1. Friedrich Schiller, “Elysium,” trans. Michèle Lester, Schubert Schiller-Lieder, vol. 1, in Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition, prod. and ed. Pauline Heister (Naxos: NHN International, 2001). For the original German text of the poem, see Friedrich Schiller, “Elysium,” in Schiller’s Sämtliche Werke, Säkularausgabe, 16 vols. (Stuttgart und Berlin: J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1905), 1:238–39.

2. For example, see Gordon B. Hinckley, “We Walk by Faith,” Ensign 32 (May 2002): 73.

3. See, for example, Neal A. Maxwell, Wherefore, Ye Must Press Forward (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1977), 87.

4. Compare Matthew 5:48 and 3 Nephi 12:48.

5. In a literal sense, Arcadia is a geographical region of Greece, “a mountainous area in central Peloponnesus approaching the sea only in the south-west, near Phigalia.” N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 94. But Arcadia came to represent mankind’s primeval childhood for eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists—a place of naive and innocent shepherds enjoying an existence of Homeric totality in which they lived in perfect harmony. Embedded in the neoclassical intellectual milieu of the day, these theorists idealized classical civilization and saw in the Greeks man at one with himself. In a certain sense, then, Arcadia was a type of Eden where man was in a state of innocent perfection that was a product of man’s unity with himself and nature. Particularly Friedrich Schiller, one of the architects of Weimar Classicism (1795–1805, the aesthetic movement that created a German classical literature), employed the metaphor of Arcadia to represent humanity’s initial state of naive innocence, which was lost through man’s entrance into society, but whose natural harmony is constantly sought again, in his essay “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry” (1795), discussed in more detail below. Friedrich von Schiller, “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” and “On the Sublime”: Two Essays, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 81–190.

6. In Greek mythology, Elysium, or Elyseum, was “the place where those favoured by the gods . . . enjoy after death a full and pleasant life.” Sir Paul Harvey, comp. and ed., The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940), 157. It is a place where “there is no snow, no winter storms and no rain, but rather the Zephyr blows softly there from over the ocean for eternity to cool those who come there.” D. Friedrich Lübker, ed., Reallexikon des classischen Alterthums für Gymnasien (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1860), 296 (All translations from German or Spanish in this article are my own unless otherwise noted in the citation). Eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists, particularly Schiller, used the concept of Elysium metaphorically to represent the end goal for which humanity was collectively striving, where mankind might regain the lost Arcadian harmony through personal moral choices. But it is not a Rousseauian return to the natural harmony experienced in Arcadia. Rather, Elysium is a higher state of perfection than Arcadia, because perfection in Arcadia resulted simply from mankind’s naive, natural—but therefore undeserved—totality, whereas the perfection attained in the metaphorical Elysium is deserved as the end product of choices in moral development. Reaching Elysium signifies a state of being in which the moral law has been so fully internalized that an individual simply will never act against it: totality is thus restored, but this time it is by choice, not ignorant nature.

7. Gordon B. Hinckley, First Presidency Christmas Fireside, 2002, as quoted in Sarah Jane Weaver, “‘We Join in Singing Praises to the Son of God,’” Church News, published by Deseret News, December 7, 2002, 3.

8. Anonymous, “Though in the Outward Church Below,” Hymns of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1972), 102.

9. Children’s Songbook of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1989), 161.

10. Peter Branscombe, “Die Zauberflöte: A Lofty Sequel and Some Lowly Parodies,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 48 (1978): 21.

11. Bernhard Paumgartner, Mozart (Freiburg i. Br.: Atlantis, 1967), 448.

12. Scott Abbott identifies German Freemasonry as “the Enlightenment institution par excellence.” Scott Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry: Freemasonry and the German Novel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 18.

13. Wallace Wood, trans., Conversations with Eckermann, Being Appreciations and Criticisms on Many Subjects by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (New York: M. Walter Dunne, 1901), 248 (March 11, 1828): “For what is genius but that productive power by which deeds arise that can display themselves before God and nature, and are therefore permanent, and produce results. All Mozart’s works are of this kind; there lies in them a productive power which operates upon generation after generation, and still is not wasted or consumed.”

