Axioms

Branded an enemy of Christianity, Lessing rearranges his own accused sentences as axioms and defends them one by one.

by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing63 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt
First published: 1778(aged 49)
Original language: German

Overview

In the notes he printed beside the anonymous fragments in 1777, Lessing had set down a few short propositions about the Bible and religion, and Johann Melchior Goeze, Hamburg's chief pastor, had attacked them in two newspapers as the words of an opponent of the Christian religion. Goeze complained that Lessing had planted them like so many axioms. Lessing accepted the word, and in this pamphlet of 1778 he reprints the sentences in a new order, as numbered axioms, and answers Goeze's objections to each, in the hope that the new order alone might make him understood. The axioms carry the core of his position: the Bible plainly contains more than belongs to religion; the letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not religion, so objections to the letter are not objections to the spirit. Christianity existed before any evangelist or apostle wrote, and stood for a long time before the canon was complete; its truth therefore rests on its inner truth and cannot hang on its written records. Then Lessing turns the charge around. If Goeze really believes that Christianity would perish should the writings of the evangelists and apostles ever be lost, the heterodoxy, Lessing says, is Goeze's. The pamphlet opens by admitting that Lessing knows whom he is writing against but hardly whom he is writing for, and it closes on a joke about Johann David Michaelis, the Göttingen biblical scholar: Lessing has no wish to set Goeze on him, and Goeze would never let go of Lessing to chase a fresh quarry anyway. The Anti-Goeze series, begun the same spring, dropped this patient tone for open polemic.

Key concepts

What is the difference between the Bible and religion?

The Bible is a book, and religion is what that book teaches about God and how to live. Lessing holds that the Bible contains more than belongs to religion, so the two cannot simply be the same thing. A doubt about some detail of the book is therefore not automatically a doubt about the faith, just as the letter of a text is not its spirit.

What does Lessing mean by the "inner truth" of Christianity?

The truth a teaching has in itself, which a person can recognise without first proving where the text came from. Lessing argues that Christianity's truth rests on this and not on the historical reliability of its written records. That is why scholarly attacks on the Gospels cannot reach it, and why a believer with no learning can hold it as firmly as a scholar.

What was Christianity before anything was written down?

A faith passed on by spoken teaching. Lessing points out that Christians believed for years before any evangelist wrote, and for far longer before the books were gathered into a canon. Even Goeze, he argues, must grant that this spoken Christianity came first and survived without the books, which shows that the faith does not depend on them.

Why is religion not true just because the apostles taught it?

Because the order runs the other way: the apostles taught it because it was true. Lessing extends the point even to God, who does not make something true by teaching it but teaches it because it is true. Truth comes first, and teachers and books only pass it on. A religion that could be true only on its teachers' authority would fall with them.

Themes of the book

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

The Bible Is Not Religion

What exactly is a believer defending when they defend the Bible? Lessing's answer decides whether every attack on a verse is an attack on faith.

The opening axioms draw a distinction Goeze took for unbelief. The Bible plainly contains more than belongs to religion, and its letter is not its spirit, so an objection to the letter, or to the Bible, is not yet an objection to the spirit, or to religion. Lessing even warns that stretching inspiration over every detail of the text brings little use and endless offence. Defended axiom by axiom, the distinction shields Christianity from whatever criticism the book itself may suffer.

scripture
religion
bible and scripture
interpretation
hermeneutics
scriptural authority
biblical interpretation
divine inspiration
religious authority
polemics
irony
rhetoric

Enter a dialogue

Faith Before the Gospels

Could Christianity survive if every Gospel were lost? The axioms say it could, because it was believed before anything was written.

Religion, Lessing argues, is not true because the evangelists and apostles taught it; they taught it because it is true. Christianity spread by spoken teaching long before any Gospel was written and stood for a long time before the canon was complete, so its truth must rest on its inner truth, not on written records. From there he turns the charge of heresy around. If Goeze holds that Christianity itself would perish with the loss of the apostles' writings, the heterodoxy is his.

oral tradition
faith
church history
religious tradition
historical evidence
truth
epistemology
religious epistemology
faith and reason
religious experience
theology
revelation

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 63
distinct concepts: 78
by passages held, corpus-wide: #612

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: “religion” and “scripture”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 16 pairings. 55 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
religion	scripture	19
oral tradition	scripture	9
faith	religion	8
oral tradition	religion	6
bible and scripture	religious authority	5
faith	scripture	5
faith	theology	5
religious authority	scripture	4
religion	theology	3
argumentation	scripture	2
bible and scripture	faith	2
oral tradition	religious authority	2
scripture	theology	2
argumentation	religion	1
faith	religious authority	1
religion	religious authority	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
The centre of the fragments controversy; after the duke's ban the same argument moved into Nathan the Wise.
DE
1778 Axioms (Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt) you are here 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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