Flesh in the Age of Reason (29 page)

Johnson was thus ensnared. Incapable through poverty, situation and temperament of assimilating himself into genteel leisure, unable to meld learning and sociability in Addisonian moderation, he lurched from melancholy toil to melancholy indolence, fearing all the time that that way madness lay.

Why could Johnson not drag himself out of this slough of despond? The answer lies in that religion which might, for another man, have been his lifeline. Johnson’s melancholy was ultimately religious melancholy. Religion, after all, was in his blood. His mother had dinned
The Whole Duty of Man
into him in early childhood, that work of piety spreading its vision of sinful man humbled by a God of Justice, omnipotent and vengeful, dictating duties for man to obey, without respite, to stay his sin. This message – which young Sam resented, leading to scoffing in his teens – finally seized his heart when he was ‘overmatched’ at the age of 20 by William Law’s
A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
. Under this rule of Law, Johnson was to remain to the end of his days overawed by the terrors of sin, death and damnation.

He could not get death off his mind. ‘Is not the fear of death natural to man?’ Boswell asked him, equally death-obsessed. ‘So much so, Sir,’ replied his mentor, ‘that the whole of life is but to keep away the thoughts of it.’ Johnson strove mightily enough to fend it
off. Sometimes, when Boswell raised the issue, he bellowed him down. Little things triggered great fears. When Bennet Langton drew up his will, Johnson made hysterical sport of him all day. Being ‘of dreadful things the most dreadful’, as he put it in the
Rambler
, the fear of death was naturally ‘the great disturber of human quiet’. Johnson’s dread of extinction became obsessive, and, as he well knew, it ate the soul: ‘Fear, whether natural or acquired, when once it has full possession of the fancy, never fails to employ it upon visions of calamity, such as, if they are not dissipated by useful employment, will soon overcast it with horrors, and embitter life.’

Christianity gave Johnson the prospect of managing mortality, a revelation of triumph over the Grim Reaper, an earnest of life eternal. But only at a terrible price, that of obeying William Law’s injunction to keep the mind so ‘possessed with such a sense of [death’s] nearness that you may have it always in your thoughts’. Perpetually thinking about death was harrowing. For Johnson’s was a God of wrath: ‘The quiver of Omnipotence is stored with arrows, against which the shield of human virtue, however adamantine it has been boasted, is held up in vain.’ God racked mankind with superhuman duties, and punished the sinful by damning them. And when, in the midst of a conversation in Oxford, recorded by Boswell, the ‘amiable’ Dr Adams reminded him that God was infinitely good – it was all to no avail:

J
OHNSON
. ‘That he is infinitely good, as far as the perfection of his nature will allow, I certainly believe; but it is necessary for good upon the whole, that individuals should be punished. As to an
individual
, therefore, he is not infinitely good; and as I cannot be
sure
that I have fulfilled the conditions on which salvation is granted, I am afraid I may be one of those who shall be damned.’ (looking dismally.) D
R. ADAMS
. ‘What do you mean by damned?’ J
OHNSON
. (passionately and loudly) ‘Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly:’ D
R. ADAMS
. ‘I don’t believe that doctrine.’ J
OHNSON
. ‘Hold, Sir, do you believe that some will be punished at all?’ D
R. ADAMS
. ‘Being excluded from Heaven will be a punishment: yet there may be no great positive suffering.’

We have already encountered the rising debate over the eternity of hell. No less alarmed than J
OHNSON
, Boswell could not resist following the question up, searching for consolation: ‘But may not a man attain to such a degree of hope as not to be uneasy from the fear of death?’

J
OHNSON
.‘A man may have such a degree of hope as to keep him quiet. You see I am not quiet, from the vehemence with which I talk; but I do not despair.’ M
RS. ADAMS
. ‘You seem, Sir, to forget the merits of our Redeemer.’ J
OHNSON
. ‘Madam, I do not forget the merits of my Redeemer; but my Redeemer has said that he will set some on his right hand and some on his left.’ – He was in gloomy agitation, and said, ‘I’ll have no more on’t.’

