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Samuel Johnson and “Natural Law”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Donald J. Greene
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Extract

The purpose of this article is to examine the assumption, encountered in some recent discussions of eighteenth-century English literary history and political and religious thought, that a belief in “natural law” is central to Samuel Johnson's political, social, and general moral thinking. In particular, one meets the assumption in the numerous recent attempts to demonstrate, first, that Edmund Burke's political thinking is based on this concept, and, second, that Johnson's political thinking was fundamentally that of Burke. The first of these propositions may be left for specialists in Burke to deal with; some of them have already dealt with it fairly unsympathetically. The second seems so paradoxical, in view of the amount of abuse Johnson and Burke are recorded to have hurled at each other's political attitudes — they appear never to have said a good word for each other's politics in their lives — that a formal answer to it hardly seems necessary. But quite apart from the nexus with Burke, the assumption raises some interesting and important questions, and deserves to be investigated.

The most obvious reason for skepticism about the importance of the concept of “natural law” in Johnson's political thought is the simple one that in the fairly voluminous political writings of Johnson, extending over a large part of his life, the expressions “natural law,” “the laws of nature,” and the like almost never appear; and this is striking in an age when few writers managed to compose a pamphlet on political theory, or even on a question of practical politics, without dragging them in in some form.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , May 1963 , pp. 59 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1963

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References

1. A convenient statement of this position is found in a paper by Russell Kirk (“Samuel Johnson the Statist”) delivered to the Johnson Society of the Great Lakes Region in 1959. Much of the paper was incorporated in a review article published in the Kenyan Review, XXII (1960), 679–86.Google Scholar The following is quoted from the abstract given in the Transactions of the Society, 1959: [Johnson] “stood for the rule of law — both natural and common law …. The first principles of such a Tory as Johnson and such a Whig as Burke were, indeed, nearly identical. To both, the politics of the dawning era, whether Jacobinical or Utilitarian, were abhorrent. Both Johnson and Burke recognized a transcendent moral order, held by the wisdom of the species, were attached to custom and prescription, upheld the idea of the Christian magistrate ….” Recent works that clearly suggest that Johnson admired Burke as a political thinker include Bredvold, Louis I. and Ross, Ralph G., The Philosophy of Edmund Burke (Ann Arbor, 1960), p. 1 Google Scholar; and Stanlis, Peter J., Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor, 1958), p. 246 .Google Scholar

2. For example, Hamburger, Joseph, review of Stanlis, , Burke and the Natural Law, Yale Law Review, LXVIII (1959), 831–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; review of Canavan, F. P., The Political Reason of Edmund Burke, T.L.S., June 17, 1960, p. 378 .Google Scholar

3. Johnson's most far-reaching denunciation of Burke is that recorded in Boswell's, Life of Johnson, April 26, 1776 Google Scholar: “In private life he is a very honest gentleman; but I will not allow him to be so in public life. People may be honest, though they are doing wrong: that is between their Maker and them. But we, who are suffering by their pernicious conduct, are to destroy them. We are sure that—acts from interest. We know what his genuine principles were. They who allow their passions to confound the distinctions between right and wrong are criminal. They may be convinced; but they have not come honestly by their conviction.” See also Life of Johnson for April 15, 1773, and April 7, 1775. For an example of Burke on Johnson, see Scott, Geoffrey and Pottle, Frederick A. (eds.), The Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle (New York, 1928–1934) XV, 234 Google Scholar; the date is Nov. 16, 1786, two years after Johnson's death: “He [Burke] was violent against Dr. Johnson's political writings. He said that he ascribed to Opposition an endeavor to involve the nation in a war on account of Falkland's Islands, which he knew to be a false charge. He [Johnson] imputed to them the wickedness of his own opposition to Walpole. He [Burke] was intemperately abusive to a departed Great Man.”

4. Johnson, Samuel, The Works of Samuel Johnson (London, 1787), X, 101 .Google Scholar

5. Johnson, Samuel, The Works of Samuel Johnson (Oxford, 1825), IX, 506 .Google Scholar

6. Rycenga, John, review of Greene, Donald J., Politics of Samuel Johnson, Modern Age V (1960–1961), 95–98. Google Scholar

