Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

← Encyclopedia

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German dramatist, critic, and philosopher of religion, born in Kamenz in Saxony on 22 January 1729 and dead at Brunswick on 15 February 1781 — one of the central writers of the German Enlightenment and, in the years after his death, the unwilling occasion of one of its sharpest quarrels. His standing rests first on the theater and on criticism: plays that helped found a serious German national drama, and essays that argued how art and faith should be judged. But the part of his work that reaches into the history of religious and esoteric thought lies at the end of his life, in two short texts and one reported conversation — and in a single proposition he advanced and then declined to nail down, that the human soul might be schooled across more lives than one.

The setting for that late turn was the ducal library at Wolfenbüttel, where Lessing served as librarian from 1770. The post gave him access to manuscripts, and one of them lit the fuse. Between 1774 and 1778 he published, anonymously, a series of Fragments of an Unknown — excerpts from a suppressed manuscript by the Hamburg orientalist Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), who had argued that the Gospels were a human fabrication and miracle a fiction. Lessing did not endorse the radical theses; he presented them as a problem the orthodox would have to answer, and answered some of them himself. The Hamburg chief pastor Johann Melchior Goeze took the publication as an assault on the faith, and the exchange that followed — Lessing’s Anti-Goeze polemics of 1778 — became the Fragmentenstreit, the fragment controversy. The Duke of Brunswick withdrew Lessing’s freedom from censorship in July 1778 and forbade him to publish on religion at all. Silenced in prose, he turned to the stage. Nathan der Weise (1779), with its parable of the three indistinguishable rings, makes the case for tolerance among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in dramatic form — the argument he could no longer make in a pamphlet. The biographical point matters for what came next: Lessing arrived at his last writings already convinced that no single confession held a monopoly on the truth.

The education of the human race

The first of the two texts is The Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts), whose hundred numbered paragraphs appeared in part in 1777 and in full in 1780. Its governing image is a tutor’s curriculum. Revelation is not a fixed deposit handed down once and for all, Lessing argues, but the education of the species: God gives humanity the truths it is ready to receive at each stage of its growth, in the way a teacher gives a child first the lessons it can grasp and only later the ones that would have been wasted on it earlier. On this model revelation and reason are not rivals but earlier and later moments of a single schooling — revelation hurries the race toward truths reason would have reached on its own, more slowly. The Hebrew scriptures are a primer fitted to a people in its childhood, the New Testament a second reader for its adolescence, and a coming age — an eternal gospel, in a phrase Lessing borrows from the medieval Joachimite tradition — will need no scripture at all, because by then the human race will do the right thing because it is right and not for the promise of reward. The whole sequence of revelation, that is, folds toward an autonomous morality in which the props of dogma fall away once they have done their work. It is one of the founding statements of the idea that religions develop, that the history of faith is a history of growth rather than of decline from a pure original.

The argument is bold but not, on its face, esoteric. What has drawn later readers of a more occult cast is the way Lessing closes it. Having brought the race to the threshold of maturity, he turns in the final paragraphs to the individual who will not live to see that maturity arrive, and asks whether the single short life is really all there is. Why, he wonders, should the same person not return to the school more than once — come back to acquire the knowledge and the powers one pass through the world could never furnish? The hypothesis of having lived before is not absurd, he notes, merely because it is the oldest; it was the opinion of the ancients before the schoolmen spoiled it with their dialectics. And if a whole eternity lies open, what is there to lose by taking the road again, however slowly? These late sections entertain metempsychosis — the return of the soul to fresh embodiment — not as doctrine but as a speculative possibility, framed as a question Lessing finds he cannot dismiss. He neither asserts the soul’s recurrence nor disowns it; he leaves it standing as the most economical way to make sense of a moral education too large for one lifetime. That tentative turn is the hook on which a later esoteric and Theosophical reception would hang him. When Theosophy and the wider currents of modern esotericism sought respectable European ancestry for the doctrine of reincarnation, Lessing — a canonical Enlightenment author musing, in plain German, that the soul might come round again — was a natural witness to summon, and was summoned often.

The conversation at Wolfenbüttel

The second strand bears Lessing’s name only because he was already dead when it broke. In the summer of 1780 the young philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi visited Lessing at Wolfenbüttel. According to the account Jacobi published five years later, he showed Lessing a then-unpublished poem of Goethe’s, the defiant Prometheus, expecting it to scandalize him; Lessing replied that the poem’s standpoint was his own. Pressed, he avowed himself a follower of Spinoza, said that the orthodox conceptions of a personal, providential God were finished for him, and gave as his own confession the old formula hen kai pan — the One-and-All, the doctrine that God and the totality of nature are not two things but one. The exchange ran further: no final causes, no free will, no providence of the watchful sort. It was, if reported faithfully, a complete avowal of the position that orthodox Europe held to be the most dangerous on offer — for Spinozism was then a byword for atheism and fatalism, the name one did not speak in approval.

