The Universal Value of Friendship as a Medium for Spiritual Experiences in a Secular Context. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1779)
The Universal Value of Friendship as a Medium for Spiritual Experiences in a Secular Context. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1779)

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the fundamental spiritual relevance of friendship which philosophers, poets, theologians, and artists have already engaged with deeply throughout time. In several previous studies, I have examined the ideal of friendship primarily in the Middle Ages and the early modern age. For this paper, by contrast, I will examine how friendship was dealt with in the age of Enlightenment, probably best expressed in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s last play, Nathan the Wise (1779). Here, true friendship overcomes all religious barriers and achieves a virtually spiritual bond among people and thus also with the divine dimension sustaining this ideal. Friendship thereby emerges as the critical catalyst to transform toleration – a grudging acceptance of difference – into true tolerance – the highest ideal in human life at least as perceived by Humanists and members of the Enlightenment, and hopefully by us today as well. All over the world and throughout time, people have enjoyed their social bonds which are the foundational building blocks for all communities. Already Aristotle had talked about people as social beings always in need of living in neighborhoods, families, associations, work contexts, offices, love relationships, and then ultimate also friendship (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I,2 (1094a-b)Since early antiquity, the value of friendship has been greatly appreciated and praised as one of the most valuable phenomena in human life. The Greeks and the Romans thus laid the foundation for this discourse on friendship (most famously, Cicero) and they were then followed by their medieval and early modern successors (see the friends in the various heroic epics, later, within the courtly context, Marie de France, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Dante Alighieri). In this study, I will draw from and rely on a vast body of relevant scholarship, including my own volume on this topic from 2010, but will then trace this major discourse far into the late eighteenth century and highlight what the German playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had to say about friendship as a basis for tolerance. In this play deeply informed by Enlightenment ideals, the relationship between friends gains a glorious profile and is identified as fundamentally important for people’s well-being irrespective of cultural, religious, racial, age, or philosophical differences.

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