          Goethe:
Poet, Philosopher, and Freemason

by Raymond H. Forbes

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt am Main on
August 28, 1749 and died in Weimar on March 22, 1832. He
was the greatest of all German writers, and universally
regarded as the most gifted writer since Shakespeare. World
famous for FAUST, he also wrote a great many lyric poems,
plays, novels, scientific works, philosophical maxims and
reflections, and letters to other famous people, as well as
to friends and relatives. In addition to all this literary,
philosophical, and scientific activity, he was for
twenty-two years director of the theater in Weimar, as well
as prime minister and chief administrator for the Grand
Duchy of Sachse-Weimar.

At an early age he came under the artistic influence of his
mother and of his grandmother, who interested him in
story-telling and in theater. This was augmented a few years
later when a French officer interested in theater was
quartered in the Goethe home. He took him to plays and got
him interested in drama.

At age sixteen he entered law school at Leipzig. After
pursuing his studies there for two years, he became
desperately ill and had to return home to recuperate. During
this formative period, he discovered some books on
alchemy, magic, and astrology as well as on Platonism, and
Pythagorean number-mysticism, in the personal library of
an elderly lady, a pietistic friend of the Goethe family. He
immersed himself deeply in these matters, and even set up
a laboratory to conduct alchemical experiments. After two
years he was well enough to return to university work, this
time at Strassburg. He began work on his FAUST while he
pursued his regular studies at the university. He was a
highly motivated student, eagerly incorporating all his
learning into one consciously integrated whole.

This was to become his characteristic procedure in all his
doings, whether his literary endeavors, his scientific work,
his philosophical investigations, or in the general conduct
of his life. His objective was always the conscious
deliberate formation of his character and spirit. In this he
followed what he perceived to be his innermost predisposition
assigned to him by destiny at birth. Thus he attempted to
determine the quality and the direction of his development.
His basic principle was the highly idealistic one that the
object of life is self-realization, or the attempt to
discover ones natural inborn potentials and then consciously
develop these; his dictum was, "Become what thou art. "

Goethe never became an academician, scholar, or philosopher
in the technical sense. Throughout his long lifetime of 82
years, he would cast his concepts into poetic image, even in
his scientific work. In his later years such images became
more and more abstract and of an increasingly generalized
type, so much so that the Second Part of his FAUST is almost
never staged. Part One is what comes to mind at the mention
of Goethe's name.

Goethe was "decidedly" not a Christian. He tells us he was
never an atheist, nor an agnostic, never antagonistic toward
the church and not unfriendly toward any given religion. He
regarded himself as a pantheist, and felt God and Nature
were interchangeable terms or ideas. He felt a reverence for
nature and a reverence for all life, human or otherwise. He
was never opposed any person on the basis of religion. He
found no one religious doctrine sufficient intellectually,
nor satisfying emotionally. In his religious and moral
orientation he followed the moral law, which means always to
act on principle, never on mere expediency. He had basically
the same moral and ethical views as those of the
philosopher Spinoza, with whose work he had become familiar
during the period of recuperation referred to above.
He made himself aware of the basic principles of each of the
major religions and ethical and moral systems of the world
and saw that they represented divine revelation to the
various races of Man, according to their respective levels
of understanding, and that we should be seeking to reconcile
their teachings and try to find what men have in common
rather than dwell on what seemingly separates them. A good
example of this is his book of Iyric poems entitled
"Westoestlicher Divan" which suggests a kind of bridge
between the Christian and Moslem worlds. The use of the word
"divan" in the title should not escape the mason, especially
since there was no "Shrine" until more than one hundred
years later.

In addition to religion and philosophy, he was well-read in
mysticism and in the Cabala. He took lessons in Hebrew and
in Yiddish, so that he could get a deeper grasp of
mysticism, especially the Cabala. He read the famous "Qabala
Denudata" by the Rosicrucian adept, Christian Knorr von
Rosenroth, which was written in Hebrew and Latin. (This
book was later translated, in part, into English by the
Scottish occultist, Samuel Liddel MacGregor-Mathers.) He
never doubted God. He felt God everywhere, in himself, and
in Nature. God was axiomatic and needed not to be proven.
Any attempt to "prove" God was not only quite futile and
vain (in both senses of the word), but would in itself
constitute a kind of blasphemy or arrogance on the part of
man; one begins existence with an intuition of life, which
also constitutes and intuition of God. God, or life, is a
given, a fact from which all else flows. Such a position is
distinguished from that of religion, which is characterized
by the conviction that God is something external to Man and
the World. The former position is a theosophy, the latter
eventuates in what is called theology. According to men like
Goethe, the entire cosmos is pregnant with God, and man is
that emanation of it that is aware of itself and knows
itself divine.

