Nicholas Boyle
Goethe described himself as a ‘heathen’.1 Though born a Lutheran, he last took his church’s sacrament at the age of twenty-one, he chose to blight his social life at the Weimar court for sixteen years by living with his mistress and his illegitimate son rather than legalize his arrangements by going through what he regarded as the hypocrisy of an ecclesiastical ceremony, he avoided attendance at church functions whenever he could, and particularly in the 1790s his unpublished, and even occasionally his published, writings contain some savagely satirical remarks about Christians, Christianity, and Christ. His very first publishing successes brought him ecclesiastical censure and censorship and throughout his life his critics charged him with blasphemy and immorality. Yet in later years, if Varnhagen von Ense is to be believed, he described himself as more Christian than his critics: he enjoyed the company of Jews, contributed to the support of the first Catholic chapel in Jena, and upbraided Herder for not being sufficiently orthodox in his sermons;2 his writings of all periods contain sympathetic depictions of the beliefs and practices of Protestant and Catholic Christians, Muslims and even Zoroastrians; and a recent volume on Goethe and Religion, a valuable collection edited by Paul Kerry,3 includes speculation on how far he can be described as a closet Catholic or a crypto-Mormon. More important still, I think, is T. J. Reed’s remark about what is ‘religion in the broadest sense’, a remark quoted by Kerry in his Introduction:
Meditation and self-questioning about one’s inner life and relation to the shaping forces of existence – spirituality, in short – do not end when orthodox faith ends. This continuity is as much what is meant by ‘secularization’ as is any rejection of orthodox faith.
That Goethe was a heathen does not mean that he did not have a religious development. Heathens have a religion too. Questions such as what it is to be, or to be subject to an obligation, whether life has a direction or can be evaluated, questions about loss and gain, about the autonomy or dependency of the self, do not go away because the formulations of them, or the answers to them, provided by particular cultural traditions are thought to have lost their hold.
Goethe’s thoughts, feelings, and attitudes in relation to ultimate questions went through several distinct phases. These phases have been relatively little studied, but a crucial turning-point is, I think, represented by his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship), on which he worked intensively in the years 1794 to 1796. I shall deal here firstly with some of Goethe’s religious ideas in the years before his work on Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship, concentrating on poems known through their musical settings, especially by Schubert, and then with the novel itself, which has proved a particularly rich source of inspiration for composers. In conclusion I shall mention a variation on these themes to be found in Faust II.
Goethe’s brush with Pietist – as we would now say, evangelical – Christianity in the years 1768-1769 coincided with a period when his health was critically poor and his survival at times in doubt. The association of Christianity with sickness and death remained a feature of his writings ever afterwards. By 1770, when he was twenty-one, the Christian episode was over, his health was rapidly improving, and at the university of Strasbourg, where he resumed the legal studies that the crisis had interrupted, he soon had a reputation as a wealthy, horse-riding tearaway, with advanced views on everything from theology to landscape. The next three years brought his first adult love affairs, with moments both of ecstasy and of guilt and loss, a revolution in his literary taste, and the first explosive manifestations of his genius in poems and plays that were as yet unpublished. The colossal self-confidence with which he transformed the language of prose and verse in these years, without as yet the support of a reading public – though there was a growing circle of those who knew something of what he was doing, and admired it – had a metaphysical or theological counterpart. Goethe saw himself as a favoured young man living his exceptional life under the eyes of higher powers, sometimes companionable and admiring, sometimes discreetly or manifestly helpful, sometimes aloof and envious, as if threatened by the independence of his own quasidivine creativity, sometimes an impotent and obsolete but self-important establishment. This last role is on the whole reserved for representations, under a thin disguise, of the Christian deity; the names under which Goethe speaks of, or to, the metaphysical audience interacting with his life are those of the Greek pantheon; and collectively he knows them as ‘the gods’. Like a character in Homer he knows them as personalities who may make obvious or concealed interventions, who may speak to him under the appearance of other human beings, who take a benevolent or hostile interest in his doings, and whose power over him, though not absolute, is to be reckoned with seriously. Cronos – no doubt, whatever the lexicographers say, as a god of time – is his postilion, ‘Schwager’, a word which also means ‘brother-in-law’ and in student parlance of Goethe’s time was the equivalent of ‘mate’, and Cronos, in the ode addressed to him,4 leads the genius at a rattling pace, on a bone-shaking path, down to Hades where the great figures of the past, divine or semi-divine, stand up to honour his arrival. In the rhapsody ‘Wandrers Sturmlied’ (HA 1, pp.33-36) Dionysus and Jupiter, as the god of storms and foul weather, are his patrons and the sources of the wild energy coursing in his verse as in that of Pindar, while Apollo, the sunshine god, is potentially envious and needs to be won over, or intimidated, by a demonstration that the poet can if necessary do without him. Jupiter/Zeus has a much more ungrateful role in the outstanding ode ‘Prometheus’ (HA 1, pp.44-46), which had the capacity to cause so much scandal that Goethe did not publish it himself: the father of the Greek gods here clearly stands for the God of Christian monotheism, and perhaps even more specifically of the Pietism from which Goethe had quickly freed himself, the object of the ceaseless prayers of the weak and the infantile, who none the less is incapable of doing anything to help his worshippers. The Prometheus of this poem treats this feeble figure with contempt – all Prometheus has achieved has been his own work and he will not be cowed by stagethunder into attributing it to any power but his own heart. Unable – and no doubt unwilling – to disavow this radical anti-Christian polemic once it had been made public by F. H. Jacobi in 1785, Goethe sought to conceal its true nature by printing it, in all collected editions of his poetry, alongside a poem written at a different time and in a different mood, with no thought of a relation to it – ‘Ganymed’ (HA 1, pp.46-47). ‘Ganymed’ shares with ‘Prometheus’ a reference to Jove, but this Jove is a God unknown to the Pietists, an ‘all-loving father’, it is true, but one who is approached through the natural world, the transports of spring, a flowering landscape, the intoxication of high places and a love that does not deny its homoerotic component.
