A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson
17. Alongside of these propagators of popular rationalism stood
2501 words | Chapter 266
a group of companion deists usually considered together--Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), and
Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786). The last-named, a Jew, "lived entirely
in the sphere of deism and of natural religion," [1347] and sought,
like the deists in general, to give religion an ethical structure;
but he was popular chiefly as a constructive theist and a defender
of the doctrine of immortality on non-Christian lines. His Phædon
(1767), setting forth that view, had a great vogue. [1348] One of
his more notable teachings was an earnest declaration against any
connection between Church and State; but like Locke and Rousseau he
so far sank below his own ideals as to agree in arguing for a State
enforcement of a profession of belief in a God [1349]--a negation of
his own plea. With much contemporary popularity, he had no permanent
influence; and he seems to have been completely broken-hearted over
Jacobi's disclosure of the final pantheism of Lessing, for whom he
had a great affection.
See the monograph of Rabbi Schreiber, of Bonn, Moses Mendelssohn's
Verdienste um die deutsche Nation (Zürich, 1880), pp. 41-42. The
strongest claim made for Mendelssohn by Rabbi Schreiber is that he,
a Jew, was much more of a German patriot than Goethe, Schiller,
or Lessing. Heine, however, pronounces that "As Luther against the
Papacy, so Mendelssohn rebelled against the Talmud" (Zur Gesch. der
Relig. und Philos. in Deutschland: Werke, ed. 1876, iii, 65).
Lessing, on the other hand, is one of the outstanding figures in
the history of Biblical criticism, as well as of German literature in
general. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Lessing became in a considerable
measure a rationalist, while constantly resenting, as did Goethe,
the treatment of religion in the fashion in which he himself treated
non-religious opinions with which he did not agree. [1350] It is
clear that already in his student days he had become substantially an
unbeliever, and that it was on this as well as other grounds that he
refused to become a clergyman. [1351] Nor was he unready to jeer at
the bigots when they chanced to hate where he was sympathetic. [1352]
On the side of religious problems, he was primarily and permanently
influenced by two such singularly different minds as Bayle [1353]
and Rousseau, the first appealing to and eliciting his keen critical
faculty, the second his warm emotional nature; and he never quite
unified the result. From first to last he was a freethinker in the
sense that he never admitted any principle of authority, and was
stedfastly loyal to the principle of freedom of utterance. He steadily
refused to break with his freethinking friend Mylius, and he never
sought to raise odium against any more advanced freethinker on the
score of his audacity. [1354] In his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, indeed,
dealing with a German play in which Mohammedanism in general, and one
Ismenor in particular, in the time of the Crusades are charged with
the sin of persecution, he remarks that "these very Crusades, which
in their origin were a political stratagem of the popes, developed
into the most inhuman persecutions of which Christian superstition
has ever made itself guilty: the true religion had then the most and
the bloodiest Ismenors." [1355] In his early Rettungen (Vindications),
again, he defends the dubious Cardan and impersonally argues the pros
and cons of Christianity and Mohammedanism in a fashion possible only
to a skeptical mind. [1356] And in his youth, as in his last years, he
maintained that "there have long been men who disregarded all revealed
religions and have yet been good men. [1357] In his youth, however,
he was more of a Rousseauist than of an intellectual philosopher,
setting up a principle of "the heart" against every species of analytic
thought, including even that of Leibnitz, which he early championed
against the Wolfian adaptation of it. [1358] The sound principle that
conduct is more important than opinion he was always apt, on the
religious side, to strain into the really contrary principle that
opinions which often went with good conduct were necessarily to be
esteemed. So when the rationalism of the day seriously or otherwise
(in Voltairean Berlin it was too apt to be otherwise) assailed the
creed of his parents, whom he loved and honoured, sympathy in his
