no return. In that sense, Goethe’s position demands that another domain of cultural production take up the function where religion has become insufficient. In contrast to Hegel’s grand teleological narrative, where religion is superseded by art, and art by philosophy, for Goethe for art to come in where religion no longer can fulfill its function is a task of the present, not of the past. Moreover, this function somehow has to do with how art instead of religion can address a general disposition toward the world, toward an order of nature, especially the capacity to engender trust in the future. In that sense, the artist—once positive religion has been exhausted—somehow has to mediate the disposition toward the future, which means he has to take up the function of a prophet. And indeed, as I will discuss in the following section, prophetic figures serve as models for how Goethe comes to explore the role and function of the poet.
This is how Goethe describes the distinction between natural and revealed religion and the irretrievable loss that occurs once doubt has destroyed one’s belief in a positive religion.
The universal, natural religion really requires no faith, since no one can escape the conviction that a great productive, regulating, and guiding Essence is concealed, as it were, behind nature, so as to come within our grasp. Even if a person sometimes lets loose of this thread that guides him through life, he can immediately take it up again anywhere. The situation is quite different with that kind of religion which proclaims to us that this great Essence has definite preferences and will espouse the cause of a single person, tribe, nation, or territory. This kind of religion is based on faith, which must be unshakable if it is not to be destroyed immediately and totally. The slightest doubt is fatal to such a religion. One can return to a conviction, but not to faith. This is the reason for the constant testing and the delaying in fulfilling repeated promises: they brilliantly highlight the capacity of those forefathers for faith.
(PT 112, translation modified; SW XIV 153)
Though religious belief might be irretrievably lost, and thus positive religion might become utterly hollow, this does not mean that the central document of revealed religion, the Bible, has become utterly obsolete. After all, Goethe spends a good portion of book 4 retelling the stories of the Old Testament patriarchs and argues that the Pentateuch held an important function for the young Goethe, although, as we have seen, its function was not to provide him with a source of religious instruction. This is how Goethe justifies for his readers his retelling of the Bible in that book:
Someone might wish to ask why I am retelling these stories in such detail, when they are so universally known and have been repeated and analyzed so often. This person would perhaps accept the answer that I know no other way of demonstrating my ability to concentrate my mind and feelings on one subject and let it quietly affect me, despite my haphazard life and fragmentary education. It is also my only way of describing the peace that enveloped me, however wild and strange the happenings outside. Whenever my constantly active imagination (of which that fairy tale can serve as evidence) led me hither and thither, and whenever the classical mixture of fable and history, mythology and religion, threatened to confuse me, I would gladly flee for refuge to those oriental religions. I would steep myself in the first book of Moses, and there, amidst the widespread tribes of herdsmen, find myself both in the greatest solitude and the greatest company.
(PT 113; SW XIV 155)
This retelling, according to the narrator, represents the only means by which he can demonstrate to his readers how during his boyhood he did not get entirely confused and lost in the dispersed life he was leading. Reading and contemplating that part of the Bible offered him a place of rest from fragmented learning, but it also protected him from being confused by his own lively imagination responding to the heterogeneity of the many different tales, ranging from fable to history, mythology, and religion. It was in the Pentateuch that he found a way of focusing and collecting his self, a site for contemplation, for a spiritual exercise maintaining his integrity and individuality. At this point it is important to note, however, that this was not a spiritual exercise in any kind of religious edification, it was not a meditation on God. There is nothing mystical about it whatsoever. Moreover, it takes as its point of departure a compendium of historical, anthropological, archeological, and philological scholarship that becomes the site of calming speculation about archaic, simpler forms of human life and civilization. And—as the mature Goethe demonstrates to his readers in the retelling—about the nature of religion in the context of mankind’s evolutionary potential. The thoughts generated by the contemplation of the Pentateuch belong not to theology at all but rather to philosophical anthropology. The adolescent boy seeks a place to be both alone and in good company, a productive kind of solitude to think about the nature of human civilization and religion. Thus, even when religious belief in the one caring God and Providence has been lost—and this, Goethe already makes clear in book 1 of his autobiography, happened when the then only six-year-old boy thought about the earthquake in Lisbon—parts of the Bible can remain powerful resources for the growing boy, in fact it is this recourse to the Bible that allows him to hold on to his individuality and integrity against the centrifugal forces of his education as well as literary fashions. It is this kind of contemplative retreat to the Pentateuch that arms him with an understanding of religion that ultimately will not allow him to remain content with what then was the literary fashion, namely the mere retelling of dramatic episodes from the Bible.