There is no point in seeking some system or method behind Goethe’s mythological references in his poetry of the 1770s, his so-called ‘Storm and Stress’ period, for it is clear that the deployment of the myth is always subordinate to the needs of the poetic and psychological moment. But that does not mean that there is not a consistent theology at work in the poetry. The theology of which the – essentially literary – allusions to Greek myths are the occasional and metaphorical expression was formulated with increasing clarity as Goethe’s own affairs moved into crisis, as he experienced the pain of an unhappy engagement, eventually broken off, and as it became clear to him that he could not stay and flourish, as the moving spirit in German literature that he had now become, in the Frankfurt that had nurtured him, but where he was the prisoner of a provincially minded society of merchants and bankers, and where he would permanently be under the eye of his father. Should he set off on a grand tour to Italy? Should he accept an invitation to visit the new young Duke of Weimar and stay for an indefinite period? Goethe clearly felt the significance of this moment of decision, felt its relation to the foundations of who he was and what he had to do, felt its religious significance – and he concluded the poem ‘Seefahrt’ (HA 1, pp.49-50), an explanation of his decision to opt for Weimar, with the firm statement that ‘foundering or landing’ he ‘put his trust in his gods’. Whatever the mythology, the belief it expressed was a belief that his life was watched over by unknown, or half-known, powers, in whose hands, at least to some extent, lay the course of events.
The belief, however, was about to change. With the beginning of his intense and painfully platonic relationship with a married lady-in-waiting at the Weimar court, Charlotte von Stein, and with the death of his sister, Cornelia, a year younger than himself and his only surviving sibling, Goethe’s relations with the powers that ruled his life took on an altogether more serious and at times a tragic tone. On a splendid moonlit night, just after he had received the news of Cornelia’s death, an unrhymed, almost prosaic, quatrain came to Goethe, that he then included in a letter to Countess Stolberg, whom he never met, but to whom he confided some of his most intimate thoughts:
Alles geben die Götter, die unendlichen,
Ihren Lieblingen ganz,
Alle Freuden, die unendlichen,
Alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, ganz.5
The insistent repetition of ‘die unendlichen’, ‘the endless ones’, enacts the presence in our finite world, in which pain and joy are mixed, of a transcendent meaning on which we are dependent, and the reference to the darlings of the gods is as bittersweet in its hubris as the world of which the poem speaks. For the darlings of the gods are those who are chosen to experience not only the joy of the world but also its pain, ‘to the full’. These four lines seem powerfully to have impressed the young Hölderlin. E.C. Mason, in his study of the relation between Goethe and Hölderlin, traced so many and so profound associations between them and Hölderlin’s phraseology in his poems that he felt sure Hölderlin must have known them, but he was at a loss to explain how, since he believed they had first been published in 1839.6 Only after Mason’s death did it become known that they had appeared sixty years previously in a German literary periodical shortly after they were sent to Countess Stolberg. If we take into account the extraordinary power and authority that Goethe’s early verse had for the next generation of poets, and that in it, as we have seen, ‘the gods’ are a ubiquitous presence as the vehicle of an alternative, non-Christian, theology, then this quatrain, which summarizes a decade of Goethe’s experience of the divine, can perhaps be seen as the channel through which Goethe contributed to the concepts both of ‘the gods’ and of ‘the poet’ which are the intellectual foundations of all Hölderlin’s mature work.
Once Goethe was in Weimar, the confident manner in which his earlier poems dealt with ‘the gods’, sometimes boisterous and familiar, sometimes ecstatic and contemplative, seemed less appropriate and the theological vein in his poetry became more reflective and tentative, more resigned and at times even bitter. The years of adjustment to Weimar court-life were not easy for a middle-class parvenu who did not know the ropes7 and was excluded from higher-profile social events because he lacked a title. In his moments of greatest doubt and uncertainty Goethe turned to his gods seeking guidance and reassurance that he was after all on the right path. In December 1777 he suddenly disappeared from Weimar and in vile weather trekked through the Harz Mountains to the Brocken, reputedly the haunt of witches, and a place of mysterious significance to the local population. If he could climb this, the highest mountain of North Germany, in the snow, as no one had done for a generation, he would regard himself as having received a sign from his gods that in Weimar he was on the right path and should continue in it. Miraculously, as it seemed, the weather did indeed improve enough for him to reach the summit and enjoy a moment of sunlight above the world.8 The anxieties of his quest, and his triumph in its crowning moment, are recorded step by step in the poem ‘Harzreise im Winter’ (HA 1, pp.50-52), whose prophetic or augural character was first recognized by Albrecht Schöne9 (and which of course furnished the text for Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody). The poem culminates in a celebration of the Brocken’s ‘snow-hung brow’ which the poet’s experience has transformed from a place of fear into an ‘altar of sweetest thanks’. ‘You know how symbolical my existence is’ Goethe wrote to Frau von Stein,10 telling her of his success – life, poetry, and theological meaning were for him inseparably intertwined.
