TOLAND, JOHN. - The most notable of the English deists (Collins, Tindal, Morgan), b. at Redcastle near Londonderry (Ireland) on 30 Nov. 1670, d. at Petney near London on 11 March 1722. From a Catholic family, he converted to the Anglican religion at the age of 16. He studied at the Universities of Glasgow (1687) and Edinburgh (1690).
His principal work is Christianity not mysterious (1st ed., anonymous, Oxford 1696). In the preface he says: "after I had been educated from the cradle in the crudest superstitions and in idolatry (the Catholic religion!), it pleased God that my reason and men who have made use of their reason should be the instrument of my conversion." For him, opposed as much to the authority of the pope as to that of the Protestant clergy, the question was one of choosing between the clear doctrine of Christ and the complicated doctrines of the theologians. Locke's aspiration in the Reasonableness of Christianity was to show that Christianity is reasonable; T.'s was to show that nothing contrary to reason, or above reason, can form part of Christian doctrine. In the Letters to Serena (Sophia Charlotte, queen of Prussia) T. combats the Cartesian concept of matter as something inert: motion is a property as essential and original to matter as extension and solidity. These ideas are developed further in the Pantheisticon sive formula celebrandae sodalitatis Socraticae (1720), in which are described the imaginary gatherings of men of every nation, free from prejudices, who identify God with the creative and ordering force of the universe. T.'s aspiration to live "free from cares as from ambitions, always with a book in hand or in mind" was much opposed by religious and political controversies. The sincere freethinker ("a candid freethinker"), as Molineux, a friend of Locke, calls him, was made to appear as a dangerous enemy of the State and of the Church.
Among his numerous other writings mention should be made of: Amyntor or a defence of Milton's life (1699); Clito, a Poem on the force of eloquence (1700); Vindicius Liberius (an apology for his conduct and for his principles in matters of politics and religion); Socinianism truly stated (1705); Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile and Mahometan Christianity (1718); Tetradymus (1720).
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Andres Ferro