Books 10 and 11, the two books in the exact middle of Dichtung und Wahrheit, narrate Goethe’s stay in Strasbourg during his legal studies, his travels in Alsace and its surroundings, his relationship to the French language and to French literature in the context of his law professor’s attempt to have him augment his legal training in Strasbourg and steer him toward a future career in diplomacy, his friendship with Herder, and his involvement with Friederike Brion and her family in Sesenheim in Alsace. Book 11 concludes with his decision to leave Alsace, to end his relationship with Friederike, and briefly focuses in the last paragraph on Goethe’s visit to the then famous classical sculpture collection in Mannheim. Even to readers who are only slightly familiar with Goethe’s biography it is well known that this phase of his life comprises the first stage of his breakthrough as a poet. It was then that he composed some of his first truly innovative lyric poems and it was that phase that immediately preceded his composition of his epistolary novel Werther.
Although the literary works composed during or shortly after that phase of Goethe’s life were presented and received as expressions of lived experience—indeed, the major innovative feature of these works consists in their evocation of an until then unheard of mode of natural and authentic speech—the narrative of Goethe’s autobiography dealing with this period does not primarily provide an account of intimate, private details and psychologically nuanced observations of his emotional involvement with Friederike, his discovery of the beauty of the Strasbourg Cathedral, or his immersion in nature. In other words, by the time he writes his autobiography Goethe deliberately abstains from precisely that approach, which was subsequently practiced by literary historians who tried to match up factoids from the author’s private life with details in his literary works. Books 10 and 11 refrain from delivering the materials for exact correspondences between art and life. Instead, these books provide a sustained reflection on the historical conditions for the possibility of the young man’s emergence as a radically innovative artist, whose innovation consists neither in how his art expresses his own experience nor in how art represents life in more general terms, but rather in the way in which art intervenes in the life of its audience.13
As to how these books provide a self-portrait of the author, there is another remarkable feature. Goethe makes the point repeatedly that he did not have any of the compositions from that time printed. To the great disappointment of his father, he even avoided the publication and printing of his dissertation on the relationship between the state and religion. There is no manuscript left of his dissertation. In the summary of his dissertation in book 11 he makes it clear that he recommended the separation between an official creed and the religious business and beliefs of private citizens. It is interesting that in this context of elaborating the function of art Goethe provides a model for containing the influence of religion. For his argument from his dissertation about the relationship between church and state encourages religious uniformity and a trend toward secularization by preventing both fervent, evangelical practices and revivals and the church’s exercise of statelike powers. Apart from not publishing his dissertation, he further makes the point that he did not publish any of his other works.
The exact turning point between the two parts of Dichtung und Wahrheit, the end of book 10 and the beginning of book 11, also focuses on the medium of writing and publication. Book 10 ends with a narrative of how he concludes a visit in Sesenheim by entertaining his hosts with the narration of a fairy tale of his, “Die neue Melusine.” In contrast to his dissertation, Goethe chooses not to summarize this story for readers of his autobiography, but he narrates how he took great pleasure in his ability to captivate the imagination of his audience. Goethe comments that the reader who would encounter that fairy tale elsewhere in print should not be puzzled by his assertions of this text’s strong impact, but rather bear in mind the grave difference between the live performance of a text and its written dissemination: “Someone at a future time may read this fairy tale in print and doubt whether it could have produced such an effect; but let him then consider that a human being is really only required to be effective in the present. Writing is a misuse of language, and solitary silent reading is a sad surrogate for discourse. A human being’s personality is what affects his fellow man most, youth what most strongly affects youth; and effects produced thus are the purest ones. It is these that invigorate the world and prevent it from dying out either morally or physically” (PT 330; SW XIV 486).
This pronouncement about the superiority of a live performance as the only authentic use of speech as opposed to the medium of writing makes an appeal to the reader’s concept of what it means to be human. According to the biographical narrator, to be human consists in being effective through one’s actual presence, through one’s personality, which has an impact on other people. Youth exerts the strongest influence on youth, an influence the narrator credits with the larger force of moral and physical renewal. If this pronouncement stems from the authority of the mature Goethe, however, one might wonder whether and how the young law student would have gained that insight, an insight that would have to be of great importance to an emerging poet and artist. And indeed the narration about the young Goethe’s first encounter with the pastor’s family in Sesenheim delivers what could be described as the experiential background to that kind of insight, for it explores at great length the youth’s learning process as he experiments with two distinct disguises as two kinds of live performance.
