John Toland - Biography

Biography

Very little is known of Toland's early life. He was born in Ardagh on the Inishowen Peninsula, a predominantly Catholic and Irish-speaking region in northwestern Ireland. His parents are unknown. He would later write that he had been baptized Janus Junius, a play on his name that recalled both the Roman two-faced god Janus and Junius Brutus, reputed founder of the Roman republic. According to his biographer Pierre des Maizeaux, he adopted the name John as a schoolboy with the encouragement of his school teacher.

Having formally converted from Catholicism to Protestantism at the age of 16, Toland got a scholarship to study theology at the University of Glasgow. In 1690, at age 19, the University of Edinburgh conferred a master's degree on him. He then got a scholarship to spend two years studying at University of Leiden in Holland, and subsequently nearly two years at Oxford in England (1694–95). The Leiden scholarship had been provided by wealthy English Dissenters, who hoped Toland would go on to become a minister for Dissenters.

In Toland's first book Christianity not Mysterious (1696), he argued that the divine revelation of the Bible contains no true mysteries; rather, all the dogmas of the faith can be understood and demonstrated by properly trained reason from natural principles. For this argument he was prosecuted by a grand jury in London. As he was a subject of the Kingdom of Ireland, members of the Irish parliament proposed that he should be burnt at the stake, and in his absence three copies of the book were burnt by the public hangman in Dublin as the content was contrary to the core doctrines of the Church of Ireland. 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".

After his departure from Oxford Toland resided in London for most of the rest of his life, but was also a somewhat frequent visitor to the European continent, particularly Germany and the Netherlands. He lived on the Continent from 1707 to 1710. Toland died in Putney on 10 March 1722. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica says of him that at his death in London at age 51 "he died... as he had lived, in great poverty, in the midst of his books, with his pen in his hand." Just before he died, he composed his own epitaph: "He was an assertor of liberty, a lover of all sorts of learning ... but no man’s follower or dependent. Nor could frowns or fortune bend him to decline from the ways he had chosen."

Very shortly after his death a lengthy biography of Toland was written by Pierre des Maizeaux.