Friendship with Lessing: The Last Phase

Lessing's essay Leibniz on Eternal Punishments, published in 1773, with its reaffirmation of the view that sinners were subject to eternal and infinite punishments, caused some alarm in Berlin Enlightenment circles. Just the year before Johann August Eberhard had criticized Leibniz’ defense of this doctrine and had done so, no doubt, under the influence of Mendelssohn's strenuous rejection of the concept. Lessing's essay sounded a discordant note.

In Leibniz’ view, as expressed in the Essais de Theodicee, the cause of ever-renewed suffering was the infinite continuity of sinning by the damned. Eberhard had denied the possibility of such infinite sinning on the part of finite creatures and had suggested, moreover, that Leibniz’ argument was intended only to strengthen the faith of individuals already predisposed to accept the dogma of eternal punishment. Lessing vigorously contradicted this interpretation of Leibniz. What Leibniz had had in mind, Lessing said, was not to please all parties but to discover the esoteric truth concealed in the shell of the dogma. Pretense and insincerity had been utterly foreign to Leibniz: “He struck fire from the flint, but he did not conceal his fire in the flint.“

At the beginning of his essay Lessing published the Latin text of a short note that Leibniz had written as a preface to his projected new edition of a treatise on the subject by Ernst Soner (1572-1612), a Socinian who had argued: sins are finite; there is no proportion between the finite and the infinite; punishments, therefore, must also be finite. Leibniz’ prefatory note had been discovered by Lessing in the ducal library. It stated: “Even if we were to admit that no sin as such is infinite, one may nevertheless truthfully say that the sins of the damned are infinite in number, since the damned persevere in sin throughout eternity. If, therefore, the sins are eternal, it is appropriate that punishments also be eternal.“

Lessing agreed with Leibniz’ view, which he interpreted to mean “that nothing in the world is isolated, that nothing is without consequences, [and] that nothing is without eternal consequences.” He concluded from this assumption that if punishments were the consequences of sin, they had to be eternal. According to Lessing, it was this “great esoteric truth” that Leibniz had confirmed.