Modern Language Review

Generations of Germanists have learnt to appreciate Lessing as a dramatist, essayist, and champion of Enlightenment values. Yet he was also eighteenth-century Germany’s foremost theologian, which is how he is presented here. It is not without cause that this aspect of his work has been neglected. His pronouncements are elusive, at times contradictory, ‘blos ein Schulgezänke’, ‘a mere theological Billingsgate’ in the phrasing of Moses Mendelssohn and Henry Chadwick (cited p. 13, n. 18). It will be argued that, by trying to pare religion down to its essentials, he was moving away from the rational world-view with which he is regularly credited.

Although Hannes Kerber was warned against writing this book on the grounds that publication would be tantamount to ‘professional suicide’, he took up the challenge, responding that the alternative would have been ‘spiritual suicide’ (p. 243). His point of departure is the seven Fragmente eines Ungenannten, based on post-humous writings by the Orientalist Hermann Samuel Reimarus, which Lessing chose to edit despite, or because of, their inflammatory content. By questioning [End Page 410] many of the essential premisses of Christianity they incurred the wrath of several prominent self-proclaimed guardians of orthodoxy, foremost among them the Lutheran pedagogue Johann Daniel Schumann and Hamburg’s inquisitorial Pastor Johan Melchior Goeze.

Kerber’s treatise centres on a paradox. In the first section of the Fragmente Lessing promised his readers that the corpus would deliver a devastating blow to Christianity, but in the second section he predicted that this assault was doomed to fail. It is hardly surprising that liberals such as Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai felt betrayed; both had previously advised against publishing Reimarus’s papers. But Lessing genuinely believed that in doing so he was performing a positive service for traditional orthodoxy, and that it was Goeze who had deviated from its core principles. So where does Lessing stand in relation to the central doctrines of Christianity? He acknowledges Old Testament prophecies and New Testament miracles, but denies them their function as instruments of faith, as past and present are essentially incommensurate. This takes us to the so-called Lessingproblem, the huge ‘ugly ditch’ that separates contingent events from necessary truths, problematic not least because he endorses the historicity of the Bible ‘aus anderweitigen Gründen’ (cited p. 77) without ever explaining what these are. Here Kerber hints at a primitivist nostalgia for old-school religiosity which Lessing cultivated ‘zum Entsetzen seiner Freunde’ (p. 67, n. 99). It is a short step to the contention that Goeze is the ‘rationalist’ among theologians, while Lessing comes down on the side of emotion, claiming ‘das Herz [ist] mehr Christ als der Kopf’ (p. 144).

The upshot is that by both promoting and refuting Reimarus, Lessing can tread a path involving neither dogma nor its rejection, and thereby reorient religion towards its spiritual centre. Nathan ‘the Wise’ takes his cue from Lessing, but not in the way we normally assume. His is no categorical injunction along Kantian lines of ‘Do good regardless of whether you believe that God is supporting you’. The focus is less on the parable of the rings than on Act iv, Scene 7 of Nathan der Weise, in which Nathan explains his Job-like return to faith in terms that remind Kerber of Saint Augustine, and he equates the line ‘Ich will! Willst du nur, dass ich will’ with the saint’s ‘Da quod iubes et iube quod vis’ (p. 235). Nathan exemplifies what neither Schumann nor Goeze was willing to countenance: a faith that proceeds not from any received bookish tradition, be it Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, but from a cathartic epiphany which is unique to the individual believer.

Has the author committed ‘professional suicide’ by publishing this monograph? Rather the contrary, I hope. He has meticulously unravelled the German Enlightenment’s most important body of theological writings, generating results that run somewhat...