Religious toleration has posed a challenge for humankind from time immemorial. The religious conflicts of our own times have intensified interest in the historical experience of past generations and in the study of religious differences across the ages. As in the past, today we are witnesses to interreligious tensions, to extremist and dogmatic ideologies, and to demonization and fear arising from the encounter with the Other. How crucial, then, it is to rehabilitate the memory of a space of openness and tolerance in the history of interreligious intercourse, reaching back as far as medieval times, to learn from history about the idea of religious toleration. One may hope that such an endeavor will support a positive discourse that emphasizes the commonalities of different religions and allows the flourishing of different truths.
The literary creation of the Parable of the Three Rings in the Middle Ages embodies the vicissitudes of an uncommon idea—the idea of religious tolerance—and its attendant notion of religious relativism, and the possibility of doubt regarding the existence of a single religious truth. The manifestation of this idea in different periods and places throughout the Middle Ages and in the early modern era, points to a continuing re-examination of interreligious relations, coupled with the recognition of a shared foundation with the other two Abrahamic faiths, namely, the Father, who represents the One God. A review of the history of the Parable shows that it tended to re-emerge in regions rich with cultural cross-pollination. This allows for a new perspective that may uncover the reflexive processes of religious and cultural identity and the notions of “Otherness” in the Middle Ages. The fact that significant chapters of the Parable’s history were affected by the Christian-Muslim encounter under Muslim rule leads to an understanding that, at the practical level, interreligious relations over generations of coexistence may naturally give rise to a measure of religious introspection and self-awareness, and a more pluralistic worldview.
In Western culture, the Parable of the Three Rings owes its fame mainly to the philosopher and dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), who showcased it in his last play, Nathan the Wise (1779).1 The protagonist, Nathan, is a wealthy Jewish merchant living in Jerusalem in the days of Sultan Saladin’s rule, shortly after the latter had wrested it from the hands of the Crusaders. To paraphrase Jan Assmann, the Parable, which constitutes the climax of the play, embodies the ideal of tolerance, in the sense that a deep religious truth exists at a point beyond the Mosaic distinction between “true” and “false” religion.2 It presents, in consummate form, the aspiration to religious truth that is common to the three Abrahamic religions. Commentators have compared Nathan to Moses Mendelssohn—a philosopher who promoted the notion of tolerance and the power of rationality in Judaism’s relations with other religions. Hannah Arendt has argued that in presenting the Parable, Lessing attempted to advance the idea that amity among people ought to override any ambition to discover some absolute truth. For Lessing, it is precisely the multiplicity of views that arise from relinquishing the desire to identify the Ring (the true faith) that constitutes the core of human experience. The German audience of Lessing’s day, Arendt, notes, was not yet ready to absorb the message of the Parable or to accept the figure of the Jew that he had created.3
The Parable tells the story of a father with three beloved sons, each of whom had received a paternal promise of a particular precious ring. As the day of the father’s death approached, in order to keep his promise, he engaged an expert jeweler to craft two impeccable imitations of the original ring. So perfectly did the jeweler fulfill the task, that even the father himself could not identify the original. Upon the father’s death, son after son presents his precious inheritance, each claiming to possess the “real” ring. These three rings stand for the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—each of which is true in the eyes of its believers. Lessing’s play was hailed as a work that embodied the idea of religious tolerance, the contemporary spirit of the Enlightenment in Germany, and the notion that no single, monotheistic “truth” trumped any other one. The play was first performed in Berlin in 1783. In 1805, an English-language version of Nathan the Wise was published in London, where it was introduced as “an argumentative drama, written to inculcate mutual indulgence between religious sects”. The translator added that “This translation … was undertaken in March 1790, when questions of toleration were much afloat.”4 The text of the translation is as follows.
