Piero MARTINETTI. — Philosopher, born in Pont (Aosta) on 21 August 1872, died there on 22 March 1943. He was professor of philosophy at the University of Milan from 1904 to 1933. Of reserved and disdainful character, he had a religious sense of philosophy and philosophizing; a thinker of vast and solid philosophical culture, rigorous method, and strong capacity for historical and theoretical synthesis, he is, together with Varisco (q.v.), the most representative figure of Italian critical idealism. He was most influenced by Indian philosophy, Plotinus, and Manichaeism in antiquity, and by Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer in the modern age; he developed these influences in dialogue with contemporary thought, especially German.
His principal work remains *L'Introduzione alla metafisica* (Turin 1904; 2nd ed., Milan 1929), in which Martinetti systematically presents his theory of knowledge, accompanied by an extensive historical excursus that is a true model. The critique of knowledge is not a formal examination of the cognitive procedures of thought by thought itself, but a critical examination of knowledge in general, embracing all reality, with the aim of eliminating inadequate metaphysical viewpoints in order to attain a superior one (*Introduzione*, pp. 40-51). Reality is neither the reflection of an object-in-itself in the subject (uncritical realism), nor the production of the subject (transcendent idealism): rather, it is consciousness itself, considered in its multiplicity and in the independence of the conscious elements that constitute it, which is the world, the object; considered in the unity of its comprehensive synthesis, it is the ego, the subject (ibid., p. 110).
The multiplicity of particular subjects points to a unity, to the Absolute Subject, in which the subjects tend to merge: life in the Absolute, in God, is the supreme end of religious consciousness. The process of knowing is an “ascesis” from the sensible to the intelligible, a process of liberation from evil and return to the whole (a Neoplatonizing pantheism with strong Spinozist and Schopenhauerian, as well as Eastern, influences). But the Absolute cannot be grasped by any intellectual form, and therefore all such forms are relative and partial expressions of the Absolute itself, which remains beyond every possible form of knowledge. The One can only be expressed by means of “symbols,” that is, inadequate and relative imaginative or rational representations, each of which is a *faith*. Thus, for Martinetti, religious faith is a degree (the highest) of philosophy and resolves itself into the rationality of philosophy itself, with the uncompromising exclusion of any revealed or supernatural knowledge.
It is not rational necessity but chance that opposes freedom; indeed, “freedom not only does not exclude, but implies necessity, because it excludes contingency” (*La libertà*, Milan 1928, p. 338). “Freedom is the autonomous explication of a conscious subject, which implies causal concatenation. Freedom of spontaneity or practice is not yet moral freedom. This is not an absurd faculty of good and evil; it is one with the power, with the dignity of a rectified spirit” (ibid., p. 401), which is respect for and fulfillment of the moral law. But the order that man strives to realize in the gradual conquest of freedom remains always an ideal, which is real in God, whom religious consciousness thinks of as totality and absolute perfection. Not a personal God (otherwise neither human responsibility nor freedom can be explained), but an impersonal Reason, to be thought of as a true omnicida realitatis, in which the various moments of reason are indestructibly preserved. “The essence and principle of human freedom is therefore in his divine personality, in his absolute being as co-existent in the Absolute Reason” (ibid., p. 491).
In a system so rigidly pantheistic, philosophy can only be understood as profound religiosity, a thirst for the divine that is within us and is the very essence of God, to which we aspire to assimilate ourselves. On the one hand, therefore, Martinetti resolves religion into philosophy, faith into reason (*Ragione e fede*, Milan 1934, p. 44); and, on the other, he criticizes all religious confessions, and among them most harshly Catholicism, advocating the establishment of small free and independent churches, stripped of all externals of religious practice, in agreement on the fundamental points of evangelical morality and on “rational” faith in a transcendent Reality: in short, a form of deism. Jesus Christ (as is seen in *Gesù Cristo e il Cristianesimo*, a work that betrays a deplorable misunderstanding of Christianity and Catholicism and a bias toward Protestant sources) would be a kind of prophet (among many) of the transcendent, sad and pessimistic about the redemption of humanity from evil and confident in a kind of final outcome of the world as the annihilation of phenomenal appearances in the All. The following works were placed on the Index: *G. Cristo e il Cristianesimo*; *Ragione e Fede*; *Il Vangelo con introduzione e note* (decree of 3 December 1937).
It goes without saying that Martinetti’s Christianity is the negation of authentic Christianity and Catholicism in its entirety. It suffices to consider that for him primitive Christianity is found uncorrupted only in Marcion and Mani. The philosopher Martinetti, and above all the methodological thinker of philosophical problems, is undoubtedly superior to the “theologian” Martinetti of a Reason in which the world, its appearance, is annulled without any other motive than the irrational and absurd necessity of Reason itself.