Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Champion of Enlightenment Tolerance

In the autumn of 1778, a forty-nine-year-old librarian named Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published a small verse play about a Jewish merchant in Jerusalem, his Christian neighbor, and a wise Muslim ruler who had a question to ask of them. He had been working on the play, in one form or another, for about five years. The play was Nathan the Wise, the most important work of dramatic art in the German language before Schiller’s Don Carlos, and the most serious statement of the principle of religious toleration in the literature of the European Enlightenment. It was, by the standards of the contemporary German stage, an act of cultural insubordination — a play whose principal characters were Jewish and Muslim, whose plot was, in the strict sense, a defense of religious pluralism, and whose central scene was a quiet rebuke of the Christian theological tradition that had governed German letters since the Reformation.

The play was a succès d’estime. It was widely read and rarely performed. Lessing himself, who had been directing the National Theatre in Hamburg in the late 1760s and who had spent the 1770s as a kind of freelance intellectual at the court of the Duke of Brunswick, was by 1778 the most famous man of letters in the German-speaking world, and the Nathan was, in effect, a final statement of the position he had been developing for twenty years. He died two and a half years after the play’s first performance, in February 1781, of a heart attack brought on, by the best evidence, by overwork, by debt, and by the death, in the previous year, of his wife Eva König, who had been the only completely stabilizing element in a life that was otherwise a sustained exercise in German literary self-construction.

The Life

Lessing was born on January 22, 1729, in Kamenz, a small town in the Saxon region of Lusatia, the eldest son of a Lutheran pastor. The father was, in the classic German-Pietist mode, a serious, well-read, and not particularly prosperous clergyman; the mother was the daughter of a Silesian pastor, and the household was, by the standards of the German middle class of the 1730s, unusually well-educated. Lessing was sent at twelve to the Fürstenschule of St. Afra in Meissen, one of the three great classical schools of Saxony, where he received a thorough grounding in the classical languages and in the new critical philosophy. He was a brilliant student and, by his own account, an insufferable one.

The next decade was the period of his formation. He studied at the University of Leipzig, where he was drawn into the world of the Leipzig theater — an association that would, in later years, embarrass the more high-minded of his admirers. He wrote his first play, The Young Scholar (Der junge Gelehrte, 1748), at the age of nineteen. He moved to Berlin in 1748, where he tried to make a living as a writer and critic, and where he worked for a decade on a series of projects — translations, reviews, the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (1759–1765), the most important critical journal in the German language — that would establish his reputation as the most important German literary critic of his generation.

The two most important encounters of his life came in the 1760s. The first was with the actor and theater director Friedrich Ludwig Schröder, the most important figure in the development of the German national stage, with whom Lessing worked on the Hamburg National Theatre from 1767 to 1769. The encounter produced the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–1769), the most important work of dramatic criticism in the German language before A. W. Schlegel, and a sustained attack on the conventions of the French classical theater and a defense of a more natural, more flexible, and more Shakespearean model of dramatic art. The second was with Eva König, the widow of a Hamburg merchant, whom he married in 1776, after a long and unconsummated engagement that had begun in 1767. Eva died in 1778, a few months after the birth of the only child of the marriage, and Lessing’s grief for her, expressed in a few short letters, is one of the most moving documents in the German literary tradition.

The last decade of his life was the period of the most ambitious of his philosophical and theological works. The Ernst und Falk dialogues on Freemasonry (1778, 1780) and the Anti-Goeze letters (1778) — the latter a long, witty, and frequently savage polemic against the Hamburg pastor Johann Melchior Goeze, who had attacked Lessing’s theological positions — were the most public of the works of the period. The Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race, 1780) was the most ambitious. Lessing was, by the time of these works, the most famous man of letters in the German-speaking world, and his death in 1781, at the age of fifty-two, was a national event.

The Major Works

The body of work is, in the judgment of this writer, the most underrated in the German literary tradition. It is more underrated than the work of Wieland, more underrated than the work of Herder, and considerably more underrated than the work of the early Goethe. The reason is partly that Lessing was, in the strict sense, a critic rather than a poet, and that the critical works, which are the most influential, are also the least read. The reason is partly that the dramatic works, which are the most read, are mostly known for the wrong reasons — as the foundation of the modern German stage rather than as the philosophical interventions they in fact are. The reason is partly that the theological works, which are the most ambitious, are also the most difficult to fit into the conventional narrative of the German Enlightenment.

