John Toland

This article is about the Enlightenment philosopher. For other individuals with the same name, see John Toland (disambiguation).
John Toland

The only known image of Toland
Born (1670-11-30)30 November 1670
Ardagh, County Donegal, Ireland
Died 11 March 1722(1722-03-11) (aged 51)
London, Great Britain
Other names Janus Junius Toland, Seán Ó Tuathaláin, Eoghan na leabhar (John of the books)[1]
Era Age of Enlightenment
Region British philosophy
Main interests
 liberty, theology, physics
Notable ideas
 Pantheism

John Toland (30 November 1670 – 11 March 1722) was a rationalist philosopher and freethinker, and occasional satirist, who wrote numerous books and pamphlets on political philosophy and philosophy of religion, which are early expressions of the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment. Born in Ireland, he was educated at the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leiden and Oxford and was influenced by the philosophy of John Locke.

Biography

Very little is known of Toland's early life. He was born in Ardagh on the Inishowen Peninsula, a predominantly Catholic and Irish-speaking region in northwestern Ireland. His parents are unknown. He would later write that he had been baptised Janus Junius, a play on his name that recalled both the Roman two-faced god Janus and Junius Brutus, reputed founder of the Roman republic. According to his biographer Pierre des Maizeaux, he adopted the name John as a schoolboy with the encouragement of his school teacher.[2]

Having formally converted from Catholicism to Protestantism at the age of 16, Toland got a scholarship to study theology at the University of Glasgow. In 1690, at age 19, the University of Edinburgh conferred a master's degree on him. He then got a scholarship to spend two years studying at University of Leiden in Holland, and subsequently nearly two years at Oxford in England (1694–95). The Leiden scholarship had been provided by wealthy English Dissenters, who hoped Toland would go on to become a minister for Dissenters.

In Toland's first book Christianity not Mysterious (1696), he argued that the divine revelation of the Bible contains no true mysteries; rather, all the dogmas of the faith can be understood and demonstrated by properly trained reason from natural principles. For this argument he was prosecuted by a grand jury in London. As he was a subject of the Kingdom of Ireland, members of the Parliament of Ireland proposed that he should be burnt at the stake, and in his absence three copies of the book were burnt by the public hangman in Dublin as the content was contrary to the core doctrines of the Church of Ireland. Toland bitterly compared the Protestant legislators to "Popish Inquisitors who performed that Execution on the Book, when they could not seize the Author, whom they had destined to the Flames".[3]

After his departure from Oxford Toland resided in London for most of the rest of his life, but was also a somewhat frequent visitor to the European continent, particularly Germany and the Netherlands. He lived on the Continent from 1707 to 1710. Toland died in Putney on 10 March 1722.[4] The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica says of him that at his death in London at age 51 "he died... as he had lived, in great poverty, in the midst of his books, with his pen in his hand." Just before he died, he composed his own epitaph: "He was an assertor of liberty, a lover of all sorts of learning ... but no man’s follower or dependent. Nor could frowns or fortune bend him to decline from the ways he had chosen."[5]

Very shortly after his death a lengthy biography of Toland was written by Pierre des Maizeaux.[6]

Political thought

John Toland was the first person called a freethinker (by Bishop Berkeley) and went on to write over a hundred books in various domains but mostly dedicated to criticising ecclesiastical institutions. A great deal of his intellectual activity was dedicated to writing political tracts in support of the Whig cause. Many scholars know him for his role as either the biographer or editor of notable republicans from the mid-17th century such as James Harrington, Algernon Sidney and John Milton. His works "Anglia Libera" and "State Anatomy" are prosaic expressions of an English republicanism which reconciles itself with constitutional monarchy.

After Christianity Not Mysterious, Toland's views became gradually more radical. His opposition to hierarchy in the church also led to opposition to hierarchy in the state; bishops and kings, in other words, were as bad as each other, and monarchy had no God-given sanction as a form of government. In his 1704 Letters to Serena – in which he used the expression 'pantheism' – he carefully analyses the manner by which truth is arrived at, and why people are prone to forms of 'false consciousness.'

In politics his most radical proposition was that liberty was a defining characteristic of what it means to be human. Political institutions should be designed to guarantee freedom, not simply to establish order. For Toland, reason and tolerance were the twin pillars of the good society. This was Whiggism at its most intellectually refined, the very antithesis of the Tory belief in sacred authority in both church and state. Toland's belief in the need for perfect equality among free-born citizens was extended to the Jewish community, tolerated, but still outsiders in early 18th century England. In his 1714 Reasons for Naturalising the Jews he was the first to advocate full citizenship and equal rights for Jewish people.

Toland's world was not all detached intellectual speculation, though. There was also an incendiary element to his political pamphleteering, and he was not beyond whipping up some of the baser anti-Catholic sentiments of the day in his attacks on the Jacobites.

Literary hoax "The Treatise of the Three Imposters"

He also produced some highly controversial polemics, including the Treatise of the Three Impostors, in which Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all condemned as the three great political frauds. The Treatise of the Three Imposters was rumoured to exist in manuscript form since the Middle Ages and excoriated throughout all of Europe. It is now thought that the work did not exist.

Toland claimed to have a personal copy of the manuscript which he passed to the circle of Jean Rousset in France. Rumours that it was then translated into French were taken seriously by some: however, not by Voltaire who issued a satirical reply.[7]

Editions of republican radicals of the 1650s

His republican sympathies were also evidenced by his editing of the writings of some of the great radicals of the 1650s, including James Harrington, Algernon Sydney, Edmund Ludlow and John Milton. In his support for the Hanoverian monarchy he somewhat moderated his republican sentiments; though his ideal kingship was one that would work towards achieving civic virtue and social harmony, a 'just liberty' and the 'preservation and improvement of our reason.' But George I and the oligarchy behind Walpole were about as far from Toland's ideal as it is possible to get. In many ways he was thus a man born both too late and too early.

