John Toland

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John Toland was an Irish-born writer and freethinker whose work sits at the hinge between Enlightenment rationalism and the older European traditions of clandestine, secret-keeping religion. He is remembered for two things above all: he gave the English language the word pantheist, and he spent much of his life arguing that organized religion carries a public, simplified face over a hidden inner teaching reserved for the few.

Out of Inishowen

He was born on 30 November 1670 in the Inishowen peninsula near Londonderry, on the far Catholic margin of the British Isles, and given the Irish name Seán Eoghain — John, son of Owen. Raised Catholic in a Gaelic-speaking district, he converted to Protestantism in his mid-teens, a break that severed him from his origins without securing him a settled home in his new confession. The conversion set the pattern of a life lived between camps. He studied at Glasgow and Edinburgh, taking a master’s degree at the latter in 1690, then crossed to the Dutch Republic to read at Leiden, the great clearing-house of heterodox learning, where the radical philology and biblical criticism of the previous generation still circulated freely. From there he passed to Oxford and its libraries. By his mid-twenties he had absorbed the full apparatus of late-humanist scholarship — Greek, Hebrew, the critical handling of ancient texts — and turned it, almost at once, against the mysteries of the faith into which he had bought.

He never afterward held a settled position. He lived by his pen, by patrons, and by political pamphleteering, moving between England, the Netherlands, and the German courts, attaching himself to the great Whig and republican circles and to princely households — the court of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, the Berlin court of Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Prussia, the milieu of the minister Robert Harley. He was a man whose welcome was rarely permanent, valued for his learning and distrusted for his opinions, perpetually one scandal ahead of his creditors.

Christianity Not Mysterious and the fire on College Green

The scandal that fixed his name came at twenty-six. Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), published anonymously, argued that nothing in genuine religion could be contrary to or above reason — that the Gospel contained nothing inscrutable, and that the “mysteries” of the faith were not divine deeps but later impositions, priestly accretions laid over a teaching that had once been plain. Where the churches held mystery to be the proper atmosphere of the sacred, Toland held it to be a contrivance, a fog generated by an interested class. The implication was incendiary: the sacrament, the Trinity, the whole architecture of revealed doctrine fell under suspicion as manufactured obscurity.

The book detonated. Legal proceedings began against it in Middlesex; Toland, identified as the author, withdrew to Dublin, only to find that the Irish Parliament had taken up the matter. The book was condemned, an order issued for his arrest, and on 11 September 1697 copies were burned by the common hangman outside the parliament house on College Green. The man himself escaped the country and never returned to Ireland. The episode made him, at a stroke, the most notorious of the English deist controversialists — the label deist attaches to him from this period and fits the early work, with its insistence that true religion answers to reason and needs no revelation it cannot justify. But his later thought reaches toward something stranger than deism, and the figure of the manipulating priest who guards a false mystery would invert, in the mature work, into the figure of the wise man who guards a true and dangerous one.

The coining of “pantheist”

In 1705 he printed a word the language had not possessed. The pamphlet Socinianism Truly Stated carried on its title page the phrase by a pantheist, and there, almost in passing, the term entered English. He glossed the position it named as the opinion of those who acknowledge no eternal being but the universe itself. The coinage gave a single name to a posture that had until then been described only by circumlocution or by the accusation atheist — and it gave that posture a dignity, a doctrine, a banner. Over the following century the noun would loosen from its inventor and float free, attached above all to Benedictus de Spinoza, whose Deus sive Natura — God, or Nature — became the standing exemplar of what the word described. The full elaboration of the position belongs to the entry on pantheism; what belongs to Toland is the act of naming.

Pantheisticon: the creed of the Socratic society

The word’s fullest staging came in 1720, in a small Latin volume printed privately and passed only to trusted hands: Pantheisticon, sive formula celebrandae sodalitatis socraticae — Pantheisticon, or the Form of Celebrating the Socratic Society. It is among the strangest productions of the early Enlightenment: half philosophical statement, half liturgy. The book sets out the creed of an imagined fraternity who hold that the universe itself is the only God — an infinite, eternal, self-moving whole, with no creator standing outside it to have made it or to govern it from beyond. Matter is not inert stuff awaiting an external mover; motion is essential to it, the cosmos animates itself, and the divine is not a person who made the world but the world conceived in its totality, living and self-sufficient.

What makes Pantheisticon singular is that Toland gave this metaphysic a ritual body. He composed for his fraternity a service modeled on a church liturgy: a president and respondents trading versicles, a brief credo, praises of the great philosophers of antiquity, recitations of the odes of Horace and sentences drawn from Cato and Cicero. The Latin sealed the work against the unlearned; only the educated could read it, which was the point. He reworked the materialist monism associated with Spinoza — the doctrine that there is one substance, and that God and Nature are two names for it, treated at length under Spinozism — into a thing one could recite, a worship of the cosmos with the cadences of the worship it replaced. Whether the society of the Pantheisticon ever assembled in fact, or whether Toland staged it purely as a literary device, has long been argued. Margaret Jacob found among his papers a record, made by the Huguenot bookseller Prosper Marchand, of a gathering that spoke of a Grand Master, of brothers, of a constitution — and read the Pantheisticon as the liturgy of a real lodge in the orbit of early continental Freemasonry, through which the radical literature of the age moved hand to hand. The question of the society’s reality remains genuinely open; the structure of the creed does not.

