Lessing as Editor of Reimarus

Lessing’s title for his publication of the Fragments in 1774 and 1777 is deliberately misleading. He had come into possession of a Reimarus manuscript, which its author had kept secret, fearing that publication would bring him and his family into disrepute. Lessing had had plans to publish the whole manuscript in 1771 but they had foundered on the refusal of the theological censor to give his approval, even though he agreed to do nothing to prevent its printing. ¹ 1771 was the year in which Lessing moved from Hamburg where he had developed a German theatre, notably with his Minna von Barnhelm, to the take up the post of Librarian at the Library of the Duke of Brunswick. He remained there till his death in 1781, continuing to write major plays in German, Emilia Galotti and Nathan the Wise. The chance to publish material from Reimarus’ manuscript came when he was granted freedom from censorship to publish manuscripts from the Wolfenbüttel Library.

1774 saw the publication of ‘Of the Toleration of Deists’. It sets out clearly the subject of the debate: that it is about revealed religion and, in particular, the biblical history; and about tolerance and tyranny (the latter a theme which Lessing had explored in his drama, Emilia Galotti, which premiered in Brunswick in March 1772). The publication of this first fragment raised little controversy.

In 1777, Lessing published a further five sections: these show Reimarus as a powerful exponent of deist criticisms of the Bible and revealed religion in general. The first, ‘Of the Denunciation of Reason from the Pulpit’, attacks the doctrine of the corruption of human reason and its basis in the biblical story of the Fall and of Paul’s dictum about the obedience of faith. The second, ‘Of the Impossibility of a Revelation which all could believe in a rational way’ shows painstakingly but powerfully the truth of that proposition. Few could have had adequate grounds for accepting or scrutinising a revelation contained in ancient writings in foreign languages. ‘The Israelites’ Crossing of the Red Sea’ subjects the logistics of that particular exercise to a detailed investigation and suggests that the miracle would lie not so much in the parting of the waters as in getting three million Israelites with their animals, baggage waggons, etc., across in time. The fourth section argues that the books of the Old Testament were not written to reveal a religion, on the grounds that they contain no doctrine of immortality. The fifth ‘On the Story of the Resurrection’, attacks the consistency of the resurrection narratives with great force.

This last fragment caused a storm of controversy in which Lessing engaged with spirit and passion, producing work which is still regarded as some of the finest polemical writing in the German language. Finally, in 1778 he published ‘Of the Purpose of Jesus and his Disciples’, after which his freedom to publish was withdrawn. In 1779 Lessing published his play Nathan the Wise, which was first performed after his death in Berlin on the 14^th May, 1783.

Why did Lessing publish the Fragments? In a letter to his brother in November 1774, Lessing writes, complaining of recent developments in the German theatre and mentioning his own plans: ‘I would prefer to stage a little play with the theologians, if I had any need of the theatre. And in a sense that is what the material I have promised to send Herr Voss is about. But perhaps, just for that reason, it is none too acceptable to him, for he perhaps feels he needs to go carefully with Semler and Teller.’ ²

What primarily concerned Lessing was the inadequacy of contemporary understanding of the traditional, ‘positive’, religions. Rationalists, of whom Reimarus was a particularly powerful example, had argued that many of the central doctrines of the Christian religion were contrary to reason (e.g., the doctrine of the Trinity) and to morality (e.g., the doctrine of eternal punishments for the damned). Equally, they attacked the trustworthiness of the documents which were supposed to contain the divinely revealed truth conveyed by Christianity. On these grounds, they rejected Christianity as a corruption of natural religion. Natural religion, founded on necessary truths of reason, was the only true guide for humanity. The orthodox, by contrast, insisted that Christianity was the revelation of God and therefore must be believed, no matter what criticisms might be levelled against it by corrupt human reason. The Bible was inspired, and the truth of the Christian revelation attested by miracles and the fulfilment of prophecy. Between these two positions the Neologists, like Semler and Teller, sought to find a via media. They believed that there was much in Christianity that was compatible with and analogous to natural religion and that in this way natural religion could support revealed religion. Revealed religion, on the other hand, was not to be identified with the letter of the Bible or of Christian doctrine, both of which were subject to rational scrutiny, but was to be found in the profound moral-religious sense which was the essence of Christianity.

Lessing’s revulsion for the Neologists was occasioned by their failure to define this moral-religious essence and by the fact that in practice what they did was to construct an amalgam of natural and revealed religion, which was neither one thing nor the other but detrimental to both. The question which Lessing wished to pose then was: is it possible to come to an understanding of the positive religions which is truly rational, which involves no submission of reason to religious authority, and which does not prematurely reject positive religion because it fails to conform to rational ways of discovering and expressing the truth?

