Note 209 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

19. Meanwhile, the drift of the age of Aufklärung was apparent in 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,209 who, insofar as he touched on Biblical questions, copied the half-grown rationalism of the school of Semler.210 “The great Pagan” was the common label among his orthodox or conformist contemporaries.211 As a boy, learning a little Hebrew, he was already at the critical point of view in regard to Biblical marvels,212 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.213 As he puts it, he had made a Christ and a Christianity of his own.214 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.215 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.216 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.217 Such utterances as the avowal that he revered Jesus as he revered the Sun,218 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 immortality219—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.”220 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.”221