08.07.1999

Storming heaven

Gerry Downing pays tribute to John Toland, an Irish influence on the materialist philosophy of Marx and Engels

“The sun is my father, the earth my mother, the world is my country and all men are my family.”

These are the words of John Toland, spoken 300 years ago this year. As the Irish establishment continues its efforts to modernise its image by curbing the power of the Catholic Church, it is perhaps time to look again at Toland’s legacy. His pantheism, his philosophical materialism, his republicanism and his internationalism make him a model for post-catholic Ireland. But be warned. Some of his ideas that were seen as so radical and dangerous back then are still far in advance of what would be acceptable to any conservative establishment.

John Toland was born in 1670 in Ardagh in the parish of Clonmany in the Inis Owen Peninsula of Donegal. His family was catholic and Gaelic-speaking. Rumours put about by his enemies in later life that his father was a catholic priest are without foundation. By the time of his death in 1722 he was one of the leading intellectual free thinkers in the world with almost 100 books to his credit. Today he is practically unknown to the English-speaking world, but his books are printed in France, Holland and Germany. He is revered as the founder of modern scientific pantheism, which is a cult religion. His most controversial book Christianity not mysterious (1696) drew the wrath of the entire English and Irish establishment on his head. He later became a leading Whig politician and an English republican.

In 1686 Toland converted to the Church of Ireland in order to obtain help in getting an education. He spent three years in Glasgow University and then went to the University of Edinburgh where he got his Master of Arts in 1690. Toland spent a year in Oxford studying Gaelic manuscripts and the outcome was a book The history of the Druids, published posthumously in 1726, which explained the reasons for ancient superstitions in Ireland.

When Christianity not mysterious was published, and it became known Toland was the author, English MPs and bishops fulminated against him and the book was condemned by the Grand Jury of Middlesex. He fled to Ireland only to meet even more ferocious opposition. The Irish House of Commons ordered the book to be burned by the public hangman in September 1697 and the author to be arrested and prosecuted. Toland was forced to flee back to England. He had good reason to fear for his life. In 1697 a student, Thomas Aitkenhead, was burned to death at the stake in Edinburgh for opposing the Doctrine of the Trinity. Toland had no way of knowing Aitkenhead was to be the last in these islands to die in this way.

What were the political and ideological influences on Eoghain na Leabhar (‘John of the books’), as the locals called the studious youth, that wrought such a transformation?

Toland went to study at Leyden in Holland in 1692 and became acquainted with the German philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz. Here he encountered the most advanced thinkers of the age, and he himself blossomed. There was a growing revulsion at the time to established religion in these circles. The Thirty Years’ War, (1618-48) ranged the catholic south against the protestant north of Europe and devastated Germany. Seven million out of a population of 21 million died and the country lay in ruins, politically and physically, from which it took over 200 years to recover. Religion featured very strongly in Cromwell’s war in Ireland and again in the war between James II and William of Orange.

The power of organised religion, and its reliance on ‘articles of faith’ that defied human logic, was seen as the origin of wars and suffering. The enlightenment, begun by the Englishman, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), and really set in motion by the Frenchman, René Descartes (1596-1650), took a new turn and John Toland was a pioneer of that orientation. Toland coined the word ‘pantheism’ and wrote extensively on the new creed. He identified the Dutch Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), as the prime modern pantheist.  The French enlightenment materialist philosopher, Baron d’Holbach (1723-89), and others were strongly influenced by Toland. He was a central character in forming the movement that led nearly 100 years later to the French Revolution and the failed Irish revolution of 1798.

It is ironic indeed to see that a defender of Cromwell’s republicanism was one of the sources of inspiration for the biggest revolt against English rule in Ireland. However, if we look at the left wing of Cromwell’s army and the Diggers and Levellers, we will understand the political descendants of these Roundheads were the short-haired Parisian sans-culottes of the early 1790s and the Irish croppies of 1798.

Cromwell was defeated by the superior horsemanship of the king’s army in the first stages of the English Civil War. He was obliged to politically mobilise the yeomen, the independent farmers of East Anglia and the Fens: “Give me some men who make a conscience of what they do and I will teach them to sit straight on their horses, and I warrant you they will not be beaten,” he proclaimed. But when he encouraged them to “make a conscience of what they do” they began to develop egalitarian political views, demanding universal suffrage (apart from women and servants!) and even the holding of land in common. They refused to go to Ireland to put down rebellion there. Cromwell savagely suppressed these oppositionists, who took too literally the promises of the parliamentarians.

Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, supporters of the Commonwealth were marginalised for a period, but the accession of William and Mary and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 partially restored their fortunes. The Tories were now pariahs because of their Jacobite sympathies. Toland became a left Whig.

Dean Swift (of Gulliver’s travels fame) and Dr John Locke, the English philosopher, feared and despised Toland for his radicalism. Even Leibniz warned him that he had gone too far when he published Adeisidaemon or ‘The man without superstition’ in Holland in 1709. It was banned by papal decree.

However, he certainly remained an establishment oppositionist. He did not seek to spread his views among the common people. In 1720 Toland published his book The pantheisticon, which elaborated his vision of a new pantheistic religion. As it was written in Latin, even those among the common people who were able to read could not understand it. Toland was not about to summons anyone to the barricades.

He was politically close to the Whig politician, Robert Harley, but denounced him in 1710 for ‘Monkism’ - Monk was Cromwell’s general who sold out and was instrumental in the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Harley became a Tory and his downfall in 1715 is largely seen as the result of Toland’s pamphleteering against him.

But perhaps the one element that most outraged contemporary society was his unapologetic rationalism and his materialist philosophy. He subjected everything, including the deity, to critical appraisal. He gave unremitting battle to all beliefs in superstition and miracles. He arrived at the conclusion that the universe was god. This was not such a large step for a Gaelic scholar familiar with St Patrick’s breastplate (Día ar mo lámh dheish, Día ar mo lámh clé - God at my right hand, god at my left hand, etc) and for a classical scholar familiar with ancient Greek notions of the deity.

However, when he asserted along with Spinoza that thought and being were one substance, the message became alarming. God did not create nature, but nature was god, asserted Spinoza, and Toland agreed. But he asserted against Descartes and also against Spinoza (expelled from the Jewish congregation for his irreverent speculation on the nature of god) that motion was a property of matter itself. God was truly becoming marginalised in this scenario, even if that was not Toland’s intention. He was falsely accused of atheism. But it is only necessary to see what eventually became of all this philosophical speculation and conflict to see that not very many among the Irish establishment will want to begin on that road again.

Not only was this the stuff that “prepared men’s minds for the coming [French] revolution” (Engels), but it also fed directly into the ideology of Marxism itself. Marx and Engels believed that Spinoza was correct against Descartes. Plekhanov, the Russian Marxist, once asked Engels: “So in your opinion old Spinoza was right in saying that thought and extension were nothing but two attributes of one and the same substance?” “Of course,” Engels replied. “Old Spinoza was quite right.”

Toland came far closer to a materialist and secular philosophy than Spinoza did. His conception that motion is a property of matter is central to dialectical materialism, the philosophy of Marxism. The following conception from The pantheisticon is also central to Marxism:

“Thought and soul is a property of matter. Thought is a special movement of the brain. The brain is the first cause of the soul, of thoughts and of sensations. Brain, being a highly composite material organ, can produce only material effects. Thus all ideas are corporal.”

In his famous polemic against Herr Eugene Dühring, Engels accuses him of having “arrived at a consciously thinking and acting nature”, thus “standing on a bridge ... from pantheism to deism”. Engels thus acknowledges the progressive development of pantheism against traditional deism. In his book Grundsätze in 1843 Ludwig Feuerbach wrote that pantheism was a “theological materialism, a negation of theology, but as yet on a theological standpoint”. Spinoza, he wrote, was “the Moses of modern free thinkers and materialists”. “What then, under examination, is what Spinoza calls ‘substance’, in terms of logic or metaphysics, and ‘god’ in terms of theology? Nothing else but nature,” he affirms. Marx and Engels were very grateful to Feuerbach for his contribution to the development of historical materialism.

Baron d’Holbach, the encyclopedist and atheist, is the clear link between Toland and Feuerbach and Engels. This German-French philosopher was on the left wing of the French philosophers. Like Toland he was the most radical thinker of his age and he had to have his best books published in Holland. Holbach saw the universe as a “deterministic system consisting of an eternal and constant totality of matter and motion”, according to The Oxford companion to philosophy (p371). Toland was indeed ‘storming the heavens’ in his thought and posed a huge threat to an English establishment now growing conservative and reactionary, following its two revolutions in the 17th century.