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Goethe/Rosicrucian/Anschauung
 
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Goethe/Rosicrucian/Anschauung


Exiling the Esoteric: Goethe and the Literary Canon

A recent issue of a well-known publication for university faculty and administrators featured on its front cover a startling collage of literary portraits -- sixteen authors with four of them x'd out in red.(1) In the top row, right, was the face of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 -- 1832), the strokes of the red x intersecting over his eye.

Why deface this great German writer, author of Faust and some of the greatest poetry in the western tradition? The editors of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, a popular college text and an important voice in defining the canon of world literature, had eliminated him from their newest edition, purportedly in order to save space and reduce the bulk of the anthology. While it might be argued that Goethe is principally a great writer, and not a theorist, it would be hard to overlook the fact that he has produced a number of important essays on literature -- in fact, the most recent translation of his work in this area contains over twenty essays on the subject.(2) No, there was certainly more to the elimination of Goethe than some shortage of suitable material. While the article did not indicate exactly why he was axed, there is already a strong hint in the title of the anthology itself, with its emphasis on theory. Further along, a telling statement underscored this point: "It made sense to treat theory not just as a development in intellectual history, but as something that was now embedded in the everyday practice of the profession."(3)
It is easy to see how the anthology had an increasingly difficult time accepting the importance of a poet who could write (in advice to a young college student):

All theories, dear friend, are gray;
the golden tree of life is green.
-- Faust, ll. 2038-2039 (4)

However, the rejection of what Goethe has to say about literature and life itself touches on a far deeper and more disturbing topic, namely the place of the esoteric in modern thought and the modern academy. Goethe was motivated throughout his literary and scientific career by a need to penetrate into life, not to turn his gaze away from it; he looked always for the hidden meaning in the events and processes around him, from the subtlest interplay of colors in nature to the spiritual and karmic background of human existence. For him, the greatest danger in thinking was to be trapped in the inner, abstract, illusory world of thought without reference to what occurs in the world. Today, the word esoteric has taken on the meaning of arcane and difficult, but the core meaning of the word ("that which is hidden") became for Goethe a key to understanding -- it is what gives real significance to his work. As he viewed the world, superficial events are only a veil of metaphor behind which the real forces shape life. Goethe worked hard to peer into this hidden world, to pierce through the veil of illusion, and to understand what he so succinctly indicated almost at the end of his life:

All that is transitory/ is only a symbol,
-- Faust, ll. 12,104-12,105.(5)

Goethe felt the most important thing a human being could do was to develop the ability to see through the veil and discern clearly what lay behind; he put his mastery of language into the service of this quest. Thus, in his novel, Wilhelm Meister, he allows the main character (and the reader) to ride along on the glittering surface of life until suddenly we plunge through to discover that the seemingly chaotic events of that life are guided by a group of figures that seemed peripheral at first. The life of Faust in Goethe's great drama unrolls against the background of spiritual events on a level to which we, the audience, are privy but Faust is not; we are witness to efforts to understand them and act out of them. In his well-developed body of scientific work, Goethe also approached this problem of esoteric understanding by showing how to awaken organs of perception through which we can participate inwardly and precisely in the intellectus archetypus at work in nature. He writes:

From the softest breath to the most savage noise, from the simplest tone to the most sublime harmony, from the fiercest cry of passion to the gentlest word of reason, it is nature alone that speaks, revealing its existence, energy, life, and circumstances, so that a blind man to whom the vast world of the visible is denied may seize hold of an infinite living realm through what he can hear.
Thus nature also speaks to other senses which lie even deeper, to known, misunderstood, and unknown senses. Thus it converses with itself and with us through a thousand phenomena.(6)

To understand Goethe and why he does not fit very well into a worldview that takes theory as its foundation and chief content, it is essential to understand that his path leads into life, through life, beyond life; purely abstract ideas and theories only serve to sidetrack and mislead on this journey. He notes the human tendency to "fall in love" with our own ideas, so that the ideas become more important than the phenomena around us, and supplant them (for example, making theory central in literary criticism rather than the literary creations themselves). We are cut off from the hidden forces, the esoteric forces, really at work in the world and they, in turn, are cut off from us. And as this abyss widens, the possibility of understanding becomes ever more remote.

When Goethe brings his gift for language to bear whether in literature or in science, the resulting pictures lead us into a spiritual experience distinguished by clarity, precision, and beauty. These strong pictures or metaphors reflect the fact that Goethe had learned to meditate in an objective way about the world.(7) His thinking about things (the theory) becomes one with the phenomena he confronts. This meditative gift is both objective and imaginative, and it yields extraordinary insights into the nature of the world and the human being. It is commonly held today that such meditation can only be subjective, and that an objective grasp of reality requires instruments and calculations that are held apart from the human being. Goethe strongly disagreed with that view, for he realized that such mechanical assistance could never lead to an understanding of life itself. Such approaches "transform living things into dead ones; they kill the inner life in order to apply an inadequate substitute from without." (8) The meditative approach he took asked the meditant to keep the outer world in all its objective reality, and also move into it and through it with the whole power of thought. Goethe called this approach Anschauung, a term he based loosely on Kant. Anschauung is a difficult term to translate into English; I have rendered it as intuitive perception.