In days of yore, there dwelt in eastern lands / A man who had a ring of priceless worth / Received from hands beloved. The stone it held, / An opal, shed a hundred colors fair, / And had the magic power that he who wore it, / Trusting its strength, was loved of God and men / No wonder therefore that this eastern man / Would never cease to wear it; and took pains / To keep it in his household for all time. / He left the ring to that one of his sons / He loved the best, providing that in turn / That son bequeath to his favorite son / The ring; and thus, regardless of his birth, / The dearest son, by virtue of the ring, / Should be the head, the prince of all his house. / At last this ring, passed on from son to son, / Descended to a father of three sons; / All three of whom were duly dutiful, / All three of whom in consequence he needs / Must love alike. But from time to time, / Now this, now that one, now the third—as each / might be with him alone, and other two / not sharing then his overflowing heart / seemed worthiest of the ring; and so to each / He promised it, in pious frailty. / This lasted while it might. Then came the time / For dying, and the loving father finds / Himself embarrassed. It is a grief to him / To wound two of his sons, who have relied / Upon his word. What’s to be done? He sends / In secret to a jeweler, of whom / He orders two more rings, in pattern like / His own, and bids him spare nor cost nor toil / To make them in all points identical. / The jeweler succeeds. And when he brings / the rings to him, the sire himself cannot / Distinguish them from the original. / In glee and joy he calls his sons to him / Each by himself, confers on him his blessing / His ring as well—and dies— / Scarce the father dead when all three sons / Appear, each with his ring, and each would be / The reigning prince. They seek the facts they quarrel / Accuse. In vain; the genuine ring was not / Demonstrable—almost as little as / Today the genuine faith.5
Image 1.1
The frontispiece of the play Nathan the Wise, published in Berlin and Leipzig in 1779. The Latin motto Lessing chose for his play—Introite, nam et heic Dii sunt! (“Enter, for there are gods here too”)—remains an enigma. His intention may have been to allude to gods other than the One God revered by the members of the three Abrahamic faiths, namely, the gods of literature and theater. (Copyright: SLUB Dresden / Deutsche Fotothek)
As one of the finest products of the German Enlightenment, Nathan the Wise concretized the Parable of the Three Rings as an expression of the era’s Zeitgeist, with its salient value of religious toleration.6 Scholars of Enlightenment culture have pointed to the radical nature of the solution the play offers to the question of religious difference by suggesting that “true” religion can never be proven, and that God himself is weary of the strife engendered in the attempts to do so.7
The Parable, as told by Lessing, constitutes the end of the present book, whose aim is to trace its intellectual roots and discuss its meaning within interreligious discourse. The prior history of the Parable and the allegory upon which it is founded extend deeply into medieval culture, branching widely and reaching as far as the Muslim Orient. The history of the Parable’s retellings that brought it to the threshold and then into the heart of Europe will be considered as the permutations of an idea—the time and circumstances of its emergence, the place of its development, and the cultural and intellectual soil in which it took root.
The trajectory of the Parable holds surprises. When it appeared in Nathan the Wise , embellished and sealed with the imprint of the Enlightenment, it served as a mirror of that era’s ideals—ideas that had taken shape within the progression of European thought. The idea of religious tolerance, as formulated in the Parable, was not birthed in Europe, however; rather, Europe had absorbed and cultivated it over the course of many centuries.
Our quest for the sources of the Parable will engage the three elements that render it unique: its allegorical core, its formal structure, and the idea that it is based upon, namely, the relationship between a “true” faith and those that are deemed false. These elements will serve as beacons to guide my excursus into the various versions of the tale. Intriguingly, we shall find that while the Parable was formulated and diffused largely within European culture, each of the above-mentioned constitutive elements can be traced to the early medieval Orient.
In addition to probing the sources of the Parable and its European reception, the book will deal with its development within Europe, and the meanings it acquired there. A version of the Parable first appeared in Catholic Europe in the mid-thirteenth century, in a formulation that leaves no doubt as to the exclusive truth of the Christian religion. The following century, however, saw the rise of a more skeptical version, in which one can discern the idea that each of the three monotheistic religions has access to truth. Our inquiry concerns the period between these two milestones in Parable history with respect to the shifting attitudes of Western Catholic Christianity toward other religions, and considers the link between religious skepticism and religious tolerance, especially in regions where interreligious encounters took place. Such encounters laid the groundwork for an intellectual climate that was favorable both to religious polemics and to attempts to think about religious commonalities. Like the history of the Parable, the development of a positive attitude toward difference was dynamic, emerging at Europe’s margins and spreading inward.
In the context of the current discussion, skepticism entails an undermining of the notion that one absolute truth is represented by a single belief system. While doubts about such a truth might constitute a heresy toward that faith, it may also break ground for comparative thinking and religious relativism. Following the appearances of the Parable in medieval Christian Europe and in the early modern era, we can trace a process of transformation from a “closed” tale, far from skepticism or tolerance, to an “open” one that leaves unresolved any determination of the “true” religion. As I shall attempt to demonstrate later in the chapter, such a process does appear to have occurred in medieval religious thought. The medieval Catholic Church aspired to create a religiously uniform culture, but its encounter with the main creeds of other religions during the thirteenth century and its feverish engagement with competing doctrines paved the way to a comparative examination of religions. Even when such an examination was undertaken with polemical intent, the common ground of these religions was apparent to inquisitive minds. Thus, I will ask whether the recognition that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam shared a foundational belief in one God contribut...