I am forming an undertaking which has no precedent, and the execution of which will have no imitator whatsoever. I wish to show my fellows a man in all the truth of nature; and this man will be myself.
Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any of the ones I have seen; I dare to believe that I am not made like any that exist. If I am worth no more, at least I am different. Whether nature has done well or ill in breaking the mold in which it cast me, is something which cannot be judged until I have been read.
Let the trumpet of the last judgment sound when it will; I shall come with this book in my hands to present myself before the Sovereign Judge. I shall say loudly, “Behold what I have done, what I have thought, what I have been. I have told the good and the evil with the same frankness. I have been silent about nothing bad, added nothing good, and if I have happened to use some inconsequential ornament, this has never happened except to fill up a gap occasioned by my lack of memory; I may have assumed to be true what I knew might have been so, never what I knew to be false. I have shown myself as I was, contemptible and low when I was so, good, generous, sublime when I was so: I have unveiled my interior as Thou hast seen it Thyself. Eternal Being, assemble around me the countless host of my fellows: let them listen to my confessions, let them shudder at my unworthiness, let them blush at my woes. Let each of them in his turn uncover his heart at the foot of Thy throne with the same sincerity; and then let a single one say to Thee, if he dares: “I was better than that man.”1
These are the famous opening paragraphs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. In them he announces his autobiography as a radically new and unique enterprise, which consists in the complete revelation of his interiority as only the eternal being has seen it. This claim justifies borrowing the title of Augustine’s work. In both cases an individual’s interiority is openly displayed with utter attention to detail and a total commitment to sincerity in a way that would match only the knowledge of an eternal being’s insight into that individual’s inner life. But in many other aspects it does not resemble Augustine’s work: certainly not in its relationship to Christian belief, nor in its way of referring to the eternal being. The last paragraph concludes with a request and a challenge. May that eternal being gather the vast crowd of the author’s fellow beings so that they may hear his confessions, so that they may cringe at learning about his disgraceful acts and blush at his woes. Would the work be received according to Rousseau’s challenge to his readers, each one of them would take his turn and open up his heart at the feet of the throne of the eternal being with the same kind of sincerity, and then just one should dare to address the divinity and say, I was better than this man there. It is rather remarkable that the function of God, the supreme judge, is not to determine the value and fate of the individual’s soul but rather to orchestrate and oversee the publication and reception of Rousseau’s book entitled Confessions. God is the authority to guarantee the utter uniqueness of Rousseau’s work.
Especially after Foucault’s critique of the disciplinary aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century institutions and practices concerned with examining the individual’s inner self, Rousseau’s challenge to his readers to “listen” to his confessions and then to follow in his footsteps and uncover their own hearts with the same kind of sincerity might be taken for the programmatic announcement of the modern culture of confession and sincerity. Indeed, it has almost become a commonplace to see in Rousseau’s Confessions the beginning of that individualizing subjection that would then with the aid of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis seek to localize in a person’s desiring structure the key to that individual’s secret, sexuality, and subjectivity that needed to be studied, cured, and normalized. In other words, Rousseau’s Confessions has been frequently considered the prototype of the transition from a religious to a worldly practice of the self, which only at first glance looks like a liberating move but actually maintains or even heightens the disciplinary aspects of the religious confession.2
The emphasis on the sincerity of the confessing subject, the focus on the minute observation of the stirrings of one’s soul, and the disregard for worldly opinions and judgments are indeed decisive elements that characterize Augustine’s as well as Rousseau’s Confessions and the Christian practice of confessing one’s sins. However it needs to be noted that the sacrament of penance and the confession of one’s sins took on many different shapes throughout the history of Christianity. There has never been just one practice and speech genre of the confession. Moreover, throughout the history of Christianity there have been other uses and meanings of the term confession. The term has not only been used to refer to the sincere and accurate account of one’s trespasses and failings based on the thorough examination of one’s conscience but also to the kind of speech that professes one’s adherence to a particular creed (the profession of faith or the credo), as well as the speech genre that codifies a particular creed (such as the Augsburg Confession). In fact, as I shall show in the first section of the Rousseau chapter, Rousseau was quite aware of these different uses and aspects of the confession. He even experimented with them in view of their potential for being transferred into a more secular framework. He did so, however, not primarily in his Confessions but in his Émile, in the way he presented the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.” Yet, considering Rousseau’s autobiographical text and the religious practices of confession as instantiations of one and the same speech genre blurs the difference between an exceptional autobiography, conscious of its uniqueness, and a common, primarily oral practice.