The Dramas

Miss Sara Sampson (1755) was the first German “bourgeois tragedy” — a serious drama about the middle classes rather than about princes and heroes. The play is, in its central situation, a careful study of a young woman of the middle class, abandoned by her seducer, dying of grief in a country inn. The play is, in its formal innovations, a deliberate break with the French classical theater, and it is, in its moral seriousness, a model for the entire subsequent tradition of German bourgeois tragedy.

Minna von Barnhelm (1767) is, in the judgment of this writer, the best German comedy of the eighteenth century. The play is set in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, and it is, in its central situation, a careful study of the relationship between a Prussian officer, a Saxon woman, and the small misunderstandings that threaten to destroy a perfectly good marriage. The play is, in its formal innovations, a kind of essay in the new German national drama, and it is, in its moral seriousness, an essay in the new German moral tradition.

Emilia Galotti (1772), based on the story of Virginia from Roman history, is the most powerful of the political dramas. The play is a careful study of the relationship between a prince, his mistress, and the father who kills his own daughter to save her from the prince’s power. The play is, in its formal innovations, a study of the limits of the Aristotelian unities, and it is, in its political argument, a careful essay in the tradition of the German natural-law critique of princely power.

Nathan the Wise (1779) is the masterpiece. The play is set in Jerusalem during the Crusades, and it tells the story of Nathan, a Jewish merchant, who returns to Jerusalem at the end of the Third Crusade to find his daughter Recha, who has been rescued from a burning house by a Christian Knight Templar. The play is built around the famous “ring parable,” in which Nathan tells the Sultan Saladin the story of a family that possessed a magical ring that gave its owner the favor of God. The ring was always given to the son whom the father loved most, and at length it came to be held by a father who had three sons whom he loved equally. He promised the ring to each of them, and so he had two copies of the ring made, and he gave a ring to each son. After the father’s death, the three sons quarreled over which of them had the real ring, and they brought the case to a judge. The judge refused to decide the case, and he told the sons that the important thing was not which of them had the real ring, but that each of them should live in such a way as to be worthy of it.

The ring parable has been the subject of a small critical industry. The standard view — most influentially argued by Hans-Jürgen Schings in Lessings Nathan der Weise (1976) — is that the parable is a defense of the equal validity of the three great monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — and that the play is, in its central argument, a manifesto of the Enlightenment tradition of religious toleration. The more recent view, in the work of the late Wilfried Barner, of Dieter Borchmeyer, and of the Lessing scholar Monika Fick, has been that the parable is, in fact, more austere — that the play is, in its central argument, a defense of the inner, spiritual religion of ethical conduct against the outer, institutional religion of doctrine and ritual, and that the three monotheistic religions are, in the play’s argument, all imperfectly adequate to the inner religion of ethical conduct. The argument is well advanced, but it is not closed.

The Laokoon and the Hamburg Dramaturgy

The Laocöon, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766) is, in the judgment of this writer, the most important work of modern aesthetics before Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Lessing argues that the visual arts and poetry are governed by different principles, and that the characteristic excellence of each is determined by the different senses and the different media through which they work. The visual arts work through figures in space, while poetry works through sounds in time. The proper subject of the visual arts is the beautiful, while the proper subject of poetry is the action.

The argument was an important contribution to the development of modern aesthetics, and it had a profound influence on the subsequent development of German literature and criticism. The young Goethe read it with care, and the Laokoon was, in effect, the foundation of the entire subsequent tradition of German Kunstkritik. The argument is dated in important respects — Lessing’s account of the visual arts is, in fact, too narrow, and the modern interest in the temporal arts of cinema, of video, and of installation art has, in effect, made his distinction less sharp than it was in the 1760s. But the central insight — that the formal properties of a medium are not, in the strict sense, separable from the kinds of experience that the medium can produce — is one of the most important in the history of modern aesthetics.

