He had come to Rome and not found...

"Goethe admitted that he could not 'say in what specifically the new light consists', and he never tells us what the disease was from which he had been cured, but we may take it that it was something like the hope of fulfilment in which he had been traveling since September [1786], the yearning that had gnawed at his heart since his youth. But the yearning had been cured not through being satisfied, but through his recognizing, and refusing any longer to tolerate, the unreality of its object. He had come to Rome and not found what he was looking for, and that, he thought, was his great discovery. He had set out on a 'symbolical' journey, and at its end had discovered the limits on the world's willingness to be filled with his own personal meaning. He had come looking for culmination, enjoyment, and a revelatory immediacy of experience, and he had found, or thought he had found, the need for study, informed understanding, and hard work."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 441.

"By thinking you get old."

"Why do you think so much? A man should never think. By thinking you get old." [Count Cesarei to Goethe, ~October 22, 1786, in the carriage nearing Florence.]

-- Cited in Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 430.

the story of Genesis

"Over the generations, the ways that people have understood Genesis tend to correlate with the ways that people have understood reality. It is not just that Genesis provides an account of the origins of reality -- which it does -- but that the kinds of meaning that people expect to find in Genesis are the same kind that they expect in the world outside of the book. In other words, the ways that people perceive Genesis both shape and reflect their perception of reality. What is perhaps surprising is how radically these ways of perceiving Genesis and reality have changed over time,..."

-- The Book of Genesis: A Biography, Ronald Hendel, 2013, p. 8.

bemasked in 1780s Weimar

"The isolation of a self cut off from a society into which it sends only masks, or 'figure', is a recurrent refrain in Goethe's letters in the early Weimar period, which only intensifies after his move to the apparently more social world of the house on Frauenplan."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 351.

"...frozen icons of the artist's self?"

"Is the mortal, transient artist the servant of an independent world-order which stretches before and after him, to whose laws he acknowledges himself subject and parts of which are imitated in his works? If so, a realistic, objective, living art is possible, of the kind we associate with Homer or Shakespeare (or perhaps, outside Germany, with the nineteenth-century novel). But if not, if the artist remains an autonomous creator, acknowledging no ordering force except that which he finds within him, can his work ever escape from its dependence upon him? Must it not remain...frozen icons of the artist's self?"

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 165-166.

Goethe or Christ, ca. 1771

"What was the origin of this sudden access of meaning-creating power? It is surely not difficult to see it in Goethe's simultaneous and conscious detachment from religious belief. Released from the pursuit by the Saviour, and so from any specific obligation to 'imitate' Christ, or to appropriate either the great symbolic acts of His Life, or the symbolic rites which the Church derives from them to articulate all lives, the self-moving monadic soul is free to define its own sacred times and places and actions, to mark the stages of its endless desire, or 'appetition'. The mechanism for the construction of meaning remains that of Christianity -- a life with symbolic episodes, a literature referring to that life both in prophecy and in retrospective interpretation -- but it becomes available for the soul to use only if Christ is displaced from His privileged position: the soul has a meaningful life of its own only in so far as it is not a follower of Christ -- it is necessarily antagonistic to His rival claims. The rejection, however, of so powerful and established a model creates what might be called a problem of objectivity. The significant events of Christ's life are grounded in secular history and are the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, while the preaching and sacraments which the Church has based upon them have an application proved in myriads of lives. What confidence can Goethe have that the meaning he finds in his non-Christian life and literature and reputation is similarly well-founded? What guarantees that his permanently renewed efforts at self-understanding do issue in truth, that he is not just telling endlessly adaptable and multipliable stories about himself, not just painting the walls of his Sentimentalist prison?"

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 109-110.

the earliest example of the transfer of religious terminology to a secular application

"There are in particular two major features of Germany's developing literature in the period of Goethe' youth -- say,  until 1770 -- which are interesting precisely because of the extent to which, for all their importance (usually ignored by the official accounts), they do not determine the original direction of Goethe's unique talent. The first is the earliest example of the transfer of religious terminology to a secular application: the growth of German aesthetic theory (the ex-theology of an ex-clerisy), the establishment of the concepts 'literature', 'art' in general, 'artistic genius', and, the religious term in which thirty years of philosophizing are eventually focused, 'artistic creativity'."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 26.

valuable real estate: hell

"In response to those who believed that virtue was its own reward, it was commonly argued that this was insufficient motive for the moral life; morality needed to be supported by fear of divine justice. Some preachers feared that sin was so attractive, and the possibility of avoiding the evil consequence here on earth so great, that without the curb of retribution vice would predominate even more than it did. In fact, the belief in the value of hell as a deterrent for immoral behavior was one of the major reasons why the doctrine of hell was so rarely attacked in the seventeenth century."

-- Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics -- A Study in Enthusiasm, Stanley Grean, 1967, p. 188.

Whence??, Whither??, Why??

"...the metaphysical thrill was a genuine and frequent experience of unbelievers in Germany long before the Romantics. As to the philosophers, Heine was not far wrong when he wrote in Die Romantische Schule that German philosophy, though it now claimed a place by the side of the Protestant Church, or even above it, was nevertheless only its daughter, and literary men too, sometimes unconsciously, were concerned to answer just those questions about life which their childhood religion had made all important for them, but which today, for many English philosophers at least, seem to be literally without meaning, so much do our intellectual interests depend on the intellectual climate we are in."

-- Culture and Society in Classical Weimar 1775-1806, W. H. Bruford, 1962, p. 28.