The principle first recognized by Schöne can be extended to a number of episodes in Goethe’s first decade in Weimar, not all of them however accompanied by the inspiration for a poem such as rewarded his first visit to the Harz. In 1779 on a tour to South Germany and Switzerland which he had undertaken with Duke Carl August as a deliberate survey of the events and places associated with his Storm and Stress past, Goethe arranged for another mountaineering expedition, this time through the snows of the Furka pass up to the Gotthard pass, which he regarded as the centre of the Alps. The Gotthard had a special significance for Goethe as the frontier of Italy from which he had already turned back once in 1775, and he now turned from it again to go back to Weimar to take up a much heavier burden of official duties than he had previously shouldered. This significant moment was also marked by a literary monument, though in prose this time, not verse, his Briefe aus der Schweiz,11 but the ‘symbolical’ role of the journey had already been recognized in a poem about the Staubbach and Reichenbach waterfalls, ‘Gesang der Geister über den Wassern’ (HA 1, p.143). That poem already suggests that Goethe’s thoughts about the gods are taking a fatalistic turn: the gods as personal beings are not mentioned in it but instead the superhuman power that affects human lives is called fate, ‘das Schicksal’, which blows us about as the wind blows the spray of the waterfall. And indeed, despite the positive augury represented by the climb to the Gotthard pass, the next few years, which saw Goethe’s deepest involvement in the administration of the duchy, including a spell as the chancellor of its embarrassed exchequer, were a period of increasing doubt and poetic frustration. He wrote less and less verse, what he wrote became more colourless, and he forced himself to keep himself in existence as a writer by completing every year one book of a rambling picaresque novel, Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission). Goethe had once thought he had a poetic mission, perhaps even a theatrical one, but that now seemed questionable to him. He had published nothing since 1776, partly from choice but mainly because he had finished nothing that he thought worthy of publication. Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission was not finished either, but we may be sure that it was no part of Goethe’s plan for the novel that Wilhelm’s ambition to transform Germany, or at least its cultural life, by the foundation of a national theatre would have been fulfilled. Thanks to the practical requirements of his involvement in the duchy’s affairs, particularly the silver mine at Ilmenau and the university of Jena, Goethe had been interesting himself in natural science and he eventually came to think that his literary period might be over and that he would in future be devoting himself to the sciences. Had he then been given his literary gifts only in order that he might suffer the torment of feeling them gradually strangled? Had he sacrificed so much, for example, the moral innocence of an ordinary middle-class family life back in Frankfurt with Lili Schönemann, for the pursuit of a chimera in Weimar? The bitterness of such a thought spilled over into a brief and utterly tragic poem which in 1783 he put into the mouth of a character in his novel, the Harpist, though it may have been written earlier, and independently of Wilhelm Meister:
Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß,
Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte
Auf seinem Bette weinend saß,
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.
Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,
Ihr laßt den Armen schuldig werden,
Dann überlaßt
ihr ihn der Pein,
Denn alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erden.12
Goethe had given a dramatic representation of a figure tormented by this antitheology, by this belief in predatory deities, to whom we are as flies to boys, for sport, in the character of Orestes in his prose drama Iphigenie auf Tauris written in 1779.13 Orestes, in this play, was healed of his belief that he was pursued by spirits of vengeance, the Furies, by the influence of the Charlotte von Stein-like figure of his sister Iphigenia who had faith that the gods were benevolent beings seeking the long term good of humanity and the healing of the wounds humanity inflicted on itself. That faith was coming under increasing strain for Goethe particularly after the year 1782 which saw not only his reaching the top of Weimar’s administrative tree and his raising to the nobility as ‘von Goethe’, but also - and perhaps crucially - the death of his father after a long dementia. It was as if his arrival in adulthood, as a man of his own making, had deprived him of the irresponsible and unpredictable creativity of a protracted adolescence and he was now forced to shake off the habits of thinking and writing that had so far provided him with an identity. After 1783 he wrote few lyrical poems – songlike verses suitable for musical settings – for many years, and entirely ceased writing the free-verse hymns or odes that since ‘Wandrers Sturmlied’, or even before, had been the principal vehicle for his more reflective and theological writing.
The last such hymn, entitled ‘Das Göttliche’ (‘Divinity’) (HA 1, pp.147-49) indicates that a profound change is on the way. The gods in this poem are projections – perhaps not yet mere projections, but projections nonetheless – from human moral qualities. Only through human moral choice, through human acts of goodness and productive help, can we form a concept of those transcendent beings who are, perfectly, what we aspire, and normally fail, to be. That was perhaps the inspiration, or the rationalization, for Goethe’s devotion to his life of self-sacrifice in the Weimar civil service and in his chaste relationship with Frau von Stein. But the duchy was unreformable, the Duke had his own agenda, and neither Goethe nor Frau von Stein was getting any younger: Goethe had good reason for thinking that the gods had let him down. He resolved to make one last desperate bid to restore meaning and purpose to his life. He signed a contract to bring out a collected edition of his works, including his unfinished and imperfect pieces, which would serve either as a monument to a period of his life that was now over, or as a spur to finish off what he could and to start again. And he decided to seek relief from his servitude as an official, the stimulus of a new climate, new people and new experiences of art, architecture and landscape, and probably also the sexual fulfilment that had evaded him in Weimar, by at least partially carrying out the plan for a Grand Tour that his father had long ago seen as the climax of his son’s education. He decided to undertake another symbolic journey, in the hope that at its end he would find some new and decisive divine revelation: in September 1786 he set out for the most symbolic goal of all, the capital of the ancient and modern world, Rome.
