Robert G. Walker
Samuel Johnson’s relationship to casuistry is a knotty issue. One may certainly find evidence that his view of casuistry is quite contemporary and identify it with that of the self-proclaimed casuist Nigrinus in Rambler 10, who describes himself as “a man grown grey in the study of those noble arts, by which right and wrong may be confounded; by which reason may be blinded, when we have a mind to escape from her inspection.”1 The casuist is criticized in a more serious context in Rambler 114, Johnson’s powerful argument against the widespread use of capital punishment: “Whatever may be urged by casuists or politicians, the greater part of mankind, as they can never think that to pick the pocket and to pierce the heart is equally criminal, will scarcely believe that two malefactors so different in guilt can be justly doomed to the same punishment” (4:245). Johnson advocates a simple, straightforward, Occam’s razor approach to modes of expression in Idler 36, telling us “to find the nearest way from truth to truth, or from purpose to effect, not to use more instruments where fewer will be sufficient, not to move by wheels and levers what will give way to the naked hand,”2 so when he picks up this thread again in Idler 70, the casuist is already suspect for unnecessary complication: “In morality it is one thing to discuss the niceties of the casuist, and another to direct the practice of common life. . . . [I]f he, who has nothing to do but to be honest by the shortest way, will perplex his mind with subtile speculations . . . the writers whom [he] shall consult are very little to be blamed, tho’ it should sometimes happen that they are read in vain” (220). Were all, or even most, of the other appearances of casuistry in Johnson (and James Boswell’s writing about Johnson) of this ilk, there would be no issue. But they are not and there is.
A Good Casuist
To start to untie the knot I begin with Johnson’s definition: both the first and fourth editions of his Dictionary define casuistry as “the science of a casuist; the doctrine of cases of conscience.” Two illustrative quotations follow, both from Pope, one of which is clearly pejorative. When Johnson defines casuist he expands the root meaning a bit: “one that studies and settles cases of conscience.” Here one of three illustrative quotations is pejorative. Johnson’s definitions are neutral and his illustrative quotations are balanced between attitudes critical and not critical. The OED cites “sophistry” as a synonym and includes in its definition, “Often (and perhaps originally) applied to a quibbling or evasive way of dealing with difficult cases of duty” (s.v. “casuistry”). G. A. Starr properly felt the need in 1971 to rescue the reputation of the term so that its influence on Defoe’s fiction could be examined: “Today casuistry tends to be regarded as at best ludicrous, at worst sinister: one must therefore stress at the outset that for all its abuses, casuistry also has its uses, and that moralists have long recognized its potentialities for good as well as evil. In the Rambler Johnson acknowledges that casuistry is ‘useful in proper hands,’ even though it ‘ought by no means to be carelessly exposed, since most will use it rather to lull than awaken their own consciences.’”3 Perhaps the most extensive recent rehabilitation attempt, this time in the realm of ethics rather than literary studies, is the 1988 work by Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning, which inspired this essay.
While I do not intend to argue that Samuel Johnson’s view of casuistry was invariably favorable, I will suggest that his view was as favorable, overall, as that of any prominent thinker since Blaise Pascal’s series of tracts, Les Lettres Provinciales, begun in 1656, supposedly “demolished the reputation of casuistry for all subsequent generations.”4 Moreover, if we start from this premise, we discover that the tradition of casuistical argument thoroughly imbues many of our favorite “Johnsonian” passages in ways not hitherto pointed out. That contemporary Johnson scholars need to be reminded—if not informed—of the role the tradition of casuistry played in both the content and the form of Johnson’s thought is suggested by several recent comments by Nicholas Hudson and Blanford Parker. Hudson sees Johnson following in the footsteps of Matthew Hale, Isaac Watts, and others who argued that charity should be regulated primarily by common sense and that one should, as Hale put it, eschew consulting “with this or that philosopher, schoolman or casuist.” He places Johnson among eighteenth-century Englishmen who “energetically assailed” the casuists of the Roman Catholic Church for “the study of problematic issues of conscience” they undertook. Parker concurs: “Pope and his contemporaries share with Johnson a mistrust of metaphysics and theological casuistry.”5 In light of such bald claims, it is well worth recalling the words of Thomas Tyers, one of Johnson’s very first biographers, writing for the Gentleman’s Magazine in December 1784, the month of Johnson’s death: “Johnson’s advice was consulted on all occasions. He was known to be a good casuist, and therefore had many cases for his judgment.”6 The man who had defined casuist as “one that studies and settles cases of conscience” would not have been disturbed in the least by this epithet.
