Goethe’s Kabbalistic Cosmology KARIN SCHUTJER U NIVERSITY OF O KLAHOMA At the end of the Book 8 of Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe describes his endeavor as a young man to fashion his own religion. He offers the reader his own creation myth, which he claims to have woven together out of several traditions. «Der neue Platonismus lag zum Grunde; das Hermetische, Mystische, Kabbalistische gab auch seinen Beitrag her, und so erbaute ich mir eine Welt, die seltsam genug aussah» (FA I.14: 382; emphasis mine). Commentators on this passage have tended to view these terms as largely indistinguishable streams within the esoteric tradition in which the young Goethe immersed himself. 1 Certainly Kabbalah, as it came down to Goethe and his contemporaries, overlapped with other intellectual currents, including hermetic alchemy, Neo-Platonism, and various varieties of Christianity. But one should not presume that the term «kabbalistic» would have held no determinate meaning for him in reference to a distinct Jewish tradition. What indeed might Kabbalah have meant to Goethe and what role does it play in this cosmological vision? Goethe gives few clues in his autobiography. He does mention having read Georg Welling’s Opus-Magus Cabbalisticum, a heavily Christianized mishmash of kabbalistic and alchemical concepts. Finding the work «dunkel und unverständlich,» he set out to investigate its sources and found his way to authors such as Paracelsus and Basilius Valentinus (FA I.14: 373). But these are of course Christian authors: nowhere does he admit to knowledge of an underlying Jewish kabbalistic tradition. And yet, I argue, some such knowledge on Goethe’s part is almost certain. I maintain that Goethe had ample opportunity to learn about Jewish Kabbalah - particularly that of the sixteenthcentury rabbi Isaac Luria - and good reason to take it seriously. I will consider how Goethe likely came into contact with Lurianic Kabbalah, what he might have known about it, and what it might have contributed to the vision of divine and human creation he articulates in Book 8. Isaac Luria lived from 1534-1572, mostly in Palestine. His thought was largely disseminated by his student Hayyim Vital (1543-1620) and later disciples, including Abraham Cohen Herrera (c. 1570-1635). Lurianic as well as other kabbalistic treatises were introduced to a Christian readership in Latin translation in the work Kabbala Denudata by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (published in two volumes 1677, 1684). As the work of Alison Coudert 22 Karin Schutjer has explored, Lurianic ideas culled from the Kabbala Denudata were highly influential for an important group of intellectuals associated with Knorr at the Court of Sulzbach, including Francis Mercury van Helmont, Anne Conway, Henry More and even Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Among the Lurianic treatises included in the Kabbala Denudata, perhaps the most far-reaching impact was had by Herrera’s work Porta Coelorum (Gates of Heaven). Knorr’s version of this treatise was his own condensed Latin translation of a Hebrew translation of Herrera’s Spanish original. 2 There is no direct evidence that Goethe read the Kabbalah Denudata, but given how widely the work was cited in discussions of Kabbalah in Goethe’s era - Herder writes about it for example (5: 462) - and given Goethe’s exploration of esoteric source texts in his youth, it seems fair to imagine he would have known something of it. Certainly Lurianic ideas entered the Pietist circles with which Goethe was associated in Frankfurt via the Swabian theologian Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702-1782). Oetinger became familiar with Kabbalah not only through Knorr’s Latin translation, but also through Hebrew sources and through direct contact with rabbis especially Rabbi Hecht in Frankfurt (Betz 6). Both Goethe’s father and Goethe’s spiritual mentor Susanne von Klettenberg owned books by Oetinger. 