Paris, June 1843

Paris, 19 June 1843
[Jacob Burckhardt to Willibald Beyschlag]

"As for Paris, it is far from making the historic impression which one expects of it. In spite of the foolish love which French art and Paris society show for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, everyone is anxiously on the look-out for what is most modern, and a hundred life-size advertisements cry down every memory of the past at all the classical spots in the town. One only gets a mythical notion of the first Revolution; on the whole, Paris is far more absorbed in an anxious care for the future than in recollections of its past, although the individual memorials are legion. I do not think it can be very long before there is another explosion. In the meantime everyone is living from day to day, that is the predominating impression."

-- The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, ed. Alexander Dru, 1955, p. 81-82.

+, -, or = True to "Thunder" on Mt Sinai?

"It was in reference to this observation of the ripples in the cosmic background radiation that George Smoot, the leader of the Cosmic Background Explorer research team, said, "If you're religious, it's like looking at God."

-- The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery, Richard Elliott Friedman, 1995, p. 227.

A Godforsaken Morality?

"Without divinity there has been no moral authority either from the powerful or the wise. The fact remains that if one believes in a God one has an authority on which to construct morality. But in an age in which the deity is not present in apparent ways and is felt by many to be "dead," then on what is one to base a morality?
"...The feeling that the deity is not actively present, engaging in one-to-one treatment of human behavior leaves the individual free to act with impunity, without fear of punishment, without hope of reward. So why be good? Not that one can say what is good in a way that is guaranteed to persuade anyone else."

-- The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery, Richard Elliott Friedman, 1995, p. 213.

"...not a world of belief in God but of knowledge of God."

"This is a world of upheavals of nature, of immediate proofs of divine presence. It is not a world of belief in God but of knowledge of God. Indeed, there is no world for "to believe" in biblical Hebrew. The word frequently translated as "to believe" means, in the original, something more like "to trust"; that is, it means that one can rely on this God to do what He said He will do, Hebrew: b'myn; e.g. Exod 14:31). It does not mean "to believe" in the sense of belief that God exists. God's existence is understood in these texts to be a matter of empirical knowledge, demonstrated by divine appearances and miraculous demonstrations. This, by the way, is what makes the stories of human rebellion in the Hebrew Bible so remarkable. It is not that humans doubt the deity's existence. The impressive thing is rather that, knowing that this God exists, they consciously rebel against His authority.
For the generation of the exodus, more than any other in the Bible, this is so:  the divine presence is depicted as a known, manifest fact. This generation of the Israelites is presented as having continuous miraculous evidence of the divine presence in full view at all times for forty years."

-- The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery, Richard Elliot Friedman, 1995, p. 14.

Paul's view of Moses' face

"Paul assumes that Moses made an ascension to the presence of the Lord, was transformed by that encounter, and that his shining face is a reflection of the encounter."

-- "Paul and the Beginning of Jewish Mysticism", Alan F. Segal, in Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys, ed. John. J. Collins, Michael Fishbane, 1995, p. 111.

Plotinus, Platonopolis, and the ethics of escape

"Porphyry refers to Plotinus' unrealized project to found an ideal city, Platonopolis. But Porphyry's Life suggests that Plotinus was active almost entirely on the individual level, as a model and guide for his friends and followers. We may regard his activity of teaching and of writing as aspects of his ethics of giving. If the Enneads propose an ethics of escape to the reader, they are themselves the product of an ethics of giving."

-- Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads, Dominic J. O'Meara, 1993, p. 109.

Two Properties of "Culture"

"The notion of a free cultivation of the mind and heart began, as we have seen, as the private reaction of a few independent spirits like Wieland, Herder, Goethe and Schiller, inspired by Shaftesbury, Rousseau and the Greeks as Winckelmann saw them, a reaction against clericalism and utilitarianism alike. It was a splendid ideal for those who had the ability and the means to follow it, but in the days when railroads were being built and the Customs Union was being created, there were few who wished to use the world simply to develop their own personality, to turn it in this sense into their 'property', as Humboldt put it, and many who were eager to learn how to develop the forces of nature and to make their mark among their fellowmen. Schoolmasters filled with the old ideals of 'inwardness' were inevitably in conflict with most of their pupils. Yet culture, or the reputation for culture, still retained its attraction, as a symbol of status at least, with the new elite, of businessmen and administrators of middle-class origin, and the more widely it was sought, the more diluted and externalized the content of individual culture became, until the cultivated man was only too often replaced by what Nietzsche called the 'philistine of culture'. Much of Nietzsche's satire is of course directed against countrymen of his who are very well informed about all sorts of dead cultures, but do not seem to him to know what culture really means, so that he finds Germany after the Franco-Prussian War utterly undistinguished."

-- Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 1775-1806, W. H. Bruford, 1962, p. 421.

'this dangerous indifference to freedom..."

"...The difference is still more marked between the attitude of the English and the German educated man towards political activity, at least until the time of the Weimar Republic, and the revival of democratic ideas after the National-Socialist interlude. A characteristic German pronouncement is that of Thomas Mann in the Reflection of a Non-political Man (1917) about the special strength of the Germans which lies in cultivation and obedience. 'Politics makes men coarse, vulgar and stupid. Only the cultivation of the mind makes men free. Institutions are of little account, states of mind of supreme account. Become better yourself and everything will be better.' Later, of course, he saw that 'this dangerous indifference to freedom had fearfully avenged itself, and the absence of political experience in the cultivated Germans and their scorn for freedom had resulted in the enslavement of the citizen to the state and to power-politics', and in exile he made every effort to correct what now seemed to him a fatal tendency in German intellectuals."

-- Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 1775-1806, W. H. Bruford, 1962, p. 406.