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WorkGotthold Ephraim Lessing

Gotthold Ephraim Leßings theologischer Nachlaß

(lit.: Theological Remains)

Early private pieces on religion, from a defence of the Moravians to a Trinity derived by reason, printed only after Lessing died.

by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing24 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Theologischer Nachlass
First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
German

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Overview

At twenty-one, in 1750, Lessing wrote "Thoughts on the Moravians", and never printed it. It defends the Moravian Brethren, the Pietist community led by Count Zinzendorf, against Lutheran theologians who believed they had beaten them in argument. Victories in war, it begins, prove nothing about who was in the right, and learned quarrels are only another kind of war. Lessing then imagines a new Socrates who calls scholars away from theory and back to virtue, and shows him jeered at in turn by an algebraist, an astronomer and two metaphysicians who cannot agree whether he ought to believe in monads. That, he says, is how the theologians treat the Moravians, who never tried to change a single doctrine and wanted only to bring Christians back from disputing to living. "The Christianity of Reason", from the early 1750s, goes the other way: a sequence of numbered propositions that derives the Trinity from reason alone. God, thinking himself from eternity, produces an image identical to himself, which scripture calls the Son, and the harmony between the two is the Spirit; from there the text moves on to the creation of finite beings and breaks off at its twenty-seventh paragraph. A third piece, "On the Origin of Revealed Religion", argues that natural religion, the knowledge of God each person can reach by their own powers, differs from one person to the next, so any community had to agree on conventions and then give those conventions the authority of natural truth; every revealed religion is therefore equally true and equally false. Lessing's brother Karl, his first biographer and the manager of his literary estate, printed the Moravian essay and "The Christianity of Reason" for the first time in Berlin in 1784, three years after Lessing's death.

Key concepts

What is natural religion?

The knowledge of God and of duty that every person can reach by their own reason, without any revelation. Lessing holds that it is real but uneven, because each person's grasp of it depends on their own powers and so differs from everyone else's. That unevenness, he argues, is exactly why people living together needed something fixed and shared.

What is a positive religion, and why is it "equally true and equally false"?

A religion built on conventions a community agreed on and then treated as given by God. It is true in that every community equally needed such agreement to have a shared public religion. It is false in that the agreed additions weaken and push aside what is essential. The best positive religion, Lessing concludes, adds the fewest conventions to natural religion.

How does reason arrive at the Trinity in "The Christianity of Reason"?

By asking what it means for God to think himself. A perfect being thinking of itself from eternity produces an image of itself that lacks nothing God has, and so is identical to him, which scripture calls the Son. The perfect agreement between God and that image is the Spirit. Lessing presents this as reason's own route to the doctrine.

Who is the "new Socrates" in the essay on the Moravians?

A figure Lessing invents to show how the learned treat anyone who calls them from theory to practice. Like the old Socrates, he urges people to look to virtue and to themselves instead of speculating. Mathematicians and metaphysicians mock him, each for not sharing their pet theory. Lessing then says this is just how the theologians treat the Moravians.

Themes of the book

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

From Disputing Back to Living

What is a religion for, if its scholars can win every argument and change nobody's life? The young Lessing's essay on the Moravians sides with practice against theory.

Victories in war, the essay begins, prove nothing about who was in the right, and learned quarrels are only another kind of war. Lessing imagines a new Socrates who calls scholars away from theory and back to virtue, and shows him jeered at by an algebraist, an astronomer and two metaphysicians who cannot agree whether he ought to believe in monads. So, he says, the theologians treat the Moravians, who changed no doctrine and wanted only to bring Christians back from disputing to living.

  • virtue
  • ethics
  • wisdom
  • satire
  • philosophy
  • self-knowledge
  • persecution
  • religious reform
  • expertise
  • knowledge
  • authority
  • superstition
  • luck
  • death
  • justice

Enter a dialogue

Religion Worked Out by Reason

How much of religion can reason reach on its own, and what fills the rest? One piece derives the Trinity from thought, another explains every revealed religion as a convention.

"The Christianity of Reason" begins with God thinking himself from eternity. That thought produces an image identical to God, which scripture calls the Son, and the harmony between the two is the Spirit. From there the text moves to the creation of finite beings and breaks off. "On the Origin of Revealed Religion" goes the other way. Natural religion differs from one person to the next, so communities had to agree on conventions and give them the authority of natural truth. Every revealed religion is therefore equally true and equally false.

  • trinity
  • creation
  • metaphysics
  • doctrine
  • cosmology
  • revelation
  • natural religion
  • positive religion
  • religious authority
  • intellectual history
  • reason
  • truth
  • infinity
  • ritual
  • religion

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
24
distinct concepts
67
by passages held, corpus-wide
#760

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.

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 1778 Anti-Goeze

    The centre of the fragments controversy; after the duke's ban the same argument moved into Nathan the Wise.

     DE
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. 1784 Gotthold Ephraim Leßings theologischer Nachlaß (Theologischer Nachlass) you are here DE
  12. 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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