When it comes to religion, Goethe's reputation is anything but spotless. Heinrich Heine famously referred to Goethe as “der große Heide” (the great heathen). August Wilhelm Schlegel took this one step further when he called Goethe “einen zum Islam bekehrten Heiden” (a heathen who converted to Islam). Wolfgang Frühwald points out that in an altar painting by Konrad Eberhard for the St. Clara Hospital in Basel, Goethe is grouped with the heathens who cannot be converted by St. Paul. Similarly, Prince Metternich opposed the creation of a Goethe monument because of Goethe's spotty record on religion, declaring that we should not “dem Andenken eines Mannes zu große Ehre … erweisen, der ersichtlich seines religiösen Bekenntnisses nicht ohne Anstoß gewesen sei” (pay too much tribute to the memory of a man whose religious creed was not inoffensive). Finally, Romano Guardini, in a letter to Ernst Beutler, summed it up when he declared that Goethe had done more harm to Christianity than even Nietzsche (Perels 28).

Though these claims are surely inflated, they are not wholly unfounded. In the following, I will provide a brief overview over Goethe's stance on religion. I then contrast Goethe's views with those introduced in Kant's “Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft” (1793; Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone). Here, I pay particular attention to the role both thinkers assign to the concepts of sensuality and the body.