The young man, who had heard much about the hospitality and amiability of the Brion family, decided he would not visit them attired as the law student from a well-off Frankfurt family that he really was, but instead chose the disguise of a poor, somewhat disheveled theology student. Then, on his second visit, eager to be seen in a more appealing exterior, he asked the innkeeper’s son from a neighboring village of Sesenheim, an attractive young man of similar stature who was actually familiar with the Brion family, to lend him his clothes and allow Goethe to impersonate him by letting him deliver a cake to the family, which the pastor was to receive in the context of an upcoming baptism. It might be helpful to compare and contrast this portrait of the young Goethe’s masquerade with Wilhelm Meister’s approach to acting, i.e., to compare the self-portrait of the young Goethe with the one of his protagonist from his bildungsroman. Whereas Wilhelm Meister chooses his roles based on projections of what he would like to be in order to act out his very own narcissistic fantasies, the young Goethe enjoys an artful disguise in order to look, move, and talk like another person, be it a type or even a specific personality. In fact, though there might have been some form of vanity in wanting to test how strangers will react to him looking less attractive and more humble—a foible the narrator Goethe compares with the antics of wandering Greek gods—ultimately, especially when it comes to assuming the disguise of the attractive innkeeper’s son George, the masquerade is not at all about a narcissistically informed desire of self-expression, but rather—as soon as the pastor’s wife sees through the young Goethe’s disguise and promises to cooperate—it becomes an engaging, quite enchanting collective play that makes everybody more perceptive and more focused on the here and now. It leads to a heightened awareness of one’s own as well as all others’ affective investments and perceptual schemata and the actual, lived emotional and perceptual reality in the presence of the moment. In other words, it prepares the conditions for the possibility of experience, if we understand by experience the encounter or perception of something that differs from what was expected. We can thus see that whereas the first disguise, the mask of the poor theology student, allows the young Goethe to glimpse the impact of his personality on strangers, in the second disguise, where the young Goethe embodies a distinct and different personality and orchestrates how various members of the Brion household negotiate the discovery that the person looking like George is actually the same who appeared in the costume of a theology student the previous day, the focus is no longer on how his own personality is received. By the second day, and this forms the conclusion of book 10 and the transition toward the young Goethe’s affirmation of his talent to entertain a live audience with his fabulations, the young Goethe’s masquerade offers the occasion to learn firsthand about the effects of illusion and disillusionment as the powerful production of presence.
Whereas book 10 ends with the narrative of how the young Goethe withdraws with the young people to an alcove and narrates “Die neue Melusine,” book 11 begins with a reference to this successful narrative performance and the Brion daughters’ express desire that he would write the story down for them so that they could read it aloud among their circle of friends. Though Goethe would have liked to oblige them, it was his friend Weyland who relieved him of this obligation by pointing out the rationale for his audience’s lively, almost exaggerated reaction to this narrative about a mismatched couple. Apparently the young women of the Brion family understood Goethe’s tale as a witty roman à clef full of references to an actual couple of their acquaintance. It was this circumstance that ultimately prevented Goethe from giving in to the wish of the young women and writing down his fairy tale at that time. Again, somewhat similar to the conclusion of book 10, Goethe’s autobiographical narrative seems to foreground a privileging of an oral performance over the written text. Through the focus on the young Goethe’s narrative performance, the guiding question for the development of the young artist is shifted away from a potential concern with the content, style, and form of particular texts to the overall impact of the artist’s presence. The impact of his personality is one that requires a live audience. For if the medium of writing constitutes an abuse of language and silent reading in isolation is a sorry surrogate for speech, then the artist distinguishes himself not primarily through a message, through what he says, but through how he is able to use the medium of language. Thus over the course of books 10 and 11 the artistic use of language that is to be effective on an audience becomes more directly defined as the intervention in the audience’s way of relating reality and fiction, art and life. This becomes clear in the rationale for Goethe’s refusal to write down the story for the Brion daughters. In that instance he intervenes in their desire to confuse or equate life with art to the extent that he withholds from them a text that would allow them to read it as the mere comical portrait of a couple of their acquaintance. Ultimately, his refusal is not that different from the effects of the masquerade, which was also a way of refusing identification of an imaginary perception with reality.
If then the innovative potential that the protagonist becomes aware of in books 10 and 11 consists in his use of language, how he intervenes in the relationship between illusion and reality, and not just in any one particular poetic or literary product, he has to realize that he needs to break with the existing paradigms of poetic and literary production. This break with tradition is first initiated through the crucial encounter with Johann Gottfried Herder, only five years older, who had come to Strasbourg for an eye operation. The two men quickly become friends, though Goethe is at times taken aback by Herder’s outspoken criticism, which does not shy away from mocking his young friend. But Goethe credits Herder with enabling him to gain a critical distance toward the contemporary literary production in the German language, as well as with introducing him to Oliver Goldsmith’s sentimental novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, a piece of fiction that greatly influences both the young Goethe’s perception of the Brion family in Sesenheim as well as the young Goethe’s approach to how fiction should be read and what degree of identification with fiction is desirable. For the composition of this part of his autobiography, Goethe even changes the actual chronology; he predates his acquaintance with Herder and familiarity with Goldsmith’s novel in order to allow him to depict his perception of the Brion family in light of the fictional characters from Goldsmith’s novel.