Clearly, what Goethe asks of himself (and of us) is not easy. Yet this was not all he asked. He also asked us to grow as human beings so that we could become worthy of receiving the perceptions that arise. For these perceptions always lead us into a realm which is both divine and magical. To approach this realm we need to rise above our inner needs and ideas; we need to become a "godlike being" (9) able to see the world for what it is, not what we want it to be. This is the crux of the issue in Faust, and what makes the play both fascinating and difficult. Goethe places the life of Faust in a divine context right from the beginning, yet we find it hard to understand how the many mistakes -- even crimes -- Faust commits can ever leave him worthy of entering the divine world. Still, he is taken up into that world (albeit, after death) because these mistakes are the very mistakes that arise as human beings strive to become divine. They are not intellectual mistakes, theoretical mistakes, but errors that result from the living of a human life that is also seeking the divine. The effect of living life is not theoretical; it possesses a magical power to bridge the abyss between us and the underlying spiritual realities, so that our life might continue. Indeed, there are strong hints that Faust's path has not yet ended when he dies, and that his "immortal part" has other lifetimes ahead of it in which to grow. Goethe also calls this "immortal part" of the human being the entelechy, or the monad, or the idea, and he said of it:

It carries a higher intention within itself, a higher task that makes its development just as regular as the development of a rose from leaf to stem to crown, and according to the same law. I don't care whether we call this an idea or a monad -- this intention is invisible and it exists prior to its visible development in the world of nature. The intermediate masks this idea wears as it develops should not confuse us. It is always the same metamorphosis or ability to transform in nature that makes a flower, a rose, out of the leaf, makes a caterpillar out of the egg and changes the caterpillar into a butterfly. (10)

Clearly Goethe saw that the role of the human being was not to make theories about the world, but rather to find this "higher intention" present within it. In fact, he makes the case that we should find our own "higher intention" in the context of what the world wants from us. In this sense he follows the Rosecrucian path with its three precepts: Ex Deo nascimur; In Jesu morimur; Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus. (11) Goethe directly describes an initiation into the Rosicrucian order in his long fragment, The Mysteries, and the final defeat of Mephistopheles by the host of angels in Faust is filled with Rosicrucian imagery. He frequently touches on the Rosicrucian theme of spiritual and physical healing in his writings. If our human situation is one in which we are separated from the spiritual reality that forms and guides our existence, then there is an important task to be fulfilled in helping human beings find a bridge into the spiritual world. Whether presenting us with literary symbols or scientific archetypes, Goethe is always concerned that we begin to see how to cross that bridge. He is the magician, the alchemist, who can bring about the transformations necessary to create the bridge (even if only for a moment). Here we can recall the sacrifice of the green snake in his alchemical story, The Fairy Tale. In this respect, Goethe also became aware of a sacrifice he made, for by the end of his long life he felt that he had been set apart from others. He spoke of himself more than once as a Merlin, never quite a part of the society around him, yet always appearing to make his mark at the right time. Not long before he died, he wrote to his friend, Zelter: "In the meantime I stand alone; like Merlin from his shining grave I sometimes let my echo be heard quietly and close by, and sometimes in the distance, too." (12)

Thus Goethe stands as a writer who put his talents in the service of the world and an understanding of its esoteric content. Throughout the range of his work and the many years of his life, he never really strayed from the path of research into spiritual realities. It would be hard to find an author able to convey so well the widths and depths of the world in which life reigns and the abstract kills:

It is not good to remain in the abstract realm for all too long a time. The esoteric only does damage when it seeks to become exoteric. Life learns best from what is living. (13)

Perhaps it is only to be expected that such an author would have no place in a worldview predicated on the centrality of theory in the practice of literature, or of life. Nonetheless, Goethe's powerful voice will continue to be heard because it must, where the importance of the esoteric is truly understood.

+++

1) The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 May 2001, p. A1.
2) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey, trans. Ellen von Nardoff and Ernest H. von Nardoff (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers New York, Inc., 1986).
3) Chronicle, p. A17.
4) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I & II, ed. and trans. Stuart Atkins, (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers New York, Inc., 1984), p. 52.
5) Faust, p. 305.
6) Preface to Theory of Color; in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller, (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers New York, Inc., 1988), p. 158.
7) He describes his ability to meditate in his review of Purkinje's Sight from a Subjective Standpoint; see Scientific Studies, p. xxi.
8) Theory of Color, ß752; in Scientific Studies, p. 277.
9) 'The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject,' in Scientific Studies, p. 11.
10) Conversation with J. D. Falk, January 25, 1813; cited in Curt Englert-Faye, Vom unbekannten Goethe (Basel: Zbinden Verlag, 1984), p. 317.
11) Fama Fraternitatis (1614); cited in Ralph White, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited (Hudson, N.Y.: Lindisfarne Books, 1999), p. 12.
12) Letter to Zelter, December 14, 1830; in Goethe, Briefe, ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1967), vol. 4, p. 412.
13) Maximen und Reflexionen, No. 487; in Goethe, Werke, ed. Hans Joachim Schrimpf (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1960), vol. 12, p. 432.

Douglas Miller is Associate Professor of German and Art at the University of Michigan -- Flint. He is the editor and translator of Goethe's Scientific Studies (published by Princeton University Press), and most recently co-authored Synthetic Vision, an international exhibition on Goethe sponsored by the Goethe Institute.

 

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