Anti-Goeze

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Anti-Goeze is the title of a series of eleven theological pamphlets by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , which were written between April and July 1778 and the first of which has the full title: Anti-Goeze / D. [as] i. [St] Necessary Additions / zu den voluntary contributions / of the owner. Past. [Ors] Goeze / First / (God give, last!) Was published, while the following only appeared as Anti-Goeze with the numbering Zweyter , Third etc.

background

These writings form the culmination of the so-called fragments dispute . As librarian of the ducal library in Wolfenbüttel (today's Herzog August Bibliothek ) in 1774, Lessing had extracts from a manuscript critical of religion by the Hamburg high school professor Hermann Samuel Reimarus, who died in 1768, as fragments of an unnamed person in the series of articles he published on the history and literature of the ducal library in Wolfenbüttel released. Reimarus, for fear of negative reactions during his lifetime, had not dared to publish this book in which he used arguments of reason to question the truth of the Bible and thus question the foundations of the Christian religion of revelation. Lessing, who knew the Reimarus family well from his time in Hamburg, probably got the manuscript through Reimarus' children. In order to protect the author and his family, he pretended that it was a work found in the Wolfenbüttel library. The compilation showed an author who rejects the theology of Revelation and advocates deism by showing a natural religion in which the world, although created by God , is free from his work in its further course.

consequences

In 1777 Lessing had this publication followed by further parts from Reimarus' writing, which the Hamburg pastor Johann Melchior Goeze , a later representative of Lutheran Orthodoxy , attacked in a newspaper article in the same year and thus challenged Lessing's reaction. Lessing and Goeze, who "was in no way inferior to Lessing in contentiousness or ability to fight," then attacked each other in quick succession from December 1777 to October 1778 with a series of polemical pamphlets and magazine articles. Eleven of his contributions, which appeared between April and July 1778 titled, Lessing Anti-Goeze and they numbered in the second part of. A twelfth was prevented in July 1778 by order of the ducal-Brunswick. Lessing 's discussion, which was less discursive and more stylistically polemic , found its factual expression in a series of smaller treatises in Lessing's way of thinking, which an individual freed from theological doctrines was striving for in favor of practical, humane morality . The series of anti-Goeze publications ended with Lessing receiving a ban on writing on religious issues from his employer, Duke Karl I of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel , in August 1778 . He then gave shape to his ideas in the 1779 drama Nathan the Wise .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter J. Brenner: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing . Reclam, Stuttgart 2000, p. 244

literature

  • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Letters and Works . Volumes 8 and 9, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Berlin 2003.

Web links