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 ...