Based on a video lecture.
Video lecture: YouTube
This is the first lecture in a series on the history of atheism and freethought in world culture. The topic has interested me for several years, and I have the relevant background: an MA in the history of religion from St. Petersburg State University. The series will not follow a strict chronology — it is an account of what I have learned, in the order I find most compelling.
The first lecture is dedicated to a personal hero.
A Forgotten Genius
The subject of today’s lecture is John Toland. What attracts me to him is not only that he was a person of high moral principle who never retreated from his convictions and was not broken by the pressure of his environment. What also draws me in is that he is today almost completely forgotten.
Search “John Toland” and you will find a contemporary American historian, author of books about Hitler. The authentic philosopher of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries will elude you. This is a serious tragedy — the tragedy of geniuses of their age, unrecognised by their contemporaries and unremembered by posterity.
The case of Bertrand Russell is telling. His foundational History of Western Philosophy contains Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Berkeley — but Toland’s name is not mentioned once. This is the standard introductory overview of the subject. Toland was not included.
Academic literature on Toland exists in the West, but it is incomparably thinner than the literature on other authors of comparable, or in my view lesser, significance.
Biography: Origins and Historical Context
John Toland was born on 30 November — the exact year is uncertain, with sources divided between 1669 and 1670. His birthplace was the village of Ardagh on the Inishowen peninsula in the north of Ireland. The nearest significant city was Londonderry (Derry).
The biographical gaps are telling in themselves: nobody particularly bothers to establish when Toland was born. Compare this to Shakespeare, whose every step is the subject of reverential scholarly attention. Toland is not Shakespeare, his name is forgotten, and so no one is looking for documents.
Toland grew up in a religious environment. There is a version that he was the illegitimate son of a Catholic priest. Ireland was historically the stronghold of Catholicism in the British Isles, and this upbringing substantially shaped his later scepticism towards religious institutions.
At sixteen, studying in Londonderry, he renounced Catholicism and converted to Presbyterianism. In 1687 he entered the University of Glasgow. In 1690, aged nineteen, he received a master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh. Notes left by teachers and fellow students describe him as gifted, even brilliant, but difficult to get along with, a troublemaker. This characterisation fits his entire life.
To understand him, one needs the historical frame. The 1640s saw the English Revolution, the execution of Charles I, and the rule of Oliver Cromwell — a Puritan. After the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, the Church of England reasserted its dominant position and nonconformists faced various restrictions. In 1688, the Glorious Revolution brought William of Orange to power: the deposed James II was not executed but allowed to emigrate in peace, a unique case in world history. In 1689, the Toleration Act was passed — but only for nonconformists. Catholics and certainly atheists received no religious freedoms whatsoever.
Toland found himself in opposition to everything simultaneously: to Catholicism, to the established Church of England, and to the monarchy. He was a republican in a thoroughly monarchical country. It is easy to be in opposition when millions march alongside you. It is hard when you are alone. This is both the fascination and the tragedy of Toland’s figure.
Christianity not Mysterious
In 1691–1692 Toland studied at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, where he encountered the ideas of Spinoza and European rationalism. Then several years at Oxford. By this point he was encyclopaedically educated: fluent in around ten languages, including Hebrew, ancient Greek, and Latin. His intellectual sources included Spinoza, Giordano Bruno, and the ancient authors, among whom Livy was a particular favourite.
In 1695–1696 he wrote the book that made his name famous across Europe: Christianity not Mysterious.
Full subtitle: “A treatise showing that there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to reason, nor above it, and that no Christian doctrine can be properly called a mystery.”
The central argument: early Christianity was a clear, simple, intelligible religion — accessible to reason. Subsequently, the clergy, acting out of political and economic self-interest, complicated it, and Christianity became encrusted with those very mysteries. Toland’s claim is that reason is the primary source of knowledge and the criterion of truth. Blind faith is unnecessary for being a Christian — in fact, it is superfluous. One needs one’s head.
In this sense Toland was a Carl Sagan or James Randi of his age: a debunker of superstitions, delusions, and pseudoscience.
He remained, however, firmly on Christian ground, and in the same book denounced atheists. The New Atheists (Dawkins, Harris) would say that faith and reason are fundamentally incompatible. Toland’s position was the opposite: rightly understood, Christianity is the religion of reason. Faith and reason are not opposed.