14. Kenneth W. Godfrey, “Freemasonry and the Temple,” in Daniel H. Ludlow, ed., Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 2:529.

15. Godfrey, “Freemasonry and the Temple,” 2:528.

16. Godfrey, “Freemasonry and the Temple,” 2:529. But “resemblances between the two rituals are limited to a small proportion of actions and words; indeed, some find that the Latter-day Saint endowment has more similarities with the Pyramid texts and the Coptic documents than with Freemasonry.” Godfrey, “Freemasonry and the Temple,” 2:529.

17. Hugh Nibley, “Apocryphal Writings and Teachings of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Temple and Cosmos: Beyond This Ignorant Present, ed. Don E. Norton, vol. 12 in The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1992), 294.

18. Quoted in Nibley, “Apocryphal Writings,” 294 (Nibley’s additions in square brackets omitted).

19. Wieland was part of the Weimar scene for over twenty years before Goethe and Schiller combined forces in 1794 to create Weimar Classicism, or German High Classicism; that is, when the Duchess Anna Amalia invited Wieland to Weimar in 1772 to tutor her son, Karl August, she began solidifying the foundation for the establishment of German classicism in that location. Nicholas Boyle, Goethe, The Poet and the Age, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 1:37.

20. W. H. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 1775–1806 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 29–30.

21. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 31.

22. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 37. For instance, Shaftesbury’s book of 1711, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc., presents an aesthetic program focused on “the Greeks [as] the best guides he knew to the good life for a cultivated man” (36).

23. Peter Branscombe, W. A. Mozart, Die Zauberflöte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 28. In pertinent part, the will provided, “I bequeath to the famous poet Herr Wieland in Weimar, as author of Tschinnistan [the other Wieland work to influence The Magic Flute], 300 Gulden”—which sum, in the event of Weiland’s predeceasing him, was to be paid to “Herr Schiller, our German Schaekspair [sic], who wrote Kabale und Liebe, for which bequest however Herr Schiller is requested to write a theatrical work and send it to every theatre in Germany.” Schikaneder was well aware of the Weimar writers: “the leading names of the theatre of the time also occur [as authors of works performed in Schikaneder’s Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna]: Lessing, Schiller and Goethe, Iffland, Schröder and Kotzebue.” Branscombe, W. A. Mozart, Die Zauberflöte, 143.

24. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Philosophie der Maurerei, ed. Wilhelm Filtner (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1923), 17, quoted in Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry, 19.

25. For example, Professor Abbott points out that Thomas Mann’s rather negative depiction of Freemasonry as political and mystical in The Magic Mountain (1924) elicited a response accusing him of being uninformed about the “‘genuine,’ humanitarian Masonry (nonpolitical and nonmystical) which had attracted the likes of Goethe, Herder, Fichte, and Mozart.” Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry, 147. Another response assumed “that Thomas Mann used only Romance sources. He did not know English or German Freemasonry.” Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry, 147.

26. Melvin Maynard Johnson, ed. and intro., Masonic Addresses and Writings of Roscoe Pound (Richmond, Virginia: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1953), 128.

27. The lawyer and Freemason Roscoe Pound paraphrased and commented on Fichte’s lectures, which were originally published in the Masonic journal Eleusinien des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1802–1803 (Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry, 189 n. 6), in Pound’s own Masonic addresses and writings, as collected by Melvin Maynard Johnson in Masonic Addresses and Writings of Roscoe Pound.

28. Johnson, Masonic Addresses and Writings of Roscoe Pound, 128.

29. I[gnaz] v[on] B[orn] M[eister] v[om] St[uhl], “Ueber die Mysterien der Aegyptier,” Journal für Freymaurer 1, no. 1 (1784): 130 (German orthography as in original source). (Ist Wahrheit, Weisheit und die Beförderung der Glückseligkeit des ganzen Menschengeschlechts nicht auch der eigentliche Endzweck unsrer Verbindung?) The German original has been included in parentheses throughout for comparison.

