A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

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.