My approach to confessional discourse and autobiography does not privilege the oral practice of the confession of sins. Nor do I attempt to write or rewrite a genealogy of “our” culture of confession. Instead, I am interested in the valorization of individual experience as one aspect of a very specific confessional discourse that emerged in the late seventeenth century as part of Pietist reading culture, which produced a highly influential and popular practice. For the same piety movement that found its central spiritual guide in Johann Arndt’s True Christianity, which I discussed in part 1, also sought encouragement and examples in the first-person narratives of fellow believers. Heinrich Reitz’s collection of first-person accounts by Christian men and women of their conversion or spiritual awakening was almost as widely and frequently published as Arndt’s spiritual how-to manual. I hope to show that it was this specific kind of confessional discourse that provided the model of how even common people would have a voice and life worthy of being narrated by themselves, a genre that has been recently studied under the general term life-writing. To the extent that these conversion narratives were part of the Pietist emphasis on lived, practical piety, they provided a template for a narrative of the self that valorized subjective experience over external authority and the judgment of others. And for this reason, I would argue, it is a mode of confessional discourse that contributed just as much to the promotion of individual judgment and tolerance, as it might have spurred practices of interrogation, surveillance, and exhibitionism.3
Although the confessional discourse of the Pietist movement could be characterized as some kind of autobiographical writing, and although Jean-Jacques Rousseau titled his most prominent autobiographical work Confessions, there is no smooth and direct continuity between the confessional practices emerging out of seventeenth-century piety and Rousseau’s and Goethe’s own autobiographies. This discontinuity stems from the functional difference between a popular form of narrating and recording subjective experiences and the presentation of an autobiographical narrative in the service of constructing and authenticating a public persona’s or an author’s authority. In this context it is interesting to consider the autobiography of the radical Pietist author of devotional literature and theological writings Johanna Eleonora Petersen. For even with regard to this pious woman’s autobiography we can see her abstention from the confessional model of life-writing and her cultivation of a different mode, her assertion of her uniqueness and independence from worldly judgment grounded in her spirituality, which she portrays as an index of her having received God’s special attention, as the guiding principles of her autobiography. Petersen’s display of her disregard for worldly judgment, even her insistence on how she was slandered and mistreated by the rich and famous as proofs of her spiritual authority and integrity might very well represent an aspect of Protestant religiosity that can also be traced in Rousseau’s insistence on his disregard for the judgment of le monde. As we could see from the opening paragraphs of his Confessions, Rousseau’s position as an author is what motivates his claims for his absolute uniqueness. Being an author is what sets him apart from everybody else. In fact, if one considers Rousseau’s Confessions as working with the model of the conversion narrative, we have a prominent substitution at the center. Where in Augustine’s Confession the conversion under the fig tree consists in applying the words of the Bible to his own life, the turning point in Rousseau’s life as depicted in his autobiography is the moment when he becomes an instant celebrity as author of the essay on the use of the arts and sciences that won him the Dijon Academy prize.
To a certain extent Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit could be characterized as the deliberate countermodel to Rousseau’s Confessions. Goethe abstains from Rousseau’s obsessive exhibitionism and instead presents his childhood, youth, and years of education and exposure to the arts and sciences from a deliberately distanced, even historical perspective. Nevertheless, Dichtung und Wahrheit is, as much as the Confessions, engaged in making a case for the uniqueness of its subject, the emergence of an inimitable author. Goethe, however, conceives of himself as an author quite differently. Whereas Rousseau’s uniqueness as a person consists in his sincerity and acute awareness of all the nuances of his emotions, which, only once coupled with utter disregard for the judgment of the world, makes him the inimitable author, at times loved but mostly persecuted by his readers, Goethe’s uniqueness consists in his very lively engagement and broad exposure to the world, all of which he took in but also overcame such that he rose above all trends and fashions. Goethe presents himself as a radical innovator in the domain of literature not just through the composition of one or the other original work but in the way he reconceived the function of art in its relationship to life.