The revelation however did not come – not, at any rate, in the form which Goethe expected, or hoped for. ‘Rome disappoints me much’, wrote A. H. Clough14 three quarters of a century later, and Goethe’s experience at first was much the same. Rome was too ruinous and too priest-ridden, the capital of a church, not of the world, and he took advantage of the Duke’s indefinite prolongation of his leave to go on to Naples and Sicily. In the landscape and flora of the coastal regions of Southern Italy, and in their remarkably well-preserved monuments from the Greek colonial period, Goethe finally caught a breath of the classical atmosphere he had been seeking and on his return to Rome was able to make it for a year into a place where his hopes and wishes could temporarily all seem fulfilled. He surrounded himself with artists, kept away from political grandees, and hired a Roman widow to experiment in manhood at last. In two respects though his time in Italy was not the success he had looked for: firstly, he wrote little, and little of it was good – the best things, his travel diary and the versification of Iphigenie auf Tauris, were the fruit of his journey to Rome, not of his stay in Rome itself; and secondly, the crowning symbolic act, having eluded him on his first arrival in the Eternal City, obstinately refused to materialize later on. In Sicily he made a pilgrimage to Enna, reputedly the entrance to the underworld, where Proserpine, for Goethe the image of his dead sister, had been abducted by Pluto. So insignificant did the visit prove to be, however, that Goethe subsequently did his best to conceal his motives in undertaking it.15 The oracles, it seemed, had fallen silent.
In January 1777, even before Goethe’s first expedition to the Harz to sound out the gods about his fate, he had written to Lavater, the enthusiastic clergyman who wanted nothing so much as to convert him, but whom at first he admired for the sincerity of his charity and his intellectual openness:
Dein Durst nach Crist[us] hat mich gejammert. Du bist übler dran als wir Heiden uns erscheinen doch in der Noth unsre Götter.16
Ten years later it seemed to Goethe that divine manifestations were no longer to be hoped for, and his feelings for Christians – and for Lavater in particular – moved from pity to contempt and angry hostility. The years after his return from Italy were in their own way even more difficult than those immediately preceding it. True, he now had a mistress, Christiane Vulpius, whom he soon regarded as his wife, even though he refused to seek the Church’s blessing on their union, and he had a son. But no other child survived from Christiane’s five pregnancies to enlarge his family as he hoped, and the death or stillbirth of his children was one of Goethe’s most private and painful tragedies. Moreover, the ménage was unacceptable at the Weimar Court and the inevitable breach with Frau von Stein added personal anguish to the social isolation. Goethe had no reason to feel kindly towards institutional Christianity and now, as an adult and Enlightened man, sexually content and with a scientific attitude to Nature, he felt not only that Christianity had no intellectual foundation, but that he no longer needed the emotional support of a theological alternative to it. In 1787 when he was in Rome Herder had sent him his newly published volume called Gott. Einige Gespräche (God. Some Conversations). Reminded of the gift in 1788 he commented smiling, ‘Then I was given God, and this year I don’t believe in one’. ‘Disagreeable things must be going through his mind’, commented Herder’s wife17 and the disagreeable thoughts soon proved to have literary consequences.
In the December of 1793 Goethe, shaken to the core by the loss of another child, resolved to devote himself in the new year to a literary project that could absorb his mind and emotions. ‘I think it will turn out to be my old novel’, he wrote to a friend.18 Wilhelm Meister had never been included in Goethe’s plans for his collected edition – perhaps it was too large a task for completion in the time available; perhaps he always intended it as the material for a second phase in his writing career. But for two and a half years from the start of 1794 he worked steadily on a revision of the six books of Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission, which he cut down to four and a half, and on the composition of another three and a half books to complete the novel. (Most remarkably, after the first year the writing proceeded simultaneously with the publication, so that Goethe had no opportunity to revise the earlier books in the light of any changes to his intentions for the later ones.) The result was Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship (HA 7), the first of Goethe’s works to be written in close collaboration with Schiller, with whom his friendship (though not his acquaintance) began in the summer of 1794. Schiller was a more dogmatic atheist than Goethe 19 but he was also much more committed to the Kantian system of ethical theology, and Goethe’s revised and redirected novel shows clear signs of its origins in the high summer of German Kantianism.
