The life of 18th-century polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) was roughly contemporaneous with that of Charles Darwin’s grandfather. Like Erasmus Darwin, Goethe was both poet and scientist and had himself at one time speculated on ideas of evolution. Both men in their lifetimes experienced the full flow of the European Enlightenment and both owed sizeable parts of their intellectual formation to Enlightenment ideas. Yet in many respects the reactions of the two men to that sea-change in human thinking were very different. Erasmus tended towards atheism (sometimes euphemistically presented as deism to avert adverse criticism) but Goethe, although not precisely orthodox in his religious beliefs, tended towards a form of what has been termed natural religion — God made manifest in the order of nature.¹ In short, he was a Christian by emotional inclination more than by adherence to any particular dogma so that “no coherent religious system can be extracted from his writings and sayings.”² The differences in the spiritual orientation of the two men provide clear evidence that the Enlightenment was no one-way street and did not achieve that universal consensus in favor of secularism for which it is habitually celebrated.

Goethe’s Hellenic Phase

Goethe in the mid 1770s had become fascinated by ancient Greece and its mythology, and this interest resulted in a drama whose first version appeared in 1779 under the title of Iphigenia on the Island of the Taurians.^3. This play, “rich in inner life but poor in action,”⁴ makes best sense if one can compare and contrast it with its ancient Greek source, Euripides’ play, Iphigenia Among the Taurians.⁵ But the German version is no derivative “costume drama” and the reason I propose to discuss it here is that, underneath its seemingly anachronistic Greek décor, it makes for a powerful drama of Christian apologetics. It has in fact been aptly termed a Seelendrama (drama of the soul). The Christian dimension is all the more noteworthy because the play was written against the backdrop of an age which, as noted, generally tended more in the direction of valorizing the secular than of endorsing traditional Christian values.

Thematically foundational to the German version is the question of faith, an issue that develops into an inner conflict for the heroine and ultimately ends in a vindication of her beliefs. As this spiritual and psychological drama unfolds it becomes more gripping (for adults at any rate) than any gory action film featuring battles between blood-soaked classical gladiators. It is in fact more akin to the kind of inner conflict with faith that most of us have faced in various ways in our own lives: many today will feel able to identify with her on that score. Early reactions to the play were in fact that it was “astonishingly modern and un-Greek” (Friedrich Schiller) and that the heroine of the play was only nominally a Greek priestess. In truth she represents Everywoman/man because her mental and emotional formation is more representative of a late 18th-century denizen of the duchy of Weimar than of an ancient Greek matron in flowing white robes. As David Pugh observed, “the play fuses the blood-stained old myth with a modern moral consciousness.”⁶

And the burning question Iphigenia confronts in the play was that being asked simultaneously by many late 18th-century Europeans, a question having little enough to do with a plurality of dubious gods in bygone times. Rather it focused on the issue of how should the one God of the Christian tradition be understood. What concerned Goethe and his first audiences was the newly contested status of the Christian God in a country which was soon to witness the challenging incursion of the Higher Criticism into formal theology. Goethe of course retains the Euripidean tradition of multiple gods because these figures are part and parcel of the epic machinery that he inherited from Euripides. Yet although they remain as fixtures in the German version due to what Germans term Stoffzwang ( = inclusion as an indispensable part of the story), they are in reality “an allegorical periphrasis for the divine.”⁷

Demonic Deities

The subject matter of the Euripidean version is deeply embedded in and takes its origin from a wider Greek cycle of myths which portray the denizens of the Greek pantheon as distinctly unsavory, mafioso-like figures. The unmotivated gratuitousness of some of their actions can even at times make them seem like tragi-comic crazies. This may initially be difficult to wrap our heads around but the surprising truth is that the ancient Greek gods had the same vices as their mortal counterparts writ large and had little enough to do with the later human tendency to project moral ideals into the non-finite and unconditioned realm seen to be that of the divine (as is the case in Christian tradition). An outstanding example of divine callousness was the infamous case in Homeric tradition of Agamemnon, whose fear of the goddess Artemis caused him to sacrifice his own daughter at the goddess’s whim in order to secure a favorable wind for his fleet’s sea voyage to Troy. This atrocious event provides the point of departure for the Iphigenia story for, at the last moment, Iphigenia is rescued by Artemis and whisked away to the island of the Taurians (modern-day Crimea). There she is assigned the role of officiating as priestess at the local shrine of that goddess.

