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Lessing's Attitude in the Lavater-Mendelssohn Controversy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Moses Mendelssohn wrote to Lessing on 29 November 1770, informing him that he was finally sending him “the Ferguson” which Lessing had been so anxious to read. Before receiving an answer, Mendelssohn wrote Lessing a second time, in mid-December, apologizing for his failure to send “the Ferguson.” Gleim, who was to have brought the book to Wolfenbüttel, had slipped out of Berlin with J. G. Jacobi without a word to Mendelssohn, and now Moses was sending the book by mail. In a postscript Mendelssohn asks Lessing if he has seen in the Jenaische Zeitung von gelehrten Sachen what J. C. Lavater read from the diary of his travels before the Consistory in Zurich. Mendelssohn tells Lessing that he has been unable to pass the matter over in silence. He has asked Lavater for an explanation, and if this does not prove satisfactory, he will be obliged to say certain things which both parties will find unpleasant.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958
References
1 G. E. Lessings sdmtliche Schriften, ed. K. Lachmann, 3rd ed., F. Muncker (Leipzig: Göschen, 1904), xix, 406 ft., 424 f. This work will hereafter be referred to as LM.
2 G. Kettner, Lessings Dramen im Lichte ihrer und unserer Zeit (Berlin: Weidemann, 1904), p. 311.
3 Lessings Stellung zum Christentum (Halle: Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses), p. 18; Lessing und das Christentum (Tubingen: Mohr), p. 38.
4 Die Religion Lessings (Leipzig: Mayer und Muller), p. 79.
5 Ibid., pp. 80 f., 89, 86.
6 Lessings Werke, ed. J. Petersen and W. v. Olshausen (Berlin: Bong, 1919), xxiv, Introd., p. 14.
7 Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläums-Ausgabe, ed. I. Elbogen, J. Guttman, and E. Mittwoch (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1930), vii, 3. This edition is still incomplete. It will hereafter be referred to as JA.
8 Herrn Carl Bonnets, verschiedener Akademien Mitglieds, philosophische Untersuchung der Beweise für das Christen-thum: Samt desselben Ideen von der kilnftigen Glückseligkeit des Menschen. Aus dem Französischen übersetzt und mit Anmerkungen herausgegeben von Johann Caspar Lavater. Nebst dessen Zueignungsschrift an Moses Mendelssohn, und daher entstandenen sâmtlichen Streitschriften zwischen Hrn. Lavater, Moses Mendelssohn, und Hrn. Dr. Kölbele ... Frankfurt am Mayn, 1774. Gedruckt und zu finden bey Johannes Bayrhoffer, auf der kleinen Gallengass (pp. 23 ff, 42 ff.). Hereafter this work will be referred to as Bonnet-Lavater.
9 Ibid., pp. 186 f., 194 ff., 86 ff., 87, 91f., 100, 136 ff., 143 ff.
10 Ibid., “Vorrede des Uebersetzers,” p. 2.
11 Bonnet is slightly hesitant in holding that probabilities can coalesce into genuine certainty. (Cf. Bonnet's Palingénésie philosophique [Geneve: Claude Philibert et Barthemi Chirol, 1770], ii, 207 ff. This is a 2nd edition, and in it Bonnet acknowledges criticisms such as that of Eberhard in iheAllgemeinedeutscheBibliolhek, xiii, No. 2,385 f., and offers further substantiation of his theory [pp. 209 ff.]. Lavater however, in a long footnote, boldly defends the thesis (Bonnet-Lavater, pp. 83 ff.).
12 Das Kälbele von Frankfurt ist gar ein Ochs in LM, xvii, 323.
13 JA, vii, 90 f. Cf. also Rawidowicz, JA, vii, Introd., p. c.
14 Moses Mendelssohn's gesammelle Schriften. Nach den Originaldrucken und Handschriften herausgegeben von Prof. Dr. G. B. Mendelssohn (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1843), iii, 311, 319 f., 321.
15 JA, vii, 75, 90 f., 97 f.
16 JA, vii, 10 f., 97 f., 101.
17 LM, xvi, 536. Muncker dates this entry winter 1778/79. Hereafter all parenthetical volume and page references in the text, unless otherwise identified, will be to LM.
18 LM, xiii, 113, 128, 132.
19 LM, xii, 428, 448; xiii, 8.
20 LM, xii, 428; xiii, 99.
21 In the Sogenannte Briefe an den Herrn Doklor Walch Lessing writes: “It is impossible for me deliberately to remain deaf when the whole of antiquity cries out to me with one voice that our Reformers threw away too much under that name, ‘Tradition,‘ which was so hateful to them” (LM, xvi, 498). It was in good part this same regard for the whole body of Christian doctrine which moved Lessing to confess—somewhat mischievously, it must be admitted—to Goeze that his concept of the Christian religion was that found in the Regula Fidei of the first four centuries of the Church (LM, xiii, 332). Lessing, referring to the traditional system of Christianity, told his brother Karl: “I know of nothing in the world to which so much human sagacity has been applied or in which it appeared so clearly” (LM, xviii, 102).
22 Cf. LM, xiii, 415. See the Preface to the Erziehung des Mensohmgeschlechts also.
23 Lessing: Sein und Leistung (Hamburg: Schroeder, 1948), p. 314.
24 Cf. Fl. Biedermann, Lessings Gespräche (Berlin: Im Propyläen Verlag, 1924), pp. 221 f. Cf. also LM, xvii, 270 and Biedermann, p. 109 (#147).
25 Die Religion Lessings, pp. 81, 86.
26 Lessing und seine Zeit (München: Beck, 1919), ii, 41.
27 LM, xviii, 284 f., 317 f., 329 f.; xxi, 222 f., 260, 276.
28 Allgemelne deulscke Bibliothek, xiii, No. 2, 370 ff.
29 Cf. also LM, xix, 327, where Nicolai tells Lessing that Mendelssohn's answer to Lavater will probably please neither Lavater nor “many theologians.”
30 Biedermann, Lessings Gespräche, p. 305.
31 Aner, Die Theologie der Lessingzeit, p. 122. Aner, however, sees Nicolai's alarm as based on a genuine attachment to revelation and cites Nicolai's Öffentliche Erklärung of 1788 against deism. Nevertheless Aner's view, even if correct, says nothing of Nicolai's ideas in 1771.