Flirting with Goethe

Goethe was a flirt. He flirted continually, not just with people, mostly younger women, but also with ideas, some very old—like tragedy. He used the younger women sometimes to create tragedy—and sometimes to overcome it. Faust, Goethe’s “sehr ernster Scherz,” the non-tragedy tragedy, becomes in the end a divine comedy, not just because there is a god who saves Faust, but also because Faust’s former flirt, Gretchen, appears at the end, or after the end, and continues to exercise that force that kept Faust striving and Goethe writing. It may or may not be becoming for a god to be jealous, but if there be a person who would seem to merit the jealousy of the god in Goethe’s Faust, it would be Gretchen. In the end, it is not a divine force that keeps Faust moving, it is not “das Ewig-Göttliche,” it is “das Ewig-Weibliche.” The question as to whether Goethe divinized woman would be rhetorical. Whether he divinized woman more than he feminized god would be a more interesting question. Goethe would most likely have avoided this question for the same reason that a god would avoid it, and a goddess would not have to ask it at all. Some questions hit too close to home. With a woman at his side, Goethe would have sided with the gods.

Divinity, femininity, eternity, and tragedy take on a myriad of faces and forms for Goethe. All remain powerful forces for and on Goethe throughout his life’s work. They are attractive, but also seductive, as beautiful as the song of the Sirens—and at least as dangerous. And yes, Goethe loved to flirt with the Sirens, armed with beeswax in one hand and an ear trumpet in the other. For Goethe divinity, femininity, eternity, and tragedy attracted not just him but also each other. The attraction had something in common with the nature of a flirt: it was a mixture of freedom and necessity. Chance and choice are pursued with the feeling of necessity.