Freelance journalists would have a certain sympathy with the deist and religious controversialist John Toland (1670-1722), who died 300 years ago on March 11th. Unlike most freelance journalists, he published many books and pamphlets and had fairly extensive connections with powerful people but was nevertheless mostly in poor circumstances. He might well have been the first "pantheist" - he was most likely the first to use the term in English – and he is seen as a forerunner of the Age of Enlightenment because of his free and rational thinking.
Little is known about his early life. He was probably born on the Inishowen Peninsula, then mainly Catholic and Irish speaking, of unknown parentage and was possibly baptised Joannes Eugenius, which would explain his adopting the name John.
After some schooling, he worked as a shepherd and converted to Presbyterianism as a teenager.
He got a scholarship to study theology at Glasgow University at age 17, acquired a master's at Edinburgh University and went on to study at the University of Leiden in Holland and for two years at Oxford.
Wealthy English Dissenters who supported his education hoped he’d become a minister for them but his public expression of controversial religious opinions led to his being expelled from Oxford and his first book, Christianity not Mysterious (1696), drew him into deeper controversy.
He argued for reason, tolerance and equality and was almost exceptional in calling for Jews to have full citizenship and equal rights
In it he argued that there was nothing in the bible that couldn’t be explained rationally and anything that couldn’t must have been falsely added on over time.
He also portrayed organised churches as powerbrokers operating secretly and deliberately obscurely.
A Middlesex grand jury deemed the book heretical and sought his arrest but he fled to Dublin. He wasn't safe in Ireland either as Irish MPs proposed he be burnt at the stake; in his absence, three copies of his book were burnt by the public hangman in Dublin. Toland had returned to London, where a former patron, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, protected him for a time. He spent most of the rest of his life in London, although he often visited the continent, especially Holland and Germany.
Toland was to publish some 100 books and his views in relation to both church and state gradually grew more radical. He opposed the idea of hierarchy in either, considering bishops and kings to be equally bad, and disliked the idea of hereditary, supposedly God-sanctioned monarchy. He wrote biographies and published editions of works of 17th-century Commonwealth republican thinkers such as John Milton, Edmund Ludlow and James Harrington. His own Anglia Libera and State Anatomy seek to reconcile republican ideas with constitutional monarchy. He favoured the succession of a Hanoverian monarch and was opposed to the restoration of the Stuarts.
Probably his most radical political proposal was his idea that liberty defines what it means to be human and that political institutions should guarantee liberty. He argued for reason, tolerance and equality and was almost exceptional in calling for Jews to have full citizenship and equal rights. However, he wasn’t above whipping up some of the baser anti-Catholic sentiment of his time, especially in his opposition to Jacobites, who wanted the Stuarts restored, and the corrupt, self-serving oligarchy that gathered around the Hanoverian cause was the antithesis of the freedom and equality he espoused.
In Socinianism Truly Stated (1705), he identified himself as a pantheist, although he had long been a Dissenter and was an Anglican for a period also. His Letters to Serena are considered his most significant contribution to philosophy; they synthesise a wide range of European thought, from ancient times to his own, and prefigure the Enlightenment. His biblical criticism and exegetical work meant future scholars in the field were indebted to him.
His most famous book, Christianity not Mysterious, challenged not only the authority of organised religion but all inherited and unquestioned authority
Despite having published so much and having rubbed shoulders with people in positions of power, by 1718 he was lodging in a carpenter's house in Putney, in poor circumstances and still living by his pen. A curious late work was an account of early Irish Christianity in which he argued that the Irish church at that time was closer to the Anglican model than to the Roman Catholic one.
His last and most loyal patron, Lord Molesworth, helped him buy stock in the South Sea Company and its collapse in 1721 ruined him. His health had been deteriorating for some time and he died the following year.
Toland's reputation as a thinker was eclipsed by John Locke and David Hume and more so by Montesquieu and the writers of the French Enlightenment. Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France dismissed Toland's work but, as one commentator has maintained, his most famous book, Christianity not Mysterious, challenged not only the authority of organised religion but all inherited and unquestioned authority.
It was certainly radical theologically but also politically and philosophically.