The Casuistry of Lying
A cartoon in a recent Wall Street Journal depicts an assistant interrupting a board meeting and whispering to the person at the head of the table, “Your parole officer is on the phone. Are you in?” The conspicuous corporate chicanery of our times is the obvious occasion for the cartoon, but some of the humor rests also in the implicit contrast between felonious behavior on the one hand and socially acceptable little white lies on the other. “What would Sam Johnson do?” is a question that rarely seems to occur to today’s CEO, but we can certainly ask it, and an answer is not far to seek. In the first months of his friendship with Johnson, James Boswell describes the two garrets over Johnson’s residence at No. 1, Inner Temple Lane, which served as Johnson’s library, chemical laboratory, and hideout. (His living quarters were on the first floor and the garrets up “four pairs of stairs.”) Boswell writes,
Johnson told me, that he went up thither without mentioning it to his servant, when he wanted to study, secure from interruption; for he would not allow his servant to say he was not at home when he really was. “A servant’s strict regard for truth, (said he) must be weakened by such a practice. A philosopher may know that it is merely a form of denial; but few servants are such nice distinguishers. If I accustom a servant to tell a lie for me, have I not reason to apprehend that he will tell many lies for himself?”7
Boswell’s view, that the “lie” is merely conventional language and harmless to all concerned, is the more modern one, but Johnson’s view is far more interesting. The philosopher Johnson mentions could have been any one in a seemingly endless number of casuists debating the morality of lying.
Any attempt strictly to categorize the various subjects most commonly treated by casuistry would be futile, but not surprisingly, casuists often dealt with issues concerning mendacity. We could place the passage just cited in a category titled, “Whether a Servant may lawfully tell a Lye for his Master?” if we wished to quote the question in the words of Defoe’s Little Review, 6 July 1705.8 Or we could place it in a broader category of relationships between masters and servants, which, as late as 1841, Thomas De Quincey found the source of “many cases of conscience daily occurring in the common business of the world” and which required the master to make the tough choice between being truthful in giving a displaced servant no character reference, thus “consigning deliberately some young woman . . . to ruin,” or being less than candid in providing a reference.9 De Quincey writes this in an essay entitled by his later nineteenth-century editor, “The Casuistry of Duelling,” which highlights the difficulty of categorizing the subject matter of casuistic discussions. When Jonsen and Toulmin selected three “cases” to examine in detail in their multicentury history of casuistry, they chose “the case of charging interest on loans, the case of equivocation under oath, and the case of defense of one’s honor” (177). As we shall see, Johnson turns repeatedly to the casuistic tradition and method to discuss issues of truthfulness, sometimes related, as above, to specific social conventions, sometimes related to unacknowledged authorship, sometimes narrowly dealing with traditional casuistic definitions of truth and falsehood in the abstract. He also holds forth on casuistic topics as diverse as hiding accused criminals on the one hand and self-defense on the other, and his discussions frequently spill outside these arbitrary designations, much as De Quincey’s was to do in the middle of the next century.
To discuss Johnson on lying is to run the risk of offering old wine in new bottles. It is difficult to think of a topic on which the Anecdotal Johnson is better known than lying, except perhaps dying. The locus classicus may be Johnson’s characterizing Warburton’s use of “lie” to describe an inaccurate note, as simply an example of Warburton’s “warm language”; Boswell, who wanted a condemnation, opines,
The language is warm indeed; and, I must own, cannot be justified in consistency with a decent regard to the established forms of speech. Johnson had accustomed himself to use the word lie, to express a mistake or an errour in relation; in short, when the thing was not so as told, though the relator did not mean to deceive. When he thought there was intentional falsehood in the relator, his expression was, “He lies, and he knows he lies.” (Life, 4:49)
Boswell is uncomfortable, of course, with Johnson’s and Warburton’s use of a word implying immoral behavior for what may be an amoral mistake. Contrast the following passage in which Boswell describes Johnson being put on the spot by the author of a translation of Carmen Seculare of Horace:
When Johnson had done reading, the authour asked him bluntly, “If upon the whole it was a good translation?” Johnson, whose regard for truth was uncommonly strict, seemed to be puzzled for a moment, what answer to make, as he certainly could not honestly commend the performance: with exquisite address he evaded the question thus, “Sir, I do not say that it may not be made a very good translation.” Here nothing whatever in favour of the performance was affirmed, and yet the writer was not shocked. (Life, 3:373–74)
This typical response is the stuff of the casuistry texts Johnson knew and had thoroughly incorporated into his thinking and behavior.
