“Thinking Aloud with a Friend: G.E. Lessing’s ‘Ernst and Falk: Dialogues for Freemasons'”

From the May/June 2025 edition of The Scottish Rite Journal.  Any accompanying photographs or citations for this article can be found in the corresponding print edition.


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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Scottish Right Journal podcast and audio presentation
of the Scottish Right Journal, brought to you by the
Supreme Council of the Scottish Right Southern Jurisdiction Mother Supreme
Council of the World. This week's article is Cornerstone's of
the Craft Thinking Aloud with a Friend G. E. Lessing's
Ernst and Falk Dialogues for Freemasons by Mary Helen Dupree, PhD.

(00:25):
And comes from the May June twenty twenty five issue
of the Scottish Right Journal. One of the most fascinating
figures of the German Enlightenment was the German philosopher, poet, critic,
librarian and dramatist Gotthold Ephraheim Lessing. Trained as a theologian,
Lessing quickly turned to theater, literature and philosophy as a

(00:47):
young student in Leipzig. He eventually became a key figure
in the Berlin Enlightenment. Was known as the German Voltaire,
and used both philosophical writing and the stage to advocate
for Enlightenment values such as critical thinking, interreligious understanding, and
a more just empathetic society. His many contributions to literary

(01:07):
history include his seventeen seventy eight dramatic poem Nathan the Wise,
which was inspired by his friendship with the Jewish German
philosopher and reformer Moses Mendelssohn and remains one of the
most significant and German language texts on religious tolerance. Throughout
his life, Lessing was deeply interested in Freemasonry. He had

(01:28):
contact with Freemasons in every stage of his life, first
in Leipzig through his association with members of the theater
company run by Caroline Nuber, then in Berlin through his
friends Christian Friedrich Voss and Christoph Friedrich Nikolai, and later
in Hamburg through his friendship with the publisher and translator
Johann Joachim Christoph Boda. Lessing was initially skeptical of Freemasonry,

(01:53):
even penning a satirical poem about the Masons entitled The
Secret Doskheimness for a Berlin news paper in seventeen fifty one. However,
his views on the topic gradually developed as a result
of his conversations with his initiated friends, and were particularly
transformed by a conversation he had with the historian Eustace

(02:14):
Moser in Bad Piermont a popular spa resort and meeting
place of the period. Lessing finally became a Freemason in
October seventeen seventy one, when he joined the newly founded
Lodge zudendrei Rosen the Three Roses and Hamburg, then a
major hub of Masonic activity. In the decade that followed,

(02:34):
Lessing began work on a series of five philosophical dialogues
entitled Ernst and Falk Dialogues for Freemasons, which eventually were
published anonymously in two installments in seventeen seventy eight and
seventeen eighty, respectively. In this series of lively conversations between
the initiated mason Falk and a curious outsider, Ernst, Lessing

(02:57):
worked through his ideas about the origins of freemaie Masonry,
its true nature, and its relationship to the Enlightenment. The
form of the platonic style dialogue allowed Lessing to exercise
his skills as a dramatist and to develop a model
of intellectual friendship that was able to tolerate interpersonal differences
and conflicts of opinion, a key theme of Nathan the

(03:19):
Wise In Ernst and Falk, Lessing asks what the true
meaning of freemasonry is, and whether it is possible to
be a Freemason in spirit without joining the fraternity formally.
In the first dialogue, The Initiated Freemason, Falk characterizes freemasonry
as necessary to human experience and the social contract, and

(03:40):
argues that if the order did not exist, one could
just as easily come up with its core ideas on
one's own, an idea very similar to Lessing's own views
on the natural truths embedded within all world religions as
expressed in his theological writings and in Nathan the Wise.
Falk also suggests to Ernst the impact of the freemason's

(04:01):
activities will be so far reaching that it may take
centuries for them to take hold. In essence, Lessing aligns
freemasonry with a moderate, gradualist version of Enlightenment whose effects
may not be felt until far into the future. Political
life and tolerance enter the chat in the second and
third dialogues, in which Lessing considers how organizations like Freemasonry

(04:25):
can contribute to the happiness of civil society as it
currently exists. Falk explains civil society is deeply divided by religious, cultural,
and social distinctions. Yet there exists a certain cohort of
men who have risen above such distinctions. At least in theory,
Freemasonry offers a space where men from every national origin, religion,

(04:48):
and social class can come together and discuss solutions to
the necessary evils affecting society, which Lessing argues can be
mitigated but never be completely eliminated. The enlightened Freemasons that
Lessing in visions are not revolutionaries, but rather moderate sowers
of goodwill and tolerance, who plant the seeds of such

(05:09):
feelings in others and cultivate them over long periods of
time that can extend into posterity. Having established the ontology
or true nature of freemasonry in the first three dialogues,
Lessing uses the last two to confront the messier realities
of Masonic life in the eighteenth century. The more skeptical

(05:29):
Ernths sharply critiques the practices of those Christian Freemasons who
exclude Jews from their lodges, which prompts Fok to make
a distinction between the social practices of specific lodges, which
he styles the business of the lodges, and the true
essence of freemasonry. The external, internal Divide mirrors Lessing's approach
to religion, although he does not label freemasonry as such.

(05:52):
For Lessing, freemasonry is not defined through its rituals and
visual iconography, but rather through its inner truth truths, and
even more importantly, through emotions the common feeling of sympathizing minds.
In the fifth and final dialogue, Lessing indulges in a
somewhat fanciful etymological digression on the origins of freemasonry, Drawing

(06:15):
on an idea developed in his conversations with Moser, his
historian friend, he claims that the English term mason is
derived not from Masonry, but rather from a German term
that found its way into the English speaking world and
was still in use during the era of Protestant reformer
Martin Luther Masonay, which refers to a closed society or

(06:38):
perhaps a drinking club that meets around a table. Riffing
on this rather dubious claim, Falk even speculates that the
first masonae was the round table presided over by King Arthur,
adding with a clear national bias that this was a
German practice that had come over to England with the
Anglo Saxons by turns serious and playful. Lessing's Ernstein Falk

(07:01):
is an important document of the history of Freemasonry in
Germany and reveals how Lessing thought about the role of
secular institutions in effecting long lasting social change. In the
twentieth century, the discussion of freemasonry in Ernst and Falk
was taken up again by the influential German historian Reinhardt Kosselek,
who traced the origins of the French Revolution back to

(07:23):
the salons and Masonic lodges of the eighteenth century, an
idea that would have no doubt horrified the more moderate Lessing,
who did not live to see the storming of the
Bastille and the reign of terror. For Freemasons and anyone
interested in eighteenth century history, Ernst and Falk remains a
delightfully accessible deep dive into the ideas and controversies surrounding

(07:46):
freemasonry in the eighteenth century. What is more, it offers
a model of intellectual companionship that can still provide inspiration today.
For nothing, as Falk says to Ernst, is better than
thinking aloud with a friend, Like and share this article
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(08:09):
hit the notifications bell. Any accompanying photographs or citations for
this article can be found in the corresponding print edition.
The Scottish Rite Journal is published by the Supreme Council
of the Scottish Right Southern Jurisdiction Mother Supreme Council of
the World. Mark Dreysenstock, thirty third degree Managing Editor. I'm
your host, Matt Bowers