Nathan does not deny the shortcomings of his own people, but he points out that everyone is simply born into a faith and cannot really help it, unless, which proves to be the decisive motivating factor for the Templar to strike a friendship with Nathan, one recognizes and acknowledges the universal condition of all people here on earth: ‘it would be enough to be called human’ (533; my trans.). As Nathan emphasizes, the primary criterion in determining who we all are as individuals would be “ein Mensch / Zu heißen” (533; to be called human), and not a religious specification, whether one is a Christian, a Jew, or a Muslim.
Soon thereafter, Nathan is called to Saladin’s court, since the Sultan needs money and hopes to borrow it from the Jew, who notoriously has rarely lent money before to anyone. However, the situation has changed, since Nathan is thankful to the Templar for having saved his daughter; that, in turn, was possible only because Saladin had spared the Templar’s life, so the Jew now declares his readiness to help out the Sultan in whatever need he might find himself (535). Nothing is the same any longer in Lessing’s play, which sets the stage for profound, innovative reflections on the meaning of religion.
When he has arrived at the court, Nathan clearly knows that Saladin might want to borrow money from him since he is the only one in the city rich enough to fill the state coffers with his credit. However, the ruler, determined to set up a trap that would allow him to force the Jew to submit under his will, at first inquires about why the people call him ‘the Wise,’ only then to probe further whether Nathan could tell him which one of the three faiths would be the true one, a most delicate question, for sure, which might, however, serve him well to snare the Jew and then force him to grant the huge loan needed for his government. Even though Nathan at first insists that he is a Jew, and hence would not be able to say anything else, Saladin insinuates that he, as a wise person, must have reflected on this issue for a long time and so ought to be able to decide on his own which would be the only true religion (553).
After some deliberation, which confirms his wisdom, Nathan decides to tell the Sultan first a story that might help him to explain his position vis-à-vis the three faiths and that would free him from the rhetorical snare. This narrative functions like a parable and contains, as is the case in Boccaccio’s version, a very startling account about a father who owns a highly valuable heirloom that he hands down to his most beloved son. That ring, however, guarantees that the wearer would be loved by everybody (“Und Menschen angenehm zu machen” (400, p. 556; to make him loved by people)). Understanding the ring’s true value, that father, living somewhere in the Orient, stipulated that the ring would always stay within the family and that every next father would pass it on to the one son whom he loves the most. One day, however, there is a father for the first time who has three sons whom he loves equally. Not knowing what to do in this dilemma, he has a goldsmith create two perfect replicas, which he then can hand out secretly to his sons, pretending each time that it is the authentic, original ring, which actually can no longer be distinguished from the others. Thus, the father deliberately creates a situation in which truth can no longer be determined, as far as it concerns the family inheritance and, hence, the continuation of the dynasty. All this, however, has to be read in a religious context.
After the father’s death, each of the three young men comes forward and claims the inheritance, as authenticated by their own ring. But with three rings being completely identical, all their arguing achieves nothing. Consequently, they go to court and want the judge to make the final decision, which proves to be impossible, of course. The father has passed away, and there are no differences among the rings, at least in their physical appearance. When the judge is about to dismiss the case as frivolous, he suddenly remembers the peculiar property of the original ring, “beliebt zu machen” (500, p. 558; to make someone to be loved), and this “Vor Gott und Menschen angenehm” (501, p. 559; pleasing to God and the people). The judge surmises that the father no longer wanted to tolerate the dominance of the one ring and thus had the two copies made as an expression of his equal love for the other sons. It might also be possible, as he states, that the original ring got lost, hence none of the present rings might be authentic, but this would not change anything regarding the ring’s religious symbolism since the father had passed one on to his sons out of love, in the firm conviction that the respective son would understand the meaning of his gesture.
The judge’s advice consists in urging the three sons to vie for the love of all people, to demonstrate harmony and goodness, devotion to God, and completely open-minded love (559). In thousand times thousand years, the three sons should return to the court and only then ask for the final judgment, which, however, at that distant point in time, would be reached by another judge much wiser than himself, that is, God Father in person.11 That future judge would know how to determine the effects of the authentic ring because only the one son truly loved by people everywhere could be identified as the veritable heir.
Nathan also explains further the nature of religion by pointing out that all faiths are based on narratives, “Geschichte” (459, p. 557; history), which had been recorded sometime in the past and which require from all faithful to believe it, without having full proof in any respect. Everyone, however, trusts his/her own family story the most, so whoever follows a certain faith thus follows the belief embraced by his/her own forefathers, or family. As Nathan then asks the Sultan, how one could trust less the own predecessors than those of other people (558), he lays the foundation for the spiritual teaching to follow suit. This story serves him as the fundamental explanation of why he refuses to distinguish those three rings himself—that is, the three religions—since God Himself did not want a difference to be noted among those rings (557), whereas love would be the only true sign of an authentic religion. This parable concludes with a profound statement regarding the need to pursue true tolerance. Neither history nor culture could be drawn upon for contemporary guarantees concerning the identification of true religion. Political or military power means nothing in the effort to determine the true faith because faith cannot be proven and is something of a very personal nature.