In the Abuse of Casuistry Jonsen and Toulmin devote a chapter to “Perjury: The Case of Equivocation,” and, in the course of their broad survey, make several findings that are especially appropriate to the tradition Johnson knew and reflected. St. Augustine took the very hard line that lying could never be morally justified, even in the case of protecting from authorities an innocent man, unjustly condemned, who is hiding in your house. He went on to “distinguish eight species of lying as varying in gravity,” as Jonsen and Toulmin explain: “The degree of sinfulness depended on the seriousness of the harm done by the deception and on whether the resulting benefits from the lie accrued to the deceiver himself or to some other party. The malice ranged from the most serious—namely, a lie that leads another to deny religious belief—to the least sinful—a lie that actually helps another without harming anyone but the teller” (196–97). Aquinas largely agreed with Augustine; however, he let the nose of the camel under the tent with this comment: “it is licit to hide the truth prudently by some sort of dissimulation” (197). Raymond of Pennafort distinguished three rather than eight types of lies (“the ‘pernicious’ lie harms someone without even bringing any benefit to the liar; the ‘officious,’ or dutiful lie benefits someone other than the liar; the ‘jocose’ lie does no harm to anyone”), but all were sinful since “the malice of a lie depended not on its consequences but on the very discrepancy between what is in the mind and what is uttered” (197). Various types of behavior began to be discussed and sometimes recommended as ways to avoid sin while not disclosing the information sought by a questioner; these included silence, distracting the questioner, responding in equivocal words, and, most controversial of all, responding with mental restriction.
Mental restriction (or mental reservation, as it was often termed in the eighteenth century) began with the concept that sometimes one was not obliged to answer a question in accord with the questioner’s intent, so long as the communication between the responder and God was truthful. Of course, God knows our thoughts, so one could indeed say one (false) thing while thinking another (true) thing. Examples from an early sixteenth-century text suggest this is not so obviously disreputable as a bald explanation implies: “If someone seeking to kill another person asks you, ‘did he go this way?’ you may answer, ‘no, not this way,’ meaning ‘his feet did not tread the very ground you are pointing at.’ If asked about something you are obliged to keep secret, you may say, ‘I do not know,’ understanding in your mind (subintelligendo) ‘so that it may be revealed to you.’” But the same source cautions against unwarranted use of this ploy: “it cannot be used in a law court before an authorized judge nor when the questioned person is bound to answer truthfully to a lawful superior” (198). A major backdrop here is the importance of protecting the secrecy of the Roman Catholic confessional, but truth-telling versus preserving a secret remained an issue in Johnson’s day in Anglican England. So too was the status of the questioner. Whether or not he had a right to ask his question could determine whether or not one was morally obliged to answer truthfully. This latter point was later formally enunciated by Hugo Grotius—“the obligation to tell the truth was correlative to the right of the questioner to know the truth” (211). Of broad mental restriction, Jonsen and Toulmin point out, “in its simplest form, this kind of dissimulation reflects certain conventions of common speech. ‘Is your husband at home?’ asks the unwelcome caller. . . . The answer, ‘no (not for you)’ was, suggested the casuists, understood by people at large” (202). But it was an answer that Johnson did not endorse in this context, as we have already seen.
