“Nathan the Wise”: An Ambiguous Plea for Religious Toleration 

Religious tolerance isn’t exactly popular these days. The ethno-religious violence coursing through and from the Muslim Middle East has been compared with the Thirty Years’ War, and for once the analogy does not seem misplaced. The major European countries swing between ultra-accommodating and ultra-suspicious or xenophobic attitudes toward the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, especially but not only the newcomers. In America, whose founders turned religious toleration into the natural right of all, significant cracks, mainly of a different kind, have opened in the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.

In search of wisdom on these matters, is there anything to be learned from the philosophers and statesmen of the 17th and 18th centuries who first articulated and defended the modern idea of religious tolerance? Incongruous as it may sound, a recent off-Broadway staging of a 1779 work by a German philosopher investigates this very possibility—and to surprisingly illuminating effect.

The philosopher in question was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781), and the name of his play, or “dramatic poem” as he called it, is Nathan the Wise. Like Friedrich Nietzsche a century later, Lessing was born the son of a Lutheran minister in Saxony and studied at Leipzig. Although most philosophers of his time wrote treatises, Lessing dabbled in and mastered an astonishing number of literary styles, penning art and theater criticism, epigrams, and essays on theology as well as comedies and tragedies. He also formed a lifelong friendship with the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), a figure who to Lessing and his contemporaries embodied the possibility of transcending religious difference and of creating a “friendship in the truth”—the truth, that is, of reason. It was upon Mendelssohn that Lessing largely modeled the character of Nathan the Wise.