The Sultan at first resists drawing the logical conclusion, insisting on the natural and critical differences among all religions, which find their expression even in foodstuff and clothing (557). In response, Nathan has to instruct him that Saladin pays attention only to external matter, whereas the true nature of religion rests in the spiritual dimension, where, ultimately, there are no real differences among the religions, as long as it pursues the ideals of love.
The subsequent developments of Lessing’s play quickly prove to be the practical exemplification of those theoretical approaches outlined in the ring parable, as idealistic as they might be. The Templar falls in love with Nathan’s daughter Recha, who strongly responds to his feelings. But Nathan then figures out that they cannot marry, as much as they would like to do so, because they are actually brother and sister. The Templar is, as Nathan explains, the son of a German woman and a Muslim man, who ultimately turns out to have been the Sultan Saladin’s brother. Recha was their daughter and was orphaned when her mother died early. The son had been left behind in Germany when the couple had left Europe to return to the warm climate of the Holy Land, but both then died, leaving their daughter behind, whom Nathan had adopted to compensate for the loss of his own family who had been murdered by Christians. This then means that Recha is really a Christian, but was raised by a Jew, who now can establish a friendship with her uncle, the Muslim Sultan, who simultaneously embraces the Templar as his own nephew. The old enmity between the religions is thus eliminated in that unique moment, and Lessing pronounces that tolerance should be the guiding principle for all of them. In other words, Nathan the Wise promotes a humanist ideal characteristic of the Enlightenment era and sets the standard of how to define tolerance in the true sense of the word.
Impressively, until today, Lessing’s play has enjoyed trem
endous popularity and is regularly performed on countless German theater stages and available in print in many languages, such as in Hebrew (1874), Russian (1897), Japanese (1920), Korean (1991), Arabic (2005), and Chinese (2011).12 Here, we encounter a practical example of what tolerance could mean, and we are invited to probe for ourselves how the concept of a universal family where the individual members might have different faiths could be applied to us as well. But we need first to ask specifically what Lessing implied with his play.13 How does tolerance work out in Nathan the Wise? The ring parable is only the theoretical base, whereas the events involving the main actors need to conform to the idealizing message.
As it turns out, Nathan recognizes the young Templar as the son of one of his old friends, long dead, who had belonged to the Muslim faith. That man had been Saladin’s brother, Assad, who apparently had fallen in love with a German, Christian woman, with whom he went to her home country. They had two children, and they left the boy back in Germany when they returned to the Holy Land. Both parents then died, and the girl was left as an orphan. For that reason, Nathan adopted her and raised her as his own daughter, giving her a Jewish name. His own family had been brutally murdered by Christians, when they had burned down his house, so taking in the Christian girl represented a strong change of heart in Nathan and the beginning of a growing sense of tolerance. As he admits to the friar, in face of the terrible situation with his family murdered, he had sworn hatred against all Christians (596). Yet, reason had returned to him, and he then had accepted God’s own plans for his life, though he could not understand the reasons for his enormous pain and suffering. All of his love for his sons he then had turned toward the girl, which makes the friar formulate: “Ihr seid ein Christ! – Bei Gott, Ihr seid ein Christ!” (597; You are a Christian! – By God, you are a Christian). Nathan does not accept this at face value and turns it around by saying the same of the friar: “das macht Euch mir / zum Juden!” (597; this make you for me to a Jew).
Once the subsequent denouement, which we have already looked at, has taken place, Saladin acknowledges the Templar as his own nephew, and the Templar embraces Recha as his sister, accepting the fact that he cannot take her as his wife. Nathan turns out to have been a close friend of Saladin’s brother, who had loved a Christian woman from Germany. She delivered two children with him, and religious difference did not make any differences to them. In other words, these three world religions prove to be, in Lessing’s view, close family members and should acknowledge each other as deeply related with each other, loving the same father and striving for the same love.
Within the play, several other significant features deserve attention. When the Templar converses with his superior, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and presents to him the case of Nathan and Recha, without mentioning names, he defends the Jew to some extent against the Patriarch’s vehement criticism of this sacrilegious behavior, pointing out that Nathan had raised his daughter neither as a Christian nor as a Jewish, but as a devout person teaching her as much about God “als der Vernunft genügt” (IV, 2, 179, p. 578; as is adequate for reason). The Patriarch gets into a rage and wants to see that Jewish man immediately burnt at the stake, disregarding all arguments by the Templar about the humanitarian attitude by the father, but the young man recognizes the irrationality and ideological fury by the Patriarch and departs from him, saying sarcastically that he regrets not being able to listen any longer to this splendid sermon (579).
