ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that Goethe is one of the greatest life-affirming writers who have been a representative of the only viable and valid form of modern literature — secular literature — whose rise dates fairly precisely from Goethe's day. It spells out Goethe's position and briefly the route by which he arrived at it, and ends by celebrating him as a preeminent supporter of the efforts to live contentedly in the world. The young Goethe's extraordinary self-confidence makes him tolerant of his Christian friends, always providing they will tolerate him. He adapts a saying of Christ's: 'In unsers Vaters Apotheke sind viel Recepte'. Then by the mid-1780s Goethe's trajectory carries him onward into science, continuing the impulses of his poetry by other means. Goethe's enlightening effect, but also its place within a larger modern constellation, can be eloquently captured in a phrase that scholar in Henry James's Aspern Papers uses of the writer to whose work he has devoted himself.
