Goethe, His Era, and Islam

Abstract

Goethe, the complete artist, is our antipode: an example for others. Alien to incompletion, that modern concept of perfection, he refused comprehension of others’ dangers; as for his own, he assimilated them so well that he never suffered from them. His brilliant destiny discourages us; after having sifted him in vain in an attempt to discover sublime or sordid secrets, we give ourselves up to Rilke’s phrase: ‘I have no organ for Goethe’.1 Goethe constructed his spiritual world with an unrivalled openness to the natural cycle of creation and destruction, the cultural accomplishments of different eras and places, the wisdom stretching beyond the whirlwinds of history. Being an ‘explosive liberator’ of all living forms of nature and culture, Goethe found the Enlightenment’s idea of history as a self-contained, linear advancement of the human mind to be a constricting notion, one that downplayed the role of humans in God’s work and presented an unacceptable erasure of interpersonal relationships and reality ...