This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Goethe called himself a pantheist more than once, and he meant it in a fairly specific sense he inherited from Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher who had been dead for nearly a century by the time the young Goethe encountered the Ethics in the 1770s, through the circle of readers gathered around Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Spinoza's central claim, that God is not a being separate from the natural world but is identical with it, Deus sive Natura, God or Nature, offered Goethe something his own restless, empirically minded temperament badly wanted: a way to take nature with total seriousness, as sacred and lawful at once, without appealing to a creator standing outside it and issuing instructions from beyond. Goethe adopted the identification of God with nature more or less wholesale, and he adopted something else from Spinoza too, a view about how a life ought to be lived, that ethics is fundamentally advice for shaping one's own character, and that happiness looks less like pleasure than like a kind of stoic, settled equanimity, an inner poise that does not depend on how the world happens to be treating you that day. But the adoption was not uncritical, and Goethe knew it was not. He told Jacobi directly that his own conception of nature diverged from Spinoza's system in important respects, though he left the precise shape of the disagreement less fully worked out than the affinity. What Goethe took from Spinoza was less a completed metaphysical system to be defended proposition by proposition than a permission, permission to treat the natural world as the proper object of reverence, and to go looking, as a working naturalist, for the patterns a creator-God model would have discouraged him from expecting to find on its own terms. The 1780s controversy touched off across German intellectual life by the revelation that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had privately professed Spinozism, the Pantheismusstreit, put Spinoza's name back at the center of German thought at exactly the moment Goethe's own scientific work was taking shape, and Goethe's quiet, working pantheism became one of the paths by which Spinoza's ideas reached the generation of German Idealists who came after him.