FREE THINKERS. - This name designates all those who, rejecting any revelation or dogmatic definition of religious or moral truths, claim for rational and human capacities an absolute emancipation. Hence the anticlerical and anti-ecclesiastical attitude of the Free Thinkers.
The historical origins of the movement are to be sought in seventeenth-century England, which was influenced by the Italian Renaissance, particularly by G. C. Vanini, P. Pomponazzi, Leone l'Ebreo, G. Bruno and T. Campanella (cf. L. Einstein, The italian Renaissance in England, New York 1902). Connected to these sources is H. of Cherbury (1582-1648), who can be considered the father of English deism, whose purely natural and rational religion can be accepted by any people (cf. De Veritate, London 1653, p. 212). The Cambridge school gave such a religion an ethical orientation, while J. Toland, J. Collins, M. Tindal, T. Woolston, etc. emphasized the naturalness of religion as one that excludes every dogma, rejects the authority of the Scriptures, the divinity of Christ and miracles. The English Free Thinkers, who had long constituted a sect, from 1778 oversaw in London the publication of the periodical The freethinking. But even earlier A. Collins had given a great impulse to their movement with his Discourse of freethinking (London 1713), in which he proclaimed that placing limits on reason was to go against reason itself.
The formation of free thought in France was aided by the activity of libertine writers and by acquaintance with the works of the English deists. The encyclopedists and Voltaire adhered to this tendency, the latter emphasizing still more the antidogmatic spirit by discrediting the Church and Revelation with irony and sarcasm.
In Germany, after the coronation of Frederick II, many translations of the English Free Thinkers circulated, finding fertile ground in Wolffian rationalism and informing the German Enlightenment. The results of German free thought were more concrete than those obtained in France, especially in the field of scriptural criticism and concerning the life of Jesus (H. S. Reimarus, D. F. Strauss, etc.; cf. G. Ricciotti, La vita di Gesù Cristo, 12th ed., Rome 1949, p. 210 ff.). Alongside the development of these schools, the influence exercised by the positive sciences lent greater credit to the autonomy of reason, and the movement of the Free Thinkers organized itself into city associations. From then on free thought was synonymous with atheism and a mark of the adversaries of religion and of the Church.
In Milan an Association of Free Thinkers was founded in 1865 (in the immediately preceding years identical associations had been founded in Parma, Siena and Florence), which published from 1866 to 1875 the periodical Il libero pensiero under the editorship of L. Stefanoni, who from 1867 also directed the Biblioteca del razionalista (Milan). In the statute of the Milanese Association one reads: "the Free Thinkers admit no truths other than those demonstrated by reason; no moral law other than that sanctioned by conscience... they consider dogmatic religions, so-called revealed, to be negations of conscience and of human liberty" (cf. Il libero pensiero, Milan 1866, pp. 56-57). Practical affirmations were the abstention of the Free Thinkers from religious marriage, from the baptism of children, the cremation of corpses, on which subject two medical congresses were held in 1869 in Florence and in 1874 in Milan. In 1880 in Brussels the Fédération internationale de la libre pensée was founded, to which the local associations already existing adhered. In Germany, in Frankfurt, the Deutsche Freidenkerbund was founded in 1881 (organ: Menschentum, later Der Freidenker) through the work of L. Büchner, so that "the scattered forces of German free thought may unite and, through the organization of associations, promote action in public life" (cf. L. Büchner, Am Sterbelager des Jahrhunderts, Giessen 1898). A notable development of the movement occurred in 1896 with the meeting in Zurich of the various societies of Austrian, Swiss, French, Italian, English and American moral action and culture, which formed an International Ethische Bund.
In 1906 Haeckel founded the Monistenbund, which in 1911, together with all the monistic associations, organized itself with headquarters in Hamburg as an International Komitee für Monismus.
While in France the movement of the Free Thinkers benefited from the advent of the left to power, after the Dreyfus affair (1899-1905), in 1913 in Berlin the Bund der Konfessionlos (organ: Der Weg) was formed, which gathered the masses that had left the Church. In 1915 the general movement of the Free Thinkers split into radicals and moderates, the former forming the International proletarischer Freidenker in Vienna (organ: Der proletarische Atheist); the latter establishing themselves in Leipzig and organizing there the Volksbund für Geistesfreiheit (organ: Die Geistesfreiheit). The Arbeiter Freidenkerbewegung, having broken away from the general movement in 1905, moved to Russia, where it constituted the League of the Godless.
In 1904 the Fédération internationale de la libre pensée of Brussels held an international congress in Rome, in which it was proclaimed that the Free Thinkers have the right and the duty to take away from the retrograde clerical spirit "the official direction of States and above all the obligatory direction of consciences, of popular education and of works of popular solidarity" (cf. Atti del Congresso della Federazione internazionale dei l. p. di Roma, Milan 1904, pp. 14-15). Concerning the anticlerical attitude of the movement of the Free Thinkers, the words of M. Rapisardi hold good: "Not to be able personally to hurl my last word in the face of the Vatican is for me a great sorrow" (op. cit., p. 16).
From the passages cited it is easy to note the content and the constantly antidogmatic and anti-Catholic attitude of the Free Thinkers, founded on an erroneous understanding of human values and of religious values: the former as having in themselves the possibility of naturally realizing human happiness; the latter as limiting human nature and slavishly binding the individual. Their movement, born with the intention of reconciling the rational fact with the religious fact, nullifies the problem by excluding supernatural values and reducing every religious content to the domain of positive and experimental science. The theories of the Free Thinkers are embraced and spread by Bolshevism, by Communism, by the "Godless."
Bibliography11 works
Enzo Maccagnolo