Herder’s influence on the young Goethe is mainly characterized as a thorough disillusionment, robbing him both of his respect for German literary production as well as his confidence in his own capacities: “He had torn away the curtain that hid from me the poverty of German literature. He had cruelly destroyed a great many of my prejudices. Only a few notable stars were left in the national sky, for he treated all the others like so many transitory meteors. Indeed the very hopes and dreams I had for myself had been so badly spoiled by him that I began to despair of my own capabilities” (PT 336; SW XIV 493).
And yet Herder’s condemnation of contemporary literary practices is contrasted with Goethe’s narrative about Sesenheim, which highlights his masquerade and acting experiments, as well as the effect of his storytelling and reading aloud of The Vicar of Wakefield. Moreover, when Goethe realizes that he does not want to remain in Alsace, that he does not intend to continue his legal studies in Strasbourg after his dissertation, when he takes account of his relationship to the French language and French literature, he reaches the conclusion that a radical break with tradition is needed at times—that French literature and culture suffer from having an unbroken line of tradition.
In fact, toward the end of book 11, Goethe engages in a long reflection on the achievements and shortcomings of eighteenth-century French literature. These reflections provide the counterpoint and response to concerns with literary authorship that were introduced as the guiding topics of books 10 and 11. Thus, whereas the opening pages of book 10 bemoan the fact that in contemporary German culture poets and writers receive little respect, when he turns to French culture he reflects on the powerful influence of Voltaire. Yet the philosophes, and especially Voltaire’s polemics, struck the young Goethe and his friends as an unfortunate form of demagoguery:
A public that hears nothing but the opinions of old men too easily becomes precocious, and nothing is more unsatisfactory than a mature opinion when it is adopted by an immature mind. For us young men, with our German love of nature and truth and our consciousness that honesty toward ourselves and others was the best guide in life and learning, Voltaire’s biased dishonesty and his defamation of many worthy persons became an increasing vexation, and every day we became more confirmed in our aversion to him. In order to injure the so-called “preachers,” he had never tired of disparaging religion and the sacred books on which it is based, and I often felt uncomfortable about this. But now, when I heard that he had tried to discredit the tradition of a Deluge by denying the existence of petrified shells and calling such things mere tricks of nature, he completely lost my confidence.
(PT 360; SW XIV 529)
In the eyes of the young Goethe and his friends, Voltaire looses his authority by being too ideologically driven, even distorting natural history to support his anticlerical agenda. It is noteworthy that Voltaire is primarily evaluated in view of his impact on an audience as well as in terms of his character and personality; it is not an issue of Voltaire as the author of specific works.
In contrast to Voltaire, Goethe gives credit to Denis Diderot and Rousseau both for their contributions to the political changes in France as well as their innovative influence on the arts. Diderot especially is credited for his reform of the theater. And it is in this context, in view of what Goethe can credit as the most important innovations in French literature and culture, that he can return to his concern with one of the key roles of literature and the arts, that of intervening in the relationship between what is real and what is ideal, as well as between what is imagined, what is fiction, what is poetic, and what constitutes reality. He criticizes Diderot for having reduced the theater to providing the illusion of one common reality instead of the illusion of a higher reality: “The supreme task of every kind of art is to use semblance to give the illusion of a higher reality. But it is erroneous to strive for a semblance so real that it amounts to mere everyday reality” (PT 362; SW XIV 532). Whereas Diderot’s revolutionary reform of the theater, the drawing in of the fourth wall, risks, according to Goethe, the erasure of the distinction between art and life by reducing even art to commonly perceived reality, Rousseau’s Pygmalion shows in its hero an artist who is unable to live with the difference between the best that art can produce and the mundane demands of life:
And besides, I want to mention a small but epoch-making work, Rousseau’s Pygmalion. Much could be said about it, because this curious production is another that alternates between nature and art and misguidedly tries to reduce the latter to the former. We see an artist who has achieved perfection and yet is not satisfied with having given external form to his ideal and thus having lent it a higher life. No! It must also be dragged down into his earthly life. Through a most commonplace sensual action he wants to destroy the highest thing that thought and deed can produce.
(PT 363; SW XIV 533–34)
Clearly, throughout these two books, 10 and 11, the task of the artist and what it means to be an author is defined in terms of the ability to produce an artifact that is not utterly alien to the reality of the audience, it has to allow for sufficient similarity to invite a certain degree of identification, but it also needs to remain distinct on account of being superior and different from nature, life, and common reality. Especially through the encounter with the Brions, these two books emphasize that what is at stake is the artist’s impact on an audience, an impact that is not portrayed as a didactic or moral achievement, not merely in terms of entertainment but also as an intervention in how the audience conceives of itself and its reality.
