Anti-Goeze

Eleven open letters to Hamburg's chief pastor, written in four months and stopped only by a ducal ban.

by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing123 passages held

German, the original language

First published: 1778(aged 49)
Original language: German

Overview

The first of these open letters carries a prayer under its number: may it also be the last. Its target, Johann Melchior Goeze, chief pastor of Hamburg, had attacked Lessing in a pamphlet whose title accused him of direct and indirect hostile attacks on the most holy religion, and in the Freiwillige Beiträge, a learned supplement whose name means voluntary contributions; Lessing styled his reply compulsory contributions to the voluntary ones. Ten more followed between April and July 1778. The quarrel had begun with the fragments against revealed religion that Lessing, as ducal librarian at Wolfenbüttel, had printed from the papers of an unnamed author. Goeze called their publication blasphemy; Lessing accused him of trying to turn the Reichshofrat, the emperor's high court, against him. Lessing's answer is that a true Lutheran wants the protection of Luther's spirit, not of Luther's writings, and that this spirit forbids stopping anyone from searching Scripture; pastors who could tell their flock where inquiry must end would have become popes. When Goeze dismissed his reasoning as the logic of a man of the theatre, Lessing granted that the stage might have spoiled his style a little, insisted that his style was not his logic, and asked to talk about truth instead. Literary historians still treat the exchange as a model of sharp polemic built on close reading. In July 1778 Duke Karl of Brunswick withdrew Lessing's exemption from censorship, and a twelfth letter never appeared. Lessing told Elise Reimarus, the anonymous author's daughter, that he would try whether he might still preach undisturbed from his old pulpit, the theatre. Nathan the Wise came out the following spring.

Key concepts

What does "unchristian" mean in these letters?

Whatever conflicts with the spirit of Christianity and its final purpose, not whatever conflicts with a sentence in a book. Lessing defines the word this way so that Goeze's charge can be tested. On that definition, printing objections to Scripture is not unchristian, while stopping people from searching it may well be. The measure is the purpose of the faith, not its letter.

What makes someone a true Lutheran, according to Lessing?

Following Luther's spirit rather than clinging to Luther's writings. Luther broke an authority that told Christians what they might read and conclude, so a Lutheran pastor who sets new limits betrays him. Lessing claims the protection of that spirit for himself. It forbids anyone, pastor or court, to stop a person from searching Scripture by their own lights.

Why does Lessing print arguments he does not share?

Because hidden objections do more harm than answered ones. The fragments of his unnamed author would have reached the world without him; printing them brought them into the light, where they could be refuted. Lessing even welcomes the schoolmasters who march against the unnamed author, since that is why he published him. Faith, on this view, gains when its strongest opponents are answered in public.

Why does Lessing insist that good logic is always the same?

Because whether an argument holds does not depend on where it is spoken or how it is dressed. Goeze called Lessing's reasoning theatre logic. Lessing replies that a sound inference is sound in a play, a sermon or a pamphlet, and that a writer's trade may colour the style without touching the proof. Judge the reasoning, he demands, not the reasoner's profession.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Luther's Spirit Against Luther's Letter

Who may tell a Christian where the search through Scripture has to stop? Lessing answers no one, and stakes the meaning of the Reformation on that answer.

Goeze, Hamburg's chief pastor, treated the printing of the anonymous fragments as blasphemy and hoped the emperor's high court would act. Lessing turns Lutheranism against him. A true Lutheran, he argues, wants the protection of Luther's spirit rather than of Luther's writings, and that spirit forbids hindering anyone from searching Scripture. Pastors who fix the limits of inquiry have made themselves little popes. Printing an objection, on this account, is reporting a poison to the health council, not bringing the plague into the land.

freedom of inquiry
censorship
religious authority
freedom of expression
intellectual freedom
religious criticism
publishing
anonymity
heresy
religion
responsibility
faith
biblical interpretation
religious controversy

Enter a dialogue

A Theatre Man's Logic

Can reasoning be sound when its author writes like a playwright? The letters insist that a style may be faulted while the argument still stands.

Goeze waved Lessing's reasoning away as the logic of a man of the theatre. Lessing grants that the stage may have spoiled his prose a little, then refuses the inference: his style is not his logic, and good logic is the same in a sermon as in a play. He fights with the weapons Goeze despises, irony, mockery and close reading of the pastor's own sentences, while asking again and again to argue about truth instead. The result is polemic that keeps demanding an argument.

rhetoric
polemics
irony
satire
argumentation
public debate
language
metaphor
reputation
hypocrisy
criticism
evidence
truth
authorship
ethics
justice

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 123
distinct concepts: 201
by passages held, corpus-wide: #462

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “argumentation” and “rhetoric”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 16 pairings. 84 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
argumentation	rhetoric	6
censorship	freedom of expression	4
censorship	freedom of inquiry	4
polemics	rhetoric	4
freedom of expression	religion	3
polemics	religion	3
argumentation	religion	2
censorship	religion	2
freedom of inquiry	religion	2
anonymity	polemics	1
anonymity	religion	1
argumentation	censorship	1
argumentation	freedom of inquiry	1
argumentation	polemics	1
censorship	rhetoric	1
religion	rhetoric	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1755 Pope ein Metaphysiker!
Written jointly with Moses Mendelssohn early in their friendship, this pamphlet first drew the line between poet and philosopher that Laocoön would later redraw between poet and painter.
DE
1757 Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel
The workshop of Lessing's dramatic theory: here, against Mendelssohn and Nicolai, he first tested the account of pity that he later rebuilt for the Hamburg Dramaturgy.
DE
1766 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie)
Prepared in Breslau, where Lessing served a Prussian general from 1760 to 1765, this is the one part Lessing published of a larger planned study, and it carries over the poet–philosopher divide of his Pope essay into the arts.
DE
1767 Hamburg Dramaturgy (Hamburgische Dramaturgie)
A periodical before it was a book, written week by week for a theatre that did not last, this became Lessing's principal work on the theory of drama.
DE
1777 Kleine Schriften zum Fragmentenstreit
Short pamphlets from 1777 and 1778, written as the fragments controversy moved from courteous replies to Schumann toward the open feud with Goeze.
DE
1778 A Rejoinder (Eine Duplik)
A reply to a single defender of the Easter accounts, written in the winter of 1777–78, just before the quarrel with Goeze crowded out every other exchange.
DE
1778 Anti-Goeze you are here DE
1778 Axioms (Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt)
Argued point by point rather than fought, this answer to Goeze sets out in compact form the distinction between the Bible and religion that the Anti-Goeze letters defend with ridicule.
DE
1778 Ernst and Falk: Dialogues for Freemasons (Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freimäurer)
Dialogue rather than treatise, and written for Freemasons rather than about them, this is where Lessing carried the tolerance argument of his theological quarrels into a theory of civil society.
DE
1780 The Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts)
Its hundred numbered paragraphs, begun inside the fragments controversy and finished after it, turn the quarrel over scripture into a single picture of religious history.
DE
1784 Gotthold Ephraim Leßings theologischer Nachlaß (Theologischer Nachlass)
An editorial title for papers Lessing kept to himself: two of them come from his early twenties in Berlin, decades before the fragments controversy made his religious views public.
DE
1795 Philosophischer Nachlass
Working notes on metaphysics that Lessing kept to himself, from his Breslau years onward; at least one reached print only after Jacobi's report had made his Spinozism a public question.
DE

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