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Nathan the Wise

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,

Ronald Schechter

Start date: July 1, 2020

Finish date: July 31, 2020

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Jun 06, 2020 Manybooks rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, book-reviews, nathan-der-weise, german-literature, drama

When I read Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's 1779 play Nathan der Weise for the first time, and no, not for high school (as my family moved from Germany to Canada when I was ten years of age and thus in high school, we of course read English language and not German language literature) but rather in a 1986 university undergraduate course on the German Enlightenment, for us students (and indeed also for our professor) Nathan's wisdom, his striving for universal religious tolerance (and to a certain poi When I read Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's 1779 play Nathan der Weise for the first time, and no, not for high school (as my family moved from Germany to Canada when I was ten years of age and thus in high school, we of course read English language and not German language literature) but rather in a 1986 university undergraduate course on the German Enlightenment, for us students (and indeed also for our professor) Nathan's wisdom, his striving for universal religious tolerance (and to a certain point that Saladin himself could also be tolerant) were basically the main and the most essential points of consideration regarding Lessing's presented text (although I did indeed find the famous "Ring Parable" both a bit difficult to understand in and of itself and also leaving me at times more than somewhat personally uncomfortable with Nathan der Weise and really not completely satisfied either).

For if according to the play, if according to Nathan der Weise (and of course equally according to the "Ring Parable") Judaism, Christianity and Islam are supposedly all sprung from some common and universally good and beneficial source, why would in the ring story the father, why would the king have even created and furnished those three separate rings? I mean, it does not (or at least it should not) really take a genius to figure out and to realise that there would of course more than likely be major conflicts arising within the three sons' families, with everyone claiming that their specific ring is the right, the correct, the most important and ergo also the most universally acceptable ring (and I could never understand therefore how in Nathan der Weise, those three rings should supposedly be a solution to religious conflict, if each of the ring wearers would be thinking and believing that his ring was the greatest, the best, one "true" ring, since this would at least in my opinion and by simple logic and necessity discredit the other two rings and their wearers).

And therefore, as much as I did indeed majorly enjoy reading Nathan der Weise in 1986 and still have rather found my recent reread very much pleasurable, there is equally and in my humble opinion beneath Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's presented and indeed very essential messages of the necessity of religious tolerance also something that is not really one hundred percent positive, not altogether shining and to be universally lauded, namely how those rings really have created not a portrait of absolute tolerance but rather the opposite, with separate claims of superiority, something that I certainly doubt Lessing had intended, but something that is nevertheless subtly but still overtly present in Nathan der Weise and not to be ignored, and in particular with regard to the fact that religious tolerance is still totally and utterly a global pipe dream at best (and that is putting things mildly, that is basically a huge and all-encompassing global, universal understatement). ...more

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