by Will Durant
Controversy sustained him. On March 1, 1768, Hermann Reimarus passed away, leaving his wife a voluminous manuscript which he had never dared to print. We have said a word elsewhere75 about this “Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes” (Apology for the Rational Worshipers of God). Lessing had seen some of this remarkable work; he asked Frau Reimarus to let him publish parts of it; she agreed. As librarian he had authority to publish any manuscript in the collection. He deposited the “Schutzschrift” in the library, and then published a part of it in 1774 as The Toleration of Deists, … by an Anonymous Writer. It made no stir. But the supernatural experts were aroused by the second portion of Reimarus’ manuscript, which Lessing issued in 1777 as Something More from the Papers of the Anonymous Writer, concerning Revelation. It argued that no revelation addressed to a single people could win universal acceptance in a world of so many diverse races and faiths; only a minority of humanity had yet, after seventeen hundred years, heard of the Judaeo-Christian Bible; consequently it could not be accepted as God’s revelation to mankind. A final fragment, The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples (1778), presented Jesus not as the Son of God but as a fervent mystic who shared the view of some Jews that the world as then known would soon end, and be followed by the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth; the Apostles (said Reimarus) so understood him, for they hoped to be appointed to thrones in this coming kingdom. When the dream collapsed with Jesus’ despairing cry on the Cross—“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”—the Apostles (Reimarus supposed) invented the fable of his resurrection to conceal his defeat, and pictured him as the rewarding and avenging judge of the world.
The shocked theologians attacked these “Wolfenbüttel Fragments” in over thirty articles in the German press. Johann Melchior Goeze, chief Hamburg pastor, charged Lessing with secretly agreeing with the “Anonymous Writer”; this hypocrite, he urged, should be punished by both Church and state. Milder opponents reproved Lessing for publishing in intelligible German doubts that should have been expressed, if at all, in Latin to an esoteric few. Lessing replied in eleven pamphlets (1778) that rivaled Pascal’s Lettres provinciales in gay sarcasm and deadly wit. “No head was safe from him,” said Heine; “many a skull he struck off from pure wantonness, and then he was mischievous enough to hold it up to the public to show that it was empty.”76 Lessing reminded his assailants that freedom of judgment and discussion was a vital element in the program of the Reformation; moreover, the people had a right to all available knowledge; otherwise one Roman pope would be preferable to a hundred Protestant prophets. After all (he argued), the worth of Christianity will remain even if the Bible be a human document and its miracles mere pious fables or natural events.—The ducal government confiscated the Wolfenbüttel Fragments and the Reimarus manuscript, and ordered Lessing to publish nothing further without the approval of the Brunswick censor.
Silenced in his pulpit, Lessing turned to the stage, and wrote his finest play. Made insolvent again by the expenses involved in the sickness and death of his wife, he borrowed three hundred thalers from a Hamburg Jew to provide the leisure to finish Nathan der Weise. He placed the action in Jerusalem during the Fourth Crusade. Nathan is a pious Jewish merchant whose wife and seven sons are slaughtered by Christians demoralized through years of war. Three days later a friar brings him a Christian infant whose mother has just died, and whose father, recently slain in battle, has on several occasions saved Nathan from death. Nathan names the child Recha, brings her up as his daughter, and teaches her only those religious doctrines on which Jews, Christians, and Moslems are agreed.
Eighteen years later, while Nathan is away on business, his house burns down; Recha is rescued by a young Knight Templar who disappears without identifying himself; Recha thinks him a miraculous angel. Nathan, returning, searches for the rescuer to reward him, is insulted by him as a Jew, but persuades him to come and receive Recha’s gratitude. He comes, falls in love with her and she with him; but when he learns that she was of Christian birth and is not being reared as a Christian, he wonders is he not bound by his knightly oath to report the matter to the Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem. He describes his problem to the Patriarch without naming individuals; the Patriarch guesses they are Nathan and Recha, and vows to have Nathan put to death. He sends a friar to spy on the Jew. But this is the same friar who brought Recha to Nathan eighteen years before; he has observed, through these years, the kindly wisdom of the merchant; he tells him of his danger, and deplores the religious animosity that has made men so murderous.
