A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

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]