3 While Oetinger transformed Lurianic Kabbalah for Christian purposes, he took seriously its Jewish provenance. Goethe’s knowledge of Lurianic Kabbalah was also informed by more deliberately scholarly accounts. The most important of these for Goethe would have been the vast histories of philosophy by the early eighteenth-century writer Johannes Jacob Brucker. Goethe claims to have read Brucker diligently in his youth (FA I. 24: 442). Later his own library contained a condensed version of Brucker’s magnum opus in Latin called the Historia Critica Philosophiae (FA I. 24: 442, 1072). In Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe also mentions discussions of a German version of Brucker’s work in question-and-answer format nicknamed «der kleine Brucker» (FA I. 14: 243). This work devotes most of a volume to «Jewish philosophy,» including Kabbalah. Another source on Kabbalah for Goethe would have been Johann Gottlieb Buhle’s Geschichte der Neuern Philosophie. Published in 1800 and checked out from the ducal library by Goethe in 1809, this work obviously could not have influenced him in his youth but certainly could have influenced his representation of his youth in his autobiography (HA 9: 752). 4 One can perhaps also assume that Goethe shared in a general received wisdom concerning Kabbalah among the educated elite. That Lurianic Kabbalah was by no means unknown within educated circles is indicated by a focus on Luria in a 1780 Deutsche Encyclopädie article on «Cabbalisten» (4: 707-12). Goethe’s Kabbalistic Cosmology 23 Goethe’s interest in Kabbalah might have been further sparked by a prominent argument concerning its philosophical reception: the claim that Kabbalistic ideas underlie Spinoza’s philosophy. This thesis was advanced in the late seventeenth century in a book by Johann Georg Wachter: Der Spinozismus im Judenthumb, oder, die von dem heutigen Judenthumb und dessen Geheimen Kabbala, vergotterte Welt … (Amsterdam, 1699). Wachter notes similarities specifically between the first part of Spinoza’s Ethics and the opening chapters of Herrera’s «Porta Coelorum.» According to Wachter, both Spinoza and Kabbalah share a pantheistic vision of God as identical with nature, and individual things as but modifications of God. 5 References to this thesis are nearly ubiquitous in Goethe’s period: the question of Spinoza’s relationship to Kabbalah comes up in Mendelssohn’s Morgenstunden (Scholem, «Introduction» to Herrera 56), in Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte (84), in accounts of the history of philosophy by Brucker (Kurtze Fragen 4: 782[fn], 784; 805[fn] 917, 950) and Tiedemann (6: 234), and even in the Deutsche Encyclopädie (4: 707, 709). In short, one can conclude that Goethe would have been highly aware of an alleged genealogy between Kabbalah and Spinoza, and one can assume that this association would also have provided strong impetus for him to attain some grasp of Kabbalah. The question arises whether Goethe, like Oetinger the Pietist theologian, would have had direct exposure to Lurianic Kabbalah through Jewish acquaintances in Frankfurt. In Dichtung und Wahrheit Goethe represents himself as having had substantial contact with the Frankfurt ghetto in his youth. He claims to have repeatedly attended the synagogue, observed a circumcision, a wedding and a celebration of Sukkot. He writes, «Überall war ich wohl aufgenommen, gut bewirtet, und zur Wiederkehr eingeladen: denn es waren Personen von Einfluß, die mich entweder hinführten oder empfahlen» (FA I. 40: 166). Of course one never knows whether to take Goethe at his word in his autobiography; and at least one historian has suggested that Goethe’s description of the ghetto may have been gleaned more from published accounts than his own experiences (Schlick 64). But assuming Goethe did have substantial, repeated contacts with the ghetto in his adolescence, perhaps he might have heard about or encountered the charismatic young ghetto prodigy Nathan Adler, a teacher and practitioner of Lurianic Kabbalah just 8 years older than himself. Adler was regarded as deeply learned and holy, and founded his own yeshiva as a young man. Later on in the early 1770s, his heterodox teachings and practices excited great controversy and, by the end of that decade, they were officially banned by the Jewish authorities (Arnsberg 15-17; Elior 135-41). While it may be impossible to know whether Goethe was aware of the religious foment surrounding Lurianic Kabbalah 24 Karin Schutjer in the Jewish community, such knowledge, it seems, cannot be strictly ruled out. What would Goethe have gathered about Lurianic cosmology through these various sources? Certainly Goethe would have known - through Brucker, Buhle, and their source text Herrera - that the kabbalistic conception of creation is a variation on the neo-Platonic notion of emanation, the idea that God creates eternally out of his own divine substance. Brucker