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JENNIFER A. HERDT
ver, ritual is the home context for scripture. But the novel was not supposed
to be a ritual script for new social rituals. Rather, the novel was about the
formation of individuals capable of resisting instrumentalization by the collec¬
tive, by the state. The Pietists had paved the way by taking scripture out of its
context within public liturgy and enshrining it in private self-examination.“
Kunstreligion — the religion of Art — was conceived as an alternative to au¬
thoritarian religious institutions. Art would help to construct self-forming
individuals. Bildung was understood as a collective task that is realized only
when individuals take a hand in their own self-realization. And yet there was
some recognition that ritual would be somehow indispensable as carrier of
meaning and significance and that ritual is properly collective. With this came
a recognition, too, that we never start de novo — literature, like ritual, neces¬
sarily works with the given, even as change/transformation of the inherited
forms is possible. Goethe is, finally, asking questions here, not giving answers.
Is Kunstreligion up to the formative task envisioned for it? How do we design
rituals that are capable of taking us in, so to speak, when we know that we
ourselves have created them? This is parallel to the question of how Goethe in
Wilhelm Meister can chart a path for his protagonist’s development, given that
1) the ideal is one of autonomous self-realization of one’s individual instantia¬
tion of humanity, and 2) Goethe does not actually have the authority to deter¬
mine what will count as genuinely good or beautiful. Goethe’s genius was to
undermine his own authority as author, just as he simultaneously depicts and
undermines the authority and influence of the Tower. This ambiguity points
beyond Goethe and forces the reader into reflective assessment. His questions
continue to reverberate through modern theater, literature, liturgy, and ritual
studies, still enabling us to grapple with issues concerning the individual and
the community, autonomy and exemplarity, repetition and innovation, em¬
bodiment and transcendence.
We can and do create formative rituals, and they can engage us fully. They
remain capable of overcoming a simple divide between Schein and Sein, ap¬
pearance and reality. This is because the beauty of goodness appears to us, and
because it appears it is capable of drawing us. But we also engage in reflective
assessment of how rituals are forming us — they do not have unquestionable
authority over us. These are two different moments; caught up in the ritual,
we do not in that moment critically question. Later, we may ask: did this ritual
innovative work acquires its specific character against the backdrop of established literary
forms. The problematic of personal individuality with which Goethe is wrestling is thus mir¬
rored at the level of literary form, Ritual und Literatur, 27.
14 On the Pietist contributions to the development of Kunstreligion and the Bildungsroman, see
Herdt: Ibid., 78-81; Engelsing: Bürger als Leser, 27-37; Hans-Georg Kemper: “‘Gottergleich’:
Zur Genese der Genie-Religion aus pietistischem und hermetischem ‘Geist’,” in H.-G. Kemper
— H. Schneider (eds.): Goethe und der Pietismus, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 2001, 171-208.
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