Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 294th anniversary of the birth of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (22 January 1729–15 February 1781), who was born in Kamenz in Saxony on this date in 1729.
Last year’s post on Lessing focused on his interest in education and the important role that education plays in the representatives of the Enlightenment. In addition to his philosophical and theological works, Lessing was also a dramatist of note, and he used the theater as another platform for his ideas (like Sartre in the twentieth century). One of Lessing’s important plays was Nathan the Wise, which is a drama about religious tolerance set in Jerusalem in the time of Saladin. In the play, Saladin says to Nathan:
I thought the faiths which I have named
Were easily distinguishable,
Even to their raiment, even to meat and drink.
Nathan responds:
But yet not as regards their proofs;
For do not all rest upon history, written or traditional
And history can also be accepted
Only on faith and trust. Is it not so?
Now, whose faith and confidence do we least misdoubt?
That of our relatives? Of those whose flesh and blood we are,
Of those who from our childhood
Have lavished on us proofs of love,
Who ne’er deceived us, unless ‘twere wholesome for us so?
How can I place less faith in my forefathers
Than you in yours? or the reverse?
Can I desire of you to load your ancestors with lies.
So that you contradict not mine? Or the reverse?
And to the Christian the same applies.
Is that not so?
The relationship of the Enlightenment to tradition, in which the idea of history plays a crucial role, is here used for argue for toleration among the Abrahamic traditions. For the Enlightenment, our relation to tradition is an accident of history on a par with our parentage; as no one chooses their parents, no one chooses their faith, which is conveyed to us by our forefathers.
In the chapter “History and Revelation” in Lessing’s Theological Writings, edited and introduced by Henry Chadwick, Chadwick described the influence of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus on Lessing:
“The tract is of great importance for understanding Lessing; yet it may be doubted whether any writing equally influential in the history of modern religious thought has been marked by a comparable quantity of logical ambiguity. His first anxiety is to undermine the unqualified certainty which, according to orthodox apologetic, attaches to prophecy and miracle. Both depend upon historical testimony and are therefore to be accepted on the reliability of that testimony. Unqualified certainty is not available for anyone not there at the time. If all ‘historical truths’ are uncertain, then they cannot prove anything. In short, ‘accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.’ The resurrection of Christ is a past event; it cannot prove the truth that he is Son of God, an idea ‘against which my reason rebels.’ The argument jumps from one category of truths to a completely different category, and ‘if that is not a μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος then I do not know what Aristotle meant by this phrase. . . . That is the ugly, broad ditch which I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make the leap’.”
The embedded Lessing quote refers to the Aristotelian notion of μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος (“metabasis eis allo genos”), which can be loosely translated as “a change into another kind of existence” (though the phrase has been translated in many ways, as we shall see below).
For some further context for the quote from Lessing that Chadwick embedded in the above paragraph, here is the passage from Lessing’s essay “On the proof of the spirit and of power” that includes the quote:
“That the same Christ to whose resurrection I can make no significant historical objection consequently proclaimed himself the Son of God, and that his disciples consequently regarded him as such — all this I most willingly accept. For these truths, as truths of one and the same class, follow quite naturally from one another. But to make the leap from this historical truth into a quite different class of truths, and to require me to revise all my metaphysical and moral concepts accordingly; to expect me to change all my basic ideas on the nature of the deity because I cannot offer any credible evidence against the resurrection of Christ — if this is not a ‘transition to another category’, I do not know what Aristotle meant by that phrase.”
As you can see, the translator of this essay, H. B. Nisbet, rendered μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος as “transition to another category,” which works also. The change or transition of belief that Lessing sees as being required to make the leap from historical beliefs to beliefs about supernatural events expressed in history might be taken as the religious parallel of the is/ought distinction such that there is an unbridgeable divide between facts such as might be related by history and metaphysical beliefs such as might be related in religion.
The traditional term for the manifestation of religious truth in history is revelation, and Lessing wrote a very short essay in eleven numbered remarks on this, “On the Origin of Revealed Religion,” of which number five is as follows:
“…out of the religion of nature, which was not capable of universal and uniform practice, it was necessary to construct a positive religion, just as a positive law had been constructed, for the same reason, out of the law of nature.”
This is another interesting parallel, like the above parallel noted with the is/ought distinction. Lessing briefly develops this distinction between natural religion and positive religion, which allows him to handle religion as a social institution separately from the naïve “natural” religion that he attributes to the individual. The implied identification of revealed religion with a socially constructed positive religion begs a question that Lessing does not answer: is there one revelation to the individual that results in individual natural religion, and another revelation that results in positive religion, or is the individual’s natural religion the “revelation” upon which positive religion is constructed? Honestly, I can’t tell what Lessing’s intention was in this cryptically short piece.
One thing, however, is quite clear, and that is that Lessing was an Enlightenment rebel who was willing to write things that, a hundred years earlier, would have resulted in a gruesome death at the hands of the authorities (and about the same time that Hume was writing his Dialogues on Natural Religion). It is a testimony of the extent to which Europe had changed in the interval.
Further Resources
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