John Toland

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2008)

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (April 2009)

John Toland (30 November 1670 - 11 March 1722) was a rationalist philosopher and Freethinker. Educated at the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leiden, and Oxford, and influenced by the philosophy of John Locke, he published many books and pamphlets in political and religious philosophy that are early expressions of the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Political thought 3 Contributions to natural philosophy 4 Religious thought 5 Impact and legacy 6 Further reading 7 References 8 Works 9 External links

[edit] Biography

Very little is known about his early life. He was born in Ardagh (Ballyliffin) on the Inishowen Peninsula, a predominantly Catholic and Irish speaking region of County Donegal in Ireland. His parents are unknown, although he was supposedly was the illegitimate son of a Roman Catholic priest and in all likelihood baptized Seán Eoghain (Sean Owen). He would later writethat he had been baptized 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. He adopted the name "John" as a schoolboy, with the encouragement of his school teacher.

After having formally converted from Catholicism to Protestantism at the age of 16, he obtained a scholarship to study theology at the University of Glasgow. He later attended the University of Edinburgh, where he was awarded a master's degree in 1690. He then got a scholarship to spend two years studying at Leiden in Holland, and then two years at Oxford in England (1694-95). The Leiden scholarship was provided by wealthy English Dissenters who hoped Toland would go on to become be 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, and the book was also burnt by the public hangman in Dublin, because it was contrary to the core doctrine of faith. 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. The 1911 Encyclopedia 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."^[1]

Very shortly after his death a biography of Toland was written by Pierre des Maizeaux.^[2]

[edit] 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 criticizing 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 grew – bit by bit – 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 coins the expression 'pantheism' - he carefully analyses the manner by which truth is arrived at, and why people are prone, as the Marxists might express it, 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 eighteenth 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. He also produced some highly controversial polemics, including the Treatise of Three Imposters, in which Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all condemned as the three great political frauds.

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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Religious thought

Toland is generally classed with the deists, but at the time when he wrote Christianity not Mysterious he was careful to distinguish himself from both skeptical 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.

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 institutionalized 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 heathen 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 coined 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 a recent book on Toland, Fouke analyses 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.

[edit] Impact 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.

[edit] Further reading

See Mosheim's Vindiciae antiquae christianorum disciplinae (1722), containing the most exhaustive account of Toland's life and writings; A Life of Toland (1722), by one of his most intimate friends; Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr John Toland, by Pierre des Maizeaux, prefixed to The Miscellaneous Works of Mr John Toland (London, 1747); John Leland's View of the Principal Deistical Writers (last ed. 1837); G. V. Lechlers Aeschichte des englischen Deismus (1841); Isaac Disraeli's Calamities of Authors (new ed., 1881); article on "The English Freethinkers" in Theological Review, No. 5 (November, 1864); J. Hunt, in Contemporary Review, No. 6. Margaret Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1976); Daniel C. Fouke, Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode: John Toland and the Way of Paradox (New York: Prometheus Books, 2008).

[edit] References

• J. I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750
• M. C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans
• This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which is in the public domain.

[edit] Works

This is a non-exhaustive list.

• Christianity Not Mysterious: A Treatise Shewing, That there is nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor Above It: And that no Christian Doctrine can be properly called A Mystery (1696)
• An Apology for Mr. Toland (1697)
• Amyntor, or the defence of Milton's life (1698)
• Amyntor, or a Defence of Miltons Life (1699)
• Edited James Harrington's Oceana and other Works (1700)
• The Art of Governing Partys (1701)
• Limitations for the next Foreign Successor, or A New Saxon Race: Debated in a Conference betwixt Two Gentlemen; Sent in a Letter to a Member of Parliament (1701)
• Propositions for Uniting the Two East India Companies (1701)
• Hypatia or the History of a most beautiful, most virtuous, most learned and in every way accomplished lady, who was torn to pieces by the clergy of Alexandria to gratify the pride, emulation and cruelty of the archbishop commonly but undeservedly titled St Cyril (1720)
• Anglia Libera, or the Limitation and Succession of the Crown of England (1701)
• Reasons for Address His Majesty to Invite into England their Highnesses, the Electress Dowager and the Electoral Prince of Hanover (1702)
• Vindicius Liberius (1702)
• Letters to Serena (1704)
• The Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church (c.1705; posthume, 1726)
• The Account of the Courts of Prussia and Hanover (1705)
• Socinianism Truly Stated (by "A Pantheist") (1705)
• Translated A. Phillipick Schiner's Oration to Incite the English Against the French (1707)
• Adeisidaemon - or the "Man Without Superstition" (1709)
• Origines Judaicae (1709)
• The Art of Restoring (1710)
• The Jacobitism, Perjury, and Popery of High-Church Priests (1710)
• An Appeal to Honest People against Wicked Priests (1713)
• Dunkirk or Dover (1713)
• The Art of Restoring (1714) (against Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer|Robert Harley)
• Reasons for Naturalising the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland on the same foot with all Other Nations (1714)
• State Anatomy of Great Britain (1717)
• The Second Part of the State Anatomy (1717)
• Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile and Mahometan Christianity (1718)
• The Probability of the Speedy and Final Destruction of the Pope (1718)
• Tetradymus (1720) translated into English in 1751
• Pantheisticon (1720) translated into English in 1751
• History of the Celtic Religion and Learning Containing an Account of the Druids (1726)
• A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr John Toland, ed. P. Des Maizeaux, 2 vols. (1726)
• His manuscripts can be found at the British Library, London W2, MSS. ADD. 4292

[edit] External links

• Works by John Toland at Google Books