"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.
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