Goethe was saturated with this awareness of Self, and in
all his actions strove to conduct himself accordingly; even
in his scientific work he customarily began with an
apperception of the essence of the phenomenon under
scrutiny. This approach is direct intuition, and is the
method which he follows in his various scientific
researches, botanical, anatomical, mineralogical,
chemical, or physical. In botany, he perceived that the
various organs of the plant develop out of the leaf. In his
anatomical researches he was the discoverer of the
intermaxillary bone in man; this is a small bone in the
upper jaw, which holds the incisors in place, a structure
never hither to noticed by anyone. He had always felt
certain that he would find it, since all the other higher
animals possessed it. He held a theory of evolution long
before Darwin. Other thinkers, notably theologians, considered
the lack of such a structure in genus homo was proof
of the doctrine of Special Creation of Man.

For his work in mineralogy, goethit was named after him; in
botany he was the founder of comparative morphology. In
1771 he met Herder, a Lutheran pastor from Bueckenburg, who
was a philosopher of history, interested in the origins of
literature. This man was convinced that folk-literature was
much like an organic growth, something that developed spon-
taneously and took on a life of its own like a plant. He had
a similar view of the development of peoples, and specifically
the concept that each entity, whether human or
otherwise, represented a unique emanation directly from
God. Goethe was much impressed with these views, and over
the course of the next few years he worked them into his own
total organic outlook. As a result he came to regard
nature and indeed the entire cosmos as one vast organic
unity. One must be careful, however, to realize an
important fact about Goethe: he never thought as some
idealists did that the individual ever became totally
absorbed into some sort of cosmic nirvana (as in Hinduism)
such a view would be alien to his personality.

He was in effect what might be called a "practical idealist"
rather than a "romantic" as such, though some of his lyric
poems might be seen as "romantic" by persons outside the
German literary tradition. In 1773 he wrote Goetz von
Berlichingen, a turbulent, emotional drama about a noble man
of action, a robber baron who rebels against society. This
work was the result of Goethe's passionate nature and of his
tremendous admiration for the plays of Shakespeare who had
much enthralled Goethe's generation. It took him several
years to get these tempestuous feelings out of his system.
In fact, he was very much the ladies' man. Throughout his
whole long life he was almost always in love. Even at age
81, he was in love with a pretty young thing, Ulrike von
Levetzlow.

In 1773, the year he wrote "Goetz," he was becoming totally
immersed in Shakespeare, the Bible, the Koran, Pindar,
etc. In 1774 he poured out all his pent-up feelings in an
emotional novel called "The Sorrows of Young Werther," in
which his love-hero commits suicide over unrequited love.
This book swept Europe like a storm. Goethe became famous
almost overnight. The impact of it upon himself was to act
as a powerful emotional detergent. Some of his young readers
were not so fortunate. Many a young man having committed
suicide was found clutching this work to his bosom. This
famous young man, Goethe, had begun a law practice in
Frankfurt. His literary acclaim had attracted the
attention of the young Duke of Sachse-Weimar, who invited
him to follow him to Weimar, where it transpired that
Goethe was to spend the rest of his life. He very much
enjoyed the court life, as one may well imagine. Under its
aristocratic influence Goethe was thus enabled to become
much more mature.

In 1776 a young professor at Ingolstadt named Adam
Weisshaupt established a society called the Illuminati, of
which Goethe himself became a member. On June 23, 1780 he
was made a Freemason at the Amalia Lodge in Weimar; one year
later on June 23, 1781 he was passed to the degree of fel-
lowcraft mason, and on March 2, 1782 he was raised to the
Sublime Degree of Master Mason. In the same year he was
ennobled by the Kaiser, and was henceforth styled J. W. von
Goethe.