It is not surprising that such storied accounts of divine malefactors caused ancient philosophers like Epicurus and his later Roman disciple Lucretius to embrace atheism and even cosmic nihilism.⁸ Those philosophers rightly contended that the gods inspired fear rather than allegiance and were more to be propitiated than venerated. Such views had a parallel in post-Enlightenment misgivings in Europe where some were beginning to question certain instances of Old Testament ethics, finding them impossible to reconcile with the true spirit of Christianity as they construed it. In fact, a parallel to the ethic surrounding the would-be sacrifice of Iphigenia is present in the case of the Old Testament God seemingly willing to countenance child sacrifice, as exemplified in the story of Abraham and Isaac — that is, before the order to Abraham is reversed and an animal sacrifice is substituted. It may even be that a negative perception of the gods was widespread in archaic belief systems and that anti-theodicean sentiments were simmering farther afield and even further back in time in the archaic world of Neolithic (wo)man.⁹

Prehistoric and ancient Greek conceptions alike were of course eventually superseded by the Judeo-Christian view of God as being supportive of humankind — although it was a slow process and the Old Testament exemplifies a belief-system in transition. For there are, it appears to me, many instances of an archaic view of God in the Old Testament as being capricious or even malevolent and the newer, more positive view of the divine only makes its full appearance in the books of the prophets. The debate has then never been fully resolved to the satisfaction of all, and Goethe’s drama implicitly asks one of the largest questions it is possible to ask: had there been some truth in archaic Greek conceptions of the divine or did the real truth lie in the New Testament Gospels?

Iphigenia as Ecumenical Missionary

In that wild Crimean outback so remote from what the Greeks called the oikumene (the civilization of Greece) Goethe’s Iphigenia makes it her mission to spread a more humane religious observance to a land where human sacrifice had been dismayingly routine. She had interpreted her own salvation from sacrifice by Athene to have been a sign that the gods, when rightly understood, do not wish for human sacrifice, and the play tells of her success in getting the Taurians and their king, Thoas, to abjure such gratuitous savagery. Later in the play she persuades her own brother, Orestes, who thinks himself to be pursued by the vengeful Furies of Greek mythology, that they do not really want his blood. So convinced is she that the gods are benign that, in a famous line, she “dares” the gods not to practice violence. This she does by appealing to them in a magnificently powerful prayer of supplication, “Save me and save your image in my soul.”¹⁰

For ever since her rescue by Athene, Iphigenia had been convinced that the attribution of ill will to the gods had merely been a false projection of events on earth into the divine sphere. She in company with her brother Orestes had been born into a truly dysfunctional and homicidal family, and by dint of a process which we might today term psychological displacement she concluded that her Greek peers had unjustly contrived to foist those characteristics onto the gods themselves. 

At the end of the play Iphigenia contrives a conciliatory farewell with King Thoas and the Taurians, but her concern is not only the simple one of bringing the benefits of Greek culture to the uncivilized Taurians. For the Greeks are manifestly guilty of the same atrocities as the denizens of ancient Tauricia, and so when she leaves, she goes fired up with determination to extend her mission to her Greek homeland at Mycene. Her mission in Greece will be to promulgate her new vision of the gods ­­­­— that understanding which became clear to her on the day at Aulis a decade earlier when she had been rescued from sacrifice by the goddess Athene.

She returns to Greece then as the ambassador for a new form of religion and as the exponent of a new form of humanity amongst her Greek peers. But she does not forget her Taurian hosts, for her ecumenical vision embraces the Taurians within the same fold as that inhabited by the Greeks themselves. The Taurians too, as it has been put, are part of “the greater family of humanity made possible by the establishment of the new faith.”¹¹ This new vision at last enables her to lift the notorious curse on the House of Tantalus, the ancient curse which had appeared to condemn her family to everlasting internecine slaughter.

Too Conciliatory a Closure?

