Justification rather than truth: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s defence of positive religion in the ring-parable

Abstract

Positive religion is not held in high esteem since the time of the Enlightenment. Then its claims, e.g. revelatory claims or claims to absolute, i.e. unique validity , were considered to be incapable of being historically verifiable or to contradict rationality, moral as well as cognitive rationality. Regarding the latter, the criticism was that since positive religious claims go beyond what is possible to know, their truth cannot be fixed. Globally speaking, three fashions of reducing or even rejecting positive religion prevailed then: Positive religion could be reduced to morality – the fashion particularly prevalent in the ‘German’ (i.e. Prussia and surrounding countries) version of the Enlightenment (see also below, section 3). Or, it could be reduced to natural religion, to deistic and similar doctrines – particularly prevalent in the English version of the Enlightenment. Or, it could be straightforwardly rejected in the spirit of an all-out atheism – the fashion particularly prevalent in the French version of the Enlightenment.