3 - Living Islam

Summary

Ultimately, there is something of this faith in all of us.

Belief in Predestination and Personal Submission to Fate

TWO CENTRAL PRECEPTS OF ISLAM do not yet appear in Goethe’s excerpts from the Qur’an of 1771–72: belief in Providence and total submission to the faith. Later, however, these doctrines took on special significance for him. One could even say that Islamic ideas influenced the second half of his life, as Goethe believed as firmly as any Muslim that fate is predestined by God and regarded it as a commandment of piety not to rebel against God’s will. While at work on the West-Eastern Divan, he had read these remarks of Joseph von Hammer, his chief source, on Islam’s major tenets:

Acceptance of the will of God and faith in Providence constitute the essence of Islam. Trust in what is to come: Inshallah, “as God wills” or “as it pleases God,” and resignation about what is past: Machallah, “that which God wishes” or “that which pleases God.” To undertake nothing without imploring heavenly aid, Bismillah, “in the name of God,” and to accomplish nothing without giving thanks, Elhamdulillah, “praise be to God.” These four words, so to speak, are the four cardinal tenets of Islam inscribed into its morality and are continually on the lips of all Muslims.

Goethe had long since arrived at a similar attitude of amor fati through his reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, whose teachings he had embraced at the time he had conceived Mahomet. According to Spinoza, human beings do not possess an absolute or free will, but are capable only of individual acts of the will, to accept one thing or refuse another. All things result necessarily from the eternal decision of God. In the degree to which our actions are perfect, we participate in the nature of the divine and become capable of recognizing God. In Spinoza’s sense, this realization should cause us to expect with equanimity whatever fate brings about through our own actions or events beyond our control.

Such belief in a providential fate and a corresponding serene resignation to its will occur extraordinarily often in Goethe’s works, increasing as he grew older, manifested to greater or lesser degree in Egmont, The Natural Daughter (Die naturliche Tochter), Poetry and Truth, the West-Eastern Divan, “Orphic Sayings” (“Urworte Orphisch”), The Feast-Day of Saint Roch in Bingen (Sankt-Rochus-Fest zu Bingen), Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, and others.