Nathan The Wise Sparknotes

Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Lessing is praised as being one of the great works of the Age of Enlightenment. The premise of the work seeks to refute a worldview that is dominated by prejudice and dogmatic practices through the way in which this play works to explore three religious cultures: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Lessing does this to convey the reality that all of these religions deserve equal amounts of respect and claims on their subjective religious truths. This concept of religious equality is one of the predominant reasons Nathan the Wise was banned in Germany soon after it’s release in 1779, as well as the claim that the book was really an attack of the Christian religion. The manner in which Lessing writes this work and

In order to talk about how Nathan the Wise conveys reason in the Enlightenment, both the definition of the Enlightenment and reason should be explained. Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher of his time, sought to answer the question, through an aptly named essay, “What is Enlightenment?” and does so very thoroughly. The Enlightenment, is defined as “man 's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity” (Kant). The immaturity Kant makes reference to is the inability for man to use his own understanding without guidance from another, and it is “self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another” (Kant). Kant then went even further to use the Greek phrase “Sapere aude!” (Kant), to challenge men to think for themselves, to use their own reason and not to let

If all religions are designed to be a delivery system for dogmatic practices, then how is there true freedom, true free will to believe in one religion over another? Dr. Ronald Schechter of the College of William and Mary, an editor and translator of Nathan the Wise, wrote an introduction to the book in which he explains how Lessing “used the plurality of religious faiths to plant the seeds of doubt in the minds of readers about the superiority of Christianity” (Schechter 12), which is one of the primary reason this book was so contested in Germany. The concept of religious equality was important to Lessing, and so he created his characters to be religiously diverse and respectful of other religious cultures. Schechter compares Lessing’s work with those of other Enlightenment writers like Montesquieu and Voltaire, who Lessing claimed preached the equality of religions, but when it came to their writings, practiced another claim. Although he shared their ideals that religions should be written as equal, Lessing took it a step further and within his writing of Nathan the Wise actually invited “readers to doubt the superiority of their religion, [and] he showed considerably more respect for all three religions than Enlightenment writers typically did” (14). He exemplifies this respect through the characters of the humble friar, Saladin, Sittah,