United States or Brunei ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
During Lessing's residence at Hamburg, he had come into possession of a most important manuscript, written by Hermann Samuel Reimarus, a professor of Oriental languages, and bearing the title of an "Apology for the Rational Worshippers of God."
Or there is Nicolai, the founder of 'The Library of the Fine Arts, to which," he added with a sly smile, "I hope yet to see you contributing. Perhaps Fräulein Reimarus will convert you that charming young lady there talking with her brother-in-law, who is a Danish state-councillor. She is the great friend of Lessing as I live, there comes Lessing himself.
But they say that to praise one's wife is self-praise. Well, then, I say no more of her! But if you had known her!" Quite cheerful! On the 10th of August he writes to Elise Reimarus, he is writing to a woman now, an old friend of his and his wife, and will be less restrained: "I am left here all alone.
Schweitzer's book, Von Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben Jesu-Forschung, 1906, not merely sets forth this deeply interesting chapter in the history of the thought of modern men, but has also serious interpretative value in itself.
The question was, however, presented with greater perspective as to its position in the history of criticism by A. Schweitzer in a book which he called Von Reimarus zu Wrede. This was translated into English, a fate denied to Weiss, with the result that in England and America the whole problem was associated with Schweitzer's name.
Reimarus, the able author of the Fragments, in his attack upon the evidences of revealed religion, had taken the same ground as Voltaire and the old English deists.
He had the acuteness to see that Lessing's refutation of deism did not make him a Christian, while the new views proposed as a substitute for those of Reimarus were such as Goetze and his age could in no wise comprehend. Lessing's own views of dogmatic religion are to be found in his work entitled, "The Education of the Human Race."
There could be no genuine cooperation between a mere iconoclast like Reimarus, and a constructive critic like Lessing. But the confusion was not an unnatural one on Goetze's part, and I cannot agree with M. Fontanes in taking it as convincing proof of the pastor's wrong-headed perversity. It appears to me that Goetze interpreted Lessing's position quite as accurately as M. Fontanes.
This, with all other similar attempts to render that an object of the sight which has no relation to sight, has been already sufficiently exposed by the younger Reimarus, Maasz, and others, as outraging the very axioms of mechanics in a scheme, the merit of which consists in its being mechanical.
Lessing's life has been sketched in the introduction to his "Minna von Barnhelm" in the volume of Continental Dramas in The Harvard Classics. "The Education of the Human Race" is the culmination of a bitter theological controversy which began with the publication by Lessing, in 1774-1778, of a series of fragments of a work on natural religion by the German deist, Reimarus.
Word Of The Day