In 1776 he had met Charlotte von Stein, the wife of a
nobleman of the duke's court. She was a person of intel-
ligence and culture, with whom he carried on a platonic
relationship until 1788. She was the inspiration for his
classical play, " Iphigenia on Tauris . " In 1786 he left
Weimar for a two-year visit to Italy where he was much in-
fluenced by classical art, including architecture,
paintings, sculpture, and drawing. He returned to Weimar in
1788 to a cold reception on the part of the Baroness von
Stein because he had left for Italy without notice. He
needed to get away from her because he felt too much under
her sway. In 1787 his play, Iphigenia, had appeared. It was
in effect his farewell to her. He had purged himself of
her tightening control In 1788 he met Friedrich von
Schiller, the world-famous playwright and author of
"Willhelm Tell," which ever since, the Swiss have espoused
as their national drama, because it so fully embodies the
Swiss national feeling for independence, which they had
wrested from Austria 800 years earlier. Goethe and Schiller
are universally regarded as Germany's greatest writers and
are thought of together, primarily because of their close
literary collaboration, which lasted until Schiller's death
in 1805. One difference between them was the mutual admira-
tion of Goethe and Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Schiller
despised. Goethe was ten years older than Schiller and had
left behind his youthful fervor for revolutionary causes
long before he ever met Schiller. He never lost his devotion
to liberty, however, and retained his admiration for
America and her ideals. But over the years since being made
an entered apprentice he had learned self-control and to
master his passions. In his literary works he had, like so
many authors, learned to put the various facets of his
personality into the different characters in his literary
works. One good example of this is Lothario, a joyous,
light-hearted lover in his long novel, "Wilhelm Meister."
Often we hear a notorious lover being called a "gay
Lothario." This expression is an allusion to this
character, who represents the amorous side of Goethe; in
this regard we can see a contrasting parallel with Werther,
the wretched suicide. In each case the character func-
tions as a purgative, a catharsis, an emotional cleansing
for Goethe, so that having in effect put that part of his
nature behind him, he could get on with his life, ever
seeking greater challenges to overcome.

Striving was perhaps the chief feature of his make-up. So
powerfully is this aspect seen in the character of Faust,
that the term "Faustian Man" is used by twentieth century
cultural historians, notably by Oswald Spengler in his
famous work, "The Decline of the West," to epitomize the
Western civilization. Ceaseless striving and overcoming
of all obstacles is the massive concern of occidental Man,
so markedly different from the cultures of the East, whose
peoples seem to exhibit passivity. And in Goethe's FAUST,
the angels declare that " wer nur strebend sich bemueht,
den koennen wir erlosesen." "Whoever is activated by
constant striving, can find salvation. " By this term he
means self fulfillment, self-realization, wholeness,
satisfaction, so far as is possible within ones natural
limitations. One always has to work within these, which
presupposes that one has to strive to discover them. In "der
Beschraenkun zeight sich der Meister" (it is within
limitation that one achieves mastery). "Es irrt der Mensch,
solang' er strebt. " (Man errs as long as he strives; is
thus that he learns his possibilities as well as his
limitations. )

Goethe favors positive, constructive thinking. He disliked
denominationalism, because it engenders strife, dishar-
mony, and discord. He especially could not countenance the
so-called "Christian" religion because of its negative
emphasis upon sin, sorrow, suffering and guilt. He found
good in all religions and his overall outlook was Olympian
Greek, rather than German or Christian as such. He used
Christian symbolism in much of his literary work, no-
tably FAUST. He felt that everything here below is a symbol
of something beyond the realm of spacio-temporal
manifestation. "Alles Vergaengliche ist nur ein Gleichnis."
(All that is transitory is but a parable, a symbol of
something more permanent.) Consider that this applies to
every event, every action contemplated or performed, every
thought even before uttered or translated into action. All
are "Gleichnisse" according to Goethe. "Gleichnis" is a word
that can be rendered as symbol, parable, equation, formula.
The basic Goethean principle is transmutation, a concept
which he imbibed from his early study of alchemy and other
pansophic views.

At the very beginning of his autobiography, Goethe gives
us his birth data and a brief interpretation of his horo-
scope. Does this mean that he was necessarily a devotee of
astrology? Certainly not at the time he wrote the book
(1811), though we cannot know just what his attitude toward
such matters was when he was a student probing into the
fascinating field of magic and related studies.
Furthermore, the question need not be of primary concern
here, since at the time of discussing the matter, his
treatment of it was clearly poetic, and as usual of a
symbolic character. He was once again using material for
literary purposes and it was clearly grist for his poetic
treatment of his life. It is excellent for his purposes and
is a good opportunity for him to stress the figurative
quality of all life here below. And it once again encourages
us to accept his basic assumption that ones tendencies,
qualities, and predispositions, are assigned by destiny at
the moment of ones birth. He chose to regard the horoscope
as a convenient glyph representing the individual. As a
poet he know how to turn the trick. Life experiences had
already taught him what his chart ought to mean, and he knew
enough of the basics of astrology to know what to look for
when attempting to "read" it. He held a poetic view of life,
of "reality," and also of these ancient pansophic
mysteries.