In the preceding sections on Goethe’s autobiography, I hope to have shown how Goethe portrays his childhood, youth, and early adulthood in view of how the young person develops a sense of his own poetic ambition and creative potential within a very specific historical context, without being determined by that context. He takes advantage of the resources of his family, his city, his education, and his surroundings and selectively assimilates and transforms them. Yet, the most important cultural resources he finds in the domain of religion, in the Bible and a range of religious tales and practices, which allow him to reflect on the nature of belief and the role of religion in distinction to the role and function of art. He realizes the importance of taking a distance toward the available literary prototypes and fashions of his time, even of breaking entirely with certain traditions. Most important, he does not conceive of himself primarily as a writer but rather as somebody who can exert a decisive influence through his presence. We have seen how he portrays himself as a storyteller and actor who does not try to enchant his audience through projections of his own wishes and desires but rather in how he allows them to see their own reality differently, refracted through the veil of fiction, enhanced by their capacity to identify with ideals, which they know to be different from reality.
Already Rousseau—as he reflects on his own position as an author—assigns a prominent position to Voltaire. According to the Confessions, it is through reading works by Voltaire that Rousseau’s attention to stylistic elegance and his own desire to write is stimulated. And it is Voltaire’s ridicule of his critique of civilization that both upsets him and contributes to his fame. Above all, it is Voltaire’s relationship to the Prussian king that offers Rousseau a countermodel for his own ideal of authorial sovereignty. Clearly, Voltaire is considered one of the most influential and powerful authors of the Enlightenment, and it is with regard to him that Rousseau and Goethe define their relationship toward power as well as their concept of authorial influence. For the young Goethe and his peers, according to Goethe’s autobiography, Voltaire’s powerful authority is deeply compromised. This is due not just to Voltaire’s overly zealous attacks on religion but also to the fact that Voltaire does not shy away from denying that the occurrence of buried seashells suggests that now dry parts of the earth must have been formerly covered by oceans. Voltaire’s hatred of religion cannot allow for the acknowledgment of this natural phenomenon because it would support the belief in the biblical tale of the great flood. Thus, according to Goethe, Voltaire’s authority is utterly discredited by his disrespect for both religion and the order of nature. By contrast, Goethe’s combined respect for religion and nature will become the crucial foundation for an ethics of authorial independence in the decisive three books of his autobiography that deal with how Goethe comes to form his own position toward an author’s relationship with power. In what follows, in my concluding section on Dichtung und Wahrheit, I shall focus on these three books (14 to 16) and show how Goethe traces his discovery of an ethics of authorial autonomy that, in contrast to Rousseau’s model of authorial sovereignty, allows for an engagement with the world without being subjected to its demands and compromises.
Books 14 to 16 cover that phase of Goethe’s early adulthood when he had already become famous as the author of Werther. He had completed his studies; it was certain that he could write well and support himself through the publication of his works. He had to decide in what direction he was going to develop his career and how he would earn his livelihood. Goethe was then extremely productive (he was composing poetry but also working on plays such as Goetz and Faust), and he had many contacts both with other young playwrights such as Heinrich Leopold Wagner, Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, and Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, who were perceived as forming together with him part of the literary movement that became known as the Storm and Stress, but also with more established culturally influential figures, ranging from Johann Kaspar Lavater, the Swiss pastor and promoter of the science of physiognomy, to the educational innovator Johann Bernhard Basedow, and the established writer Christoph Martin Wieland. It was then that he received a visit by a representative from the Weimar court on a mission to inquire if he was interested in a position. Although Goethe’s father had strongly supported his son’s legal training, the kind of study that would make him exceptionally well suited for an affiliation with a princely administration, Goethe père was greatly opposed to the idea of his son serving at any court. In his view, the life of a courtier was not desirable for a proud citizen of Frankfurt, a city that was not subordinate to any principality but placed directly under the rule of the emperor.
Again, as we have observed before, it is telling which of his literary works Goethe mentions and how much attention is given to them. The literary productions that receive the most attention in those three books are in book 14 the unfinished and now lost play about Mohamed, of which the famous poem “Mahomeds Gesang” has survived, in book 15 his plan to write an epic based on the legend about the Wandering Jew, and the controversial reception of his ode “Prometheus.” These literary works, however, do not figure primarily in Goethe’s narrative as literary texts and artifacts, rather they serve as stand-ins for the figure of the prophet, the disbeliever, and the lonely artist who works in defiance of the gods to serve humanity and thus mark stations in the young artist’s coming to terms with the specific nature of his role in the world. I shall trace how Goethe interweaves the biographical narrative of these three books with references to Mohamed and Christ, the wandering Jew and Prometheus in order to reflect on the issues and problems the cultural innovator encounters once he is exposed to a larger audience, how he manages to negotiate the different demands of spirituality, on the one hand, and the world with its instrumental rationality, on the other. Ultimately, according to Goethe’s account, it is his appropriation of Spinoza’s radically this-worldly understanding of God as the equivalent of nature that allows him to imagine his attitude toward his own creative work such that it is not compromised by the demands of a paying audience, that it does not have to pander to any literary market, but rather that he can allow it to thrive as a quasi-natural force; however, it also is Spinoza’s ethics that allows him to accept the prospect of a paying career at court, where he will do his service, where he will rationally engage with the world instead of withdrawing from it into a secluded, private realm of spirituality.