7. Voitle, Robert, Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. 68ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Ironically, perhaps, a vigorous protest against the identification of “natural law” with Christianity comes from a classical scholar indignant that the credit for the idea should be usurped by Christians from his pagan protégés: “It is implied [by modern writers] that natural law is a theological rather than a philosophical conception, and that it was ‘the idea of divine laws which led to that of natural laws.’ … It is true that the medieval Church adopted this doctrine and emphatically stressed its dependence upon the theory of a supreme lawgiver and the arguments of natural theology. But … Plato, Aristotle, and their Greek and Arabian followers worked out the theory of natural law without any special reference to the Christian revelation.” Wild, John, Plato's Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law (Chicago, 1953), p. 135 .Google Scholar

9. Barth, Karl, Against the Stream (London, 1954), pp. 27–28 .Google Scholar

10. Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Man (London, 1941), I, 281 .Google Scholar

11. “The latter part of the eighteenth century was marked by assaults from all quarters upon its basic assumptions [those of “natural law” theory]. Montesquieu taught that while law may rest remotely on a standard of absolute justice prior or superior to law, it is related more directly and intimately with environment and custom.” Harding, Arthur L., “A Reviving Natural Law,” in Harding, Arthur L. (ed.), Natural Law and Natural Rights (Dallas, 1955), p. 76 .Google Scholar

12. Dunning, W. A., A History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu (New York and London, 1905), pp. 388–89.Google Scholar Voitle, , in Samuel Johnson the Moralist, pp. 65–66, 70 Google Scholar, seems to argue from Johnson's expressed admiration for Grotius to Johnson's concurrence in Grotius's notions of natural law. But the works of Grotius that Johnson read and praised were his apologetic ones, especially the De veritate religionis Christi. The De jure belli ac pacis, which contains his views on natural law and from which Voitle quotes, presumably as illustrating Johnson's thinking, is not listed in the index to the Hill-Powell edition of Boswell's Life, to which Voitle refers his reader (Samuel Johnson the Moralist, p. 65, note 16) for Johnson's “knowledge of the works of Grotius.”

13. Johnson, Samuel, The Works of Samuel Johnson [Yale Edition] (New Haven, 1958), I, 119 Google Scholar; Boswell, James, Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, G. B. and Powell, L. F. (Oxford, 1934–1950), III, 380 Google Scholar; Hill, G. B. (ed.), Johnsonian Miscellanies (Oxford, 1897), II, 194 .Google Scholar

14. Eliot, T. S., “The ‘Pensées’ of Pascal,” Selected Essays (New York, 1950) p. 359 .Google Scholar

15. The passages I quote are from the sections numbered 230, 238, and 242 in Pascal, Blaise, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Chevalier, Jacques [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade] (Paris, 1954).Google Scholar In older editions, these are found in what is usually marked “Chapter V” of the work. I have made use of the translation in the Modern Library series, and that by C. Kegan Paul (London, 1890). In his early reporting of the parliamentary debates, Johnson gives what is apparently a direct quotation of one of these aphorisms of Pascal: “It has been observed that with regard to governors and subjects, power subsists upon opinion.” Gentleman's Magazine XIII (1743), 118. Google Scholar

16. Some dismay has been expressed at my having suggested ( The Politics of Samuel Johnson [New Haven, 1960], p. 246 Google Scholar) that such views of Johnson's are not unlike those found in Hobbes. It may be pointed out that Pascal's many similarities, and even direct indebtedness, to Hobbes have been commonplaces of Pascal criticism, from Fontenelle to Sainte Beuve and beyond. Gilbert Chinard studies the question in detail, and sums it up by speaking of “les affinités intellectuelles, le parallélisme des vues scientifiques et la ressemblance des vues politiques que l'on peut constater entre l'auteur du De Cive et l'auteur des Pensées …. En plusieurs circonstances et sur des points forts differents, Hobbes a fortement influencé la pensée pascalienne et lui a servi de point de départ.” En Lisant Pascal (Lille-Genève, 1948), p. 36 .Google Scholar

17. BM, King's MS 80, fol. 7-15. I am greatly indebted to Professor E. L. McAdam, Jr., for allowing me to use his microfilm copy of the MS of the Vinerian lectures. McAdam prints the short excerpt I mention in his Dr. Johnson and the English Law (Syracuse, 1951).Google Scholar

18. Harding, , “A Reviving Natural Law,” Natural Law and Natural Rights, pp. 68–69 .Google Scholar

19. According to Voitle, Robert (Samuel Johnson the Moralist, p. 70)Google Scholar, my contention (Politics of Samuel Johnson, p. 194) that Johnson follows Hooker in basing his scheme of society on the postulate that “man is a social animal” means that I “grant Johnson all that is necessary to a belief in natural law.” Voitle's definition of “natural law” must be at least as wide as this last one of Harding's. I doubt that other recent writers on the subject would agree that adherence to this postulate — with which Bentham, Mill, and Marx would readily have concurred — is all that is necessary.