For two years after his return from Italy Goethe worked intensively on completing his collected edition: this work was highly productive, if essentially retrospective, and it was accompanied by a new burst of poetry inspired by Christiane Vulpius, admittedly in the highly artificial and ironical form of the Roman Elegies. But once the work on the edition was over Goethe found himself looking into a void, and for three or four years of what he later called a ‘realistical’ [i.e. materialist] ‘tendency’ his writing lost direction, original poetry ceased completely, and no new large-scale project was launched. ‘I […] destroyed all sentimentality within me and so suffered damage to the closely related ethical and mental sphere’, he wrote.20 However these were the years in which Germany at large was going through an intellectual revolution in parallel to the political revolution taking place in France. New ethical issues and a new ethical consciousness were coming to preoccupy the younger generation as the Kantian philosophical movement started to gather momentum. Kant’s refoundation of moral principles in the self-understanding of the autonomous moral agent had an even broader and deeper effect in Germany than his refoundation of scientific knowledge in the subjective necessities of thought. Goethe could not stand aloof from these developments and did not wish to – the new energies might after all revitalize and redirect his own writing, even if they tended to reinterpret and so to re-establish theology, rather than to complete its abolition.
The story of Wilhelm Meister, in the form in which it first reached the German public, is the story of a young man’s emancipation from belief in ‘the gods’ – from the belief, that is, that his life is being shaped by the guiding hand of a higher power than himself. Wilhelm initially calls this power ‘Fate’, or ‘Destiny’ (Schicksal), a term much used by Goethe also in his letters during the period of his belief in ‘the gods’. In a philosophical conversation with a stranger not further identified to us, Wilhelm remarks at the end of Book 1 that he honours ‘the Destiny that knows how to initiate what is best for me and best for everyone’ (HA 7, p.71) and provokes a diatribe against the very word. By confusing the boundaries between what in our lives is inevitable, and what in them is mere chance, and so obscuring the different roles that our reason has to play in dealing with these two very different categories of experience, the concept of ‘Destiny’ – the stranger says – allows us to loiter aimlessly through life and to call the result ‘by the name of divine guidance’. Wilhelm needs to recognize, the stranger goes on, that ‘Everyone has his good fortune in his own hands, as the artist has the raw material that he intends to transform into a figure’.
But like all arts this one has to be learnt, and in the course of the next three books Wilhelm shows little sign of learning it. Chance and his own moods seem to get the better of him in determining his involvement with the theatre and his wanderings through eighteenth-century Germany, until his faith in his guiding star very nearly costs him his life. However, after an ambush which leaves him seriously wounded and his fellow-actors plundered, Wilhelm, lying on his sickbed, begins to think seriously about the shape of his career so far. He is particularly concerned by the place in his life of the striking horsewoman in male clothing, the Amazon, as he calls her, who arrived in time to rescue him. She has now disappeared, but Wilhelm has become obsessed with her image, which seems to him to be related to ‘all the dreams of his youth’ – his feelings for her seem to have been anticipated by his childhood fascination with Tasso’s heroine Chlorinda, who disguised herself as a man in order to fight, or with the princess Stratonice, the object of her stepson Antiochus’s incestuous love:
‘Sollten nicht’, sagte er manchmal im stillen zu sich selbst, ‘uns in der Jugend wie im Schlafe die Bilder zukünftiger Schicksale umschweben und unserm unbefangenen Auge ahnungsvoll sichtbar werden? Sollten die Keime dessen, was uns begegnen wird, nicht schon von der Hand des Schicksals ausgestreut, sollte nicht ein Vorgenuß der Früchte, die wir einst zu brechen hoffen, möglich sein?’21 Wilhelm has begun to discover the secret of the construction of his own life, which is at the same time the secret of the construction of Goethe’s novel – namely that it is built up on the principle of motivic repetition.22 There are patterns laid down in it from the earliest days he can remember, from even earlier perhaps, and these recur throughout his life, ever more insistently, ever more clearly. Two of these structuring patterns are mentioned explicitly by Wilhelm in this moment of insight – a third which is not mentioned is of course the various forms of the theatre – firstly, the image of the woman in man’s clothing, the androgyne, and secondly, the image of a love that transgresses socially established boundaries. The motif of the androgynous woman will prove to be of particular importance, for it is this motif which links the puppets of Tancred and Chlorinda in Wilhelm’s childhood with the image that opens the whole novel, that of his lover, the actress Mariana, dressed in soldier’s uniform, and then with the figure who has above all appealed to artists and musicians after Goethe, the figure of Mignon. The female Mignon dresses as a boy, sings some of Goethe’s finest poems, and seems to be associated with the freedom and unbiddability of Romantic art, but her hermaphrodite character also links her, not only with the fair Amazon who first reveals the principle of structural interconnection, but with the figure in Books 7 and 8 who might seem to be Mignon’s antithesis. Theresa, the countrywoman who stomps about in boots and trousers, who is completely impervious to sentiment and the arts of fiction, is also briefly described as an ‘Amazon’. The motif of socially transgressive love, already sounded in the liaison between Wilhelm, the son of a respectable merchant, and Mariana the actress, runs through the whole of the novel, culminating in the clutch of marriages at the end of Book 8, every one of which, as the first critics of the novel noted,23 is a mésalliance, and in the awful warning that is the counter-example, the story of the incestuous love between the Harpist and his sister, from whose unnatural union the doomed Mignon was born.