The reception was predictable. The book was burned by the Irish parliament as blasphemous. Toland himself was ordered arrested but managed to flee to England in time. England offered no warm welcome either — the Toleration Act did not cover someone with his level of heterodoxy.
Letters to Serena
Around the turn of the century Toland travelled through Europe and encountered Princess Sophia Charlotte, later Queen of Prussia and grandmother of Frederick the Great. She was an intellectually cultivated figure, in correspondence with Leibniz. From his letters to her, Toland assembled another major work: the Letters to Serena.
This is the book that generated particular enthusiasm among Soviet historians of philosophy — and the reason is clear.
Since Aristotle, and then through the reception of Aquinas in Western European thought, the central argument for the existence of god had been grounded in the derived character of motion: if the world entered into motion, that motion had a starting point, and that starting point is god. The cosmological argument, the argument from the prime mover, and so on. Even Spinoza acknowledged that this problem was difficult to resolve within the framework of his monism.
Toland takes a step beyond Spinoza. Motion, he says, is an inherent attribute of matter. Matter moves by its own nature. Accept this premise and take one further logical step, and god is no longer required by the picture.
Toland does not take that final step. Soviet scholars explained this as fear: an atheist at heart, simply afraid of the consequences. Western scholars have suggested otherwise: Toland was genuinely rooted in the Christian tradition and could not imagine atheism for himself. He continued to denounce atheists as morally deficient throughout his career. Which interpretation one accepts depends substantially on the ideology one brings to the text.
Regardless, it is in the Letters to Serena that Toland laid the foundations of European materialism. Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau — the entire great constellation of French philosophes drew on this source.
The Letters are also worth reading for their literary qualities: Toland is underrated as a writer. The book is available in Russian translation.
Spiritual Evolution: From Catholicism to Deism
Toland’s spiritual trajectory is worth tracing: Catholicism in childhood, then Presbyterianism, then deism.
Deism: the recognition of god as the supreme originating principle, who created the world and gave it laws, but without attributing to him the specific characteristics and ongoing interventions that traditional monotheistic religions posit. Deism resolves an obvious difficulty: if tens of thousands of Christian denominations each have their own god, then all but one must have the wrong one. The deist says: god exists, but his nature is not as any confession describes it.
In his final substantial work, the Pantheisticon (written in Latin), some scholars see a transition to pantheism. I do not share this reading — it reads more as an exploration than as a positive declaration of position.
Final Years
After his European travels, Toland bought a house in Surrey but eventually fell into serious debt, sold it, and found lodging with a working family in exchange for assistance. He suffered from numerous ailments: jaundice, rheumatism of the hip, severe toothache, persistent vomiting and gastrointestinal problems. The medicine of the day was deeply questionable even by contemporary standards — Hahnemann’s homeopathy, invented after Toland’s death, was considered a progressive method.
Through all of this he retained his humour and clarity of spirit. He wrote the inscription for his own gravestone.
John Toland died in 1722 — in debt, ill, and in complete obscurity.
A great person combined with a great tragedy is more than simply a great person. Tragedy makes a life more fitting for sympathy and recognition of greatness.
Posthumous Reception
After his death, Toland remained in obscurity for many decades. Soviet historiography was the first to recover his name and actively publish his texts — because for a materialist worldview, he provided ideologically useful historical grounding. Soviet scholars worked hard to present him as a latent atheist, as they did with Spinoza. The key works are Boris Meerovsky’s monograph and Bolin’s preface to the collected works. If one reads these texts skipping the citations of Marx and Engels, which appear every couple of pages, they are competent and genuinely informative pieces of scholarship. Soviet historiography, for all its ideological loading, was professionally serious.
In the 1960s interest in Toland revived in the West as well. Justin Champion’s political biography, which reads Toland as a republican figure in the politics of his time, is particularly worth noting.
My own interest, coming from the history of religion, is primarily in his views on religion and his influence on the subsequent history of thought.
John Toland was an outstanding thinker who substantially shaped the development of Continental materialist philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and made a major contribution to the tradition of critical thinking. He wrote because he could not help writing — even in the most difficult circumstances. That seems to me to deserve recognition and careful study.
Subsequent lectures in this series will cover Anthony Collins and other figures in the history of freethought.