It is a rather shocking exchange.
Timor mortis conturbat me
obviously applied just as strongly to Johnson as it did to any medieval poet or preacher; and much as he might have wished to embrace a less awful option, he clearly feared that his companions’ more liberal doctrines revealed not just a denial of Scripture but man’s sorry capacity for self-deception. Indeed, he was eternally suspicious of all convictions of a better future, which he was apt to dismiss as ‘visionary’.

For Johnson the possibility of hell was at least preferable to the probability of oblivion. The wavering Boswell was less certain, and on one occasion he ‘endeavoured to maintain that the fear of it might be got over’ by rather tactlessly bringing up the opinions of Johnson’s
bête noire
, the sceptic and unbeliever David Hume:

I told him that David Hume said to me, he was no more uneasy to think he should
not be
after his life, than that he
had not been
before he began to exist. J
OHNSON
. ‘Sir, if he really thinks so, his perceptions are disturbed; he is mad; if he does not think so, he lies.…’ B
OSWELL
. ‘Foote, Sir, told me, that when he was very ill he was not afraid to die.’ J
OHNSON
. ‘It is not true, Sir. Hold a pistol to Foote’s breast, or to Hume’s breast, and threaten to kill them, and you’ll see how they behave.’ B
OSWELL
. ‘But may we not fortify our minds for the approach of death’…

How dare Boswell of all people lecture Johnson about the need to strengthen his mind!

To deny the fear of dying was, for Johnson, hypocrisy, bluster or
madness. When a certain Mrs Knowles tried to hearten him, saying that death was but ‘the gate of life’, Johnson insisted ‘No rational man can die without uneasy apprehension’. She did her best:

M
RS.KNOWLES
. ‘The Scriptures tell us, “The Righteous shall have
hope
in his death”.’ J
OHNSON
. ‘Yes, Madam; that is, he shall not have despair. But, consider, his hope of salvation must be founded on the terms on which it is promised that the mediation of our S
AVIOUR
shall be applied to us, – namely, obedience; and where obedience has failed, then, as suppletory to it, repentance. But what man can say that his obedience has been such, as he would approve of in another, or even in himself upon close examination, or that his repentance has not been such as to require being repented of? No man can be sure that his obedience and repentance will obtain salvation.’… B
OSWELL
. ‘Then, Sir, we must be contented to acknowledge that death is a terrible thing.’ J
OHNSON
. ‘Yes, Sir, I have made no approaches to a state which can look on it as not terrible.’ Mrs. K
NOWLES
(seeming to enjoy a pleasing serenity in the persuasion of benignant divine light): ‘Does not St. Paul say, “I have fought the good fight of faith, I have finished my course; henceforth is laid up for me a crown of life”?’ J
OHNSON
. ‘Yes, Madam; but here was a man inspired, a man who had been converted by supernatural interposition.’ BOSWELL. ‘In prospect death is dreadful; but in fact we find that people die easy.’ J
OHNSON
. ‘Why, Sir, most people have not
thought
much of the matter, so cannot
say
much, and it is supposed they die easy. Few believe it certain they are then to die; and those who do, set themselves to behave with resolution, as a man does who is going to be hanged: – he is not the less unwilling to be hanged.’ M
ISS SEWARD
. ‘There is one mode of the fear of death, which is certainly absurd: and that is the dread of annihilation, which is only a pleasing sleep without a dream.’ J
OHNSON
. ‘It is neither pleasing, nor sleep; it is nothing. Now mere existence is so much better than nothing, that one would rather exist even in pain, than not exist.’

The views of the pious Mrs Knowles – that God had set out in the Bible the prospects of a future existence secured through Christ’s sacrifice – Johnson’s brain no doubt subscribed to. But his gut reaction was to resist the reassurance, presumably because of his
profound suspicion of being taken in by what, in others, he would have dismissed as false hopes, sentimentality or muddle-headedness.

