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| John Toland |
"I take him to be a candid freethinker and a
good scholar. But there is a violent sort of spirit reigns here, which already
begins to show itself against him: and I believe I will increase daily; for I
find the Clergy alarmed to a mighty degree against him."
John Locke
"None are found today in the whole mortal
world, who are either as refined in their manners and more honourable, or in
all the burdens and responsibilities of the good civic offices less in error
than the sect of the Chinese called the literati. Their commission and mandate
from the king is a civil administration which excludes religious cults.
Although they believe in an eternal and incorruptible world, they do not
believe in a Spirit which is distinguished from the structure of matter; and
they completely reject as stories and political contrivances the doctrine of
the future existence of souls."[1]
John Toland
Introduction
Among other things, the historian E. P Thompson was
famous for rescuing people from the condescension of history. It is a shame
that Thompson did not write about John Toland because if ever a figure needed
rescuing from history, it was Toland.
John Toland was many things to many people, and
that is a significant problem. He was a prodigious pamphleteer, a polemicist
who liked to play practical jokes. A cursory look at recent academic articles
on Toland confirms difficulty in placing him in the correct political and
historical context. Academics have found it profoundly difficult to find a
clear picture of him. According to A R Sullivan, "Toland habitually
covered his tracks, and the bulk of his papers have been destroyed".
Perhaps this is the reason why he has suffered so
much over the last three centuries of historical obscurity. However,
thankfully, this has started to change. The religious and philosophical outlook
of John Toland, far from being a debate confined to the past, has a
contemporary feel to it. According to Paul Harrison people are still looking
for "some helpful guidance about our place in the universe. He continued
that people are looking for a religion that does not suspend rational thought
or assume an "invisible realm".
One of the foremost scientists of the 20th Century
Albert Einstein was attracted to this idea. Recent scientists such as Daniel
Dennett and Richard Dawkins have looked for a religion that would stress the
beauty of the universe revealed by science.
This type of religion has been given many names
such as religious atheism, religious humanism. However, according to Harrison
"they all share two basic premises: acceptance of the natural world as
revealed by the senses and science, and deeply religious response to that revelation".
Publishers are now showing more interest in the
works of John Toland. Lilliput Press republished Christianity Not Mysterious in
1997 with accompanying essays on Toland and his work. A Political
Biography of John Toland by Michael Brown of Aberdeen University was recently
published. Academics are now publishing substantial essays; one example among
many is Ann Talbot's The Man without Superstition: John Toland and China.
Biography
John Toland came to England from Dublin in the
summer of 1697. Toland was born in near Londonderry, Ireland on November 30
1670. He was christened in a Catholic Church but converted to Protestantism at
the age of 15. Toland achieved a degree from the University of Edinburgh in
1690. He studied in England, Germany and Holland. From an early age, Toland's
somewhat unorthodox views made it difficult for him the make a living. He made
money writing political pamphlets and biographies for aristocrats. Toland wrote
on a wide range of subjects from religious tolerance and civil liberty.
Even at the young age of 27, Toland had a very high
level of political consciousness. It was during this time he produced his most
famous work Christianity, Not Mysterious. Tom Wall points out in an article
written for the Dublin Review of Books that "the premise of the
book was that the original message of Christianity was easily understood and
accessible to human reason but had been usurped and turned into gibberish in
divinity schools to serve the interest of an emergent priestly class. He argued
that mysteries, so-called, could be explained by natural phenomena. The same
case, expressed less stridently, had already been made by John Locke without
too much of a stir. However, in Toland's case, the anti-clerical tone outraged
the Anglican establishment because it was clear that their Clergy and bishops,
and not just those of the papists, were targets. Archbishop Marsh of Dublin did
everything he could to ensure that Toland suffered for his impertinence.
Toland, referring to himself in the third person, humorously described the
reception he encountered on his arrival in an appendix to subsequent editions
of the book"[2].
"Mr Toland was scarcely arriv'd in
that country when he found himself warmly attack'd from the Pulpit,
which at the beginning could not but startle the People, who until then were
equal Strangers to him and his book, yet they became, in a little time, so well
accustomed to this Subject that it was as much expected of the course as if it
had been prescribed in the Rubrick. This occasioned a Noble Lord to give it for
a reason why he frequented not the church as formerly, that instead of his
saviour Jesus Christ, one John Toland was all the discourse there."[3]
Toland was acutely aware that the publication of
this book was a danger to his life. While many of the ruling elite who read the
book did not understand it that did not stop them from deeming it blasphemous
and ordered Toland to be arrested. His book was burnt with a grand ceremony with a
hangman presiding. Toland was a "Visible, available and vulnerable"
target for those who wanted to find heretics. It was perhaps not all his own
making".
Toland got the message, while the book burning was
deemed a piece of theatre and nothing else Toland would have known that a few
months earlier, a twenty-year-old medical student, Thomas Aikenhead, had been
executed for blasphemy in Edinburgh.
The Enlightenment
While it is not difficult to place Toland within
the context of the Englightenment, it is a more complicated matter to figure
out how important was his place in the history of the Englightenment. As Ann
Talbot points out “The name of John Toland has become a relatively well known
in early Enlightenment history following the pioneering work of Margaret Jacob.