Jacobi confided the conversation to Moses Mendelssohn, Lessing’s old friend and the most respected Jewish philosopher of the age, and the two fell into a correspondence over what it had meant. In 1785 Jacobi published that correspondence, without Mendelssohn’s blessing, as Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza, in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn — to Mendelssohn a grave breach of confidence. Jacobi’s purpose was polemical, not antiquarian. He held that consistent rational demonstration, followed to its end, leads inexorably to Spinoza’s system; that Spinoza’s system is fatalism and, at bottom, a denial of the living God; and that the only escape is a salto mortale, a deadly leap, out of reason and into faith. Lessing — the most reasonable man of the age, the very ornament of the Enlightenment — was Jacobi’s prize exhibit: proof that the proudest reason ends in the abyss. Mendelssohn rushed to rescue both his friend’s memory and his own rational theism, in Morning Hours (1785) and the unfinished To Lessing’s Friends (1786); he disputed that Lessing had meant his Spinozism in any crude sense, reading it instead as a refined or purified doctrine. He died in January 1786, in the thick of the dispute, and his friends laid the strain of it at Jacobi’s door.

This quarrel — the Pantheismusstreit, the controversy over pantheism — drew in much of educated Germany: Kant, Herder, Hamann, and the rising generation of idealists. Its lasting effect was the opposite of what Jacobi intended. Far from burying Spinoza as the proof that reason ends in ruin, it made him a name one could now pronounce, argue over, even embrace. A younger cohort took from the controversy not Jacobi’s warning but the attraction of the One-and-All itself: Goethe, whose Prometheus had been the spark, read Spinoza as a poet of nature’s divinity; Herder gave the One-and-All a warm, vitalist coloring in his dialogues on God; and Schelling and Hegel built their own systems in its long shadow. The forbidden name became the common property of German philosophy, and the broad sympathetic immanentism that fed German idealism and Romanticism — the sense that the divine is not above the world but the world’s own depth — owes its respectability in part to a conversation Lessing may or may not have had exactly as Jacobi remembered it.

What can and cannot be established

The boundary between these two strands is worth drawing sharply, because they do not stand on the same footing. The Education of the Human Race is Lessing’s own text, published under conditions he chose, available to be read in his own words; its argument and its tentative flirtation with the returning soul are matters of record. The avowal of Spinozism is not. It survives in a single source — the memoir of an opponent who published it after Lessing could no longer confirm, qualify, or deny a word of it, and who had every motive to render his subject’s position in its starkest, most damning form. Mendelssohn, who had known Lessing for thirty years, did not recognize the portrait. Whether Lessing was a settled Spinozist, a man trying out a position in conversation, or a wit baiting an earnest young visitor cannot be recovered from Jacobi’s pages alone. The dates and the texts are firm ground; the man’s last creed is reported testimony, and contested testimony at that.

What can be said is that the two strands rhyme. The author of the Education treated revelation as a curriculum the race outgrows; he was a man who set the search above the finding, who wrote in 1778 — in the heat of the Goeze quarrel — that if God offered him all truth in one hand and the lifelong striving after truth in the other, he would humbly ask for the left, since pure truth is for God alone. A hen kai pan that dissolves the personal, intervening deity into the order of nature is exactly the destination such a temperament might reach, and exactly the one it might decline to fix in a formula. The figure who emerges is consistent in this much: he preferred the open road to the closed system, the question to the catechism. He sits, in this respect, at the far end of the road from a confessional reformer such as Philipp Melanchthon, who two centuries earlier had labored to write the Lutheran faith down in fixed articles; where Melanchthon’s life was given to settling doctrine, Lessing’s late work was given to keeping it unsettled.

The afterlife of his name belongs to the second strand more than the first. He became, against his will, the test case for a single question: whether Spinoza could be spoken aloud in a Christian Europe — whether the One-and-All was a heresy to be exorcised or a thought to be thought. The dramatist who had staged revelation as an ongoing schooling, with no final examination in view, was posthumously enrolled as the proof that the most enlightened man of the age had, in the end, no personal God to pray to. His friends called it slander and his enemies called it candor; what neither could do was ask him. The man who would not close the book on revelation became, in death, the one figure over whom the whole of educated Germany reopened it.

Texts and scholarship

The two key works are short and well edited. The Education of the Human Race circulates in English in several translations, including the early version by Fred. W. Robertson (1858) and the standard modern scholarly text in H. B. Nisbet’s Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2005); a public English rendering of the 1777 portion is hosted by the German History in Documents and Images project, and an editorial overview of the work’s argument is given by Encyclopædia Britannica. The documents of the controversy are gathered in English in G. Vallée, J. B. Lawson, and C. G. Chapple, The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi (University Press of America, 1988), and Jacobi’s own writings in George di Giovanni’s translation, F. H. Jacobi: The Main Philosophical Writings (McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1994); the German Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit were edited by Heinrich Scholz in 1916. The historiography of the episode is the subject of Frederick C. Beiser’s The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Harvard University Press, 1987), whose opening chapters made the controversy central to the story of post-Kantian thought, and a compact reference account is given in the Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon and in the survey article on the Pantheism Controversy. For Lessing’s life and thought as a whole the authoritative biography is H. B. Nisbet’s Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life, Works, and Thought (Oxford University Press, 2013).

→ Related: John Toland · Theodore Parker · Spinozism · Pantheism · Reincarnation · Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe · Jewish Philosophy · Esotericism · Theosophy · Philipp Melanchthon