Iphigenie auf Tauris might well serve as an illustration to the theme and the avoidance of tragedy. According to the last pages of the fourteenth book of Dichtlung und Wahrheit, the poet cherished in the year 1774, during the period of his intimacy with Lavater and Basedow and arising from his observation of these two men, the plan of writing the tragedy of a great religious leader led to betray the primal purity of his faith: Das Himmlische, Ewige wird in den K*rper irdischer Absichten eingesenkt und zu vergiinglichen Zwecken mit fortgerissen.' was to be the hero of this drama, the plot of which Goethe outlines in some detail in his autobiography. But it never got written. Five years later, however, in 1779, the first version of Iphigenie did get written, and it is a drama about the founder of a new faith, the faith of humanity. The play is essentially religious, for it deals with the testing both of the new faith and its founder. The dramatic tension derives principally from the temptation the heroine is forced to undergo when she and her faith are subjected to the test of harshest reality. Unlike the Goethe had visualized, Iphigenie survives the test. In Mahomet man's insight into the divine was to be sacrificed to earthly ends; in Iphigenie the gods-here an allegorical periphrasis for the divine--make man sacrifice himself to their ends, and so save both him and their image in his heart. Goethe's Iphigenie is the drama of the struggle of the gods within men to make men see the true nature of divinity. In the play itself this struggle is carried out on a purely human level, reflected in the relation of man to man, and without supernatural intervention, though the whole has been set in motion by the gods. The only intercourse between gods and men within the play is through prayer, that is, through the heart of