On this date in 1749, Germany’s most famous poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,was born in Frankfurt am Main, to a comfortable bourgeois family. He began studying law at Leipzig University at the age of 16, and practiced law briefly before devoting most of his life to writing poetry, plays and novels. In 1773, Goethe wrote the powerful poem “Prometheus” [quoted below], which urged human beings to believe in themselves, and not in the gods. His first novel was The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a semi-autobiographical tragedy about a doomed love affair. A line from that novel: “We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things: and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.” In his 1797 Hermann and Dorothea, Goethe observed: “The happy do not believe in miracles.” Goethe typified the Sturm und Drang romantic movement, celebrating the individual. The Grand Duke of Weimar appointed him an administrator in 1775, where, according to historians, Goethe turned Weimar into “the Athens of Germany.” In supervising the arts and sciences, Goethe discovered the human intermaxilary bone, also known as the Goethe bone (1784), among other discoveries. After a sojourn in Italy from 1786 to 1788, Goethe returned to his art, writing for a journal edited by freethinker Friedrich von Schiller and starting his own. Inspired by Christopher Marlowe‘s play “Faust,” Goethe wrote part 1 of his most famous play, published in 1808. Part 2 was published in 1832. From Part 1, Scene 9: “The church alone beyond all question/ Has for ill-gotten gains the right digestion.” Although Goethe’s beliefs ebbed and flowed, he was uniformly anti-Christian and, at most, a pantheist. D. 1832.

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