The Druids and the keepers of the oral law

A second preoccupation marks Toland as a figure of esoteric interest in his own right. He wrote at length on the ancient Druids, the learned priesthood of the pre-Roman Celtic world, in A Specimen of the Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning, the work later gathered and printed after his death, in 1726, as a History of the Druids. Drawing on the small, hostile classical record — Caesar, Pliny, Tacitus, Strabo — and on his own command of the Gaelic he had spoken as a child, he reconstructed the Druids as a caste who guarded their knowledge by keeping it oral, committing nothing of their inner teaching to writing, transmitting it only by long apprenticeship to the chosen. The portrait suited his larger thesis perfectly: here was an ancient priesthood that ran, by deliberate policy, a public religion for the people and a reserved philosophy for the initiate.

The reconstruction outran its evidence, and later antiquarians and occult revivalists seized on it past anything the sources will bear. Toland founded no Druidic order, despite a durable legend to the contrary: the story that he convened an Ancient Druid Order at the Apple Tree Tavern in Covent Garden in 1717 is a twentieth-century invention, retrofitted around the genuine founding of the Grand Lodge of England that same year and credited to Toland only long after his death. What he actually left was a learned and speculative book, and an image — the priest as custodian of a hidden tradition — that would prove far more durable than its scholarship.

Clidophorus: the key-bearer

The image found its theoretical statement in Clidophorus, one of the four dissertations of his Tetradymus (1720). The title means the bearer of the key, and the essay revived in full the old distinction between exoteric and esoteric doctrine: the claim that philosophers from antiquity onward had taught one thing openly, to the crowd, and another in private, to the few — an outer teaching fitted to the prejudices and the safety of the public, and an inner teaching reserved because it was either too subtle or too dangerous to be said aloud. Toland traced the practice across the ancient schools and made of it a general law of intellectual history under conditions of persecution. The concept of esotericism as a structural feature of philosophy — a doctrine deliberately divided into a public face and a guarded interior — receives in Clidophorus one of its sharpest early modern formulations.

It is hard to read the essay without reading the author into it. Clidophorus is at once a historical thesis and a self-portrait: a writer who had felt the hangman’s fire on his own first book setting out, with scholarly detachment, the ancient art of saying as much as the censors permit and reserving the rest. The exoteric/esoteric distinction was not for him an antiquarian curiosity but the working condition of his own pen.

The editor and the network

He worked, too, as an editor and transmitter of dangerous books — a node in the clandestine literary networks through which forbidden manuscripts and republican arguments passed across the Channel. He produced an edition of the prose of the poet John Milton, with a controversial life of its author, and edited the political writings of the republican James Harrington, whose Oceana he issued in 1700. These were not idle labors of scholarship; they were the recovery of a commonwealth tradition, the deliberate keeping-alive of republican and freethinking arguments in a culture that had reason to bury them. His own minor works ran the same channels: the Letters to Serena of 1704, addressed to a royal correspondent and pressing toward the thesis that motion is essential to matter and not impressed on it from outside, supplied the physics that the Pantheisticon would later set to liturgy.

The thread running through all of it — the deist critique of priestly mystery, the coining of pantheist, the self-moving cosmos of the Pantheisticon, the oral-secret Druids, the key-bearer’s law of the two doctrines — is the conviction that religion as practiced is a public construction laid over a reserved interior, and that the philosopher’s task is to know the difference and to navigate it without burning. It placed him in a recognizable lineage. The skeptic Xenophanes, who had ridiculed the anthropomorphic gods of Homer and pointed instead toward a single all-encompassing divinity, was a natural ancestor; the later rational theology of figures such as William Whiston ran in a parallel current of reason brought to bear on revelation; the German Enlightenment’s recovery of the esoteric/exoteric problem in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and the later American radicalism of a minister like Theodore Parker, who would stake religion on inward intuition over miracle and creed, carried versions of his wager forward into other languages and centuries.

The scholarly recovery

For two centuries Toland was dismissed as a scandal-monger, a clever and unscrupulous controversialist whose books were better burned than read. The modern study of his work has overturned that verdict and set him instead among the serious radical minds of his generation. Robert E. Sullivan’s John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Harvard University Press, 1982) reconstructed the intellectual setting of his theology and the strategies by which he adapted older heterodox materials to a new public. Justin Champion’s Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester University Press, 2003), built on Toland’s surviving private archive, integrated the religious radicalism with the republican politics, showing the freethinking and the commonwealth program to be a single project of reforming public religion. Margaret Jacob’s earlier The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (1981) had placed him at the center of a continental underground of pantheists and lodge-men. The Britannica entry and the standard biographical reference works now treat him as a founder rather than a footnote: the man who named pantheism and gave it a liturgy, and who articulated, in Clidophorus, the law of the divided doctrine. His primary texts and the contest over their meaning are tracked through the scholarship at the Politics of Pantheism study in the Revue de Synthèse.

He died on 11 March 1722 at Putney, near London, poor and out of favor, having spent his career on the contested ground between what may be said in public and what is kept back.

→ Related: William Whiston · Gotthold Ephraim Lessing · Xenophanes · Theodore Parker · Pantheism · Benedictus De Spinoza · Spinozism · Druidism · Monism · Esotericism · Priest · Freemasonry · Religion