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3 unusual facts about John Toland


Atheism in the Age of the Enlightenment

Margaret C. Jacob outlines a relationship between John Toland and Dutch Freemasonry; Jean Rousset de Missy, the founder of the Masonic lodge in the Dutch Republic in 1735 was a self-described pantheist, borrowing the term coined by Toland.

John Toland

He would later write that he had been baptised 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.

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.


Naturalistic pantheism

The term “pantheism" is derived from Greek words pan (Greek: πᾶν) meaning "all" and theos (θεός) meaning God. The term pantheism was coined by Joseph Raphson in his work De spatio reali, published in 1697. The term was also used by Irish writer John Toland in his 1705 work Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist that described pantheism as the "opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe.


see also