LESSING, G. E.

LESSING, G. E. (1729–1781), was a German dramatist, historian, and essayist. Born in Kamenz, the son of a Lutheran pastor, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing went to university in Leipzig in 1746 to study theology, which his interest in drama soon caused him to abandon. He moved to Berlin in 1748 and there became acquainted with noted Enlightenment figures. Between 1755 and 1760 Lessing spent time in Leipzig and Berlin as a journalist. In 1760 he took up residence in Breslau, where he wrote his famous drama Minna von Barnhelm (1767–1777) and his treatise comparing literary and visual arts criticism, Laokoon (1766). In 1766 Lessing became resident critic for a new theater in Hamburg and composed the Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767). The theater soon failed, and Lessing finally became librarian at the library of the duke of Brunswick in Wolfenbüttel. Here he pursued intently his heretofore intermittent theological and historical studies. His publication of anonymous fragments from a manuscript by Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), attacking Christianity, provoked heated opposition from orthodox Lutherans, and Lessing eventually became embroiled in polemics with the Hamburg pastor Johann Melchior Goeze (1717–1786). Upon being placed under censorship by the duke in 1778, Lessing answered with his famous play Nathan the Wise (1779), which pleads for religious toleration. He died in Braunschweig in 1781. Lessing's theological tracts include Vindication of Hieronymous Caradanus (1754); Leibniz on Eternal Punishments (1773); Berengarius Turonesis (1770); "Editor's Counterpropositions," prefacing Reimarus's fragments (1777); New Hypotheses Concerning the Evangelists Seen as Merely Human Historians (1778); Axiomata (1778); and The Education of Mankind (1780).

Lessing's theological reflections have produced divergent interpretations. He is variously seen as an Enlightenment rationalist, basing knowledge upon mathematical models, or as an irrationalist influenced by British empiricism. There are sound textual grounds for both positions, but both presuppose a consistent and relatively complete theory on Lessing's part. Lessing is most effectively interpreted not as a consistent theorist, however, but as one caught up in the cognitive crisis of precritical philosophy between 1750 and 1781. Rationalistic and empiricist paradigms are evident as organizational principles in his handling of religious data.

Religion, specifically revealed religion, became an acute problem for Lessing because its medium is history. "Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason," he wrote in On the Proof of the Spirit and the Power (1777). Reason, he argued, posits a mathematical mode for all reality. The inner truth of being evinces the formal features of necessity, universality, and intelligibility; truth about God must accord with the formal structure of reason. Historical truth is, on the other hand, always concerned with what, empirically, has occurred. But empirical events are structurally accidental, that is, their contradiction is always possible; this generates the accidental essence of the historical. To base metaphysical and moral truth about God and human relation to God on accident would accordingly constitute metabasis eis allo genos (passage into another conceptual realm). Lessing does not flatly deny, for instance, the historical truth of Christ's resurrection. Letting it be accepted as historically possible, he nevertheless balks at drawing a conclusion of salvational importance from such an "accidental" event. History would thereby become a "spider's thread," too weak for the weight of eternity.

Because Lessing freed himself from orthodox dependence upon the literal word of the Bible, he was able to entertain various theses concerning the purely historical origins of the books of the New Testament. He can thus be considered an early exponent of higher criticism.

Through Lessing's reflections there runs an empiricist, if not irrationalist, counterthesis: Humankind as it really is—in history and as historical being—is not a rationalist, grounding moral activity on rational insight into the nature of God. From his youthful poetic fragment "Religion" to his late "collectanea to a book," The Education of Mankind, Lessing complained of the benightedness of human consciousness. Indeed, he sometimes viewed reason as a destructive force that has removed humanity from a primitive innocence. At any rate, humankind, left to its own powers, would wander about for "many millions of years" in error, without reaching moral and religious perfection. De facto, humanity has fallen from a primordial state (be it in fact or only in allegory) and is cognitively limited. De facto, humans do not possess a rational consciousness; they are limited to "unclear" ideas. In short, human consciousness is sensate-empirical. Along with humanity's benighted cognition goes its essentially emotional psychology. Images, not abstract ideas, move humans to action.

Lessing clearly separated himself from Lutheran orthodoxy, but he expressed his appreciation for it: Historical Christianity at least addresses humans as they de facto are. Neological and rationalist theologies, on the other hand, assume humans to be rational; this, history proves false. Lessing thus repeatedly opposed theological "liberals" such as J. A. Eberhard (1739–1809).

Lessing reconciled rationalism and Christianity by distinguishing between Christianity as history and Christianity's contemporary meaning; he then brought the two together through the notion of the progressivity of history. Humankind, clearly incapable of reaching moral perfection, is in need of a directional impulse from beyond. Lessing accordingly accepts hypothetically the basic Christian position that God has entered history. But for Lessing, God enters history as an educator who uses prerational means (e.g., miracles) to stimulate human evolution toward rational self-sufficiency. The Old and New Testaments are thus stages leading to a new eternal covenant, not unlike that envisioned by some rationalists, in which humankind will reach per-fection.

In the modern period, revealed religion is valid independent of any historical proofs because it has the function to stimulate humankind's progressively improving capacity for rational self-reflection. The effects (still evident) of a maturing Christianity, not its historical miracles, become the criterion of the inner truth of Christianity. True religion improves humankind.

Lessing's theology does not constitute a worked-out philosophy; rather, it evinces a laborious and painful encounter with revolutionary tendencies of the modern world. His progressive view of history constitutes an early link in the great theodicies of historical evolution developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly by Hegel.

Lessing's influence on posterity has been ambiguous. He founded no school and had no followers, yet his theological efforts encompass and epitomize the theological currents of the eighteenth century, currents that influenced subsequent developments critically. In addition, he was a master stylist and rhetorician. Lessing's writings are masterfully, even dramatically, constructed. Here is the source of his lasting influence. He has historical importance because of the content of his theologizing and enduring appeal because of the creative form of his writing.

Bibliography

An agreed-upon interpretation of Lessing's theology is lacking, and great divergencies among scholars are evident. In the twentieth century some found Lessing to be a secular rationalist. In this connection, see Martin Bollacher's Lessing: Vernunft und Geschichte; Untersuchungen zum Problem religiöser Aufklärung in den Spätschriften (Tübingen, 1978) and Martin Haug's Entwicklung und Offenbarung bei Lessing (Gütersloh, 1928). Bollacher's study is a particularly good presentation of this view. Since the 1930s some scholars have found Lessing to be a theist, even Christian to a degree—at any rate, at least receptive to the idea of revelation. For two very important works concerning this thesis, see Arno Schilson's Geschichte im Horizont der Vorsehung: G. E. Lessings Beitrag zu einer Theologie der Geschichte (Mainz, 1974) and Helmut Thielicke's Offenbarung, Vernunft und Existenz: Studien zur Religionsphilosophie Lessings, 3d ed. (Göttingen, 1957). My study G. E. Lessing's Theology: A Reinterpretation (The Hague, 1977) is an attempt to integrate the two traditions by viewing Lessing not as a systematic thinker but as one who evinced contradictions and hovered between secularism and Christianity. For two introductions in English to Lessing's theology, see Henry Allison's Lessing and the Enlightenment (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966) and Henry Chadwick's "Introduction," in Lessing's Theological Writings (Stanford, Calif., 1957), pp. 9–49.

L. P. Wessell, Jr. (1987)