What Johnson did endorse were many of the typical casuistic subtleties, especially for purposes of evaluating achievement and determining authorship. What Boswell interprets as a momentary puzzlement when the translator of Carmen Seculare requests a literary judgment could just as well have been Johnson’s weighing the advisability of delivering a rebuke in this social setting to an impertinent questioner. Elsewhere Johnson explained the nuances: “There is a great difference between what is said without our being urged to it, and what is said from a kind of compulsion. If I praise a man’s book without being asked my opinion of it, that is honest praise, to which one may trust. But if an authour asks me if I like his book, and I give him something like praise, it must not be taken as my real opinion” (Life, 2:50–51). Johnson as literary arbiter is hardly in so difficult a position as a Catholic priest protecting the sanctity of the confessional from officers of the Inquisition, or an English Catholic of the mid-sixteenth century forced to come to terms with the Act of Supremacy (1559) and the behaviors it mandated, or an Anglican of the mid-seventeenth century compelled to negotiate the Puritan Parliament’s Engagement Oath, but his choice of language (“a kind of compulsion”) suggests a similar seriousness. He was not given to hyperbole but found it natural when dealing with cases of conscience in the area of truth or falsehood. After complaining of the lack of propriety of being shown another translation of Horace, this one by “a young Miss,” or the young Miss’s mother (“Nobody has a right to put another under such a difficulty, that he must either hurt the person by telling the truth, or hurt himself by telling what is not true”), Johnson continues, “Therefore a man, who is asked by an authour, what he thinks of his work, is put to the torture [my emphasis], and is not obliged to speak the truth.” Johnson sees a further moral complication in giving a literary opinion of a manuscript and determines it, as a good casuist would, in the direction of doing the least harm to another: “Yet I consider it as a very difficult question in conscience, whether one should advise a man not to publish a work, if profit be his object; for the man may say, ‘Had it not been for you, I should have had the money.’ Now you cannot be sure; for you have only your own opinion, and the publick may think very differently.” When Sir Joshua Reynolds somewhat misses the point and suggests “two judgements; one as to the real value of the work, the other as to what may please the general taste at the time,” Johnson answers, “But you can be sure of neither; and therefore I should scruple much to give a suppressive vote” (Life, 3:319–20).
In an age when some publications were anonymous and others joint ventures, moral issues appeared to Johnson not only in the evaluation of texts but also in the attribution of them. Reynolds tells us, “I once inadvertently put [Johnson] in a situation from which none but a man of perfect integrity could extricate himself. I pointed at some lines in the Traveller which I told him I was sure he wrote. He hesitated a little; during this hesitation I recollected myself, that as I knew he would not lye I put him in a cleft stick, and should have had but my due if he had given me a rough answer.”10 Reynolds is aware he has asked a question without having the right to do so and his phrase, “put him in a cleft stick,” nicely sums up the position the responder frequently occupies, not just being in a dangerous or tricky place but caught between choices. Fortunately, the situation allowed Johnson to answer specifically and directly and still not harm his friend Goldsmith. Johnson was reputed to have written the entire poem for his (then) unknown friend, so his response to Reynolds was in a sense a defense of Goldsmith: “Sir, I did not write them, but that you may not imagine that I have wrote more than I really have, the utmost I have wrote in that poem, to the best of my recollection, is not more than eighteen lines” (Life, 2:6n3).
Reynolds values more highly the intricacies of the casuistic tradition than does Boswell, whose view seems predictably more modern. A subtle sign of this different view occurs in the rendering of the confrontation between Johnson and Donald M’Queen over the authenticity of the works of Ossian. Boswell indeed states that M’Queen had always “evaded” the point of authenticity, but after Johnson challenges M’Queen—“M’Pherson’s is not a translation from ancient poetry. You do not believe it. I say before you, you do not believe it, though you are very willing that the world should believe it”—Boswell writes simply, “Mr. M’Queen made no answer to this” (Life, 5:240). Johnson’s version in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland seems at first almost identical: “I asked a very learned minister in Sky, who had used all arts to make me believe the genuineness of the book, whether at last he believed it himself? but he would not answer. He wished me to be deceived, for the honour of his country; but would not directly and formally deceive me. Yet has this man’s testimony been publickly produced, as of one that held Fingal to be the work of Ossian.”11 Johnson carefully establishes his right to ask the question, both because he has been imposed on by M’Queen’s “arts” and because M’Queen’s opinion has moved into the realm of public “testimony.” Here, then, M’Queen’s silence will not pass as a tool to avoid lying while at the same time continuing to deceive.