Saladin, now governor of Jerusalem, is in financial straits. He sends for Nathan, hoping to arrange a loan. Nathan comes, senses Saladin’s need, and offers the loan before being asked. The Sultan, knowing Nathan’s reputation for wisdom, inquires which of the three religions he considers best. Nathan answers with a judicious variation of the story that Boccaccio had ascribed to the Alexandrian Jew Melchizedek: A precious ring is passed down from generation to generation to designate the legitimate heir of a rich estate. But in one of these generations the father loves his three sons with such equal fervor that he has three similar rings made, and privately gives one to each son. After his death the sons dispute as to which ring is the original and only true one; they bring the matter to court—where it is still undecided. The loving father was God; the three rings are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; history has not yet decided which creed is the true law of God. Nathan gives a new turn to the tale: the original ring was supposed to make its wearer virtuous; but as none of the three sons is more virtuous than other men, it is likely that the original ring was lost; each ring—each faith—is true only insofar as it makes its wearer virtuous. Saladin so admires Nathan’s answer that he rises and embraces him.—Shortly after this philosophical parley an Arabic manuscript turns up which shows that the Templar and Recha are children of the same father. They mourn that they cannot marry, but rejoice that they may now love each other as brother and sister, blessed by Nathan the Jew and Saladin the Mohammedan.
Was Nathan modeled on Moses Mendelssohn? There are resemblances between the two, as we shall see in a later chapter; and, despite many differences, it is probable that Lessing found in his friend much to inspire his idealization of the merchant of Jerusalem. Perhaps Lessing, in his eagerness to preach toleration, painted the Jew and the Moslem with more sympathy than the Christian; the Templar is, in his first meeting with Nathan, fanatically harsh, and the Patriarch (Lessing’s memory of Goeze?) hardly does justice to the kindly and enlightened bishops who were then governing Trier, Mainz, and Cologne. The Christian public of Germany repudiated the play as unfair when it was published in 1779; several of Lessing’s friends joined in the criticism. Nathan the Wise did not reach the stage till 1783, and on the third night the house was empty. In 1801 a version prepared by Schiller and Goethe was well received at Weimar, and thereafter the play remained for a century a favorite in German theaters.
A year before his death Lessing issued his final appeal for understanding. He couched it in religious terms, as if to mollify resistance and provide a bridge from old ideas to new. In some aspects the essay The Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlects, 1780) justifies the old ideas; then we perceive that the apology is a plea for the Enlightenment. All history may be viewed as a divine revelation, as a gradual education of mankind. Every great religion was a stage in that step-by-step illumination; it was not, as some Frenchmen had supposed, a trick imposed upon credulous people by self-seeking priests; it was a world theory intended to civilize humanity, to inculcate virtue, decency, and social unity. In one stage (the Old Testament) religion sought to make men virtuous by promising them worldly goods in a long life; in another stage (the New Testament) it sought to overcome the discouraging discrepancy between virtue and earthly success by promising rewards after death; in both cases the appeal was adjusted to the limited understanding of the people at the time. Each religion contained a precious kernel of truth, which may have owed
its acceptance to the coating of error that sweetened it. If, around the basic beliefs, theologians developed dogmas hard to understand, like original sin and the Trinity, these doctrines too were symbols of truth and instruments of education: God may be conceived as one power with many aspects and meanings; and sin is original in the sense that we are all born with a tendency to resist moral and social laws.77 But supernatural Christianity is only a step in the evolution of the human mind; a higher stage comes when the race learns to reason, and when men grow strong and clear enough to do the right because it is seen to be right and reasonable, rather than for material or heavenly rewards. That stage has been reached by some individuals; it has not yet come to the race, but “it will come! It will assuredly come, … the time of a new, eternal Gospel!”78 Just as the average individual recapitulates in his growth the intellectual and moral development of the race, so the race slowly passes through the intellectual and moral development of the superior individual. To put it Pythagoreanly, each of us is reborn and reborn until his education—his adjustment to reason—is complete.