30. von Born, “Ueber die Mysterien der Aegyptier,” 130. (Und kann wohl auch ein erhabnerer edlerer Endzweck seyn, als unsre Kenntnisse durch wechselseitige Mittheilung zu erweitern, jedem, der sich an unsern Kreis schließt, auf dem Pfade der Tugend den geraden Weg zur Vollkommenheit zu zeigen, ihn, wenn er auf Abwege geräth, brüderlich zurückzubringen, uns täglich zur Ausübung tugendhafter Handlungen aufzumuntern, alles Gute auszuüben, alles Böse zu verhindern?)

31. Branscombe, W. A. Mozart, Die Zauberflöte, 20–25.

32. Paumgartner, Mozart, 448. Eighteenth-century Freemasons worked to achieve a state of enlightenment as their end goal in the educative process of their fraternity: “In French orations masters and brothers were routinely described and complimented as éclairé; in Dutch, as verlichte; in German, as aufgeklärt. In Britain one of the principle duties of a lodge was to ‘initiate the unenlightened.’ Genevan masons described themselves as ‘true children of the light.’” Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 145.

33. Compare Paul E. Kerry, “‘Initiates of Isis Now, Come, Enter into the Temple!’: Masonic and Enlightenment Thought in The Magic Flute,” in this issue of BYU Studies, 104–30.

34. Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry, 33: “Fénelon’s Aventures de Télémaque (1699), describing the educational adventures of Télémaque under the guidance of Minerva (disguised as Mentor), is generally considered the first novel with Masonic ties.”

35. Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry, 34.

36. Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry, 34.

37. Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry, 35.

38. All references to the text of The Magic Flute are given parenthetically in the text.

39. John Locke, A Letter concerning Toleration [1689], ed. and intro. James H. Tully (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 46: “For Truth certainly would do well enough, if she were once left to shift for her self. She is not taught by Laws, nor has she any need of Force to procure her entrance into the minds of men. If Truth makes not her way into the Understanding by her own Light she will be but the weaker for any borrowed force Violence can add to her.”

40. Sarastro indicates to Pamina that he holds her for her own benefit, hinting that she is better off away from her mother’s dark influence.

41. Albert G. Mackey, “Truth,” in An Encyclopedia of Freemasonry and Its Kindred Sciences Comprising the Whole Range of Arts, Sciences and Literature as Connected with the Institution, new and rev. ed. by William J. Hughan and Edward L. Hawkins, 2 vols. (New York: Masonic History, 1925), 2:805.

42. Paumgartner, Mozart, 452: “But in the pit of fire Tamino is saved from danger through unwavering faith in truth and love: the pure sound of the flute has become a symbol of his soul” (In der Feuerhöhle aber wird Tamino durch unerschütterlichen Glauben an Wahrheit und Liebe aus der Gefahr gerettet: der reine Ton der Flöte ist zum Symbol seiner Seele geworden).

43. Friedrich Schiller, “Etwas über die erste Menschengesellschaft nach dem Leitfaden der mosaischen Urkunde” (Something about the First Human Society according to the Guide of the Mosaic Document), in Schiller’s Sämtliche Werke, 13:26. (Dieser Abfall des Menschen vom Instinkte, der das moralische Übel zwar in die Schöpfung brachte, aber nur um das moralische Gute darin möglich zu machen, ist ohne Widerspruch die glücklichste und größte Begebenheit in der Meschengeschichte; von diesem Augenblick her schreibt sich seine Freiheit, hier wurde zu seiner Moralität der erste entfernte Grundstein gelegt.)

44. Schiller, “Etwas über die erste Menschengesellschaft,” 13:26–27. (Der Philosoph hat Recht, es einen Riesenschritt der Menschheit zu nennen, denn der Mensch wurde dadurch aus einem Sklaven des Naturtriebes ein freihandelndes Geschöpf, aus einem Automat ein sittliches Wesen, und mit diesem Schritt trat er zuerst auf die Leiter, die ihn nach Verlauf von vielen Jahrtausenden zur Selbstherrschaft führen wird.)