However, when Wilhelm begins to suspect this underlying unifying principle in his experience he still makes the mistake of attributing it to the operation of Fate or Destiny. He still has to learn how much it is his own work, the work of a creative imagination that he is misapplying by confining it to the unprofitable world of the theatre. That lesson becomes clearer to us than it does to Wilhelm in the aesthetic discussions that take up much of the rest of Book 4 as Wilhelm approaches what he thinks of as his supreme goal – a production of Hamlet in which he will play the lead. Wilhelm shows himself able to apply to a text the shaping hand that he is as yet unable to apply to his own life, and if he recognizes that the difference between a drama and a novel is that a drama deals with Fate while a novel deals with chance, he fails to recognize that he has hitherto been living his life as a drama when it is really a novel. The turning point in Wilhelm’s development comes precisely halfway through the novel, at the beginning of Book 5, and it is, as it was for Goethe, the death of his father. At first the significance of this event is not recognized, but Wilhelm is confronted with it at the climax of his theatrical career when he hears the words, ‘I am thy father’s spirit’, and half believes them: the boundary between play and reality, on which his theatrical frivolities have been predicated, breaks down. He gives the performance of his life, because he is playing himself, but thereby demonstrates his lack of a true actor’s vocation.
Held together in the past only by Wilhelm’s determination to reach this one point, the troupe fragments and the theatre sets itself new, less demanding, and more lucrative tasks. Wilhelm, already drifting away from it, begins at last to formulate the lesson which is now becoming clear to us as readers. Wilhelm, like us, reads, in Book 6, the life-story of a woman, known only as ‘the Beautiful Soul’, who concentrates as entirely on her inner development as he on wandering through the outer world, but who learns, as he learns, to discern truth through the erroneous images that at first preoccupy her, and so to tell her own story to herself as a story of recurrent leitmotifs. Wilhelm summarizes the wisdom that this autobiography contains in terms that apply also to his own life: it is not in the interventions or intentions of some external power, whether the gods, or Fate, or Christ, that the meaning and value of our life lie, but in the interpretation and estimate that we put on it ourselves. That, evidently, is a change in moral consciousness that a Kantian generation could at once appreciate, though it was already implicit in Goethe’s thinking at the time he wrote the poem ‘Divinity’. Wilhelm, however, goes further, though he is still pursuing a strictly Kantian line of thought; we cannot, he says, give a meaning to our life without assuming that that meaning is grounded somewhere outside us:
Ein heiterer Tag ist wie ein grauer, wenn wir ihn ungerührt ansehen, [says Wilhelm at the start of Book 7 as he rides away from the theatre under a magnificent rainbow] und was kann uns rühren, als die stille Hoffnung, daß die angeborne Neigung unsers Herzens nicht ohne Gegenstand bleiben werde?24
The balance of power in Wilhelm’s life has suddenly shifted – from his destiny to the inclination of his heart – but he recognizes that the inclination of his heart still requires completion by some external goal or purpose. The death of his father has released Wilhelm into responsibility for his own actions, but it remains a responsibility to a standard outside himself. Like the Beautiful Soul, and like Kant, Wilhelm finds in moral and aesthetic experience the confirmation that faith and hope has, as the Beautiful Soul puts it, ‘a real object’:
Uns rührt die Erzählung jeder guten Tat, uns rührt das Anschauen jedes harmonischen Gegenstandes; wir fühlen dabei, daß wir nicht ganz in der Fremde sind, wir wähnen einer Heimat näher zu sein, nach der unser Bestes, Innerstes ungeduldig hinstrebt.25
The question which the last two books of the novel have to answer, then, is: what is this external goal, where does the home lie towards which Wilhelm’s heart is striving, what is the object of his innate inclination? Plainly the answer to that question, given by the structure of all Wilhelm’s previous experience, is ‘the fair Amazon’. But since the structural significance of the fair Amazon in Wilhelm’s life can no longer be assumed to be the consequence of some decision or hidden plan of an external Destiny, but is rather a significance bestowed by the innate inclination of Wilhelm’s heart, to give that answer is only to beg the further question: but who or what is the fair Amazon as a ‘real object’? Towards what is Wilhelm striving by pursuing this androgynous figure through her many manifestations? To the question in this form Books 7 and 8 of the Lehrjahre give two different successive answers.
The answer given by Book 7 involves only a partial emancipation of Wilhelm from the idea of Destiny that has so far dogged him. In the place of a mysterious, transcendent, unaccountable guiding hand, in the place of the gods who persecute the Harpist as they once persecuted Orestes, there is briefly put the wholly transparent and comprehensible guiding hand of human society, of a human society, the Society of the Tower, as it is called. The Society of the Tower is a kind of Masonic group of the reasonable, the benevolent, and the humane, who guide each other to a rational goal and enable their members to look back on their own development and see in it in retrospect a clear and logical pattern, however confused it may have appeared at the time. This society, into which Wilhelm is initiated at the end of Book 7, claims to have been guiding and influencing him through secret emissaries since his youth, and his story, as the Society of the Tower understands it, has been written down, like the stories of all its members, on a scroll, which he is shown, bearing the title ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship’ (HA 7, p.497). It is the novel of Wilhelm’s life which he should have taken it upon himself to write – not the drama he thought he was involved in as the pawn of Destiny. There is certainly something admirable about the Society of the Tower: it sees human beings as reasonable and as free, as capable of development and as best left to develop for themselves, if necessary through error, in the confidence that they will tend naturally to move upwards towards the light. It sees human beings also as essentially social and sociable and it acts as a structure for the mutual support even of those who do not know each other personally. But it cannot provide Wilhelm with the right answer to the question: who is the fair Amazon? It points him to the wrong person entirely, to Theresa, who loves in Wilhelm only what he is, not what he is to become (HA 7, pp.530-32), and who is the ideal practical companion, but not the Ideal itself.
