John Toland

John Toland ( born November 30, 1670 in Inishowen, Ireland, † March 11, 1722 in Putney in London) was an Irish freethinkers of the Enlightenment.

Life and work

As the son of Catholic parents converted to Protestantism in 1687 Toland. He studied in Glasgow, Edinburgh and suffering theology and philosophy. 1696 published the early reconnaissance his writing Christianity not Mysterious, in which he presented in the following John Locke, that Christianity with human reason was recorded. The work was publicly burned in 1697 in Dublin. Its author fled to London. There he published in 1699 a complete edition, including a biography of the famous, but also controversial poet John Milton, which in turn met with hostility. However, he struggled with his writing Amyntor.

In 1701 he traveled to the German states, met Electress Sophia of Hanover and Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia, which he felt very connected. At Sophie of Prussia his Letters to Serena ( Letters to Serena ) were addressed in 1704. The world he sees now as divine, a belief in individual immortality he refuses. He took pantheistic ideas. 1709 he traveled again Germany and Holland and published Adeisidaemon. Very much later, a Nazarene, or jewish, gentile and mohametan christianity and finally two years later the work Pantheisticon.

Books and articles

• John Toland: Letters to Serena (1704 ), Berlin ( East), 1959 ( " About the superstition ", " About matter and motion ")..
• John Toland: Reasons for the naturalization of Jews in Great Britain and Ireland ( 1714), ed. v. Herbert Mainusch, Stuttgart 1965 ( Introduction, Eng. text and German translation ).
• John Toland: The Pantheistikon (1720 ), Leipzig 1897.
• Michael Palmer, John Toland: Adeisidaemon. Reason between atheism and superstition / materialism and Commonwealth by John Toland. With a new edition and translation of Toland Adeisidaemon & origines Judaica, Dissertation, Berlin, 2002. As e -book