refers to this immanent unfolding of the divine in creation as «Ausfluß.» Herrera employs forms of the verb extendo (Knorr von Rosenroth 1: 51). But while emanation is a theory of creation that conforms to the classical principle that «nothing comes from nothing,» Lurianic Kabbalah nonetheless attempts to square this account with the diametrically opposed biblical account of a discrete creation event that indeed occurs «out of nothing.» Lurianic Kabbalah combines neo-Platonic emanation with «ex-nihilo» creation through a dynamic called «Zimzum,» which Gershom Scholem pronounces «one of the most amazing and far-reaching conceptions ever put forward in the whole history of Kabbalism» (Scholem, Major Trends 260). Zimzum is the act of divine self-limitation that serves as the precondition of creation. In the beginning, so the account goes, divine light was infinite and all pervading, but because there was no void, there could be no space for creation. Thus the light contracted away from a middle point in order to form a sphere in which creation could occur. Here is Herrera’s paraphrase of Luria’s description of Zimzum (from a modern German translation of Knorr’s Latin version): [R. Isaac Luria schrieb,] daß jenes unendliche göttliche Wesen sich zu allen denkbaren und möglichen Orten ausbreite und sie mit dem Licht seines Angesichts erfülle; da es sich aber offenbaren und Geschöpfe hervorbringen wollte, habe es sich selbst zusammengezogen und in Schranken gehalten, und so einen gewissen Ort innerhalb jener unendlichen Räume zurückgelassen, die es zuvor ganz ausfüllte, den es erfüllen könnte, wie es ihn auch [nun] mit den Wesen, die es innerhalb desselben hervorbrachte, erfüllt hat, doch so, daß es auch selbst sich dahin ausbreiten und dort offenbaren könnte wie vor deren Hervorbringung. (143; emphasis in original) In this passage we see the juxtaposition of the contrary but complementary motions of contraction (sich zusammenziehen) and expansion or extension (sich ausbreiten): the divine originally extends everywhere, chooses to contract in order to allow a domain of creation, and at last, in and through creation, it further expands and reveals itself. Herein lies the «Cabbalistische Lehre de Deo expanso & contracto,» a phrase Goethe could have come across in «der kleine Brucker» (Kurtze Fragen 4: 553fn). The notion of the contracting God in Kabbalah is indeed common enough currency by the late eigh- Goethe’s Kabbalistic Cosmology 25 teenth century that in Jacobi’s account of his conversations with Lessing on Spinoza, Lessing makes a joke about it. 6 The larger significance of this doctrine would not have been lost on Goethe. Buhle discusses it specifically within the context of the traditional problem of evil. According to Buhle, emanation theory in general grapples with the familiar paradox that God represents absolute goodness and perfection and yet is the author of the material world from which evil springs. 7 While earlier (neo-Platonic) emanation theory poses the expanding light of creation against a realm of darkness at the outer limit of divine power, kabbalistic thought begins with unconditioned, omnipresent light. Instead of being limited by something outside of itself, the divine limits itself. In Buhle’s words, «Gott, das unendliche vollkommenste Wesen, beschloß, sich in Endlichkeiten und Unvollkommenheiten zu offenbaren» (381). 8 Thus the kabbalistic account asserts the original omnipotence of the divine and, in this regard, comes closer to the Christian view. But only to a point, for the explanation of the root of evil still stands in marked contrast to the traditional Christian doctrine. Augustine’s conception of original sin attributes evil entirely to human sinfulness - a sinfulness inherited from Adam’s first disobedience. The corollary to God’s perfect goodness and power is, in this view, the perfect goodness of creation. Addressing God, Augustine writes, «… you made man, but you did not make sin in him» (27). By comparison, the Lurianic conception of creation is more ambivalent, predicated on divine absence and self-limitation. While there is actually a secondary event in Lurianic Kabbalah called the breaking of the vessels (Shevirat Ha-Kelim) that more explicitly marks the catastrophic origin of evil, Scholem argues, «In the final resort … the root of all evil is already latent in the act of Tsimtsum» (Scholem, Major Trends 263). While creation is affirmed for its ultimate