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John Toland

1670–1722

 

The Irish hold themselves to be a deeply religious people, but that religion can often take curious forms.  None were more so than the career of the theologian John Toland, the man who gave the concept of 'free thinker' to the world.

      Born into a Catholic family at Inishowen near Derry on 30th November 1670, Janus Junius Toland, as he was christened, became a zealous Protestant in 1686 at the age of sixteen.  He was educated at Glasgow University, where he received his master's degree in 1690.  In 1692 Daniel Williams' Presbyterian congregation sent Toland to Leyden (where he studied with the famous scholar of the day, Fredrich Spanheim).  He had plans to become a non-Conformist minister.  Losing his faith, he settled to be simply a nonconformist.

      By 1694 Toland was at Oxford.  In 1696 he anonymously published Christianity Not Mysterious, or, A Treatise Shewing That There Is Nothing in the Gospels Contrary to Reason, Nor Above It; and That No Christian Doctrine Can Be Properly Called a Mystery, a book which aroused immense controversy.  Toland wished to show that true religion (deism, in fact), and natural morality were practically synonymous.  Any notions which transcended reason, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Grace, ought to be discarded as mere superstitions.  What he sought was a religion (or more properly an ethical position) 'as old as creation' and not dependent on church views.  Though these were scandalous notions in the seventeenth century, such ideas can be found today among advanced theologians of many Christian outlooks.

      He acknowledged the book as his own on its second edition the same year, and was prosecuted for irreligion by the grand jury of Middlesex, which covered part of London.  He escaped to Dublin in 1697, but found further troubles in his native land.  He was attacked by churchmen and others, and in September the Irish parliament ordered his book burned by the common hangman for being godless and subversive of morals.  An order for his arrest was made.  In a country rife with persecution, Toland was soon driven back to England.

      The term free thinker was used for the first time in history by William Molyneaux of Dublin in a letter to John Locke in 1679, in which he calls Toland 'a candid free thinker'.  (Molyneaux's own book, The Case of Ireland Stated, advocating Irish independence, had also been burned by the hangman in Dublin.)  Fifteen years later JONATHAN SWIFT [34] referred to 'atheists, libertines, despisers of religion, that is to say, all those who usually pass under the name Free Thinker'.  It is an achievement of the first order to bring a new concept and term like this into use.

      Toland later wrote A Life of Milton, which proved almost as controversial.  In the manner of so many outspoken young men since, intent on shocking their elders, he referred to 'the numerous suppositious pieces under the name of Christ and His apostles and other great persons'.  He was accused of doubting the authentic nature of the New Testament, and replied to these charges in a book entitled Amyntor, or a Defence of Milton's Life, which attempted to open up the whole question of the canon of scripture and how it had come down to us.  This is still a vexing question in this day, but in Toland's time a critic of biblical texts put his life in danger.

      Toland was in Hanover in 1701 as part of a government embassy, and was received by the Electress Sophia on account of his recent book Vindicius Liberius (1702), a defence of the Hanoverian succession which, of course, affected the throne of England.  In this book he admitted that Christianity Not Mysterious had been 'a youthful indiscretion'.  In 1703 he was again in Hanover and in Berlin, where he was received at court once more.

      His travels to Hanover and Prussia brought him into contact with German philosophers and contributed in a small way to the emergence of the German enlightenment.  In a book which resulted from these visits, Letters to Serena, he attacked Spinoza and anticipated some of the ideas of modern materialism.  In 1707 he also published his An Account of the Courts of Prussia and Hanover, which remains an important source for the career of Frederick the Great.

      The rest of his life was lived in some obscurity.  He seems to have been a spy for the British government from time to time.  He continued to publish on politics and religion, and in 1709 was in the Hague, where he published Adeisidaemon and Origines Judaicae.  Another theological work appeared in 1718 called Nazerenus, or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity.  In this he claimed that the early Christians of the first century had been Jewish Christians following the old Mosaic law.  They were the later Nazarenes (or Ebionites) and Elkesaites, condemned by the church as heretics.  To Toland's mind it was nicely ironic that the organized church should persecute true Christians, so to speak.

      His Pantheisticon (1720) introduced the term pantheism, that is an identification of the deity with the universe, of God and Nature, and it outlined a society of pantheists.  This caused as much offence to the pious as his first book.  To his critics, it seemed that he had reduced God to the material universe and to have made him little more than a mechanical law of nature.

      Toland lived these years in great poverty, sinking to the position of a semi-political hack writer, dependent on the patronage of Harley, Shaftesbury, and others.  He died, pen in hand, in Putney outside London on 11th March 1722.

      In 1726 a collection of his writings was published, which included his History of the Druids, a key work in the development of ideas about the ancient past of Ireland.  He asserted that the Druids (about whom little is known) were, like him, pantheistic philosophers.  This view is maintained to this day by the Druid orders.  One of these, the British Circle of the Universal Bond, claims to descend (through the poet William Blake) from a group organized by Toland in 1717 at a meeting on Primrose Hill north of London.  This curious claim may have arisen from a group related to the Socratic Society, which Toland wrote about and which he seems to have been organizing at the time of his death.

      Toland was one of the most influential Irish philosophers; deism as a notion begins with him in 1696, largely a consequence of the application of the Cartesian method to religion.  The eighteenth-century encyclopediaists in France, the German enlightenment, and the religious debate in England continued his ideas and developed them as an increasingly rationalist approach to religion.

      Deism was never a mass movement, though its influence can be seen in the Unitarian church.  Toland's ideas were effective elsewhere, for deism easily moves away from any kind of theism and into atheism.  He certainly contributed to the beginning of the decline of religion as a social force.

      His ideas about pantheism can be traced through some of the poets and writers of the Romantic Movement, and even among some like Wordsworth, who were Christians.  Again, like deism and free thought, John Toland had brought a new idea before the world.  He can therefore be seen as an important source of many New Age notions which remain current to this day.