"To the end of his life Goethe believed that God 'is continually active in higher natures, to lead on those with lesser powers'. These are the last words of Goethe quoted by Eckermann in the third part of the Conversations. He could not conceive God as a Being apart from the world, responsible only for its first creation and for pushing it round, as it were, from outside. He had not been idle since the six days of creation but had revealed Himself repeatedly, not only in prophets and teachers, but in artists and scholars too, as well as in His own works in nature, as Goethe was never tired of saying. This is a mythical way of expressing a kind of humanism which, while rejecting the idea of special revelation and making use poetically of many different mythologies at different times, was yet not guilty of spiritual pride. Goethe could not think of the work of even a Mozart, a Raphael or a Shakespeare, to quote the last Eckermann conversation again, as 'completely of this world, and nothing more than a product of purely human forces'. Creation was going on continually, both in nature and man, and there was a mystery about it which, though it could be dispelled in part by study, always retained something which we must be content to regard 'with quiet reverence'.
-- Culture and Society inn Classical Weimar, W. H. Bruford, 1962p. 179. (Quotes from Conversations with Goethe, March 11, 1832.)
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