The dramatic conclusion might strike some as a bit glib or even schmaltzy, yet Goethe’s delineation of the multiple travails of his central character makes it clear that Iphigenia had to struggle mightily to establish the credibility and eventual acceptance of her new faith. I will not expand on further plot details here but those wishing to read the play (in English translation) will discover that the heroine is obliged at times to fight within her own heart to retain faith in the very gods in whom she yearns to repose her faith. Potential catastrophes as well as temptations to spiritual despair frequently obstruct Iphigenia’s path forward — which makes her final triumph all the more moving. In fact, the play generates more than enough poetic power to make us believe in the credibility of its spiritual vision and, I would even venture to suggest, to give succor and inspiration to those who find their faith faltering — but that of course is a matter for individual readers to judge.

Towards the end of the play Iphigenia experiences a feeling in her heart that the ancestral curse on the House of Tantalus has now at last been lifted (“Es löset sich der Fluch. Mir sagt’s das Herz”). The significant word here is Herz or heart for it has been remarked that “in this optimistic play all hear and heed their hearts, for it seems that the gods dwell there if anywhere.”¹² But for Goethe this was not simply a case of the kind of reductive “man is the measure of all things” humanism which would have endeared itself to many Enlightenment thinkers; for the poet was of the conviction that God speaks to us through our hearts and minds, “ believing that divine powers are inherent in humanity.”¹³ Referencing his prolific scientific writings, Goethe explicitly wrote that “we have no need to concern ourselves with atomistic, materialistic, mechanistic approaches” and, as Douglas Miller put it, “ his reverential feeling for nature, his perception of a divine quality in it, led him to reject the anthropomorphic views which prevailed at the end of the eighteenth century.”¹⁴

Goethe’s Iphigenia may in a superficial sense be just another classicizing drama born of the late 18th-century European vogue of Hellenism, but at another level it has subtle but insistent theodicean pretensions supportive of the kind of religion which the poet judged it worthwhile to promote.

Notes

1. Professor Ritchie Robertson describes this form of religion as one which does not depend on an adherence to any one historical creed, but rather one springing from apprehensions unamenable to rational argument. See Robertson, Goethe: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2016), p. 106.
2. H. B. Nisbet, “Religion and Philosophy” in The Cambridge Companion to Goethe, edited by Lesley Sharpe (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp.219-231, citation 224.
3. Iphigenie auf Tauris, edited by Max Kämper, 2^nd edition (Stuttgart; Reclam, 2015); Frank Ryder (translator), Goethe: Plays. Egmont, Inphigenie in Tauris, Torquato Tasso (London: Continuum, 1997).
4. Humphrey Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks (Cambridge: CUP, 1941), p. 100.
5. See Iphigenia among the Taurians, Bacchae. Iphigenia at Aulis, Rhesus, translated by James Morwood with Introduction by Edith Hall (Oxford: OUP, 2008), pp.1-43.
6. “Goethe the Dramatist” in The Cambridge Companion to Goethe, edited by Leslie Sharpe (Cambridge: CUP , 2002), pp. 66-83, citation 72.
7. R. M. Browning, “The Humanity of Goethe’s Iphigenie,” Germanic Quarterly 30 (1957), pp. 98-113, citation 98.
8. That is, the notion that the world must have arisen by a chance collocation of atoms, a patently nonsensical notion which has unaccountably been revived two millennia later by some of our brightest scientists. Cf. for instance Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012).
9. “Was God a monster to have allowed life to develop with all its attendant suffering? Megalithic religion had a very simple answer to this question: Yes.” See Adrian Bailey, Why Darwin Matters to Christians (Shrewsbury: Youcaxton, 2011), p. 43.
10. “Rettet mich und rettet euer Bild in meiner Seele.”
11. Browning, “The Humanity of Goethe’s Iphigenie,” p. 113.
12. Hans-Wilhelm Kelling, “Thoughts about Goethe’s Religious Convictions,” in Goethe and Religion, edited by Paul E. Kerry (Utah: Brigham Young University, 2000), pp. 99-122, citation 120.
13. Nisbet, “Religion and Philosophy” (footnote 2) p. 221.
14. Goethe: Scientific Studies, edited and translated by Douglas Miller (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988), Introduction, p. xi.