It was entirely fitting that this man be made a mason. And
he imbibed much from his Masonic affiliation, we may be
sure. In any case, like everything else in his life, it
found its way into his writing. In his long two-part novel,
"Wilhelm Meister", there are many references to the
fraternity. It is interesting that in part two, it appears
as the "Tower Society", a shadowy order, whose very
existence remains unknown to the hero, until it is ready to
reveal itself to him, and divulge to him that it has been
following his movements and has been secretly guiding his
development toward fulfillment as a master (a meister
indeed!) Once again Goethe raises what is perhaps a fairly
mundane facet of so-called "reality" to the level of poetic
mystery and fascination.

FAUST, his masterwork, engaged his attention for over sixty
years. He began working on it when he was about 20 and was
done with it at age 81. He did not work on it constantly
over that long period, of course, but kept adding to it,
altering it, and allowed himself to grow and develop over
the years, and let his world-view deepen.

The first version was the so-called "Urfaust", a manuscript
dating from about 1776, and not discovered until 1887. It is
not in Goethe's hand and was not intended for publication,
having been written down by a family friend, a certain
Fraeulein von Goechhausen. We know from this version, that
he already had incorporated the traditional figure of FAUST
with his usual companions: the evil Mephistopheles as his
"familiar", Wagner, his assistant, and the scene with
students in the famous Leipzig pub, "Auerbach's Keller."
But he had added a few scenes forming the Gretchen tragedy.
This was his own idea, based on a very familiar theme that
of a simple girl seduced and abandoned; but, this formed
no part of the traditional Faust legend.

The next version we have is FAUST, EIN FRAGMENT published by
Goethe in 1790, though obviously not complete, being indeed
only a fragment, with even the end of the Gretchen-episode
omitted, thereby giving it a decidedly unfinished look. We
know, however, that he had indeed already written that
ending from our subsequent discovery of the Urfaust
manuscript.

In 1796, at the height of his classical period, he resumed
work on his FAUST. He added the dedicatory poem, the
"Prologue on the Theater", and the "Prologue in Heaven", all
of which serve to explain the appearance of Mephistopheles
and the pact signed between them; and the long "Walpurgis
Night scene", the festival of witches, on the Brocken, a
mountain in central Thuringia. This complete part 1, con-
taining, of course, the full Gretchen story, appeared in
1808, at the age of 59, and three years after the death of
his friend Schiller.

As already pointed out, the complete FAUST is finished very
near the end of Goethe's life, which occurred in 1832 in
Weimar. Quite aside from the fact that the work does have
two different parts, very different indeed...appearing at
widely separated dates...an examination of the total poem
shows that although the two parts seem not to display
unity, nevertheless the total poem does exhibit a unity of
cosmic purpose. As far as form goes, part one does seem to
be a drama, whereas part two seems more like some kind of
cosmic metaphysical dream, indeed sometimes seeming to
possess a highly rarefied atmosphere, far distant from so
called " real life " . Yet upon closer examination, one
can see that the entire work is a poem, a long Iyrical
philosophical poem, of great and compelling power. For we
must remember that basically Goethe is a Iyrical poet,
rather than a dramatist or technical philosopher.

His great skill is in casting mighty images, and
expressing titanic emotions. To be sure, his literary works
contain a vast amount of what one immediately senses is
wisdom. Be that as it may, a lot of it, if couched in
ordinary prosaic, mundane language, might appear as little
more than simple common sense, to which one could readily
give ones assent; but the force, the power, the eloquence
of his language are so much a part of what is being said,
that the overall impact of his utterances is stupendous,
a proof, if one were ever needed, of the often overlooked
fact that the way we say or do something is actually part
of what is being said, or done. (Have we not all heard, and
quite recently, that "We are changing the way we do
business, but not the business that we do?" This may be a
dandy slogan, but is in fact very dangerous sophistry. It
is always necessary to remember that the essence of wisdom
is to call things by their right names. Goethe, in my
opinion, always did that and this is the real reason he is
perceived as a wise man.)

