The Education of the Human Race

Lessing's late essay in a hundred paragraphs, in which each scripture becomes a schoolbook that the human race is meant to outgrow.

by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing36 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts
First published: 1780(aged 51)
Original language: German

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Overview

Lessing presented this book as somebody else's. Its first fifty-three paragraphs appeared in 1777 in his own Wolfenbüttel series, alongside the fragments against revealed religion. When all hundred were published in Berlin in 1780, they carried no author's name, only a short preface by the supposed editor, who says the writer has climbed a hill from which he believes he can see a little beyond the road laid out for the day. The claim fits in one sentence: revelation is to the human race what education is to a single person. A teacher gives a child nothing the child could not in time have worked out alone, only sooner and more easily, and God, on this account, teaches humanity the same way. The Old Testament is a primer for a rough people, and its silence about the immortality of the soul is the silence of a good primer about what the pupil cannot yet grasp. Here Lessing takes issue with William Warburton, the English bishop who had argued from that silence that Moses' mission was divine and then, in Lessing's view, pushed the argument too far. The Jews learned more of immortality among the Chaldeans and Persians and in the schools of the Greeks; then a better teacher, Christ, took the worn-out primer from the child's hands; and the New Testament too will one day be outgrown. A third age is coming, the time of a new eternal gospel, which certain visionaries of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries glimpsed too early. The last paragraphs ask why each person might not return to the world as often as there is something new to learn. Lessing died in February 1781, the year after the complete text appeared.

Key concepts

What does "revelation" mean in this book?

God's teaching of the human race through history, given in stages suited to what people can understand. Revelation here never tells humanity anything reason could not discover in time. It supplies it sooner, the way a teacher saves a child years of groping. The Old and New Testaments are two stages of that teaching, not its end.

Why does Lessing call the Old Testament a primer?

Because it teaches a rough, childlike people only what they can grasp, like a first reading book. It speaks of one God and of rewards in this life, and says nothing of the soul's immortality, which the pupil was not ready for. A good primer, Lessing argues, may pass things over in silence, but must never block the way to what comes later.

How can a revealed truth become a truth of reason?

By being worked through until reason sees why it holds and no longer needs revelation's authority. Lessing compares revealed doctrines to the answer an arithmetic teacher tells his pupils in advance, so that they can check their working against it. The answer given beforehand is meant to be understood one day on its own terms, once reason has caught up.

What is the "eternal gospel" of the third age?

Lessing's name, borrowed from medieval visionaries, for a coming stage in which people will do right because it is right, not to win a reward in this life or the next. That time, he says, is promised even in the New Testament's own schoolbooks. The visionaries who announced it centuries ago were right about its coming and wrong only about its hour.

Themes of the book

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

God as the Teacher of Humanity

Why would God reveal what reason could find by itself? Lessing's answer turns the history of religions into a curriculum and every scripture into a schoolbook.

Revelation, the book proposes, is to the human race what education is to a single person: it gives nothing a pupil could not reach alone, but gives it sooner and more easily. The Old Testament is a primer for a rough people, and its silence about the soul's immortality is a good teacher's silence about what the pupil cannot yet grasp. Here Lessing parts with Warburton, who made too much of that silence. The Jews later learned more among the Chaldeans and Persians, and then a better teacher came.

revelation
religious education
education
pedagogy
scripture
monotheism
hermeneutics
religious development
religious epistemology
reason
miracles
divine providence
religious authority
religion
faith

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Toward a Third Age

If every scripture is a schoolbook, what happens when the pupil finishes school? The last paragraphs look past the New Testament itself.

Christ, in Lessing's picture, takes the worn-out primer from the child's hands, but the New Testament is a primer too and will in turn be outgrown. A third age is coming, the time of a new eternal gospel, in which people will do good because it is good and not for reward, and revealed truths will have become truths of reason. Visionaries of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries glimpsed that age too early. The book closes by asking why each person might not return to learn more.

immortality
afterlife
reincarnation
moral autonomy
moral motivation
moral psychology
human development
historical progress
cultural progress
divine justice
trinity
christianity
divine nature
religious belief
religious conversion

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Within this work

passages held: 36
distinct concepts: 74
by passages held, corpus-wide: #699

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: “reason” and “revelation”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 7 concepts, joined by 14 pairings. 19 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
reason	revelation	5
education	revelation	4
afterlife	scripture	3
immortality	religious education	3
religious education	revelation	3
religious education	scripture	3
education	reason	2
reason	religious education	2
afterlife	immortality	1
afterlife	religious education	1
education	scripture	1
immortality	reason	1
immortality	revelation	1
revelation	scripture	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)
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) you are here 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

— or open another of their works