John Toland (30 November 1670 – 11 March 1722) was an Irish 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.
His first, and best known work, Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), opposed hierarchy in both church and state. In Ireland, copies were burned by the public hangman, and he was forced to flee the country never to return.
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.
Having formally converted from Catholicism to Protestantism (Anglicanism) 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), where he acquired a reputation for great learning and "little religion." 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), begun at Oxford, 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. His argument immediately attracted several rebuttals, and 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—curtailing a visit in 1697, he fled the country—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".
After his departure from Oxford Toland resided in London for most of the rest of his life. He was financially supported by other opposition Whigs such as Robert Molesworth and the Earl of Shaftesbury. He frequently visited the European continent, particularly Germany and the Netherlands, living on the Continent from 1707 to 1710.
Toland died in Putney on 10 March 1722. The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1911) 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, part of which reads: "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." Although he himself had written biographies in his career, it concludes, tellingly: "If you would know more of him, search his writings."
Very shortly after his death a lengthy biography of Toland was written by Pierre des Maizeaux, a primary and authoritative source on his life.
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, particularly its Commonwealthmen faction. 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. During a brief visit to Hanover in 1701, he was received by the electress Sophia, as Anglia Libera contained a defence of the Hanoverian succession.
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 analysed 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 work Reasons for Naturalising the Jews, he called for naturalizing foreign-born Jews and allowing them to hold public office. The work borrowed from Simone Luzzatto's 1638 Discourse on the Jews of Venice.
Toland's world was not all detached intellectual speculation, however. There was also an incendiary element to his political pamphleteering, and he was not beyond appealing to some of the baser anti-Catholic sentiments of the day in his attacks on the Jacobites.
Dissemination of "The Treatise of the Three Imposters"
Toland claimed to own a personal copy of the manuscript of the Treatise of the Three Impostors, in which Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all condemned as three great political frauds, which he passed to the circle of Jean Rousset in France. 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.
Rumours that it was then translated into French were taken seriously by some: however, not by Voltaire, who issued a satirical reply.
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". George I and the oligarchy behind Walpole, however, were far from Toland's ideal.
Contributions to natural philosophy