LESSING
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LESSING
just as ridiculous is it to fear any clanger to Christianity from an attack upon Scripture. In liis Diiplix Lessing maintained, in reference to tlic history of the resurrec- tion, tliat it contains irreconcilable contradictions ; but he held also that it does not follow from this circumstance that the resurrection is unhistorical. "Wlio has ever ventured to draw the same inference in profane history? If Livy, Polybius, Dionysius, and Tacitus relate the very same event, it may be the very same battle, the very same siege, each one differing so mucli in the details that those of the one completely give the lie to those of the other, has any one, i'or that reason, ever denied the event itself in which thej' agree ?"
Such are the thoughts which Lessing advanced in his theological polemical writings, particularly in the controversy with pastor Gotze after the ]Hiblication of the so-called " WolfenbiUtel Fragments," but to present from them a connected theological system strictly de- liuiiig Lessing's stand-point has not yet been made pos- sible. Indeed, we would say with Hagenbach (Church Hist. ofiSth and 19/A Cent.'i, 288) that "he had none." But just as much difficulty we woidd find in assigning Lessing a place anywhere in any theological system of thought already in vogue. Eeally, we think all that can be done for Lessing is to consider in how far his writings justify the disposition that has been made of him as a theological writer. There are at present three different classes of theologians who claim him as their ally and support. By some he has been judged to have hold the position of a rather positive, though not exact- ly orthodox character. This judgment is based upon liis views on the doctrine of the Trinity in his Erziehung des Menschenr/eschkcktes. (He there says: "What if this doctrine [of the Trinity] should lead human reason to acknowledge that God cannot possibly be understood to bo one, m that sense in which all finite things are one? that his unity must be a transcendental unity, which does not exclude a kind of plurality," evidently explain- ing the Trinity as referring to the essence of the Deity.) By others, either in praise or condemnation, he has been adjudged a "freethinker;" while still others have pro- nounced him guilty not only of a change of opinion — of a change from the camp of orthodoxy to heterodoxy — but have also given him up in despair, as incapable of having cherished any positive opinion, because he was so many-sided in his polemics ; indeed, he had himself explicitly declared that he preferred the search for the possession of the truth. The first to break a^vay from one and all of these classifications has been Dr. J. A. " Dorner (^Gesch. der protest. Theol. [Munich, 18G7, 8vo], p. 722 sq.), who assigns Lessing a position similar to that generally credited to Jacobi, the so-called "philos- ojiher of faith" (see Jacobi), and for this there is cer- tainly much in favor in Lessing's own declarations ; for, like Jacobi, he held that reason and faith have nothing in conriict with each other, but are one. He held fast, likewise, to a self-conscious personal God of providence, to a living relation of the divine spirit to the world, to whom a place belongs in the inner revelation, notwith- standing that he assails the outer revelation in its his- torical credibility, and assigns it simply a place in the faith of authority (Autoritiitsglauben). " It is true," says Dorner (p. 737), "Lessing has particularly aimed to secure for the purely human and moral a jjlace right by the side of that general!}' assigned only to Christi- anity. But lie is far from asserting tliat the understand- ing (Vernunft) of humanity was from the beginning per- fect, or even in a normal development, but rather holds it to be developing in character, and in need of educa- tion by the divine Spirit, whom also he refuses to regard as a passive beholder of the acting universe." (We have here a number of premises, which later writers, partic- ularly Schleiermacher, have taken to secure for histor- ical religion a more worthy position.) Indeed, right here, in the attempt to make humanity progressive, and this progress dependent upon revelation, centred the whole of Lessing's theological views. "To the reason,"
he said, " it must be much rather a proof of the truth of revelation than an objection to it when it meets with things that suri)ass its own conceptions, for what is a revelation wliich reveals nothing?" (Comp. Hegel on this point as viewed by Hagenbach, Ch. Hist, of 18th and 19//* Cent, ii, 30-1 sq.) Thus he acknowledged the truth of revelation, though he woukl not regard the idea of a revelation as settled for all time, but rather as (iod's gradual act of training ; and to elucidate this thought he wrote, in 1780, iJle Krzieltung des Menschencjeschlechtes (the authorship of which has sometimes been denied him : comp. Zeitsehr. f. d. hist, theol. 1839, No. 3 ; Guh- rauer, Erziehung des Menschengeschlechtes kritisch und jihilosophisch erortert [Berlin, 18-H]), a work in which, concentrated in a hundred short paragraphs, is a system of religion and philosophy — the germ of Herder's and all later works on the education of the human race. " Something there is of it," says a writer in the West- minster Rev. (Oct. 1871, p. 222, 223), "that reminds the reader of Plato. It has his tender melancholy and his undertone of Inspired conviction, and a grandeur which recalls that moving of great figures and shifting of vast scenes which we behold in the myth of Er. There speaks in it a voice of one crying words not his own to times that are not yet come."