ABSTRACT
Weimar culture was wholly secular. Schiller’s ethic has Christian analogues and perhaps ultimately, like much Aufklärung thinking, Protestant roots; Goethe could use the term ‘pious’ of his aspiration to know ‘den ewig Ungenannten’ in nature. 1 But their art is not subordinated to doctrine or cult. Gods appear in their work not as objects of belief but as chosen means, changing with the task in hand: ‘Wir sind naturforschend Pantheisten, dichtend Polytheisten, sittlich Monotheisten’, said Goethe. 2 Schiller was less serenely adaptable, more troubled (as ‘Die Götter Griechenlands’ shows) by the gap between such uses and real belief, but his position was substantially the same. The gods of Greece and Rome and occasionally, somewhat uneasily, of Christianity provided the Classicists with a language of the imagination.
