Democratic Enlightenment

The Fracturing of German Protestant Culture 325
local consistory, became thoroughly alarmed. In July 1778, he forbade Lessing to
publish any more of Reimarus’ manuscript which he confiscated along with other
papers, permanently cancelling his prized ex officio exemption from ecclesiastical
censorship. 116 He was forbidden to publish anything more on the controversy
without ecclesiastical permission. To the relief of most, princely and ecclesiastical
authority had finally intervened to abort Reimarus’ subversion and forbid Lessing’s
use of it. Yet it had never been a genuinely open public debate at any stage as the main
text and facts surrounding it had all along been withheld. No more than the rest
of Europe was Germany ready for a truly open public debate on such matters.
The clamp-down was followed by rumours that Lessing was leaving Wolfenbüttel
for Vienna, which in the event were not borne out. Deeply frustrated Lessing tried to
reverse the decision to withdraw his censorship exemption; but with his position now
gravely weakened, and dogged by ill health, he found himself hampered on all sides
especially in being gagged from answering his opponents’ sallies, 117 an outcome
Mendelssohn, worried from the start, had long predicted.
The controversy was thus shelved, so to speak, by ducal authority. Herder was
among those disappointed that Reimarus’ full text remained unpublished and that
the authorities chose to render the whole business inconclusive. 118 Lessing himself,
by the autumn of 1778, was increasingly given to feelings of depression and defeat.
But he worked on, striving, notably with the full version in 1780 of his The Education
of the Human Race, a tract betraying unmistakable signs of the impact on him of
Fontenelle and Diderot as well as Spinoza, boldly to transform men’s notion
of revelation from a glorious divine intervention into the progressive unfolding of
collective human reason. He sought to redefine revelation, converting it from a
miraculous event into a development understood only non-miraculously and historically
as a long-term process, the progressive emergence of the rationality and
moral consciousness of man in society.
Hence, Lessing substituted for a philosophical ‘reason’ that is static, analytical, and
lodged in the individual, a collective social ‘reason’ dynamic, historical, and synthetic
and driven by freedom of thought and debate. 119 Revelation and religious truth were
reconfigured as natural phenomena essential to balancing individual interest and
freedom against collective need and social order. Lessing validated the core of Moses’
and Jesus’ teaching while relegating Judaism—in a manner that disappointed
Mendelssohn—to the status of an obsolete vestige of a primitive past. Theology,
through the marginalizing of the biblical account, in this way came to be disarmed
and subordinated to philosophy, critique, and history of thought.
116
Duke of Brunswick to Lessing, 13 July 1778, Lessing, Werke und Briefe, iii. 163–4; Freund, ‘Ein
Trojaner’, 137; Elise Reimarus to Lessing, Hamburg, 29 July 1778, in Lessing, Werke und Briefe, iii. 174–5.
117
Karl Lessing to Lessing, Berlin, July 1778, in Lessing, Werke und Briefe, iii. 164; Engel, ‘Von ‘‘Relativ
wahr?’’ ’, 229.
118
Herder to Lessing, Weimar, 25 Dec. 1778, in Lessing, Werke und Briefe, iii. 218.
119
Cassirer, Philosophy, 194–5.