Boswell’s more modern view of casuistry shows up as well when he writes about the “Bathurst” Adventurer essays. Mrs. Williams has told Boswell that “as [Johnson] had given those essays to Dr. Bathurst, who sold them at two guineas each, he never would own them; nay, he used to say he did not write them: but the fact was, that he dictated them, while Bathurst wrote.” Boswell tells us, “I read to him Mrs. Williams’s account; he smiled, and said nothing.” Boswell seems perturbed by the italicized equivocation and may miss entirely the pun that Johnson surely intended on own, for he continues, “I am not quite satisfied with the casuistry by which the productions of one person are thus passed upon the world for the productions of another” (Life, 1:254). There follows Boswell’s lengthy analogy between children and literary works, with mention of the selling of a Scottish chieftainship and Esau’s birthright. This seems rather unconvincing and dull when compared to Johnson’s witty, albeit casuistic, statement to Mrs. Williams. Mrs. Williams, by the way, seems to have a bit of the equivocal strain in her as well, as Boswell found out when he questioned her about whether Johnson had written a poem on the death of Stephen Grey: “Sir, (said she, with some warmth,) I wrote that poem before I had the honour of Dr. Johnson’s acquaintance.” Boswell attempts to verify her statement with Johnson, who answers, “It is true, Sir, that she wrote it before she was acquainted with me; but she has not told you that I wrote it all over again, except two lines” (Life, 2:26).
At times the epigrammatic excellence of Johnson can overshadow the surrounding casuistic environment. All students of literature are familiar with the quotation, “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” What may escape us are the threads of casuistry that encircle it. When Johnson disapproves of Dr. Dodd’s implicitly claiming authorship of the originating text, “The Convict’s Address to his unhappy Brethren,” Boswell calls him on it: “But, Sir, . . . you contributed to the deception; for when Mr. Seward expressed a doubt to you that it was not Dodd’s own, because it had a great deal more force of mind in it than any thing known to be his, you answered, —‘Why should you think so? Depend upon it, Sir . . . ’” (Life, 3:167). Johnson defends himself first with an argument similar to those used by priests asked to violate the vow of secrecy of the confessional: “Sir, as Dodd got it from me to pass as his own,
. . . there was an implied promise that I should not own it. To own it, therefore, would have been telling a lie, with the addition of breach of promise, which was worse than simply telling a lie to make it be believed it was Dodd’s.” He concludes by referring to his manner of diverting the questioner: “Besides, Sir, I did not directly tell a lie; I left the matter uncertain” (Life, 3:167).
Before leaving the area of attribution, let us consider an instance in the arena of anonymous work. Boswell quotes Johnson on the identity of Junius: “I should have believed Burke to be Junius, because I know no man but Burke who is capable of writing these letters; but Burke spontaneously denied it to me. The case would have been different had I asked him if he was the authour; a man so questioned, as to an anonymous publication, may think he has a right to deny it” (Life, 3:376–77). We see the implicit reference to the license to lie under certain types of questioning, although Johnson’s “may think” may be telling. We have seen that he preferred other casuistic tools like equivocation or silence. G. B. Hill’s note to this passage points toward a recent literary precursor to the “right” Johnson alludes to, namely, Swift’s witty defense against Bettesworth. Johnson covers the issue in his “Life of Swift.” Swift had satirized the lawyer Bettesworth in four lines of a poem on the Presbyterians in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1733. The satire was effective, says Johnson, bringing the lawyer “from very considerable reputation . . . into immediate and universal contempt. Bettesworth . . . went to Swift and demanded whether he was the author of that poem.” Swift’s answer (as rendered by Johnson) deserves to be quoted at length: “Mr. Bettesworth, . . . I was in my youth acquainted with great lawyers, who, knowing my disposition to satire, advised me, that, if any scoundrel or blockhead whom I had lampooned should ask, ‘Are you the author of this paper?’ I should tell him that I was not the author; and therefore I tell you, Mr. Bettesworth, that I am not the author of these lines.”12 Swift employs a modified version of a paradox of Eubulides, the self-referential liar, so that his answer will be the same (a denial) regardless of whether or not he was the author. Adding to the delight is that the modification is in the form of legal advice, repeated to “a lawyer eminent for his insolence to the clergy,” as Johnson has just put it.