The Hamburg Dramaturgy is, in the judgment of this writer, the most important work of dramatic criticism in the German language before the Romantic period. The essays are a sustained attack on the conventions of the French classical theater and a defense of a more natural, more flexible, and more Shakespearean model of dramatic art. The work is, in its central argument, an essay in the new German national drama, and it is, in its formal innovations, an essay in the new German critical tradition.

The Theological and Philosophical Writings

The Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, 1780) was one of the most ambitious works of Enlightenment philosophy of history. Lessing argued that the human race is being gradually educated by God through a series of historical stages, each of which is necessary for the development of the next. The Old Testament, with its emphasis on a single God and a system of rewards and punishments, is appropriate to the childhood of the human race. The New Testament, with its emphasis on the inner spiritual life and the immortality of the soul, is appropriate to its youth. A third stage, in which the human race will reach moral and intellectual maturity, is yet to come.

The argument was a remarkable vision of human history, and it was one of the founding documents of the modern philosophy of history. The German Idealists, including Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all developed their philosophies of history in critical engagement with Lessing’s pioneering work. The argument is, in some respects, the most ambitious of the Enlightenment visions of history, and it is, in some respects, the most vulnerable. The historical-relativist reading — that the doctrine of the three stages is, in effect, a doctrine of the historical relativity of all religious and moral truth — has been the basis of a small critical industry, and the contemporary work on Lessing has, in general, tended to take the relativist reading more seriously than Lessing himself would have wanted.

The defense of religious toleration, in the Ernst und Falk dialogues, in the Anti-Goeze letters, and in the Nathan, was Lessing’s most important contribution to the Enlightenment tradition. The Ernst und Falk dialogues were, in their central argument, an essay in the proper relationship between civil society and the institutions of the Enlightenment — the Freemasons, the learned societies, the secret societies — and a defense of the principle that the state should tolerate the existence of institutions that the state cannot, in the strict sense, control. The Anti-Goeze letters were, in their central argument, a careful restatement of the principle that the state has no authority to determine the religious beliefs of its citizens, and that the proper function of the church is the cultivation of the inner, spiritual life of the believer rather than the enforcement of the external, institutional doctrines of the church.

A Judgement

Lessing is, in the judgment of this writer, the most underrated of the major figures of the German Enlightenment. The reason is partly that his works are not, in the conventional sense, great works of philosophy. They are, in the strict sense, the works of a man who was, above all, a critic — a man whose central intellectual activity was the careful reading of the works of other men and the production of a critical position that was, in effect, a synthesis of the best of what the European Enlightenment had to offer. The reason is partly that his works are not, in the conventional sense, great works of literature. They are, in the strict sense, the works of a man who was, above all, a dramatist — a man whose central literary activity was the production of a small number of plays that have, in the judgment of the subsequent tradition, been eclipsed by the work of his successors. The reason is partly that the theological works, which are the most ambitious, are also the most difficult to fit into the conventional narrative.

The verdict that comes out of the best of the recent scholarship — the work of Hugh Barr Nisbet in his Lessing: A Biography (2013), of Monika Fick, of the late Wilfried Barner, and of the late Gerhard Kaiser — is that Lessing was, in fact, the central figure of the German Enlightenment. He was, in particular, the figure who established the conditions of possibility for the great works of the German philosophical tradition. The Critique of Pure Reason could not have been written without the Laocöon and the Hamburg Dramaturgy. The Phenomenology of Spirit could not have been written without the Education of the Human Race. The Nathan the Wise is, in fact, the most enduring German play of the eighteenth century, and the most important work of dramatic art in the German language before the Romantic period.

The contemporary reception of Lessing’s religious position is, in this writer’s judgment, the most interesting part of the contemporary reception of the Enlightenment. The standard view — that the Enlightenment was, in the strict sense, an irreligious project, and that the proper response to the Enlightenment is the postmodern critique of the secularization narrative — has, in the last thirty years, been complicated by the careful work of the German theologians Wolfgang Huber, of the historian of religion Hans Joas, and of the late Lessing scholar Gerhard Kaiser. The more nuanced view, in the work of these scholars, is that the Enlightenment was, in fact, a complex of religious and secular positions, and that the proper response to the Enlightenment is not the postmodern critique but a careful re-reading of the religious positions of the major figures — of Lessing, of Kant, of Herder, of Mendelssohn, of the early Goethe — that the conventional account has, in effect, obscured.