Sic Superstitionis stirpes omnes ejiciendae: John Toland, Cicero, and the fight against superstition

Katie East (RHUL)

In 1712 the notorious radical John Toland published a treatise, entitled Cicero Illustratus, in which he set forth his plans for a new complete edition of Cicero’s works. In order to justify such an endeavour to his addressee Eugene of Savoy, who was also his intended patron, Toland deploys two primary arguments: first, that Cicero had a fundamental instructional function for all of Toland’s contemporaries who were engaged in public service, and second, that his predecessors in Ciceronian scholarship had, for various nefarious reasons, managed to cause acute damage to the great man’s reputation, a wrong that Toland deems it his duty to rectify. What Cicero Illustratus provides, then, is an unrivalled insight into the value placed on Cicero in the early eighteenth century.

Toland’s conviction that generations of Ciceronian scholars had manipulated the orator’s words required explanation, which is duly offered. In deconstructing Toland’s argument a more effective understanding of the exact nature of Toland’s vision of Cicero becomes possible, and is indeed of the utmost significance. I propose to demonstrate that while Toland couches both arguments identified above in terms of Cicero’s public role, his actual purpose is to construct from the Ciceronian tradition and texts a weapon that could be wielded in the great passion of his intellectual life, his war against superstition and priest craft in the Church of England. A careful reading of Cicero Illustratus will reveal that Toland’s propositions for liberating the ‘true’ Cicero from the manipulations of the scholars is a carefully constructed ploy to establish Cicero as a champion of rational thought against the tyranny of superstition and revelation. I would hence argue that this marks Toland, and his Cicero Illustratus, as clear forerunners of the Radical Enlightenment, in which Cicero was prized for his scepticism, and his application of reason and natural law to his understanding of the world around him.