The ninth commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour,” is Johnson’s text for Sermon 17, which the Yale editors note “combines legal argument and homiletical eloquence.” Johnson “deals only briefly with perjury and concentrates his attack on the defamation of which men in society are guilty every day.”13 I hope it is not Zoilistic to suggest that casuistic rather than legal argument is the mode of the sermon, in both the earlier section on perjury and the later one on defamation. The casuist’s tendency to categorize is everywhere present, as is the tendency to evaluate the degree of evil in an act by tracing its consequences. Thus a person committing perjury in a literal sense by making false statements under oath in a court of law, “by which the life of an innocent man is taken away, the rightful owner stripped of his possessions, or an oppressour supported in his usurpations,” has committed “a crime that includes robbery and murder” (Sermons, 182). The inventor and propagator of a defamatory falsehood cannot vindicate himself by alleging that he spread a partial truth: “a calumny, in which falsehood is complicated with truth, and malice is assisted by probability, is more dangerous, but therefore less innocent, than unmixed forgery, and groundless invectives” (184). Ignorance of the falsity of the report one spreads is no excuse, although when we are ourselves deceived by the lie, there is a mitigation: he “who is deceived himself, cannot be accused of deceiving others, and is only so far blameable, as he contributed to the dishonour or prejudice of another, by spreading his faults without any just occasion, or lawful cause. . . . The crime indeed doth not fall under the head of calumny, but only differs from it in the falsehood, not in the malice” (185). Exactly what would constitute a just occasion or lawful cause under which one might properly spread another’s faults is an issue Johnson does not specify here, but we shall see him address it later in a very problematic context.
As a final point on Johnson’s view of the casuistry of lying, let us recall the classification of lies begun by St. Augustine thirteen hundred years earlier and recounted above. Johnson apparently was working with this idea “jocularly” when he spoke of the license allowable to historians: “There are . . . inexcusable lies, and consecrated lies. For instance, we are told that on the arrival of the news of the unfortunate battle of Fontenoy, every heart beat, and every eye was in tears. Now we know that no man eat his dinner the worse, but there should have been all this concern; and to say there was, (smiling) may be reckoned a consecrated lie” (Life, 1:355). In Adventurer 50, devoted entirely to the topic of lying, Johnson puts himself into the casuistic tradition, tongue-in-cheek at first but ultimately to a serious moral purpose: “The casuists have very diligently distinguished lyes into their several classes, according to their various degrees of malignity: but they have, I think, generally omitted that which is most common, and, perhaps, not least mischievous; which, since the moralists have not given it a name, I shall distinguish as the Lye of Vanity.” Since “suspicion is always watchful over the practices of interest,” most other common lies (for example, “the lye of commerce . . . and the lye of malice”) are much more easily detected than the lie of vanity, designed merely for self-exaltation (363).
Cases Considered
Johnson enjoyed Swift’s wit at the lawyer’s expense, as we still do today, and his extensive interest in the law was well known, if not well documented, before the publication in 1951 of E. L. McAdam’s Dr. Johnson and the English Law. Nevertheless, we err if we assume that he refers primarily to a case of law when he uses an expression like “the case would have been different,” as he did in the Junius discussion. Jonsen and Toulmin write, “The medieval term for what we call casuistry was ‘cases of conscience’ (casus conscientiae)” (127), and Johnson defined it exactly that way in his Dictionary in 1755. I suggest that when Johnson uses the word case he recalls more often a casuistic discipline than a legal one. That this presents itself in his periodical essays is not surprising in view of the previous century’s progenitor, John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury, with its original subtitle of “Casuisticall Mercury, resolving all the most nice and curious questions proposed by the ingenious of either sex.”14 Hymenaeus writes to the Rambler, “[I] will lay my case honestly before you, that you or your readers may at length decide it,” thus prefacing his detailed narration of failures in courtship (Rambler 113, 4:237). In another instance, Myrtilla, at age sixteen years and ten weeks, writes to complain of the “tyranny” of her aunt-governess: “I shall therefore lay my case before you, and hope by your decision to be set free from unreasonable restraints.” We smile along with the Rambler, who does not respond, despite Myrtilla’s urgent reminder in a postscript: “Remember I am past sixteen” (Rambler 84, 4:76–77, 81).15