case as in Goethe's always predetermined his attitude; [1359] and it
is not untruly said of him that he did prefer the orthodox to the
heterodox party, like Gibbon, "inasmuch as the balance of learning
which attracted his esteem was [then] on that side." [1360] We thus
find him, about the time when he announces to his father that he had
doubted concerning the Christian dogmas, [1361] rather nervously
proving his essential religiousness by dramatically defending the
clergy against the prejudices of popular freethought as represented
by his friend Mylius, who for a time ran in Leipzig a journal called
the Freigeist--not a very advanced organ. [1362]
Lessing was in fact, with his versatile genius and his vast reading,
a man of moods rather than a systematic thinker, despite his powerful
critical faculty; and alike his emotional and his critical side
determined his aversion to the attempts of the "rationalizing"
clergy to put religion on a common-sense footing. His personal
animosity to Voltaire and to Frederick would also influence him; but
he repugned even the decorous "rationalism" of the theologians of
his own country. When his brother wrote him to the effect that the
basis of the current religion was false, and the structure the work
of shallow bunglers, he replied that he admitted the falsity of the
basis, but not the incompetence of those who built up the system,
in which he saw much skill and address. Shallow bunglers, on the
other hand, he termed the schemers of the new system of compromise
and accommodation. [1363] In short, as he avowed in his fragment on
Bibliolatry, he was always "pulled this way and that" in his thought
on the problem of religion. [1364] For himself, he framed (or perhaps
adopted) [1365] a pseudo-theory of the Education of the Human Race
(1780), which has served the semi-rationalistic clergy of our own day
in good stead; and adapted Rousseau's catching doctrine that the true
test of religion lies in feeling and not in argument. [1366] Neither
doctrine, in short, has a whit more philosophical value than the other
"popular philosophy" of the time, and neither was fitted to have much
immediate influence; but both pointed a way to the more philosophic
apologists of religion, while baulking the orthodox. [1367] If all this
were more than a piece of defensive strategy, it was no more scientific
than the semi-rationalist theology which he contemned. The "education"
theorem, on its merits, is indeed a discreditable paralogism; and
only our knowledge of his affectional bias can withhold us from
counting it a mystification. On analysis it is found to have no
logical content whatever. "Christianity" Lessing made out to be a
"universal principle," independent of its pseudo-historical setting;
thus giving to the totality of the admittedly false tradition the
credit of an ethic which in the terms of the case is simply human, and
in all essentials demonstrably pre-Christian. His propaganda of this
kind squares ill with his paper on The Origin of Revealed Religion,
written about 1860. There he professes to hold by a naturalist view
of religion. All "positive" or dogmatic creeds he ascribes to the
arrangements that men from time to time found it necessary to make
as to the means of applying "natural" religion. "Hence all positive
and revealed religions are alike true and alike false; alike true,
inasmuch as it has everywhere been necessary to come to terms over
different things in order to secure agreement and unity in the public
religion; alike false, inasmuch as that over which men came to terms
does not so much stand close to the essential (nicht sowohl ... neben
dem Wesentlichen besteht), but rather weakens and oppresses it. The
best revealed or positive religion is that which contains the fewest
conventional additions to natural religion; that which least limits the
effects of natural religion." [1368] This is the position of Tindal
and the English deists in general; and it seems to have been in this
mood that Lessing wrote to Mendelssohn about being able to "help the
downfall of the most frightful structure of nonsense only under the
pretext of giving it a new foundation." [1369] On the historical
side, too, he had early convinced himself that Christianity was
established and propagated "by entirely natural means" [1370]--this
before Gibbon. But, fighter as he was, he was not prepared to lay
his cards on the table in the society in which he found himself. In
his strongest polemic there was always an element of mystification;
[1371] and his final pantheism was only privately avowed.
