18 Facts About John Toland

John Toland 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.

John Toland was born in Ardagh on the Inishowen Peninsula, a predominantly Catholic and Irish-speaking region in northwestern Ireland.

John 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".

John Toland lived on the Continent from 1707 to 1710.

John Toland was the first person called a freethinker and went on to write over a hundred books in various domains but mostly dedicated to criticising ecclesiastical institutions.

John 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.

John Toland produced some highly controversial polemics, rumors including the Treatise of the Three Impostors, in which Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all condemned as the three great political frauds.

John Toland claimed to have a personal copy of the manuscript which he passed to the circle of Jean Rousset in France.

Actually, for John Toland, rest is a special case of motion.

John Toland replied in his Amyntor, or a Defence of Milton's Life, to which he added a remarkable list of what are now called New Testament apocrypha.

John Toland identified himself as a pantheist in his publication Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist in 1705.

However, David Berman has argued for an atheistic reading of John Toland, demonstrating contradictions between Christianity not Mysterious and John Toland's Two Essays.

Later on, we find John 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 term "pantheism" was used by John Toland to describe the philosophy of Spinoza.

John Toland 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.

John 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.

Still, in Christianity not Mysterious, the book for which he is best known, John Toland laid down a challenge not just to the authority of the established church, but to all inherited and unquestioned authority.

However, John Toland managed to find success after his death: Thomas Hollis, the great 18th century book collector and editor, commissioned the London bookseller Andrew Millar to publish works advocating republican government - a list of titles which included John Toland's work in 1760.