the practically freethinking attitude of the two foremost men of
letters in the new Germany--Goethe and Schiller. Of the former,
despite the bluster of Carlyle, and despite the æsthetic favour
shown to Christianity in Wilhelm Meister, no religious ingenuity
can make more than a pantheist, [1416] who, insofar as he touched
on Biblical questions, copied the half-grown rationalism of the
school of Semler. [1417] "The great Pagan" was the common label
among his orthodox or conformist contemporaries. [1418] As a boy,
learning a little Hebrew, he was already at the critical point of
view in regard to Biblical marvels, [1419] though he never became a
scientific critic. He has told how, in his youth, when Lavater insisted
that he must choose between orthodox Christianity and atheism, he
answered that, if he were not free to be a Christian in his own way
(wie ich es bisher gehegt hätte), he would as soon turn atheist as
Christian, the more so as he saw that nobody knew very well what
either signified. [1420] As he puts it, he had made a Christ and
a Christianity of his own. [1421] His admired friend Fräulein von
Klettenberg, the "Beautiful Soul" of one of his pieces, told him
that he never satisfied her when he used the Christian terminology,
which he never seemed to get right; and he tells how he gradually
turned away from her religion, which he had for a time approached,
in its Moravian aspect, with a too passionate zeal. [1422] In his
letters to Lavater, he wrote quite explicitly that a voice from heaven
would not make him believe in a virgin birth and a resurrection,
such tales being for him rather blasphemies against the great God
and his revelation in Nature. Thousands of pages of earlier and later
writings, he declared, were for him as beautiful as the gospel. [1423]
Nor did he ever yield to the Christian Church more than a Platonic
amity; so that much of the peculiar hostility that was long felt
for his poetry and was long shown to his memory in Germany is to be
explained as an expression of the normal malice of pietism against
unbelievers. [1424] Such utterances as the avowal that he revered
Jesus as he revered the Sun, [1425] and the other to the effect that
Christianity has nothing to do with philosophy, where Hegel sought
to bring it--that it is simply a beneficent influence, and is not to
be looked to for proof of immortality [1426]--are clearly not those
of a believer. To-day belief is glad to claim Goethe as a friend in
respect of his many concessions to it, as well as of his occasional
flings at more consistent freethinkers. But a "great pagan" he remains
for the student. In the opinion of later orthodoxy his "influence on
religion was very pernicious." [1427] He indeed showed small concern
for religious susceptibilities when he humorously wrote that from
his youth up he believed himself to stand so well with his God as to
fancy that he might even "have something to forgive Him." [1428]
One passage in Goethe's essay on the Pentateuch, appended to the
West-Oestlicher Divan, is worth noting here as illustrating the
ability of genius to cherish and propagate historical fallacies. It
runs: "The peculiar, unique, and deepest theme of the history
of the world and man, to which all others are subordinate,
is always the conflict of belief and unbelief. All epochs
in which belief rules, under whatever form, are illustrious,
inspiriting, and fruitful for that time and the future. All
epochs, on the other hand, in which unbelief, in whatever form,
secures a miserable victory, even though for a moment they
may flaunt it proudly, disappear for posterity, because no man
willingly troubles himself with knowledge of the unfruitful"
(first ed. pp. 424-25). Goethe goes on to speak of the four
latter books of Moses as occupied with the theme of unbelief,
and of the first as occupied with belief. Thus his formula was
based, to begin with, on purely fabulous history, into the nature
of which his poetic faculty gave him no true insight. (See his
idyllic recast of the patriarchal history in Th. I, B. iv of the
Wahrheit und Dichtung.) Applied to real history, his formula has
no validity save on a definition which implies either an equivoque
or an argument in a circle. If it refer, in the natural sense, to
epochs in which any given religion is widely rejected and assailed,
it is palpably false. The Renaissance and Goethe's own century were
ages of such unbelief; and they remain much more deeply interesting
than the Ages of Faith. St. Peter's at Rome is the work of a
reputedly unbelieving pope. If on the other hand his formula be
meant to apply to belief in the sense of energy and enthusiasm, it
is still fallacious. The crusades were manifestations of energy and
enthusiasm; but they were profoundly "unfruitful," and they are not
deeply interesting. The only sense in which Goethe's formula could
stand would be one in which it is recognized that all vigorous
intellectual life stands for "belief"--that is to say, that
Lucretius and Voltaire, Paine and d'Holbach, stand for "belief"
when confidently attacking beliefs. The formula is thus true only
in a strained and non-natural sense; whereas it is sure to be
read and to be believed, by thoughtless admirers, in its natural
and false sense, though the whole history of Byzantium and modern
Islam is a history of stagnant and unfruitful belief, and that of
modern Europe a history of fruitful doubt, disbelief, and denial,
involving new affirmations. Goethe's own mind on the subject was in
a state of verbalizing confusion, the result or expression of his
temperamental aversion to clear analytical thought ("Above all," he
boasts, "I never thought about thinking") and his habit of poetic
allegory and apriorism. "Logic was invincibly repugnant to him"
(Lewes, Life of Goethe, 3rd ed. p. 38). The mosaic of his thinking
is sufficiently indicated in Lewes's sympathetically confused
account (id. pp. 523-27). Where he himself doubted and denied
current creeds, as in his work in natural science, he was most
fruitful [1429] (though he was not always right--e.g., his polemic
against Newton's theory of colour); and the permanently interesting
teaching of his Faust is precisely that which artistically utters
the doubt through which he passed to a pantheistic Naturalism.