ABSTRACT
The father has issued his warning; it is time for the boy’s studies to come to an end. He has cost his father a great deal of money, nearly half the very considerable Goethe income over the past four years. Above all, the councillor is anxious for his son, following his own footsteps, to produce a nicely printed Doctor’s thesis. Goethe starts to work on it, if we can call it work; Herder’s ideas on original genius are very much in his mind. In a few weeks, with someone to help him, in particular to help him polish his Latin style - elegant Latin was still of much greater importance to a thesis than its content - he manages to put together something on the subject of ecclesiastical law. The little work has been lost, and almost all we know about it is what Goethe himself has told us: it dealt with the problem of to what extent the authority of the State is entitled to establish the form of worship, and thereby bring to an end all religious disputes. This should have pleased the professors, who all had a great respect for State authority. Obviously, however, Goethe incorporated in his thesis various unorthodox ideas: that the Ten Commandments, for instance, were not the real laws of the Children of Israel but a form of ceremony. At any rate the Dean refused to accept the work and deposited it, as not suitable for publication, in the official files. Goethe was far from inconsolable. He was told that he could get the degree of ‘Licentiate’ merely by debating a number of themes in public. With the help of friends he quickly put together fifty-six positiones juris. They sound almost like a students’ rag: ‘The study of law is by far the most distinguished of all studies’ and ‘Uneducated people and those unversed in the law cannot be judges’, along with some others slightly less naive. The public ‘disputation’, conducted in Latin, was also an amusing affair, held among friends, with the good Lerse as his opponent. Lerse harassed Goethe a little, until the latter laughingly called out to him in German, which was out of order: ‘Methinks, brother, you are trying to bully me!’ And so instead of the ‘Doctor’s feast’, they held a fraternal celebration for his Licentiate. The positiones were printed by the university printer, Heitz - the firm still exists - and sent to the father; in ill humour the latter put the little thing on his shelf, alongside his own imposing quarto volume. The Strasbourg Licentiate, so Goethe consoled himself, should be ‘as good’ as a Doctor’s degree 96in Germany, and, in any case, it permitted him to practise law. So he now happily assumed the title Doctor Goethe, and kept it until he became ‘Geheimrat Goethe’. No one bothered; even the first edition of his collected works, published four years later by the pirate firm of Himburg in Berlin, bore the title D. Goethens Schriften. They were not so scrupulous about academic titles in those days.