Again, as I have shown in my analysis in the previous sections, the argument of Dichtung und Wahrheit proceeds by way of Goethe’s selection and combination of narrative episodes, which are then held together through distinct foci that, however, in most cases are not directly thematized. Books 14, 15, 16, which autobiographically deal with Goethe as a successful writer and part of the Storm and Stress movement who contemplates what to do with his career and how to earn his money, are introduced through a series of character portraits. Goethe does not engage at all with the programmatic aspect of the Storm and Stress movement, the reform of German drama, or the rebellion against neoclassicist ideals. Quite to the contrary, he describes his friends and peers quite critically. Goethe does not mention that the concern with the increased prosecution and execution of unwed women accused of infanticide was a much explored and discussed social and political issue among the entire group of these young writers and beyond that gave rise to diverse literary productions.14 Instead, he accuses his friend Wagner of having plagiarized his own plans for treating the Faust legend. Obviously, if he wants to portray himself as the original genius qua cultural innovator, he cannot allow for a depiction of his own literary activity as part of a trend, of a collective concern. Indeed, in the same book we can find Goethe’s critique of the cathedral of Cologne as a work of architecture, which betrays only too blatantly the traces of a collective enterprise.
Goethe shows how his peers, the other Storm and Stress playwrights, are ultimately limited by their own character traits, talents, and weaknesses. Lenz, for instance, is caught up in an obsession with detail, guilt, and self-destructive self-observations, which ultimately culminates in his madness, Klinger is somewhat limited by his Rousseauvian natural talent and good nature, which also makes him an adherent of the French philosopher and susceptible to bitterness toward those who are more fortunate and not entirely self-made like him. The issue of Goethe’s own character and talent is not yet addressed at this point. Instead, it emerges through a network of comparisons and contrasts with various religious figures both contemporary and historical as well as one nonreligious figure, the ambitious pedagogical reformer and institution builder Basedow. The central figure in all of these comparisons is the slightly older Lavater, who by then had become well known for his fervent character studies based on the science of physiognomy.
The figure of Lavater allows Goethe to treat several aspects of how a talented, well-known man can use his talents, but also go astray, for instance, when he sharply criticizes him for his proselytizing zeal toward Moses Mendelssohn. Goethe nevertheless makes the point that he liked Lavater because of his pleasant, good-natured, and gentle character as opposed to Basedow, who was a less pleasant travel companion, relentlessly lecturing about the flaws of Christian doctrine, whereas for Goethe doctrinal issues were mere epiphenomena of certain theological trends and schools and by far not the essence of religion. As both slightly older figures try to win Goethe over to their respective beliefs and agendas, Goethe comments on his position by quoting some ironic verses in which he compares himself to Jesus joining some of his disciples on the way to Emmaus: “As though along Emmaus road / We stormed with paces keen / On either side the prophets strode / With worldling me between” (PT 456; SW IXV 676). In Luke 24:13–53 the adherents of Jesus on their way to Emmaus are joined by a stranger whom they tell about their grief over Jesus’s death and disappointed messianic hopes only to be scolded by the stranger who reveals himself as the resurrected Christ: “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken” (Luke 24:25). In Goethe’s verses the term prophet also obtains a negative connotation. It implies narrow-mindedness and misplaced zeal when he calls both his two travel companions prophets and precedes the quotation of his verses with a mention of how, seated with them in an inn at Koblenz, they attached themselves to other guests at their table and took up proselytizing. Lavater could not help but instruct a country parson in the mysteries of the Revelation of John; Basedow obstinately, but in vain, tried to prove to a dance instructor that baptism had become an obsolete custom.
But, and this is the implication of calling both Lavater and Basedow a prophet and of comparing himself with the resurrected but not ascended Jesus, Goethe neither condemns religion nor the achievements of the prophets per se. Indeed, he completes the remainder of the book by focusing exactly on the tension alluded to with his verses: Jesus as the “child of the world” and the demands that the world makes on the other two prophets, on Lavater and Basedow. He becomes the witness to how each one of the two compromised their beliefs by getting too much involved in worldly dealings, especially as they engaged in various forms of fund-raising:
I, who was wasting my time and talents to no purpose, soon could not fail to be struck by the fact that both men, each in his own way, while busily teaching, instructing, convincing, were keeping in reserve certain hidden goals which they were very intent on furthering. Lavater’s methods were gentle and clever, Basedows’s vehement, outrageous, even awkward. But both of them believed so firmly in their favorite pursuits and undertakings, and in the excellence of their procedure, that one had to consider them honest men, and love and respect them. … The celestial and eternal are always lowered into the body of earthly aims and subjected to the fate of transitory things. I regarded the careers of both men from this point of view, and Lavater and Basedow seemed to me to merit pity as much as honor, for I believed I foresaw that they might find themselves compelled to sacrifice higher goals to lower ones.