It was through a series of outside influences that he went so far,
in the open, as he did. Becoming the librarian of the great Bibliothek
of Wolfenbüttel, the possession of the hereditary Prince (afterwards
Duke) of Brunswick, he was led to publish the "Anonymous Fragments"
known as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments (1774-1778), wherein the methods
of the English and French deists are applied with a new severity to
both the Old and the New Testament narratives. It is now put beyond
doubt that they were the work of Reimarus, [1372] who had in 1755
produced a defence of "Natural Religion"--that is, of the theory of
a Providence--against La Mettrie, Maupertuis, and older materialists,
which had a great success in its day. [1373] At his death, accordingly,
Reimarus ranked as an admired defender of theism and of the belief
in immortality. [1374] He was the son-in-law of the esteemed scholar
Fabricius, and was for many years Professor of Oriental Languages in
the Hamburg Academy. The famous research which preserves his memory
was begun by him at the age of fifty, for his own satisfaction, and
was elaborated by him during twenty years, while he silently endured
the regimen of the intolerant Lutheranism of his day. [1375] As he
left the book it was a complete treatise entitled An Apology for the
Rational Worshipper of God; but his son feared to have it published,
though Lessing offered to take the whole risk; and it was only by the
help of the daughter, Elise Reimarus, [1376] Lessing's friend, that the
fragments came to light. As the Berlin censor would not give official
permission, [1377] Lessing took the course of issuing them piecemeal
in a periodical series of selections from the treasures of the
Wolfenbüttel Library, which had privilege of publication. The first,
On the Toleration of Deists, which attracted little notice, appeared
in 1774; four more, which made a stir, in 1777; and only in 1778 was
"the most audacious of all," On the Aim of Jesus and his Disciples,
[1378] published as a separate book. Collectively they constituted
the most serious attack yet made in Germany on the current creed,
though their theory of the true manner of the gospel history of course
smacks of the pre-scientific period. A generation later, however,
they were still "the radical book of the anti-supernaturalists"
in Germany. [1379]
As against miracles in general, the Resurrection in
particular, and Biblical ethics in general, the attack of
Reimarus was irresistible, but his historical construction is
pre-scientific. The method is, to accept as real occurrences
all the non-miraculous episodes, and to explain them by a
general theory. Thus the appointment of the seventy apostles--a
palpable myth--is taken as a fact, and explained as part of
a scheme by Jesus to obtain temporal power; and the scourging
of the money-changers from the Temple, improbable enough as it
stands, is made still more so by supposing it to be part of a
scheme of insurrection. The method further involves charges of
calculated fraud against the disciples or evangelists--a historical
misconception which Lessing repudiated, albeit not on the right
grounds. See the sketch in Cairns, p. 197 sq., which indicates the
portions of the treatise produced later by Strauss. Cp. Pünjer,
i, 550-57; Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 4. Schweitzer (Von Reimarus zu
Wrede), in his satisfaction at the agreement of Reimarus with his
own conception of an "eschatological" Jesus, occupied with "the
last things," gives Reimarus extravagant praise. Strauss rightly
notes the weakness of the indictment of Moses as a worker of fraud
(Voltaire, 2te Ausg. p. 407).
It is but fair to say that Reimarus's fallacy of method, which
was the prevailing one in his day, has not yet disappeared from
criticism. As we have seen, it was employed by Pomponazzi in
the Renaissance (vol. i, p. 377), and reintroduced in the modern
period by Connor and Toland. It is still employed by some professed
rationalists, as Dr. Conybeare. It has, however, in all likelihood
suggested itself spontaneously to many inquirers. In the Phædrus
Plato presents it as applied by empirical rationalizers to myths
at that time.
Though Lessing at many points oppugned the positions of the Fragments,
he was led into a fiery controversy over them, in which he was
unworthily attacked by, among others, Semler, from whom he had looked
for support; and the series was finally stopped by authority. There
can now be no doubt that Lessing at heart agreed with Reimarus on
most points of negative criticism, [1380] but reached a different
emotional estimate and attitude. All the greater is the merit of
his battle for freedom of thought. Thereafter, as a final check to
his opponents, he produced his famous drama Nathan the Wise, which
embodies Boccaccio's story of The Three Rings, and has ever since
served as a popular lesson of tolerance in Germany. [1381] In the end,
he seems to have become, to at least some extent, a pantheist; [1382]
but he never expounded any coherent and comprehensive set of opinions,
[1383] preferring, as he put it in an oft-quoted sentence, the state
of search for truth to any consciousness of possessing it. [1384]
He left behind him, however, an important fragment, which constituted
one of his most important services to national culture--his "New
Hypothesis concerning the evangelists as merely human writers." He
himself thought that he had done nothing "more important or ingenious"
[1385] of the kind; and though his results were in part unsound and
impermanent, he is justly to be credited with the first scientific
attempt to deduce the process of composition of the gospels [1386]
from primary writings by the first Christians. Holding as he did to
the authenticity and historicity of the fourth gospel, he cannot be
said to have gone very deep; but two generations were to pass before
the specialists got any further. Lessing had shown more science and
more courage than any other pro-Christian scholar of the time, and,
as the orthodox historian of rationalism has it, "Though he did not
array himself as a champion of rationalism, he proved himself one of
the strongest promoters of its reign." [1387]
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