For the Templar, the situation proves to be highly complicated because he is opposed to Jews, and even abhorred that a Jewish man could have raised a Christian girl as his own. However, he has already understood Nathan’s true character, holds great respect for him, and finds himself now shocked, even abhorred, about the Patriarch’s resolute opinion that the Jew deserves to die in the flames although he had lovingly taken care of the orphan (578). This scene underscores the extent to which Lessing was opposed to any kind of dogmatism and orthodoxy.
Lessing was the first German, maybe even the first European, writer to place a Jewish character as the central figure on the stage; and this not with the intention of satire, but of introducing a thoroughly positive hero. He also deserves our attention for his willingness to have young people enjoy a close relationship with each other—marriage, or as siblings—despite their religious difference, which ultimately turns out to be irrelevant because they belong to the same universal family anyway.14
By contrast, the official representative of Christianity, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, is depicted as corrupt, ideologically oriented, disrespectful of all humanities, brutal in his attitude toward foreigners, and careless in his critical analysis of human conditions. This Patriarch goes so far as to try to convince the Templar to do service for him first as a spy and then as an assassin of Saladin, but he rejects both tasks resolutely since they would be in opposition to all of his own values and ethics. A poor friar has to convey the Patriarch’s message, but he is only obedient according to his position; he secretly disagrees with the murderous plans and actually feels deeply pleased when he realizes that the Templar will not meet the Patriarch’s request. The young man finds it horrifying that he could kill the very man who had spared his life from execution. For him, this would constitute villainy, whereas the Patriarch views it as a worthy task, even for a Templar knight since Saladin is the common enemy of all of Christianity. For him, utilitarianism matters the most, as long as it serves the purposes of the Christian Church; God would bless even such a betrayal. However, the Templar knows only too well how much gratitude he owes the Sultan, irrespective of the religious difference, and he is also deeply subscribed to knightly values that are not bound by religious concepts.
Even though there is no specific discussion of tolerance itself, the entire scene beautifully reflects the meaning of the relevant ethics that must be universal and cannot be bound by any specific religion. The Templar, as hot-headed as he appeared at the beginning—rejecting Nathan and his family because they are Jews—now lives up to his own ideals and sends the friar away in disgust, knowing too well that he would betray his inner value system if he were to become a tool in the Patriarch’s hands. For the friar, this strong stance represents a high value that he can appreciate, although he himself simply obeys his lord and carries out his task as a messenger. If there is tolerance in this scene, then it proves to be a pragmatic one, not limited simply to words.
This also applies to Nathan since he has adopted the Christian girl and raised her as his own daughter, giving her even a Christian nurse to take care of her, Daja. All three religions thus intertwine in this play, and ultimately, as the denouement illustrates, the various representatives prove to be members of one large family. Most tragically, as he reveals to the friar, just a few days earlier in the past when the girl had arrived, the Christians had killed the entire Jewish population in Darun, amongst them Nathan’s wife and their seven sons. Nathan had deeply grieved for three days and then accepted the orphan girl, who was the daughter of his deceased friend, Assad, who was, as we learn later, Saladin’s brother. When the friar understands this situation, he calls Nathan a ‘true Christian’, irrespective of his Jewish faith, identifying the true faithful with the one who lives by the highest moral and ethical ideals.
All this finds vivid expression also in one of the final scenes in which Recha is afraid that the account about how Nathan had adopted her might rob her of him as her father. She loves Nathan fully and insists, addressing Saladin, that blood bonds do not necessarily make a father-daughter relationship. Although the Sultan knows that she is, at heart and from her origin, a Christian, he offers himself as her new father, out of deep sympathy for this young woman whom he would like to embrace with his full heart to help and soothe her. When Nathan and the Templar arrive at the court, Saladin greets them as his good friends, indicating how much he has already transgressed any traditional religious forms of identity, and treats them as what they are, as admirable human beings.
Intellectual
and Spiritual Transformations
Lessing’s play, Nathan the Wise, sets the stage for our subsequent discussion of whether we might be able to identify a discourse on toleration and tolerance. For Lessing, there was no higher value but tolerance, as best identified by the Jew Nathan, whose thinking and actions soon bring out the best in the other figures, such as the Templar, the friar, and Saladin. It is well possible to identify direct connections between the individual figures in the play and, on the one hand, major philosophers, such as Spinoza, Christian Wolff, Immanuel Kant, on the other, virtues and ideals.15 As the ring parable indicates, the true message of any religion should be love, at least within the context of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Curiously, however, the play is at first predicated on horrible forms of intolerance. The Templar represents the most violent form of religious hatred, being a leading figure of the Second Crusade. He hates the Muslims, of course, and has only contempt for Jews. Yet, as soon as he has a chance to converse with Nathan, his rigid position begins to melt down, and he begins to see the true value of this man’s character. Saladin at first regards the Christians collectively as his worst enemies but then has to recognize in the Templar his own nephew. He also views Jews very suspiciously and tries to blackmail Nathan to grant him a huge credit, but once he has learned the message contained in the ring parable, his entire attitude changes. Lessing’s play thus provides a powerful platform for the practice of tolerance.
Toleration and Tolerance in Medieval European Literature Page 2