(PT 462; SW XIV 684–85)
Goethe emphasizes his own “aimlessness” and freedom in contrast to the two men, who are completely committed to the practice of their talent and the realization of their goals; thus they do not shy away from instrumentalizing others, sacrificing the means to the end. On the other hand, he obviously respects them more than his Storm and Stress peers, who merely act out their own characters and are not involved in more far-reaching goals of cultural innovation. Only the latter is the domain of the genius or the prophet, and it is in view of these questions that he approaches the project of writing a play based on the life of Mohamed. Goethe concludes book 14 by telling his reader more about the issues he was working through with respect to this historical figure, whom he could never consider a deceiver but in whom he could study how good intentions would lead to misery and destruction, even violence and corruption. In his summary of the play, Mohamed looses the purity of his faith when he starts to proselytize and conquer on a grand scale, and he only returns to his true faith in a process of renewal once he realizes that he was poisoned in revenge for an execution he had initiated.
Already with regard to Mohamed, Goethe treats the figure of the prophet and cultural innovator beyond the Christian religion. In the same book that concludes with his work on the figure of Mohamed he also describes his first intensive encounter with the ethics of Spinoza, which provides him with an attractive, important way of thinking about divinity and the self; in Spinoza’s words, which he quotes: “Wer Gott recht liebt, muß nicht verlangen, daß Gott ihn wieder liebe” (681; “He who loves God rightly must not require God to love him in return” [459]). He considers Spinoza’s ethics most committed to a way of being non-self-serving, which he adopts for himself and illustrates by invoking the motto of the joyously frivolous and this-worldly character Philine from his novel Wilhelm Meister: “If I love you, what concern is that of yours?” This comprises both a model of sovereignty and this-worldliness and a commitment to the world and others that extends far beyond self-interested rationality. In its affirmation of love, passion, and desire, it affirms an affective, sensual self as well as a willingness to take risks and embrace the full range of human experience. What Goethe narrates as the first serious encounter with Spinoza, initiated through his friendship with Nicolai, is then picked up again and expanded on in book 16, the beginning of the last quarter of this autobiography, which he had abandoned after book 15 for a few years. In book 16 Spinoza’s ethics and metaphysics provide him with the definite answer to his model of authorship, which allows him to be committed to his talent without compromising his art. In the intervening narrated episodes, especially in book 15, Goethe treats his increasing distance toward Christianity.
In book 15 Goethe describes in great detail the affectionate relationship he had with the Moravian Pietist Susanne von Klettenberg. As opposed to Lavater, she did not attempt to convert him but accepted him quite lovingly as her pagan friend. His status as a pagan became especially clear during that phase when he was closest to the Moravian community. For it was the Moravians who pointed out to Goethe that he was separated from them on the grounds of his belief in the fundamental goodness of the human being, i.e., his refusal to accept the doctrine of original sin, which amounted to the heresy of Pelagianism. Goethe was not in the least offended or bothered by this, but decided to take both an ultimately historical position toward organized Christianity, a perspective that illustrated the transitory nature of such doctrinal issues and legitimated him in fabricating his own version of Christianity if he so desired. But he also makes a point of comparing Lavater’s and Susanne von Klettenberg’s religiosity by arguing that each person’s spirituality ultimately is merely the response to and expression of their gender, their character disposition, and their ability to desire and to relate to alterity. In other words, their religiosity, as impressive and pleasant as it might seem, turns out to be primarily a reflection or doubling of their general disposition, of their being in the world, a deficiency of religiosity or spirituality that Goethe has diagnosed before, as we have seen in his critique of the beautiful soul’s otherworldliness in Wilhlem Meisters Lehrjahre.
