A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

Edelmann (1698-1767), one of the most energetic freethinkers of his age. Trained philosophically at Jena under the theologian Budde, a bitter opponent of Wolff, and theologically in the school of the Pietists, he was strongly influenced against official orthodoxy through reading the Impartial History of the Church and of Heretics, by Gottfried Arnold, an eminently anti-clerical work, which nearly always takes the side of the heretics. [1277] In the same heterodox direction he was swayed by the works of Dippel. At this stage Edelmann produced his Unschuldige Wahrheiten ("Innocent Truths"), in which he takes up a pronouncedly rationalist and latitudinarian position, but without rejecting "revelation"; and in 1736 he went to Berleburg, where he worked on the Berleburg translation of the Bible, a Pietist undertaking, somewhat on the lines of Dippel's mystical doctrine, in which a variety of incredible Scriptural narratives, from the six days' creation onwards, are turned to mystical purpose. [1278] In this occupation Edelmann seems to have passed some years. Gradually, however, he came more and more under the influence of the English deists; and he at length withdrew from the Pietist camp, attacking his former associates for the fanaticism into which their thought was degenerating. It was under the influence of Spinoza, however, that he took his most important steps. A few months after meeting with the Tractatus he began (1740) the first part of his treatise Moses mit aufgedecktem Angesichte ("Moses with unveiled face"), an attack at once on the doctrine of inspiration and on that of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The book was intended to consist of twelve parts; but after the appearance of three it was prohibited by the imperial fisc, and the published parts burned by the hangman at Hamburg and elsewhere. Nonetheless, Edelmann continued his propaganda, publishing in 1741 or 1742 The Divinity of Reason, [1279] and in 1741 Christ and Belial. In 1749 or 1750 his works were again publicly burned at Frankfurt by order of the imperial authorities; and he had much ado to find anywhere in Germany safe harbourage, till he found protection under Frederick at Berlin, where he died in 1767. Edelmann's teaching was essentially Spinozist and pantheistic, [1280] with a leaning to the doctrine of metempsychosis. As a pantheist he of course entirely rejected the divinity of Jesus, pronouncing inspiration the appanage of all; and the gospels were by him dismissed as late fabrications, from which the true teachings of the founder could not be learned; though, like nearly all the freethinkers of that age, he estimated Jesus highly. [1281] A German theologian complains, nevertheless, that he was "more just toward heathenism than toward Judaism; and more just toward Judaism than toward Christianity"; adding: "What he taught had been thoroughly and ingeniously said in France and England; but from a German theologian, and that with such eloquent coarseness, with such a mastery in expatiating in blasphemy, such things were unheard of." [1282] The force of Edelmann's attack may be gathered from the same writer's account of him as a "bird of prey" who rose to a "wicked height of opposition, not only against the Lutheran Church, but against Christianity in general."