This study presents, elaborates on, and summarizes the thought of Leonardo Coimbra (1883-1936) related to the defense of freedom of religious teaching in private schools supervised by the State that the thinker advocated as Minister of Public Instruction between November 30, 1922 and January 9, 1923, during the period of the First Portuguese Republic (1910-1926). The question of freedom of religious teaching, in its cultural, political, autobiographical, biographical, and bibliographical aspects, took on the whole of anthropological
Coimbra's anthropological, philosophical, pedagogical, and theological thought, a preponderant role in the way he anticipated and contributed to its evolution and philosophical, religious, and theological transmutation, from creationist idealism to ideorealism of Christian matrix.
From his The Creationism (1912) to his last work The Russia of Today and the Man of Forever (1935), Leonardo Coimbra moved from a theology to a philosophy of religion, founded on an aesthetic reason and a transcendental reason, which allows us to qualify him as a typical and unique Portuguese theology, It emerged from literature, from poetics, from aesthetics, from a progressive philosophy open to new integrations, in a spiral helical movement - ascending and descending - integrating the gnosiological-metaphysical, metaphysical-religious, religious-Christian, and aesthetic-theological dimensions of his thought.
The exemplary defense of the freedom of religious teaching harmonized Leonardo Coimbra's constructive and creationist thought to the extent that it conjugated, consensualized, and integrated the foundational theses of his philosophical and theological thought. This theological determination of freedom, reviewed on a pedagogical horizon in the light of Leonardo Coimbra's thought, currently legitimizes freedom of religious instruction to the extent that it protects the transcendental
in that it protects the transcendental possibility of the person and his freedom, incoherible by anthropolatrous humanisms or humanist messianisms.
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