In order to understand Rousseau’s model of authorship, much can be learned by focusing on how he depicts his relationship to live audiences, anonymous crowds, and the virtual audience of print. His relationship to his audience serves him to prove his sovereignty, his independence from worldly judgment, which alone makes him an inimitable author. Goethe’s strategy of making himself independent from literary fashions is quite different. Not the disregard for the world, but the ability to step back into another time and culture, and above all one that is in its appeal and staying power above every changing trend, namely the Bible and the Judeo-Christian tradition and religion as a most lasting, most powerful cultural force, serves Goethe in his autobiographical account as a crucial point of reference and reflection, in view of which he was able to become an author as a discourse innovator. It is along these lines that I shall analyze Rousseau’s Confessions and Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit as biographies of the emergence of a unique author, asserting a model of authorship that goes far beyond the simple, standard definition of the eighteenth century, namely as somebody who has published a book. If being an author is to mean more than that, if what is at stake consists in establishing the writer as an authority that lays claim to having something new and lasting to say to a wide audience, the writer cannot produce this kind of authority by way of depicting himself within a traditional mold, as the mere product of his education and times. But he or she cannot rely on the religious model of the conversion narrative either, for in that case the first-person narrator is not an author but merely a witness to the workings of divine grace. Thus, as I shall show, even within the religious circles of the radical Pietists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, a religious leader and composer of devotional literature without the institutional support and backup of her male counterparts, Johanna Eleonora Petersen, would not choose the confession or conversion narrative as template for her autobiographical work. Whereas some of her male colleagues would write their autobiographies within the traditional genre of the scholar’s biography, which allowed them to justify their authorial role and authority based on their educational history, Eleonora Petersen chose another route altogether. She wrote her autobiography as that of God’s special child, who finds herself in the role of inspired prophet serving as a medium for the divine message, and she justified her authority in her utter disregard for worldly norms and expectations.
The organization and structure of my discussion of “Confessional Discourse, Autobiography, and Authorship” is based on these reflections, which ultimately come down to the following observations: Pietist conversion narratives, as a popular form of life-writing, do not provide a template for a smooth transition to those autobiographies that should be read as biographies of the author, i.e., a form of life-writing that makes an emphatic case for an individual author, her or his authority and novelty, and hence relevance for a broad audience. However, as these same conversion narratives formed part of a larger culture of paying attention to an individual’s inner life as a source of inner strength in disregard of official dogma, external norms, and the opinion of others, they contributed to what we might call Enlightenment practices of independent thought and tolerance. Indeed, though neither Rousseau’s nor Goethe’s autobiographical works can be considered in direct continuity with this kind of life-writing, because of their own ambitious concept of authorship, which their autobiographies set to lay out, these very same authors, exactly in their exalted role as cultural innovators, paid close attention to these newly popularized discursive genres. They studied them closely and probed them and experimented with them in view of their secularizing potential for a new culture of Enlightenment that supported the individual’s inner sources of strength for independent thought and action. Both Rousseau and Goethe did so primarily in the pedagogical domain, Rousseau in his Émile, Goethe in the bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship). Thus in what follows I shall proceed in three larger units, each one juxtaposing the analysis of confessional discourse with the analysis of an author’s autobiography: Pietist confessional discourse will be contrasted with Johanna Eleonora Petersen’s autobiography, Rousseau’s presentation of the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” in the Émile will be contrasted with his Confessions, and Goethe’s presentation of the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship will be contrasted with his Poetry and Truth. In so doing I shall trace two different approaches to the issue of secularization. First I shall examine the different discursive forms of confessional discourse in different pragmatic contexts, from religious edification to the intimate exchange between friends and the probing of its ultimate shortcomings vis-à-vis the potential of art. Then, and this will primarily be the focus of my analysis of Goethe’s autobiography, I shall examine the conscious uses of religion in the assertion of an exalted model of the author as genius, artist, and discourse innovator.