What were Lessing’s final views on religion? He accepted it as an immense aid to morality, but he resented it as a system of dogmas demanding acceptance on pain of sin, punishment, and social obloquy. He thought of God as the inner spirit of reality, causing development and itself developing; he thought of Christ as the most ideal of men, but only metaphorically an incarnation of this God; and he hoped for a time when all theology would have disappeared from Christianity, and only the sublime ethic of patient kindness and universal orotherhood would remain. In the draft of a letter to Mendelssohn he declared his adherence to Spinoza’s view that body and mind are the outside and inside of one reality, two attributes of one substance identical with God. “The orthodox conceptions of deity,” he told Jacobi, “no longer exist for me; I cannot endure them. Hen kai pan—One and All! I know of nothing else.”79 In 1780 Jacobi, visiting him at Wolfenbüttel, asked him for help in refuting Spinoza, and was shocked by Lessing’s reply: “There is no other philosophy but Spinoza’s.... If I were to call myself after someone, I know of no other name.”80
Lessing’s heresies, and his occasional truculence in controversy, left him lonely in his final years. He had a few friends in Brunswick, with whom, now and then, he came to chat and play chess. His wife’s children lived with him in Wolfenbüttel; he devoted entirely to them the little legacy she had left. But his adversaries denounced him throughout Germany as a monstrous atheist. He defied them, and dared to oppose the man who paid his salary: when Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, now (1780) duke of Brunswick, threw into prison a young Jew who had incurred his displeasure, Lessing visited the youth in jail, and later took him into his house to win back health.
His own health was gone. His eyesight was now so dim that he could hardly read. He suffered from asthma, weakening of the lungs, hardening of the arteries. On February 3, 1781, on a visit to Brunswick, he experienced a severe asthmatic attack, and vomited blood. He instructed his friends: “When you see me about to die, call a notary; I will declare before him that I die in none of the prevailing religions.”81 On February 15, as he lay in bed, some friends gathered in the next room. Suddenly the door of his room opened; Lessing appeared, bent and weak, and raised his cap in greeting; then he sank to the floor in an apoplectic stroke. A theological journal announced that at his death Satan bore him away to hell as another Faust who had sold his soul.82 He left so little money that the Duke had to pay for his funeral.
He was the herald of Germany’s greatest literary age. In the year of his passing Kant published the epochal Critique of Pure Reason, and Schiller published his first play. Goethe looked up to Lessing as the great liberator, the father of the German Enlightenment. “In life,” said Goethe to Lessing’s shade, “we honored you as one of the gods; now that you are dead your spirit reigns over all souls.”
VI. THE ROMANTIC REACTION
Goethe spoke for a small minority; the great majority of the German people clung to their Christian heritage, and they hailed as divinely inspired the poet who sang their faith. Six years after Handel stirred at least Ireland with the heavenly strains of Messiah, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock won the heart of Germany with the first fervent cantos of Der Messias (1748-73).
Born in 1724, Klopstock antedated Lessing by five years, survived him by twenty-two. Lessing, the son of a clergyman, became a freethinker; Klopstock, the son of a lawyer, took as a main mission of his life the composition of an epic poem on the life of Christ. He was so aflame with his theme that he published the first three cantos when still a lad of twenty-four. These unrhymed hexameters won so grateful an audience that when, a year later, he proposed to his cousin, letters came to her from various parts of Germany urging her to accept him; she refused. But Frederick V of Denmark, on the recommendation of his minister Johann von Bernstorff, invited Klopstock to come and live at the Danish court and finish his epic at four hundred thalers a year. On his way to Copenhagen the poet took kindly to a Hamburg admirer, Margareta Moller; in 1754 he married her; in 1758 she died, breaking his heart and darkening his verse. He commemorated her in the fifteenth canto of The Messiah, and in some of the most moving of his odes. He stayed in Copenhagen twenty years, fell from favor when Bernstorff was dismissed, returned to Hamburg, and in 1773 published the final cantos of his massive poem.