Lessing himself had already addressed some of these question in his writings, not least in ‘Das Christentum der Vernunft’ ³ and ‘Über die Entstehung der geoffenbarten Religion’. ⁴ In the former, ‘Rational Christianity’, he puts forward a view of the Trinity based on rational principles; in the latter, ‘On the Rise of Revealed Religion’, he explains why revealed religion needed to emerge alongside natural religion, namely in order to provide some agreement and conformity in human society, which would otherwise have entertained a great variety of views of natural religion. Just as positive laws had to be formulated to give clear, if conventional, expression to ideas of natural law in human society, so too with positive religions. They derived their authority from the regard in which their founders were held, who claimed that the conventional element which they taught came from God mediated through themselves; while the essential aspect of such religions came directly through human reason. Thus natural religion and revealed religion are for Lessing both equally true and equally false: true insofar as it was everywhere necessary for the cohesion of society to formulate agreed accounts of religion; false insofar as the agreed elements not only stand alongside, but weaken and suppress the essential truth of natural religion. He concludes: ‘The best revealed or positive religion is the one which contains the fewest conventional additions to natural religion and which least restricts the good effects of natural religion.’ ⁵

This provides a good basis, at least, from which to understand the selection of the Reimarus’ manuscript which Lessing had published by 1777. For Lessing, it gave a clear view about the essential nature of rational religion. It gave an equally clear view of the pragmatic character of positive religions, which made their claims to supernatural authority intelligible but open to the fierce criticism which Reimarus had directed towards them. It demonstrated the inner contradictions of the resurrection narratives and therefore the falsehood of any religion based on them. ⁶ What Lessing now wanted was to offer a yet greater offence than that of the attack on the resurrection narratives. In what did that offence lie?

The text starts relatively acceptably by setting Jesus in the context of the development of Jewish religion. By contrast with the Pharisees, who had introduced a doctrine of the resurrection but taught a very formal notion of morality, Jesus, while agreeing with them on the question of immortality and blessedness, taught a better righteousness. He even held open the possibility that the heathen might not be entirely excluded from the hope of immortality. But then Reimarus interposes a question which takes the enquiry in a wholly new direction, if one which is at least hinted at in Lessing’s piece on the rise of revealed religion. ‘Just as after this there can be no doubt that Jesus in his teaching pointed men to the true great purpose of any religion [viz., to embrace the truths of natural, rational religion], so we are left only with the question what purpose Jesus himself had for himself in his teaching and actions.’ ⁷

As I have suggested elsewhere, the question is slipped in almost as if Reimarus himself had hardly grasped its significance, its originality. ⁸ It cuts across traditional orthodox, Christological enquiries into Jesus and opens out onto a fully historical examination of the documents as Reimarus immediately recognises. ‘We want to know what Jesus’ teaching actually was, what he said and preached, and this is a question of res facti, a question of something that occurred; and, therefore, something that has to be drawn out of the reports of those who wrote the histories.’ ⁹ This involves a close scrutiny of the Gospels: Reimarus’ investigation of the resurrection narratives has already given an example of the kind of critical thinking that this will involve. But it involves more: the question about Jesus’ purpose for himself requires answers in terms of Jesus’ motivations, his hopes and goals, his relationship to his contemporary world and society. Reimarus will attempt to answer the question by asking how key terms which Jesus used—‘Kingdom’, ‘Messiah’, and ‘Son of God’—and his actions in gathering a band of followers, preaching and bringing his message to Jerusalem related to his aims and understanding of the religious and political situation in Roman Palestine.

Reimarus’ answers are distinguished on the one hand by considerable philological sophistication and on the other by too simple a political reading of Jesus’ message and actions. He is able to show how far traditional Christological readings of terms like ‘Son of God’ are from their standard sense in the biblical literature. On the other, having stripped them of their later Christological meanings, he then offers a reading of the Jesus story which casts Jesus as a political messiah, a would-be political liberator of his people, whose efforts ended in failure and whose followers then turned his message into the religious doctrine of a suffering messiah, resurrected by God. What is missing is any attempt to understand Jesus’ message and actions as the work of a religious leader concerned with the fate of his people. His distinction between Jesus’ two purposes creates a divide between the political, this-worldly arena and the religious world of the search for immortality, blessedness However, once the distinction is made, it provokes the question how these two worlds are to be related, and this is a question which will not go away.