revelation of the glory and majesty of the divine, that revelation occurs through a process rather than as a complete state of perfection from the start. Goethe’s rejects the doctrine of original sin explicitly in his autobiography (FA 14: 691): his creation myth in Book 8 suggests an alternative view of the nature of evil that bears important affinities with the Lurianic account. In Book 8, Goethe does not hold to the narrative of Zimzum in detail, but employs kabbalistic conceptions as themes and motifs within his own free variation. He clearly works with a model of creation as successive emanations from an eternal divine source, beginning his account: «Ich mochte mir wohl eine Gottheit vorstellen, die sich von Ewigkeit her selbst produziert» (FA I. 14: 382). The material world is the product of successive emanations of the divine, originating «doch durch Filiation vom göttlichen Wesen her» (FA I. 14: 383). The Godhead reproduces itself first as «der Sohn» and then as a third 26 Karin Schutjer equally vital divine form (FA I. 14: 382). He thereby echoes the tradition in Christian Kabbala that interprets the first three sephiroth or divine attributes as the Christian trinity. 9 The fourth emanation or divine self-production in Goethe’s account is Lucifer, who concentrates into himself and forgets his origin. The material world derives from Lucifer, «alles was wir uns als schwer, fest und finster vorstellen» (FA I. 14: 383). Here Goethe may also be playing with another level of Lurianic cosmology - not with the sephiroth or divine attributes - but with the «worlds» or planes of reality. From Brucker he would have learned that the fourth world or Asiah is the «region of evil spirits» (History of Philosophy 2: 416). 10 There the light becomes dense and concentrated. Brucker writes, «Weil aber die Asiahtische Welt am weitesten von dem ursprünglichen Gottheits Licht ablieget, so ist sie auch am finstersten, und das Licht am meisten zusammen gepreßt, und daher ist sie cörperlich» (Kurtze Fragen 4: 860). But more to the point, in his depiction of Lucifer, Goethe is playing with the Lurianic notion of a contracting and expanding God. Just as the narrative of Zimzum involves expansion, contraction, then expansion again, in Goethe’s narrative the initial emanations are followed upon first by Lucifer’s concentration within himself, and then, after the intervention of the Elohim, by expansion again. Expansion and contraction stand quite explicitly in complementary relation to each other. Lucifer’s orientation is «einseitig[ ]»; once the Elohim introduce the possibility of countermotion, «der eigentliche Puls des Lebens war wiederhergestellt» (FA I. 14: 385). Thus Lucifer’s evil, such as it is - «das ganze Unheil, wenn wir es so nennen dürfen» (FA I. 14: 383) - emerges as part and parcel of the creation process. Indeed Lucifer himself possesses creative power: «Dieses war nun Lucifer, welchem von nun an die ganze Schöpfungskraft übertragen war, und von dem alles übrige Sein ausgehen soll» (FA I. 14: 383). Human beings, once they enter the story, reproduce Lucifer’s one-sidedness: «Es währte nicht lange, so spielte [der Mensch] auch völlig die Rolle des Lucifer» (FA I. 14: 384). But in stark contrast to Augustine’s conception of original sin, human beings, while certainly implicated in evil, are not its origin in the universe. In fact, humanity has a decidedly non-Augustinian role to play in Goethe’s narrative. In the later passage where he rejects the doctrine of original sin, Goethe’s chief complaint is the passive stance attributed to humanity in relationship to the divine: «der Mensch [habe] auf seine eignen Kräfte durchaus Verzicht zu tun, und alles von der Gnade und ihrer Einwirkung zu erwarten» (FA I. 14: 690-91). Instead Goethe identifies with Pelagianism, the resurgent heretical belief «in the ability of man to determine his own destiny as well as that of the world’s» (Coudert, Impact 340). 