Only in Book 8 does Wilhelm meet the Ideal itself, the Ideal as a real object, the fair Amazon in her full reality, and that reality proves a mysterious thing indeed. It takes Wilhelm beyond his life as a novel that it is incumbent on him to write and takes him into the life that is his and his only, not shaped for anyone else, but shaped for the fulfilment of his own entelechy, of the purpose for which he was born and towards which he must move for as long as he is alive. It therefore bears the name Natalia. It is the home towards which all moral and aesthetic experience directs him, the meaning and significance of his life not as something that the gods have kept concealed from him even as they have taken responsibility for guiding him towards it, but the meaning and significance of his life as that which is implied by his own complete responsibility for himself and his own self-orientation towards the good – which is for Kant the only compelling evidence for the existence not of the gods, but of God.26 Natalia, therefore, to whom Wilhelm is betrothed in the last lines of the novel, is God, God, at any rate, for him, and a Kantian God at that. She is the Ideal, the Idea that is regulative of all Wilhelm’s experience, that derives from his own inmost rationality, but that imprints on all his experience the mark and reminder of the androgynous perfection for which his experience is made, and she is the Idea thought of as real – what Kant calls the Ideal. Kant also says, in his treatise on religion, that the historical instantiation of the Ideal may properly be thought of as the Son – or presumably the Daughter – of God.27
Wilhelm Meister at the end of his apprenticeship is therefore on the point of marriage to a female Christ. Goethe’s return to the conceptual repertoire of the religion he abandoned at the age of twenty-one is nothing if not heterodox. Having once made the breakthrough into subversive reinterpretation he seems to have enjoyed its potential for mischief and I should like in conclusion to point to another well-known example, from a much later work, of Goethe’s enjoyment of what we may surely call thealogical speculation.
Faust Part Two, Goethe said, was a collection of very serious jokes28 and Albrecht Schöne has shown how one of the jokes Goethe seriously intended, though he did not in the end carry it out in its entirety, was to conclude the play with the salvation not just of Faust, but of the Devil and the entire contents of Hell.29 Schöne does not, however, note the thealogical joke in the last two of the play’s over 12,000 lines. ‘Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan’ – ‘The ever-womanly Draws us onwards’ – are among Goethe’s best-known words, but their significance, I suspect, is usually overlooked. Probably they are assumed to refer to some erotic lure held by Romantics to be characteristic of women. Not a bit of it, I say. They are another case of Goethe’s tweaking the sensibilities of the orthodox. ‘Are there no men in heaven, then?’30 an irritated male critic is reputed to have expostulated on reading the last scene, and thereby fell into the trap Goethe had set for him. Faust, as I have argued elsewhere,31 has two conclusions – an earthly and a heavenly. Faust’s earthly end is in meaningless delusion – the moment of his death is worthless and empty, says the Devil, and once all the perturbation of spirit that has been his life is over it might as well never have been at all. Indeed uninterrupted nothingness would for Mephistopheles be preferable to the vexations of memory – ‘Ich liebte mir dafür das Ewig-Leere’. ‘The eternally empty’ is the last word pronounced on Faust’s life in what we might call the realistic, the terrestrial, section of the drama. But that realistic section is encased within a metaphysical frame which puts an Idealist gloss on the story and which provided Mahler, of course, with the text set in the second movement of his Eighth Symphony. The full nature of the gloss and of the re-reading it requires need not concern us here – all we need notice is that the invocation of ‘Das Ewig-Weibliche’ is the response that the metaphysical framework makes to Mephistopheles’ taunt of ‘Das Ewig-Leere’. ‘Das Ewig-Weibliche’ is the source of the redemption and love that fills out the Mephistophelean emptiness. It swamps Mephistopheles in a flood of love represented by rose-petals that to him are indistinguishable from the fires of Hell, it threatens to redeem him too, though with a great effort he diverts this power of love into the channels of the unnatural, and through the intercessory prayer of the penitent women it is effectual for the redemption of Faust.
Despite the appearance of a wholesale adoption of Catholic imagery and allusions to Dante, however, Goethe deliberately introduces some discords that alert his audience to the presence of another conceptual scheme that is making use of the religious vocabulary for its own metaphorical purposes. The other scheme is a later variant of the Kantian idealism that subtends Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship and the first discord that alerts us to its presence is the use of the title ‘Göttin’, ‘goddess’, in an address to the Virgin Mary – an impossible title in a Catholic context, but entirely natural as part of the Kantian adaptation in the Years of Apprenticeship of Goethe’s earlier thoughts about the gods. If the Virgin Mary, like Natalia, is a metaphor for the ultimate Ideal she may with equal propriety be called either God or Goddess. And if she is called ‘Goddess’ we may then notice the discordant quality of the title ‘Das Ewig-Weibliche’ too, for it is certainly not an orthodox attribute of the divine. But it is not an orthodox Catholic world in which Faust is saved, even though it is an orthodox and not only Catholic sentiment to think of God as drawing all the redeemed permanently onwards and upwards into an ever deeper vision of the Divine mystery. In the heaven to which the last lines of Faust II allude, however, not only are there no men, but God Herself is, eternally, a woman.32
Footnotes
1 See for example WA I, 28, p.302, I, 32, p.491, and especially the letters to Herder, 15 March 1790, and to Jacobi, 7 March 1808 (the latter countering the powerful influence of the visit of Zacharias Werner; see the conversation with Riemer on 27 March 1808: Goethes Leben von Tag zu Tag: Eine dokumentarische Chronik, ed. Robert Steiger (Zurich: Artemis, 1982-) 5, p.178) in: Goethes Briefe, Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow (Hamburg: Wegener, 1962) (henceforth HABr) 2, p.123; 3, p.66.