The controversies which followed the publication of this last selection from Reimarus’ manuscript were rich and varied. Semler, whom Lessing had singled out in his letter to his brother, wrote a long reply, in which he effectively accepted Reimarus’ philological readings of Jesus’ preaching but then argued that Jesus’ spoke in different ways to different audiences. When he addressed the sarkikoi, he spoke to their material and political expectations; to the pneumatikoi he spoke of the spiritual world (as, for example, in the Fourth Gospel and when he spoke to his disciples on their own). Thus, he spoke both of a political and a suffering messiah. Lessing was, by the time of the publication of Semler’s Beantwortung, forbidden by the censor to reply, but he expressed his deep frustration in his letters. Albert Schweitzer refers to Semler as the inaugurator of the ‘Yes-but’ theology, which he saw as dominating the nineteenth century. ¹⁰ Such contributions did little of themselves to move the debate forward, though who can say how things would have developed if Lessing had been allowed to reply. It was not till the development of a more radical history of religions approach to the biblical texts, and then, later, of a sociology of religion approach in the 1980s, that these questions were more directly addressed.

While the immediate impact of the publication of the Fragments was in this way limited, there were nevertheless important contributions to the debate, which Lessing himself made before the imposition of censorship, that pointed the way forward to theology beyond the rationalism which Reimarus so strongly represented.

As we have seen, Lessing had already been sketching ideas about the relationship between natural and revealed theology before the publication of the Fragments. These earlier pieces echoed ideas widely held among rationalists, that natural religion was primary and that revealed religion was a later development which distorted the truth of natural religion. What is interesting in Lessing’s sketch is the view that natural religion took many diverse forms, such that there needed to be an agreement within communities about the particular form which their religious views should take. Thus, the positive religions were seen as analogous to positive laws, giving an agreed form to insights based on natural law. Revealed religion is seen as an historical development of natural religion, necessary for social cohesion, but nonetheless distorting. This view is developed in different directions in Lessing’s The Education of the Human Race which sees the emergence of the various positive religions as part of a (divinely inspired?) learning process on the part of different communities. There are the beginnings here of the fascination with theologies of history, which draws its main inspiration from Hegel. And history is a theme which will recur again and again in the subsequent controversies, whether in terms of the corrosive effect of historical enquiry into the founding documents of the Christian faith, which forfeit their timeless authority once the historians subject them to critical scrutiny; or whether it be in terms of the contrast Lessing wants to draw between the certainty of rational, a priori truths and the contingent, accidental truths of history. Lessing’s famous dictum that ‘accidental truths of history can never become the proofs of necessary truths of reason’ ¹¹ in a way does no more than draw out one aspect of the problem of developing a truly historical account of religion: namely that it needs to give an account of theological epistemology which is very different from that of the rationalists. Hegel echoed many of Lessing’s concerns in his early essay, The Positivity of the Christian Religion, ¹² and did so in a manner that reflected much of the rationalist spirit of Reimarus. Yet between the writing of this work in 1795–6 and the writing of The Spirit of Christianity in 1798–9, ¹³ great changes take place pointing forward to Hegel’s fully developed philosophy of history.

In the same way, Lessing’s comments on Reimarus’ attack on the resurrection narratives and the inspiration of Scripture pose deep questions for the orthodox. The simple dictum: ‘Religion was there before the Bible’ ¹⁴ points to a religious reality and truth which is very different from that based on an infallible, authoritative text. What is the nature of the faith which found its expression in the biblical records, rather than being inspired by the reading of those texts as authoritative revelation? Lessing’s patient and merciless laying bare of Hauptpastor Goeze’s lack of logical clarity is not only a masterpiece of polemics, but a sustained attempt to draw out the priority of a religion which is based on the spirit, on the inner experience of the believer, not on the slavish acceptance of a supposedly infallible external authority. It is not difficult to see a line here from Lessing’s ‘Axiomata’ to Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion where under the growing influence of romanticism and of Spinoza, religion is described as ‘Anschauung und Gefühl’, a particular way of looking at and experiencing the universe. ¹⁵ Lessing’s ‘play with the theologians’ was not the source of all these ideas; rather, it opened up the dialogue which was conducted with extraordinary creativity in the two decades following the publication of the Fragments.

What ultimately drove Lessing was not the desire to promote a particular understanding of the nature of religious truth, but rather to encourage the most open pursuit of such truth. It is worth quoting a fuller section from his ‘Eine Duplik’ (1778):

It is not the truth which anyone possesses, or imagines he possesses, but rather the honest effort which he has made to come after the truth, which constitutes the value of a human being. For it is not the possession but the searching for the truth which expands his powers, in which alone his ever-growing perfection consists. Possession makes a person docile, idle, proud.—

If God were to hold out to me in his closed right hand all truth and in his left only the ever-active drive towards truth and were to say to me, ‘Choose!’ I would fall with humility on his left and say, ‘Father, give! The pure truth is for you alone!’ ¹⁶