20. There has been undue alarm about coupling the name of Johnson, a devout Christian of Evangelical (among other) tendencies, with “Utilitarianism.” Élie Halévy devotes the last part of his classic History of the English People in 1815, written nearly half a century ago, to establishing, with impressive documentation, the proposition he thus formulates in his concluding paragraphs: “It would be a mistake to establish an irreconcilable opposition between the Utilitarian ethic and the Christian …. British individualism is a moderate individualism, a mixture whose constituents are often mingled beyond the possibility of analysis, a compound of Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism.” Halévy, , History of the English People in 1815 (New York, 1949), pp. 586–87.Google Scholar Robert Voitle (Samuel Johnson the Moralist) has convincingly argued the case for Johnson's “utilitarianism.”

21. Johnson, , Works (1787), X, 233 Google Scholar [review of Soame Jenyns, A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil].

22. Eliot, , “The Pensées of Pascal,” Selected Essays, pp. 363, 366 .Google Scholar Regarding Swift, Eliot says: “Pascal's disillusioned analysis of human bondage is sometimes interpreted to mean that Pascal was really and finally an unbeliever, who, in his despair, was incapable of enduring reality and enjoying the heroic satisfaction of the free man's worship of nothing. His despair, his disillusion, are, however, no illustration of personal weakness; they are perfectly objective, because they are moments in the progress of the intellectual soul; and for the type of Pascal they are the analogue of the drought, the dark night, which is an essential stage in the progress of the Christian mystic. A similar despair, when it is arrived at by a diseased character or an impure soul, may issue in the most disastrous consequences though with the most superb manifestations; and thus we get Gulliver's Travels; but in Pascal we find no such distortions; his despair is itself more terrible than Swift's, because our heart tells us that it corresponds exactly to the facts and cannot be dismissed as mental disease.” Selected Essays, p. 364. The myth of Swift's “mental disease,” “diseased character,” and so on has long been exploded; it was derived from just such a misreading of Swift's writings as Eliot so caustically condemns in the case of Pascal's. Everything Eliot says in vindication of the “despair,” the “disillusion” of the Pensées applies with equal force to Gulliver's Travels, a profoundly Christian document in the tradition of Augustine and Pascal.

23. “Augustinianism and Thomism are often said to constitute the two correlative though not necessarily contradictory poles, so to speak, of Christian thought. The Thomist interpretation is unthinkable without the notion of natural law.” D'Entrèves, A. P., Natural Law (London, 1951), p. 46 .Google Scholar

24. Cf. Article IX of the Articles of Religion of the Church of England: “Original Sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk;) but it is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man, that naturally is ingendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God's wrath and damnation …,” and Article X, “… we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us ….”

25. And Kierkegaard. Mesnard, Jean, Pascal, His Life and Works (New York, 1952), pp. 188–89Google Scholar, notes the obvious relationship between Pascal, and Kierkegaard and the existentialists. Students of Swift and Johnson might gain some illumination by noting these parallels.

26. “Pascal was loyal to the tradition of Saint Paul and to the spirit of Jansen, who unceasingly condemned the corrupting influence of Origen and the Scholastics, and sought to purify religion of all traces of Platonic metaphysics and Stoic ethics, that is to say, of all pagan influences.” Cailliet, Émile, The Clue to Pascal (Philadelphia, 1944), p. 56 .Google Scholar Cf. Swift's sweeping denunciation of “heathen philosophy” (including Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Peripatetics) in his sermon on the text “The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God”; and Johnson's condemnation of Stoicism in Rasselas, ch. xviii (and ch. xxii, for that matter, for the Shaftesburianism condemned there is essentially a form of Stoicism), Rambler 32, and the conclusion of The Vanity of Human Wishes; and of “Chrysippus's untractableness of matter and the Arabian scale of existence” in the review of Soame Jenyns. Chrysippus was a Stoic; Averroes, “the great interpreter of Aristotle to the later Schoolmen,” was one of the Arabian exponents of the Great Chain of Being. “Johnson's criticism reached very nearly to the root of the matter,” says Lovejoy, A. O., The Great Chain of Being (New York, 1960), p. 254 .Google Scholar

27. D'Entrèves, , Natural Law, pp. 35–37 .Google Scholar

28. Ibid., pp. 68-70.

29. Ibid., pp. 70–71.