Last Works by Moses Mendelssohn

Author:Moses Mendelssohn [Mendelssohn, Moses]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252036873
Amazon: B008Z17U0Y
Barnesnoble: B008Z17U0Y
Published: 2018-07-25T02:19:21+00:00

Lecture XV

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Lessing. His Service to the

Religion of Reason. His Thoughts

Concerning Purified Pantheism.

1 Our friend D., who surprised us with his visit the last time we were together, did not finally bid me farewell until he had raised a number of objections against what I had said. “What is it,” he said, “that makes you turn our Lessing into a defender of so erroneous and ill-reputed a doctrine? Had you no other name to which you could attach this whole unsavory business?” “You know,” I replied,

“that Lessing was always the first to come to mind whenever I looked about for a judge in such matters. With him I had a long philosophical association; we had for many years shared with one another our thoughts on these matters, and we had shared as well an impartial love of truth that would tolerate neither stubborn dogmatism nor fawning complaisance. [260] It is his so very familiar image, then, that will often rise up before me whenever a philosophical proposition is the subject of discussion, or when arguments and counterarguments need to be weighed against one another and their relative merits assessed.” “I would nevertheless hesitate,” he said, “to make use of his name on this occasion.

There is nothing in the world that would induce me to cast even the slightest suspicion upon the religious principles of this decent man. How could it be? Is Lessing a defender of pantheism, a doctrine that is built on oversubtle sophisti-cal premises? If this doctrine does not quite overturn all the truths of natural religion, it at least renders them highly problematical. Is there anyone for whom one could say that the truths of the religion were more inviolable than they were for him, the great ally of the Fragmentist and the author of Nathan?1 Germany has never known a philosopher who has expounded the religion of reason with such sincerity, so free of any drop of error or prejudice, and who so persuasively laid it out before simple common sense as the Fragmentist. His commitment to natural religion went so far that in his zeal on its behalf he would suffer no revealed religion to stand beside it. [261] He felt obliged to extinguish all other lights so that the full illumination of the light of reason might be permitted to pour forth in one brilliant stream. And in his defense of the Fragmentist, Less-

Lecture xv

ing seems to have invested all the force of his being. One can recognize already in his earliest writings that for him the rational truths of religion and morality were eternally sacred and inviolable. And even after his acquaintance with the Fragmentist, one notices in his writings, in all the essays that he composed for the defense of his friend or ‘guest,’ as he called him, the same quiet conviction that was so deeply ingrained in him, the same unbiased distance from all embittered skepticism, the same level course of common sense in pursuit of the truths of the religion of reason.

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