Yet did not Johnson himself often clutch at straws? That is evident, for example, in his ardent but old-fashioned belief in spirits, ghosts and other signs of the supernatural – precisely as upheld a century earlier by the likes of Henry More, Joseph Glanvill and Robert Boyle. By Johnson’s lifetime such views were considered archaic, plebeian, fanciful or Methodistical. Johnson, by contrast, battled against those who, in that enlightened age, argued the diabolical and spiritual away. As recorded by Boswell in his
Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides
(1785), he was having supper with some of the leading Scottish
literati
:

Mr. Crosbie said, he thought it the greatest blasphemy to suppose evil spirits counteracting the Deity, and raising storms, for instance, to destroy his creatures. – J
OHNSON
. ‘Why, sir, if moral evil be consistent with the government of the Deity, why may not physical evil be also consistent with it? It is not more strange that there should be evil spirits, than evil men: evil unembodied spirits, than evil embodied spirits. And as to storms, we know there are such things; and it is no worse that evil spirits raise them, than that they rise.’ –
CROSBIE
. ‘But it is not credible, that witches should have effected what they are said in stories to have done.’ – J
OHNSON
. ‘Sir, I am not defending their credibility…. You must take evidence: you must consider, that wise and great men have condemned witches to die.’ – C
ROSBIE
. ‘But an act of parliament put an end to witchcraft.’ – J
OHNSON
. ‘No, sir; witchcraft had ceased; and therefore an act of parliament was passed to prevent persecution for what was not witchcraft.’

Johnson was thus desperate to believe. But the belief which became imprinted on him was that of the onerousness of God’s ‘call’, a
via crucis
of religious duties – prayers, fasting, church attendance, Bible reading, soul-searching – from which he equally continually shied away, because they all brought him inescapably face-to-face with his own worthlessness, not least his ‘idleness’. Objectively, Johnson’s morbid anxiety about wasting time was completely irrational and makes sense only under the ultimata of religious terrorism, under the lash of a divine taskmaster. With prayer upon prayer he abased
himself: ‘O Lord, enable me by thy Grace to use all diligence in redeeming the time which I have spent in Sloth, Vanity, and wickedness.’ But successive promises of reformation only exposed his inability to amend. The demands were superhuman: how could he rise at six, as he continually pledged, when the dread insomnia kept him awake till deep into the early hours? How could he be dutiful in soul-searching when it brought to light nothing but fresh proofs of wickedness? In turn this produced more guilt, further confessions of ‘manifold sins and negligences’, spawning yet more ‘oppressive terrors’.

Religion thus proved a torment, and Johnson never found peace. Mrs Thrale knew it only too well. As she perceived, it was precisely Johnson’s religion which triggered his fears of madness: ‘daily terror lest he had not done enough originated in piety, but ended in little less than disease…. He… filled his imagination with fears that he should ever obtain forgiveness of remission of duty and criminal waste of time.’ And Johnson himself was helplessly aware how he made rods for his own back, notably by his ‘scruples’. To assuage guilt, strengthen his resolve and placate the Deity, Johnson habitually bound himself by vows, which he called ‘scruples’. As with his nervous tics and mannerisms, these resolutions temporarily relieved tension and acted as charms against further backslidings. But they too had their revenges. For the very act of making them created guilt, aware as he was of their superstitious, quasi-magical nature (‘a vow is a horrible thing… a snare for sin’); and he was still guiltier about not keeping them: ‘I have resolved till I am afraid to resolve again,’ he confessed, in despair, in 1761.

Johnson was utterly tenacious of his reason; nothing meant more to him. People of other temperaments or convictions could ache for its eclipse, but Johnson’s creed forbade such euthanasia of the spirit, since he believed it his cardinal responsibility to ‘render up my soul to God unclouded’. He consistently esteemed the mind infinitely above the body. The physical was as nothing: ‘I would consent to have a limb amputated,’ he characteristically confided to Dr Adams, ‘to recover my low spirits.’ When he suffered a stroke, his real fear
was for his mental powers, which he tested by composing a thematic Latin prayer:

Summe Pater, quodcunque tuum de corpore Numen
    Hoc statuat, precibus Christus adesse velit;
Ingenio parcas, nec sit mihi culpa rogasse,
    Qua solum potero parte, placere tibi.

(‘Almighty Father, whatever the divine Will ordains concerning this body of mine, may Christ be willing to aid me with his prayers. And let it not be blameworthy on my part to implore that thou spare my reason, by which faculty alone I shall be able to do thy pleasure’.)