11 His own myth, then, assigns an Goethe’s Kabbalistic Cosmology 27 active, restorative role to humankind, as the «Wesen, welches die ursprüngliche Verbindung mit der Gottheit wiederherzustellen geschickt wäre» (FA I. 14: 384). Restoration or Tikkun is also a core idea of Lurianic Kabbalah (see Herrera, esp. 246-70). Scholem defines it as «striving for the perfection of the world» (246). In «der kleine Brucker» Goethe would have read: «Endlich [schwingt] die Seele sich völlig auff zu dem einigen Wesen, von dem sie kommt und abhanget, und [wird] dadurch ihrer ersten Ursache ähnlich, und [vereinget] sich mit ihr, als dem allgemeinen Anfang und Ende aller Dinge. …» (Kurtze Fragen 889). In this description the soul brings itself into a restorative relationship with the «first cause» of creation. The idea is essentially Pelagian that human beings help redeem the world and indeed complete the work of creation. What then does Lurianic Kabbalah contribute to Goethe’s vision of creation in Book Eight? Certainly it suggests a much more active role for humanity in remaking the world than did the Lutheran orthodoxy of Goethe’s age. Further Zimzum seems to offer Goethe, by analogy with divine creation, a sophisticated model of artistic creation. The creative process, it suggests, is morally ambivalent - containing in its very structure the necessity of evil, isolation, and reification. And yet this process is progressive, directed towards an ultimate restoration of the good. In its peculiar mix of pessimism and optimism, Lurianic Kabbalah presents Goethe with a complex modern view of human destiny. Notes 1 Erich Trunz’s commentary, which is otherwise very useful in identifying Goethe’s various esoteric sources, gives decidedly short shrift to Kabbalah. He mentions Kabbalah as a source for Goethe’s conception of contraction and expansion, but cites only Buhle’s chapter on «kabbalistische Philosophie,» specifically a passage on the Christian Kabbalah of Robert Fludd. (HA 9: 752, see also 759). Zimmermann places much more emphasis than Trunz on the contribution of Kabbalah to Goethe’s conception of contraction in his creation mythos, exploring in particular the link through Oetinger. Zimmermann mentions the kabbalistic conception of Zimzum by name, but never its author Luria (1: 202). 2 I cite Friedrich Häußerman’s German translation of Knorr’s version. That the modern German translation is removed by three degrees from Herrera’s original is not so significant in this context, since I am chiefly concerned with the reception of the Latin version. 3 Von Klettenberg owned «Das rechte Gericht,» «Reden Gottes an alle Gläubigen,» «Die Philosophie der Alten wiederkommend in der güldenen Zeit,» «Öffentliches Denkmal der Lehrtafel der Prinzessin Antonia von Württemberg,» and «Reden nach dem allgemeinen Wahrheitsgefühl» (Burdach Pt. 3: 739). Goethe’s father owned «Swedenborgs und anderer Irrdische und Himmlische Philosophie» and «Schwedische Urkunden von Swedenborg» (Götting 39). 28 Karin Schutjer 4 Trunz quotes Goethe’s notation in his journal on March 25, 1809: «Buhle Geschichte der Philosophie … Nach Tische Picus von Mirandola, Agrippa von Nettesheim und Cabbalistische Lehren» (HA 9: 759). 5 On the controversy surrounding Wachter and the relationship, whether real or imagined, of Spinoza to Kabbalah, see Scholem’s introduction in Herrera, esp. 47-55, Scholem, «Wachtersche Kontroverse,» Popkin, and Goldstein. Goldstein, for example, points out that at the time of his death, Spinoza’s library contained a copy of a Hebrew translation of Herrera’s treatise (147). 6 Jacobi reports, «Einmal sagte Leßing, mit halbem Lächeln: Er selbst wäre vielleicht das höchste Wesen, und gegenwärtig in dem Zustande der äußersten Contraction. - Ich bat um meine Existenz. - Er antwortete, es wäre nicht allerdings so gemeint, und erklärte sich auf eine Weise, die mich an Heinrich Morus und von Helmont erinnerte. Leßing erklärte sich noch deutlicher; doch so, daß ich ihn abermals, zur Noth, der Cabbalisterey verdächtig machen konnte» (33-34). 7 «Sieht man auf den Grund im Wesen der Vernunft, der die Emanationstheorie veranlaßte, so war es das Bedurfniß, das Uebel und das Moralischböse in der Welt zu erklären; ein Bedürfniß, das für die Vernunft dringend wurde, sobald man die schaffende Gottheit als ein Princip des absolut Guten und Vollkomnen voraussetzte, und ihr gliechwohl auch die Hervorbringung der Materie, als der Wurzel alles Uebels und alles Bösen, beylegen mußte» (378). 8 Buhle criticizes this view as grounded in human observation of the workings of light and argues that the relationship of God to the world should be viewed as a transcendent matter, of which a theoretical, objective knowledge is impossible (381). 9 Noted for example by Brucker, Kurtze Fragen 4: 815. 10 Buhle too describes the inhabitants of this world as «bösartige und materiale Geister» (2: 376). 11 Coudert, Impact 340. 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