Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
German Enlightenment writer, critic and philosopher (1729–1781), born in Kamenz, Saxony, into a family of Lutheran pastors, generally regarded as the founder of modern drama in the German language and one of the most influential literary critics of the entire European Enlightenment. His work Laocoön, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), one of the founding aesthetic treatises of modernity, established with argumentative rigour the fundamental distinction between spatial arts — such as painting and sculpture, which represent bodies and static moments — and temporal arts — such as poetry, which represents actions unfolding over time — criticising the then-dominant doctrine of 'ut pictura poesis' (poetry as speaking painting) and laying the foundations of an aesthetics differentiated by expressive medium that would exert lasting influence on art theory. As a playwright, Lessing introduced bourgeois drama to Germany (Miss Sara Sampson, Emilia Galotti) and, above all, wrote with Nathan the Wise (1779) one of the most influential plays of the European Enlightenment on religious tolerance: written as a direct response to a bitter personal conflict with Lutheran orthodoxy and banned by the Saxon ecclesiastical government, the play presents, through the famous 'parable of the three rings', a resounding argument for the fundamental moral equality of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and against all exclusionary religious dogmatism. As a philosophical critic, Lessing also developed an original theory of the education of humanity as a progressive process of moral and religious maturation — The Education of the Human Race (1780) — and took part in the pantheism controversy that later pitted Jacobi against Mendelssohn over his possible late adherence to Spinozism, a controversy that profoundly marked the development of post-Kantian German idealism. A close friend of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, whom he took as the model for his own Nathan, Lessing is regarded as one of the central figures who made religious tolerance and freedom of critical thought foundational values of the German Enlightenment.