As much as "The confessions of a beautiful soul" constitute a literary text, it contains an undoubted philosophical interest, at least judging by the extension of the concept of "beautiful soul" in the philosophy of the eighteenth century. It can be found, for example, in Rousseau, Zinzendorf, Hemsterhuis or Wieland and later in Hegel and Schiller, as well as Goethe himself. However, its origin must go back to Plato. The history of the concept is curious: from Plato it passes to Plotinus, from Plotinus to Saint Augustine and from there to the German mysticism of the late Middle Ages and to the Spanish religious literature of the 16th and 17th centuries.
But what is a "beautiful soul"? In general, and regardless of the many and subtle nuances that the question has, a "beautiful soul" is one that tends to good by itself, by nature and without apparent effort or contradiction with itself. It is, therefore, a moral category, but one that is expressed in aesthetic terminology: uniting the beautiful and the good, according to the old Greek ideal, overcoming, incidentally, the split between nature and freedom. From this point of view, it is interesting to point out that the "beautiful souls" are usually women, who in themselves reconcile inclination and duty, nature and freedom, but not for themselves, but speculatively for the man who sees himself reflected in them, and that on them he writes «beautiful» literary works. In addition to the obvious resonances that this mystification of the feminine may have for a feminist critic, the category of «beautiful soul» also allows us to understand some keys to the aesthetic mystification of romanticism and nineteenth-century classicism. And all this through the fine psychological gaze of a pen like Goethe's, in which the philosophical tension accumulated by the idea is tamed and redirected by the subtlety of a literature in which the ?concept? "beautiful soul" becomes "intuition."