Abstract: This article examines how Goethe places his reading about a Jesuit disputation with a Buddhist monk in seventeenth-century China within the context of German philosophical debates. Goethe immediately draws an analogy connecting Weimar debates between Kantians and idealists to the earlier Nanjing debate about Jesuit and Buddhism metaphysics. His inclination to perceive parallels between philosophy in China and Germany anticipates his later comments to Eckermann about the similarities between the Chinese and European novels that served as the basis for his pronouncements about Weltliteratur (world literature). A careful reading of Goethe and Schiller's letters shows that as a heretical thinker, Goethe was inclined to identify with the Buddhist dismissal of Christian theism; however, the emerging atheism controversy surrounding accusations made against Fichte's lectures at the University of Jena led him to cautiously avoid entering into yet another Enlightenment debate about religion.

Keywords: world literature, Chinese-German relations, Fichte's atheism controversy, Jesuit missionaries in China, analogy, similarity

ON JANUARY 3, 1798, Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote his best friend, Friedrich Schiller, that he had just come across a curious story in an old tome describing a debate held in Nanjing, China during a banquet in 1599 involving a Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci and an unnamed Buddhist scholar, who today is identified as the renowned abbot Xuelang Hong’en (1545– 1607). The Jesuit texts refer to him as Sanhoi. Goethe wrote: “Dieser Fund hat mich unglaublich amüsiert und mir eine gute Idee von dem Scharfsinn der Chineser gegeben” (This discovery amused me unbelievably and gave me a good idea of how sharp witted the Chinese are). Typical for the way in which humanists combined friendship, letter writing, and intellectual labor, Goethe promised to send Schiller a handwritten copy of the passage. Three days later, Goethe followed through with his promise and went on to speculate how the Buddhist might have even more wittily turned the tables on the Jesuit Ricci. Rather than agreeing with the Jesuit arguments about the creation of the earth, Goethe takes the heterodox step of siding with the Buddhist—not a complete surprise, as he had resumed working on Faust the previous summer.

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WORLD LITERATURE DOES NOT REQUIRE that its readers travel; instead, the texts are brought to us, so that we do not need to go out into the world to find them. By the nineteenth century, several generations of academics had already compiled and translated narratives acquired through global exploration. Enlightenment scholars gave precedence to travelogues and memoirs when formulating their own anthropological theories about distant societies. To be sure, armchair anthropologists were always subject to criticisms from world travelers, yet at the start of the nineteenth century Europeans interested in learning Mandarin, Persian, or Sanskrit were more likely to visit the royal libraries than they were to cross the Indian Ocean. A parallel emerged between Europeans’ consumption of Asian luxury products and their reading of foreign literature. Already at the start of the eighteenth century, the consumption of fine goods such as tea, porcelain, spices, and perfumes set an aesthetic precedent for the intellectual engagement with foreign literature. Paris and London were the most important nodal points in the European network that amassed books, goods, and art together in large collections. These concentrations allowed consumers to see a material world culture before their eyes—yet from the start Goethe and his contemporaries juxtaposed the benefits of such large agglomerations against the injustice perpetrated in their acquisition. In the West-östliche Divan (West-Eastern Divan, 1819) Goethe raises the question of how to treat foreign treasures, literary and material, as he formulates an aesthetic that intertwines the public presentation of poetry with luxury consumption. Even as he eschews the strict separation of art from commerce typical of Weimar classicism and finds inspiration in Hafez's ghazals, he continues to rely on Greek epics and myths as representations of the violence and robbery that precede the idyll.

In proclaiming the era of world literature, Goethe stresses that the end of the Napoleonic Wars has renewed communication and exchange between European nations and the world at large. Many types of exchange are assumed in such a generalization. One of the complexities within Goethe's idea concerns the exact relationship between the circulation of culture and the demarcation of political territories. World literature, as Goethe states quite clearly, becomes conceivable only after the lifting of strict enforcement of territorial boundaries, in this case the British assertion of its control over the flow of goods to the European continent.