Contributions to natural philosophy

Toland influenced Baron d'Holbach's ideas about physical motion. In his Letters to Serena, Toland claimed that rest, or absence of motion, is not merely relative. Actually, for Toland, rest is a special case of motion. When there is a conflict of forces, the body that is apparently at rest is influenced by as much activity and passivity as it would be if it were moving.

Religious thought

Toland identified himself as a pantheist in his publication Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist in 1705. At the time when he wrote Christianity not Mysterious he was careful to distinguish himself from both sceptical atheists and orthodox theologians. After having formulated a stricter version of Locke's epistemological rationalism, Toland then goes on to show that there are no facts or doctrines from the Bible which are not perfectly plain, intelligible and reasonable, being neither contrary to reason nor incomprehensible to it. All revelation is human revelation; that which is not rendered understandable is to be rejected as gibberish.

However, David Berman has argued for an atheistic reading of Toland, demonstrating contradictions between Christianity not Mysterious and Toland's Two Essays (London, 1695). Berman's reading of Toland and Charles Blount attempts to show that Toland deliberately obscured his real atheism so as to avoid prosecution whilst attempting to subliminally influence unknowing readers, specifically by creating contradictions in his work which can only be resolved by reducing Toland's God to a pantheistic one, and realising that such a non-providential God is, for Blount, Toland and Colins, "...no God, or as good as no God...In short, the God of theism is blictri for Toland; only the determined material God of pantheism exists, and he (or it) is really no God."[8]

After his Christianity not Mysterious, Toland's "Letters to Serena" constitute his major contribution to philosophy. In the first three letters, he develops a historical account of the rise of superstition arguing that human reason cannot ever fully liberate itself from prejudices. In the last two letters, he founds a metaphysical materialism grounded in a critique of monist substantialism. Later on, we find Toland continuing his critique of church government in Nazarenus which was first more fully developed in his "Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church", a clandestine writing in circulation by 1705. The first book of "Nazarenus" calls attention to the right of the Ebionites to a place in the early church. The thrust of his argument was to push to the very limits the applicability of canonical scripture to establish institutionalised religion. Later works of special importance include Tetradymus wherein can be found Clidophorus, a historical study of the distinction between esoteric and exoteric philosophies.

His Pantheisticon, sive formula celebrandae sodalitatis socraticae (Pantheisticon, or the Form of Celebrating the Socratic Society), of which he printed a few copies for private circulation only, gave great offence as a sort of liturgic service made up of passages from pagan authors, in imitation of the Church of England liturgy. The title also was in those days alarming, and still more so the mystery which the author threw around the question how far such societies of pantheists actually existed. The term "pantheism" was used by Toland to describe the philosophy of Spinoza.

Toland was famous for distinguishing exoteric philosophy—what one says publicly about religion—from esoteric philosophy—what one confides to trusted friends. In 2007 Fouke's Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode: John Toland and the Way of Paradox presented an analysis of Toland's 'exoteric strategy' of speaking as others speak, but with a different meaning. He argues that Toland's philosophy and theology had little to do with positive expression of beliefs, and that his philosophical aim was not to develop an epistemology, a true metaphysical system, an ideal form of governance, or the basis of ethical obligation, but to find ways to participate in the discourses of others while undermining those discourses from within. Fouke traces Toland's practices to Shaftesbury's conception of a comic or 'derisory' mode of philosophising aimed at exposing pedantry, imposture, dogmatism, and folly.

Influence and legacy

Toland was a man not of his time; one who advocated principles of virtue in duty, principles that had little place in the England of Robert Walpole, governed by cynicism and self-interest. His intellectual reputation, moreover, was subsequently eclipsed by the likes of John Locke and David Hume, and still more by Montesquieu and the French radical thinkers. Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France wrote dismissively of Toland and his fellows: "Who, born within the last 40 years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers?"

Still, in Christianity not Mysterious, the book for which he is best known, Toland laid down a challenge not just to the authority of the established church, but to all inherited and unquestioned authority. It was thus as radical politically and philosophically, as it was theologically.

Of his influence, humanities professor Robert Pattison wrote: "Two centuries earlier the establishment would have burned him as a heretic; two centuries later it would have made him a professor of comparative religion in a California university. In the rational Protestant climate of early 18th-century Britain, he was merely ignored to death."[9]

References

  1. ↑ Harrison, Alan. John Toland (1670–1722). Baile Átha Cliath: Coiscéim, 1994
  2. ↑ Biography of John Toland by his contemporary Pierre des Maizeaux, dated 26 May 1722, which is readable online and downloadable at OL806650W.
  3. ↑ Gilbert JT, History of the City of Dublin (1854) vol 3 p66.
  4. ↑ J. A. I. Champion (1999). "'Manuscripts of Mine Abroad': John Toland and the Circulation of Ideas, c.1700-1722". Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr 14: 9–36. JSTOR 30071408.
  5. ↑ John Toland, his Methods, Manners and Mind by Stephen Daniel.
  6. ↑ This primary and authoritative source on the life of Toland is downloadable as a 92-page preface to the book A Collection of Several Pieces of John Toland OL806650W.
  7. ↑ Making Man in Reason's Image : The Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Humanity (Portable Professor Series) by James Schmidt.
  8. ↑ David Berman,"Disclaimers in Blount and Toland", in: Hunter & Wootton (eds.), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992) pp. 268–272
  9. ↑ Pattison, Robert (1987). The Triumph of Vulgarity. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 22. ISBN 0-19-503876-2. OCLC 13699782.

Further reading

Writings by John Toland

This is not an exhaustive list (and it does not clearly distinguish pamphlets from books):

External links

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