We are all familiar with the traditional story of FAUST, the
flashy charlatan, and master of legerdemain, the confi-
dence artist and trickster, who sold his soul to the devil
for earthly pleasures and power, and who was snatched off to
the gaping jaws of Hell at the end of a wretched, wicked,
disreputable, disgusting life. Goethe takes this rotten
person, and transforms him through literary alchemy into a
noble individual who through his lofty aspirations is wor-
thy of salvation rather than everlasting torment and
punishment.

In his FAUST, Goethe makes it clear practically at the
outset, that the devil is not going to obtain FAUST's soul
because the terms of the pact state that the devil will
win the wager only if he is able, through his own wiles, to
get Faust to feel satisfied; that is, completely sated, with
the pleasures of this world, and say that he desires things
to continue permanently the way they are. That moment
never comes, indeed never can come because there is
literally nothing that the devil can ever provide that would
satisfy a person like Faust. Scholars who should know be
better feel that Mephistopheles is cheated of his prize. To
be sure, late in Part Two, Faust does reach a stage in his
operations on behalf of humanity, when he says in
anticipation of such a moment, "Verweile doch, du bist so
schoen" (O Moment stay, thou art so fair.) But this has not
come about as a result of anything Mephistopheles has
done. Moreover, Faust is engaged in the construction of a
vast land-reclamation project, which will enable a free
people to stand on free soil and breathe free air and aspire
to further humanity. He has in no way gotten Faust to agree
that he has arrived at a moment when he desires to lie back
on a bed of ease and strive no more. Inaction is entirely
alien to his make-up; ceaseless striving toward ever more
challenging activity on behalf of all mankind is the only
thing he can ever countenance or desire.

This is Goethe's signature: ceaseless striving onward and
upward toward ever more noble and challenging objectives.
This topic is so vast that a thousand papers on Goethe
would not be enough. This one merely scratches the surface.
Libraries are filled with thousands of books about this
man, his works, and their significance.

One more point in this very brief treatment: the importance
of women in Goethe's life. We have already alluded to the
influence of his mother, his grandmother, his many loves,
and the guiding presence of the Baroness von Stein as forces
con`    tributing to Goethe's ever-ripening maturity. Gretchen's
central position in Part One of FAUST is shown to be
essential to the development of the hero. She represents a
force which Goethe calls "das Ewig-Weibliche", the "Ever
Womanly", a feminine symbol for the power of attraction
which draws us ever onward and upward. In the last scene
of Part Two Gretchen reappears as a redemptive spirit. It is
clear that her personal tragedy, caused by Faust (pregnancy,
despair, infanticide, subsequent execution for
infanticide) has contributed mightily to the regeneration
and ultimate salvation of Doctor Faust, the servant of
the Lord.

On the other hand, Helen of Troy, whose shade he conjures up
from the netherworld, was the ancient Greek ideal of
feminine beauty, the most beautiful woman in the world.
For Goethe she is the symbol of absolute perfection, the
goal of every Freemason in the world.

It is reputed that Goethe's last words as he lay on his
deathbed were: "Licht!, mehr Licht!". (Light! More Light! ")

References 1. The Autobiography of Goethe, Dichtung und
Wahrheit

2. Dobel, Richard Lexikon der Goethe Zitate

3. Goethes Wereke in 14 Baenden, Hamburg, 1964 Wegner
Verlag

4. Goethe's FAUST, edited by Heffner, Rehder and Twaddel,
Madison 1954

5. Eckermann, J.P., Conversations with Goethe

6. Harold von Hofe, FAUST. Leben, Legende, und Literatur
1965 Holt, Rinehart and Winston

7. Wort Index zu Goethes Faust Hohlfeld, Jous, and Twaddell
Madison, 1940

8. Kiewsewetter, Carl. FAUST in her Geschichte und Literatur
George Olms. Hildes heim, 1963

9. Goethe's Urfaust edited by Harold Lenz and FJ. Noik,
Harper, 1938

Editor's Note From
Peter P. Kloskowski

Brother Raymond Forbes traveled many miles, and discussed
many Masonic topics with me. He was a very knowledgeable,
well educated professor of the German language. It was his
ardent desire to produce a work that he and the fraternity
could be proud of. He worked many long hours in research,
roughing in, changing, and rearranging this work, until he
was satisfied. Although his health was failing, he
requested that if completed, this work he put together, and
presented to the A.M.D. by me, in his behalf. Brother
Raymond H. Forbes passed away August 1, 1993. This is his
work.
