Flora Unveiled

434 i Flora Unveiled

tolerably indifferent to us. Prohibited books condemned to the flames, which then

made a great noise, produced no effect upon us.^12

Reading between the lines, Goethe seems to imply that young German intellectuals
had already advanced beyond the traditional view of an anthropomorphic, personal God
to a more abstract and pantheistic conception of the divine. Thus Goethe and his friends
regarded Holbach’s book as grim and repellant, but perfectly harmless:

We did not understand how such a book could be dangerous. It appeared to us so

dark, so Cimmerian,^13 so deathlike, that we found it difficult to endure its presence,

and shuddered at it as at a specter.^14

Because of the book’s title, they had hoped to learn more about nature from it but were
greatly disappointed:

Not one of us had read the book through, for we found ourselves deceived in the

expectation with which we had opened it. A  system of nature was announced, and

therefore we hoped to learn really something of nature, our idol. ... But how hollow

and empty did we feel in this melancholy, atheistical half- night, in which the earth

vanished with all its images, the heaven with all its stars. There was to be matter in

motion from all eternity, and by this motion, right, left, in every direction, without

anything further, it was to produce the infinite phenomena of existence.^15

They did not deny the operation of natural laws, nor did they consider themselves
immune to such laws. Nevertheless, they felt they possessed something like free will:

[W] e nevertheless felt within us something that appeared like perfect freedom of will,

and again something which endeavored to counterbalance this freedom.^16

In keeping with the spirit of the Reformation, Goethe and his peers rejected the idea
of the duality of the material and spiritual planes. It was the notion of this duality, they
reasoned, that allowed sophists like Holbach to dispense with the spiritual plane entirely.
Goethe and his friends preferred a pantheistic theology along the lines of Spinoza’s, in
which God and nature were unified. In such a system, God is also a necessity:

“All was to be of necessity,” so said the book, “and therefore there was no God.” “But

could there not be a God by necessity too?” we asked.^17

Goethe and his friends dismissed Holbach’s treatise as the misanthropic ravings of a
senile old man:

We laughed him out; for we thought we had observed that nothing in the world that

is loveable and good is in fact appreciated by old people. “Old churches have dark

windows; to know how cherries and berries taste, we must ask children and sparrows.”

These were our gibes and maxims; and thus that book, as the very quintessence of

senility, appeared to us as unsavory, nay, absurd.^18