TOLAND, JOHN. — The most notable of the English deists (Collins, Tindal, Morgan), born at Redcastle near Londonderry (Ireland) on 30 November 1670, died at Petney near London on 11 March 1722. Of a Catholic family, he converted to the Anglican religion at the age of sixteen. He studied at the Universities of Glasgow (1687) and Edinburgh (1690).
His principal work is Christianity not misterious (1st ed., anonymous, Oxford 1696). In the preface he says: “after I had been brought up from the cradle in the grossest superstitions and in idolatry (the Catholic religion!), it pleased God that my reason, and men who had made use of their reason, should be the instruments of my conversion.” For him, opposed to the authority of the pope as to that of the Protestant clergy, the issue 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 (Sofia Carlotta, 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 the imaginary gatherings of men of every nation, free from prejudice, are described as identifying 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 his hand or in his head” was greatly thwarted by religious and political controversies. The sincere freethinker (“a candid freethinker”), as Molineux, Locke’s friend, calls him, was made to appear a dangerous enemy of the State and the Church.
Among his many other writings, the following should be mentioned: Amyutor 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 principles in matters of politics and religion); Socinianism truly stated (1705); Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile and Mahometan Christianity (1718); Tetradydimus (1720).
BIBLI: C. Dentice d'Accadia, Il deismo inglese del '700, J. T., in Giorn. crit. d. filos. it., 15 (1934), pp. 69–95; M. Muff, Leibnizens Kritik d. Religionsphilos. V. T., dissertation, Zurich 1941; F. H. Heinemann, T. and Leibniz, in The philos. review, 54 (1945), pp. 437–57; W. Ziegenfus, Philosophes-Lex., II, Berlin 1950, pp. 228–29. V. DEISMO. Andres Ferro