2 Goethes Gespräche ed. F. von Biedermann and W. Herwig (Zurich: Artemis, 1965-84) 2, p.575 (No.3285); Nicholas Boyle, Goethe. The Poet and the Age. Volume II. Revolution and Renunciation (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), pp.263 and 284; HABr 1, p.424.
3 Goethe and Religion (Literature and Belief 20.2), ed. Paul E. Kerry (Provo: Brigham Young, 2000). Reed’s remark: p.xvii.
4 Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: Beck, 1988) (henceforth HA) 1, pp.47-48.
5 HA 1, p.142. I have however given the text in the more familiar form in which it originally appeared in editions of Goethe’s works (see e.g. HA, first (1949) edition, 1, p.142). ‘The gods, the endless ones, give everything to their darlings in full; all joys, the endless ones, all pains, the endless ones, in full’.
6 E. C. Mason, Hölderlin and Goethe, ed. P.H. Gaskill, Britische und Irische Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur 3 (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1975), p.42.
7 See the autobiographical poem ‘Ilmenau’ (1783), HA 1, pp.107-12, especially ll. 112-19.
8 HABr 1, p.247.
9 A. Schöne, ‘Auguralsymbolik’, GJh 96 (1979), pp.22-53.
10 HABr 1, p.246.
11 Later published as Briefe aus der Schweiz. Zweite Abtheilung, WA I, 19, pp.221-306.
12 HA 7, p.136. ‘He who has never eaten his bread with tears, who has never spent nights of sorrow sitting weeping on his bed, does not know you, o you heavenly powers. You lead us into life, you make the wretch become guilty, then you leave him to his torment, for all guilt is avenged on earth’.
13 WA I, 39, pp.321-404.
14 A. H. Clough, ‘Amours de Voyage’, I, i, in: Poems (London: Macmillan, 1895), p.269.
15 Nicholas Boyle, ‘Faust, Helen, and Proserpine: Reflections on Some Goethe Drawings’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 63 (1993), pp.64-96.
16 HABr 1, p.231. ‘Your thirst for Christ makes me sorry for you. You’re in a worse state than us heathens: at least our gods appear to us when we are in need.’
17 Goethe. Begegnungen und Gespräche, ed. E. and R. Grumach (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965-) iii, p.228.
18 HABr 2, p.174.
19 Boyle, Goethe II, p.161.
20 WA I, 33, p.363.
21 HA 7, p.235. ‘ “Might it not be”, he sometimes said to himself in secret, “that in our youth as in our sleep the images of our future fates surround us and are visibly prefigured to our innocent eye? Might it not be that the seeds of what is to occur to us are already sown by the hand of Fate, might not a foretaste be possible of the fruits we one day hope to pluck?” ’
22 U. Mölk, Goethe und das literarische Motiv, Bursfelder Universitätsreden 11 (Göttingen, 1992).
23 Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe ed. S. Seidel (Munich: Beck, 1984) 1, p.191.
24 HA 7, p.421. ‘A fine day is like a grey one if we look at it unmoved, and what can move us but the quiet hope that the innate inclination of our heart will not remain without an object?’
25 HA 7, p.421. ‘We are moved by the narration of any good deed, we are moved by the contemplation of any harmonious thing; we feel then that we are not altogether in a strange land, we imagine ourselves nearer to a home towards which our best and inmost being is impatiently striving.’
26 I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §§86-91, in: Werke ed. W. Weischedel (Frankfurt: Insel, 1957) 5, pp.567-606.
27 Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft II. i. a, Werke 4, pp.712-14.
28 Letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt, 17 March 1832, HA 3, p.468.
29 A. Schöne, Fausts Himmelfahrt. Zur letzten Szene der Tragödie, Themen 56 (Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 1994).
30 Schöne, Himmelfahrt, p.14.
31 Nicholas Boyle, ‘ “Du ahnungsloser Engel, du!”: some current views of Goethe’s Faust”, German Life and Letters 36 (1982-3), pp.116-47. See also my Sacred and Secular Scriptures. A Catholic Approach to Literature (University of Notre Dame, 2004), pp.171-86.
32 For the sake of brevity I have here omitted most of the second half of the story. After Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Goethe's thinking about the Divine was largely (though not entirely) dominated by the concept of (feminine) Nature. The roots of this concept lay in his earliest adulthood and excluding it from this paper meant also excluding a significant element in his theology even before 1796. It was rightly pointed out in the discussion that the argument presented here needs to be complemented by consideration of the Spinozan (or apparently Spinozan) vein in Goethe's scientific and religious thought.