Goethe and Spinoza on Faith, the State, and the Old Testament

Abstract The relationship between Spinoza’s philosophy and Goethe’s own ideas, which Goethe himself refers to as “elective affinity,” is primarily guided by the Ethics and its identification of God and Nature. And yet, Goethe’s preoccupation with the Old Testament would be difficult to imagine without Spinoza’s historical-critical exegesis, his exploration of “libertas philosophandi,” or his distinction between national-religious authority and philosophy. Spinoza’s early influences can be inferred from the 1770s onward; his hermeneutic method had a fortifying effect on Goethe’s examination of the Book of Books, and the essay Israel in the Desert. Goethe’s direct knowledge of the TTP has been traced by H. E. G. Paulus to, at the latest, the 1802/3 edition of Spinoza’s Opera. But Goethe, whose engagement with Spinoza was widely influential, also differs from his “old lord and master” in his appreciation of the Bible as a record of prehistoric poetry.