THE DEATH OF DIONYSOS - ETD - Vanderbilt University

It is all the more puzzling, then, when the author of the Confessions insists
repeatedly that her trust in God is founded on experience. The first few times that the
words Erfahrung and erfahren appear in Book Six, they refer to what the narrator learns
from her life in society or in other words, from lived experience. Eventually, though, even
the tender sensations (Empfindungen) that she enjoys whenever she retreats from society
into prayer and reflection come to be equated with experience–her experience of God–
because she learns by experience how to replicate them. She even conducts an alchemical
experiment, as it were, to determine the origin of the cherished sensations. Retreat and
reflection are conducive to spiritual feelings, she discovers; society and “sinnlich[e]
Munterkeit” [“robust sensuality”] are not (364; DWH). She concludes:
Je sanfter diese Erfahrungen waren, desto öfter suchte ich sie zu erneuern,
und ich suchte immer da den Trost, wo ich ihn so oft gefunden hatte; allein
ich fand ihn nicht immer [. . .]. Ich spürte der Sache eifrig nach und
bemerkte deutlich, daß alles von der Beschaffenheit meiner Seele abhing;
wenn die nicht ganz in der geradesten Richtung zu Gott gekehrt war, so
blieb ich kalt. (376ff.)
[My experiences in this quarter were so soothing that I returned there ever
more often, always seeking the consolation that I had found before. But I
did not find it always. (. . .) I asked myself, seeking the reason and coming
to the conclusion that it all depended on the state of my own soul: if it were
not entirely directed straight toward God, I remained unwarmed (. . .) (EAB
229).]
Her single-minded quest for the god of her heart lead her first to give up dancing and more
frivolous social intercourse, and then to break off her engagement to Narziss; later that
same devotion to her personal faith will interrupt her communion with fellow believers
and finally separate her even from her family and relations.
Innerness and Aesthetic Self-Awareness
This rather pessimistic reading of Book Six follows the social logic of Becker-
Cantarino’s contrast of the schöne Seele with her historical model, the gregarious Pietist
von Klettenberg. The analysis of Friedrich Strack could scarcely reach a more different
conclusion. 26 While he diagnoses in the religious convictions of the schöne Seele “eine
26
See Strack, “Selbst-Erfahrung oder Selbst-Entsagung? Goethes Deutung und Kritik des Pietismus
in ‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’”, in: Verlorene Klassik? Ein Symposium, ed. Wolfgang
21