The extensive works of Jonathan Israel have placed him among the leading
figures of the radical Enlightenment. He has returned to favour after a long
period of obscurity. Toland’s eclipse can be dated at least to
Leslie Stephens’ dismissal of him as “a poor denizen of Grub Street.” It might
even be said to have begun 6 with Edmund Burke’s remark, “Who born within the
last forty years has read one word of Collins and Toland, and Tindal and Chubb
and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves freethinkers?” Toland was
a central figure in 7 the Deist controversy although he is often described as a
Unitarian and a Pantheist. His philosophy has attracted considerable attention
in the revival of 8 interest in his writings. Studies of his political writings
have explored his role 9 in transmitting mid-seventeenth century English
political ideas to the rest of Europe and the American colonies.”[4]
While it has been the current fad amongst Post
Modernists writers to attack the importance of the Englightenment it was in the
words of Tom Wall "a defining European historical process. It is perhaps
not an overstatement to describe it as the dawn of intellectual emancipation.
If the early Enlightenment involved only small
elites within Europe, in Ireland, it could only embrace a minority of a
minority. But within that (Protestant) minority there were some who were more
than usually receptive. Many veterans of Cromwell's army had settled here; the
recipients of lands seized from Catholics. A disproportionate number of these
were religiously independent. A high proportion of the Scottish Presbyterians
who settled in Antrim and Down were non-subscribing (that is refusing to
subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith) and receptive to "New
Light" liberal Presbyterianism. The oppressed Catholic majority had more
compelling concerns, yet, surprisingly, it was from a Catholic, Gaelic-speaking
community that one of the leading proponents of the radical Enlightenment
emerged. The radical philosophers were distinguished by their direct challenges
to orthodox religious beliefs and their opposition to the arbitrary power
exercised by princes and prelates. John Toland gained much notoriety throughout
Europe for the vehemence with which he advanced such beliefs".
Toland's work began to attract other philosophers
who were beginning to cast doubt on previously held religious and philosophical
views. As the Marxist writer David North writes "Until the early
seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the
ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life
were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had
been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus's De
Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt a death blow to
the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of
departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler
(1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not
yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition
and the political structures that rested upon it, was well underway.
The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the
general intellectual environment. Above all, there was a new sense of the power
of thought and what it could achieve if allowed to operate without the
artificial restraints of untested and unverifiable dogmas. Religion began to
encounter the type of disrespect it deserved, and the gradual decline of its
authority introduced a new optimism. All human misery, the Bible had taught for
centuries, was the inescapable product of the Fall of Man. But the invigorating
scepticism encouraged by science in the absolute validity of the Book of
Genesis led thinking people to wonder whether it was not possible for a man to
change the conditions of his existence and enjoy a better world.[5]
One figure who was looking for a better world was
John Locke, who wrote of Toland "I take him to be a candid freethinker and
a good scholar. But there is a violent sort of spirit reigns here, which
already begins to show itself against him: and I believe will increase daily;
for I find the Clergy alarmed to a mighty degree against him. He has raised
against him the clamour of all parties; and this not so much for his difference
in opinion, as by his unreasonable way of discoursing, propagating and
maintaining it. Coffee houses, and public tables, are not proper places for
serious discourse relating to the most important truths. But when also a
tincture of vanity appears in the whole course of a man's conversation, it
disgusts many that may otherwise have a due value for his parts and learning.[6]
Pantheism
Locke was defending a very controversial theory
Pantheism coined by Toland in 1705 to describe his religious worldview. Toland who
was in awe of the physical universe and believed that "minds were an
aspect of the body".
While Toland never defined himself as a deist and
was committed to the idea of "Pantheist esotericism" it is generally
accepted amongst scholars that Toland was a Deist. According to R E Sullivan
"scholars who have characterised him as a Deist have usually enveloped the
label with a patchwork of qualifications and elaboration". Toland has not
helped things much using the words atheism and deism as interchangeable.
While Toland defined his beliefs as pantheists
anyone who defined themselves as materialists were labelled a deist or
atheist. Two of the most critical materialists of the day Hobbes and Spinoza
were called Deists regularly.
According to Sullivan, no one
could "agree on a single principle typical of
deism, but that did not deter them from lumping individuals together
as desists". That is not to say that there were no deists again according
to Sullivan "they adopted this name in order to describe either their
coolness toward revelation or their adherence to some kind of natural system of
belief and practice. In many cases, they seem to have believed in religious
principles, which resemble at least some of those that Herbert had offered in
De Veritate. Sometime before 1730 Tindal had become a professing deist, but
neither Toland nor Collins ever made such a profession."
According to the Frederick C Beiser, One of the
important events in the history of the early English Enlightenment was the
so-called 'deism controversy', which began in 1696 and did not die out until
the 1740s. In the most dramatic fashion, this dispute raised anew the old
question of the rule of faith. But it did so in a new form. The issue was no
longer whether reason had some authority— for everyone in the 1690s was ready
to grant that—but whether it had complete sovereignty. Now it was the other
rules of faith—Scripture, enthusiasm, and apostolic tradition—that were in
question. The controversy raised the general issue: Are there any mysteries or
truths above reason in Christianity? Or are all its beliefs subject to the
criticism of reason? By questioning the very possibility of revelation, the
dispute cast doubt upon the old rules of faith, which claimed to be, in one
form or another, sources of knowledge of revelation”[7].
[1] Quoted in Ann Talbot’s The Man without
Superstition: John Toland and China. https://www.academia.edu/39708305/The_Man_without_Superstition
[3] An apology
for Mr. Toland in a letter from himself to a member of the House of Commons in
Ireland, written the day before his book was resolv'd to be burnt by the
Committee of Religion : to which is prefix'd a narrative containing the
occasion of the said letter. https://eebo.chadwyck.com/home
[5] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of
Socialism-By David North-24 October 1996-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html
[7] The Sovereignty of
Reason-Frederick C. Beiser-Published by Princeton University Press-Chapter
6-Toland and the Deism Controversy