The position of the pagan or the disbeliever is explored especially with regard to the figure of Prometheus, which resulted in another one of Goethe’s great odes of that period, and whom he describes in book 15 as a figure that is not primarily one of rebellion against the gods but far more one who is on equal terms with them and who goes about his business of serving the human race entirely on his own. But there is another figure, parallel to Prometheus, that did not result in a finished literary product, but merely in a plan for one, which Goethe partially summarizes in the same book. This is the legendary figure of the Wandering Jew, who had not believed in the claims of Christ to be the Messiah. It was with the aid of this figure that Goethe claims he was going to explore the points of church history and the history of religion that concerned him. For him the Wandering Jew, modeled after a shoemaker from Dresden whom he had known, was to represent a good-natured this-worldly person who tried to dissuade Jesus from gathering disciples around him, warning him about the political fallout due to his influence over crowds and the kind of audiences he would generate. Incapable of believing in Jesus’s otherworldly, spiritual claims, he is without sympathy, even full of reproach toward him as he is on his way to his crucifixion. Goethe breaks off the narrative of his planned epic about the Wandering Jew and switches to his treatment of Prometheus only to return to the earlier narrative in book 16, when he mentions that he got back his interest in Spinoza, that he studied him in all seriousness as the proponent of an ethics of renunciation, disregarding all the defamations of this philosopher. He claims that the impact of Spinoza on him was of great consequence for his future life, that whereas he first tried to come to terms with Spinoza’s philosophy by having the Wandering Jew visit Spinoza in his narrative about that legendary figure, he ended up abandoning the narrative and integrating Spinoza’s philosophy into his own life.
By again mentioning the Wandering Jew in the beginning of book 16, he harks back to the concern over the dangers involved if an influential figure begins to depend on various audiences. When he explains his decision to accept the offer from the court at Weimar, which would provide him with a regular income, the brief reference to the Wandering Jew allows him to motivate this decision also as a decision that makes him independent from the audiences of his poetic works. In the same context, Goethe mentions how much the thought of selling his works would feel to him like selling his own offspring, a transgression against nature. He then proceeds to narrate how a certain Himburg had printed and sold a collection of Goethe’s works without the author’s knowledge and authorization and then proudly offered to send him some porcelain from Berlin should he so desire. Goethe was outraged by this and recalled how Jewish families on the occasion of their weddings were obliged to buy a certain quantity of porcelain only to boost the sales volume of the royal factory.
In the same context in which Goethe explains how he conceives of his own career, how he envisages combining his artistic talent with a way of earning his money such that he is not obliged to sell his works and cater to a market, he explicates Spinoza’s famous dictum deus sive natura as follows: “Nature operates according to eternal, necessary laws, which are so divine that the Divinity itself cannot alter them. Unconsciously, all human beings are in perfect agreement about this. Just consider how any natural phenomenon astounds and actually horrifies us if it hints at understanding, reason, or merely free will” (PT 524; SW XIV 731).
Nature’s might is the same as that of God; there is no otherworldly authority but only a this-worldly one, and that is the force of nature exhibited through its order and arrangement, felt even prerationally by our spontaneous reactions to those phenomena that seem to contradict the order of natural beings, when, for instance, an animal appears to act rationally or, even more, when a plant seems to exhibit feelings, such as the sudden reaction of the mimosa to touch. Goethe’s concept of himself as an author and a cultural innovator, then, evolved as a way of fitting in with regard to his understanding of Spinoza:
I had gotten to the point of viewing my indwelling poetic talent altogether as nature, especially since I had been directed to look upon external nature as its subject matter. Of course, a specific occasion could move me to exercise this poetic gift for a particular purpose, but it was at its most joyous and opulent when it burst forth involuntarily, nay, against my will. … It was very pleasant for me to think that my lovely natural gift, like something holy, might continue being expended disinterestedly while I was demanding real payment from people for actual services. This observation saved me from the bitterness I might have started to feel when I was forced to see how this most desired and admired talent was being treated in Germany as though it were outside the law and at anyone’s mercy. For it was not only in Berlin that pirated editions were considered permissible.
(PT 526–27; SW XIV 732–35)
All throughout the last quarter of Dichtung und Wahrheit, Spinoza serves Goethe as the reference point around which he can gather the complex net of references and reflections on how he became an author as a discourse innovator, as a figure who would intervene and change his contemporary culture’s perception and experience, especially as it concerns the relationship between art and life and reality and illusion. We have seen how Goethe makes sure to distinguish his portrait of an emphatically sovereign author from a merely adept writer and stylist who conforms to the artistic standards of his time. In this autobiography Goethe traces how he becomes an author who does not depend on contemporary fashions, trends, and traditions. However, he is keenly aware of his own historical situation as he comes to learn how to intervene in the historically situated perception of reality of his contemporaries. His capacity for innovation is not part of his upbringing, but it breaks with tradition creatively and amounts to an originality that can only be compared to the forces that produce change in nature itself. In the final narrative quarter of Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe’s artistic talent is portrayed as the gift of a nature that is conceived, along the lines of Spinoza, as a this-worldly productive power, rather than the product of his education or the trends of his time. We have seen how Goethe arrives at this concept of his own artistic talent by focusing on various aspects of his relationship to religion, both natural religion and revealed or positive religion, to the figure of the prophet, as one eminent model of a radical cultural innovator, and finally by reflecting on the role of religion in articulating both his position on the function of art he envisages as appropriate for his historical era and the future to come.
