Justin Champion. Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696-1722. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. viii + 264 pp. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7190-5714-4.
Reviewed by Jacqueline Rose (Clare College, Cambridge)
Published on H-Albion (July, 2004)
Intellectual Liberties
A study of the Augustan freethinker John Toland must necessarily be one of paradoxes. Ubiquitous and notorious from the 1690s to the early Walpolean era, this republican ideologist nevertheless mounted a firm defense of the post-1689 Williamite regime, a freethinker whose attack on priestcraft was combined with a staunch insistence on a national church. Justin Champion's latest book, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696-1722, importantly does not seek to downplay these apparent incoherencies, but instead turns to explain how the late Stuart and early Hanoverian era made possible such positions.
The overthrow of James II in 1688-89 did not render English politics a simple choice between freedom and tyranny. The Revolution gave scope for attacks on popish "priestcraft" and monarchical absolutism, eroding the twin pillars of clergy and "tyranny" within a loyalist framework. Yet William III's determination to maintain his prerogative rights, and the revival of the High Church party under Anne, meant that anticlerical and anti-absolutist writers did not have it all their own way. Toland's career exemplifies the problematics of such men, picking their way across political minefields to find out when their intellectual principles would be acceptable to their political patrons.
Champion's aims are ambitious: a study of Toland's own conception of his purpose, the views of his contemporaries, and the effectiveness of his rhetoric is hardly a "simple" one (p. 7). A wealth of methodologies are used to contextualize Toland's writings in the socio-cultural debates of his age: a mode of intellectual history which, whilst declaring its debt to the "Cambridge School," nevertheless seeks to move beyond this to the social history of texts and their reading. Analyzing Toland's library and communities of circulation of texts and ideas, Champion explores the political, religious, and ecclesiological dimensions of elite as well as popular intellectual culture. Most importantly, and most successfully, he demonstrates the large and complex overlap between the worlds of scribal and print culture, for example in the divergence between the scribal and printed versions of Nazarenus (1718), in which Toland defended a fifth Gospel of Barnabas (and which Champion edited in 1999).
This is, however, explicitly not an intellectual biography, but a self-declared "reconsideration of the nature of English politics and society in the Augustan age" (p. 6). The sense is that of a book modeled on the recent (although unmentioned) work of Peter Miller, Peiresc's Europe, where one man is used as an entry point into an intellectual milieu--a complicated task, for Peiresc and Toland had many milieux.[1] Toland is the reader's traveling companion through the worlds of the courts of the Continent and the British Isles, scribal and print culture, and coffee houses. Champion tries to maintain a judicious balance between Toland and his circle; a balance most clearly maintained in part 1, whereas parts 2 and 3 focus more on Toland and his immediate antagonists. Its success depends on how strong Champion's claim that Toland was not a marginal figure is deemed to be, an argument which would have been strengthened had he more explicitly emphasized the differences between the politics of Anne's reign and those of her forbear and successor. Under Anne, Toland's links to the Hanoverian court put him in touch with a future establishment, but, by that very fact, partly estranged him from the present one. The ambiguities of the treatment of Toland by men such as Harley contrast, implicitly, with the reception of his ideas in European circles, and point to the need for a more detailed account of some sort of "English Enlightenment," in which Toland must play a leading role (p. 253).[2]
Prior accounts of Toland have focused on his political or his theological scholarship. Through Blair Worden we know of Toland's ideological republication of republican works; here Champion emphasizes the marriage of this to Williamite and Hanoverian loyalty. (In fact, Champion argues, Toland's textual intervention was unusually unsubtle with regard to Ludlow.) Toland's combination of praise for the present government (here treated as sincere) and his conception of republican liberty to be found under a virtuous monarchy recalls accounts of an Elizabethan "monarchical republic." Toland's ecclesiology, and the centrality of his Harringtonian attacks on priestcraft as preventing intellectual freethought and thus obviating any chance of political liberty, suggest the importance of ecclesiological debate after the Toleration Act of 1689: his political theology means his thought must be treated as a whole. Whilst Robert Sullivan's treatment of Toland's theology (John Toland and the Deist Controversy, 1982) is complemented rather than superceded, Champion's work is the more accessible, and his treatment of Toland's Anglican opponents is more judicious, doubtless due to his previous work on the Church of England. By showing how Toland manipulated the textual norms of patristicism and natural religion, Champion effectively accounts how traditional rhetoric was subverted from within. That this subversion was done by a man with links to the heir to the throne only served to increase the danger it posed.
John Toland's eclecticism makes him an apt figure through which to enter Augustan socio-intellectual spaces, although one must consider how typical he was in crossing so many of these worlds. This book is therefore important reading for more than intellectual historians, for it touches on political life, political thinking, ecclesiology, and the history of reading (chapter 1 is especially strong on this). The footnotes, whilst virtuously concise, could perhaps have done a little more to point to relevant historiography on these topics--alternatively, a bibliography would have been useful (although there is one of Toland's works). As so much of Augustan intellectual culture remains unmapped, the contribution of this book will hopefully be to stimulate further research as well as uncovering some of this landscape itself, showing how the discourses of the seventeenth century mutated into those of the eighteenth. Toland's marriage of republicanism and monarchist loyalism, and his role in adapting Erastianism into civil religion were, we may conclude, key moves in England's historical transition from Restoration confessional nation to Georgian enlightened monarchical commonwealth.
Notes
[1]. Peter N. Miller, Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). See also, Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, new ed., 2002), which focuses on Spinoza.
[2]. A step in that direction is Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001).
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-albion.
Citation:
Jacqueline Rose. Review of Champion, Justin, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696-1722.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11083
Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.