It began with an invocation echoing Milton; then through twenty cantos it told the sacred story from the meditations of Christ on the Mount of Olives to his ascension into heaven. After taking almost as long to write his epic as Jesus had taken to live it, Klopstock concluded with a grateful Te Deum:
Lo, I have reached my goal! The stirring thought
Thrills through my spirit. Thine all-powerful arm,
My Lord, my God, alone hath guided me
By more than one dark grave, ere I might reach
That distant goal! Thou, Lord, hast healed me still,
Hast shed fresh courage o’er my sinking heart,
Which held with death its near companionship;
And if I gazed on terrors, their dark shapes
Soon disappeared, for thou protectedst me!
Swiftly they vanished.—Savior, I have sung
Thy Covenant of Mercy. I have trod
My fearful path! My hope hath been in Thee!83
The Messiah was welcomed by orthodox Germany as the best poetry yet written in the German language. Goethe tells of a Frankfurt councilor who read the first ten cantos “every year in Passion Week, and thus refreshed himself for the entire year.” As for himself, Goethe could enjoy the epic only by “discarding certain requirements which an advancing cultivation does not willingly abandon.”84 Klopstock poured his piety so profusely into his verse that his poem became a succession of lyrics and Bachian chorales rather than the fluent narrative that an epic should be; and we find it difficult to follow a lyric flight through twenty cantos and twenty-five years.
As Voltaire generated his opposite in Rousseau, so Lessing, by his skepticism, rationalism, and intellectualism, made Germany feel the need of writers who would, in contrast, recognize the place and rights of feeling, sentiment, imagination, mystery, romance, and the supernatural in human life. In some Germans of this period, especially women, the cult of Empfindsamkeit (sensibility) became a religion as well as a fashion. Darmstadt had a “Circle of Sensitives” whose members made a principle and ritual of sentiment and emotional expression. Rousseau was the Messiah of these spirits. His influence in Germany was far greater than Voltaire’s; Herder and Schiller acknowledged him as a fountainhead; Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason was suffused with Rousseau; Goethe began with Rousseau (“Gefühl ist Alies”), went on to Voltaire (“Gedenke zu leben!”), and ended by knocking their heads together. From England, meanwhile, came the poets of feeling, James Thomson, William Collins, Edward Young, and the novelists of feeling, Richardson and Sterne. The Reliques of Percy and the “Ossianic” poems of Macpherson aroused interest in medieval poetry,
mystery, and romance; Klopstock and Heinrich von Gerstenberg brought to life the pre-Christian mythology of Scandinavia and Germany.
Johann Georg Hamann, before 1781, was the Kapellmeister of the revolt against reason. Born, like Kant, in cloudy Königsberg, strongly imbued by his father with religious feeling, educated in the university, he labored in poverty as a tutor, and found solace in a Protestant faith resilient to all the blows of the Enlightenment. Reason, he contended, is only a part of man, lately developed and not fundamental; instinct, intuition, feeling, are deeper; and a true philosophy will base itself upon the whole nature and gamut of man. Language originated not as a product of reason but as a gift of God for the expression of feeling. Poetry is deeper than prose. Great literature is written not by knowledge and observance of rules and reasons, but by that indefinable quality called genius, which, guided by feeling, overleaps all rules.
Friedrich Jacobi agreed with Hamann and Rousseau. Spinoza’s philosophy, he said, is perfectly logical if you accept logic, but it is false because logic never reaches the heart of reality, which is revealed only to feeling and faith. God’s existence cannot be proved by reason, but feeling knows that without belief in God the life of man is a tragic and hopeless futility.