45. Schiller, “Etwas über die erste Menschengesellschaft,” 13:25 (bold added, italics in original). (Er sollte den Stand der Unschuld, den er jetzt verlor, wieder aufsuchen lernen durch seine Vernunft und als ein freier vernünftiger Geist dahin zurück kommen, wovon er als Pflanze und als eine Kreatur des Instinktes ausgegangen war; aus einem Paradies der Unwissenheit und Knechtschaft sollte er sich, wär’ es auch nach späten Jahrtausenden, zu einem Paradies der Erkenntnis und der Freiheit hinauf arbeiten, einem solchen nämlich, wo er dem moralischen Gesetze in seiner Brust ebenso unwandelbar gehorchen würde, als er anfangs dem Instinkte gedient hatte.)

46. Schiller, “Etwas über die erste Menschengesellschaft,” 13:26. (der Mensch wurde . . . aus einem glücklichen Instrumente ein unglücklicher Künstler.)

47. T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre: Goethe and Weimar, 1775–1832 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1980), 75.

48. Dieter Borchmeyer, Weimarer Klassik: Portrait einer Epoche (Weinheim: Beltz Athenäum, 1994), 239. (den Menschen, der durch den Dualismus von Vernunft und Sinnlichkeit zerrissen ist, als Einheit und Ganzheit wiederherzustellen.)

49. This sounds very Kantian for a reason: Schiller used Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1981) and other philosophical writings as a springboard for his own aesthetic philosophy of completion in the “beautiful soul” in his essay “On Grace and Dignity” (Über die Anmut und Würde, 1793). But Schiller surpasses a mere harmonization of the famous Kantian dualism within the moral subject between Pflicht (duty) and Neigung (inclination). Indeed, Schiller breaks free from the Kantian paradigm because his own aesthetic ideal actually constitutes a natural “inclination to duty.” Emil Carl Wilm, The Philosophy of Schiller in Its Historical Relations (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994, reprint of 1912 edition), 127.

50. Friedrich Schiller, “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry” (Über naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung), trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, in Friedrich Schiller, Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, The German Library: Vol. 17 (New York: Continuum, 1993), 232. “Change” has been substituted in square brackets for Dahlstrom’s curious use of “alter” in this passage. “Aber ihre Vollkommenheit ist nicht ihr Verdienst, weil sie nicht das Werk ihrer Wahl ist. was uns von ihnen untersheidet, ist gerade das, was ihnen selbst zur Göttlichkeit fehlt. Wir sind frei, und sie sind notwendig; wir wechseln, sie bleiben eins.” Schiller, “Über naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung,” 2:541.

51. Gerhard Kaiser touches on this participatory role of aesthetics in his collection of Schiller lectures and studies from 1966 to 1977. See, for example, Gerhard Kaiser, Von Arkadien nach Elysium. Schiller-Studien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1978), 9, 206–17.

52. Schiller, “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” 232.

53. Hans-Wilhelm Kelling, “Thoughts about Goethe’s Religious Convictions,” in Literature and Belief 20, no. 2, Goethe and Religion, ed. Paul E. Kerry (2000): 115.

54. Kelling, “Thoughts about Goethe’s Religious Convictions,” 115–16.

55. Robert McFarland, “Mann und Weib, and Baby Makes Two: Gender and Family in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Magic Flute Sequel,” in this issue of BYU Studies, 206–17.

56. Dieter Borchmeyer, Goethe, Mozart, und Die Zauberflöte (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1994), 22–23.

57. Russell M. Nelson, “Fundamentals and Initiatives,” in Life in the Law: Answering God’s Interrogatories, ed. Galen L. Fletcher and Jane H. Wise (Provo, Utah: J. Reuben Clark Law Society and Brigham Young University Press, 2002), 53.

58. Neal A. Maxwell, Not My Will, but Thine (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1988), 8.

John B. Fowles

BYU Studies Publications