Rambler 81 displays a debt to the casuistic tradition expressed more seriously. The initial topic is “the precedency or superior excellence of one virtue to another,” which leads Johnson to the Golden Rule: “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do unto them” (4:60–61). Johnson examines several arguments that have been advanced to suggest that this rule is not so absolute and all-encompassing as its proponents, including Johnson himself, claim: “One of the most celebrated cases which have been produced as requiring some skill in the direction of conscience to adapt them to this great rule, is that of a criminal asking mercy of his judge, who cannot but know that if he was in the state of the supplicant, he should desire that pardon which he now denies” (4:62). Although Johnson does not specify that the criminal is accused of a capital offense, that would make the case most challenging, for the judge could be seen as potentially in conflict with the fifth commandment as well as the Golden Rule. As I mentioned earlier, Johnson was a vigorous opponent of the widespread application of capital punishment in eighteenth-century England, but here he seems to imply support for it under certain circumstances, and by means of familiar casuistic arguments. In discussions of capital cases, the judge was frequently said to be society’s sword or instrument of justice, and thus not individually and personally responsible for taking another life. Moreover, the potential harm to society from lack of enforcement was held up as a deterrent to inappropriate leniency. Both ideas appear in Johnson’s explanation:
The difficulty of this sophism [that is, the judge’s refusing to grant the mercy he would seek in the criminal’s position] will vanish, if we remember that the parties are, in reality, on one side the criminal, and on the other the community of which the magistrate is only the minister, and by which he is intrusted with the publick safety. The magistrate therefore, in pardoning a man unworthy of pardon, betrays the trust with which he is invested, gives away what is not his own, and, apparently, does to others what he would not that others should do to him. Even the community, whose right is still greater to arbitrary grants of mercy, is bound by those laws which regard the great republick of mankind, and cannot justify such forbearance as may promote wickedness, and lessen the general confidence and security in which all have an equal interest, and which all are therefore bound to maintain. For this reason the state has not a right to erect a general sanctuary for fugitives, or give protection to such as have forfeited their lives by crimes against the laws of common morality equally acknowledged by all nations. (4:62)
How firmly Johnson is working in the casuistic tradition becomes even clearer when he discusses another possible objection to the precedence accorded “this great rule”: “One occasion of uncertainty and hesitation, in those by whom this great rule has been commented and dilated, is the confusion of what the exacter casuists are careful to distinguish, ‘debts of justice,’ and ‘debts of charity.’” Of these two categories the Golden Rule applies primarily and unquestionably to the former, Johnson continues, but “the discharge of the ‘debts of charity,’ or duties which we owe to others not merely as required by justice, but as dictated by benevolence, admits in its own nature greater complication of circumstances and greater latitude of choice.” Johnson is seemingly willing to accept the distinctions of “exacter casuists,” usually made in order to point out that failure to discharge a debt of justice was a sin with a tail (peccatum caudatum), that is, it required restoration or restitution. Failure to discharge a debt of charity did not, in part because of the “greater latitude of choice” it involved. The Golden Rule, then, is “not equally determinate and absolute with respect to offices of kindness, and acts of liberality, because liberality and kindness, absolutely determined, would lose their nature; for how could we be called tender, or charitable, for giving that which we are positively forbidden to withhold?” (4:63).
Johnson concludes the essay by cautioning those who would bend the Golden Rule back upon itself and use it as an excuse to act less charitably toward others than they otherwise might. Because of the inherent danger of underestimating what is due another, “it is safest for minds not oppressed with superstitious fears to determine against their own inclinations, and secure themselves from deficiency by doing more than they believe strictly necessary.” In circumstances of uncertainty about how charitable one should be, the uncertainty must be resolved by applying the rule of tutior via: “it is surely the part of a wise man to err on the side of safety” (4:64).
The Casuistry of Secrets and Sex
Casuistry has much to say, then, concerning how to answer when one is questioned, when it is permissible to respond evasively, and what type of evasion is acceptable. But what does it have to say about volunteering information, especially when such information is entrusted as a secret or when such information might be seen as embarrassing or harmful? In his marvelous discussion of the laws of secrecy in Rambler 13, Johnson seems to suggest that casuistry may not be generally useful here even while he indicates an awareness of it: “I am not ignorant that many questions may be started relating to the duty of secrecy, where the affairs are of publick concern; where subsequent reasons may arise to alter the appearance and nature of the trust; that the manner in which the secret was told may change the degree of obligation; and that the principles upon which a man is chosen for a confident may not always equally constrain him.” Any and all of these extenuating circumstances could, Johnson suggests, be employed by one who would violate the trust expected of the secret-keeper. But Johnson immediately counters these potentially effective distinctions by ones of his own: “But these scruples, if not too intricate, are of too extensive consideration for my present purpose, nor are they such as generally occur in common life; and though casuistical knowledge be useful in proper hands, yet it ought by no means to be carelessly exposed, since most will use it rather to lull than awaken their own consciences; and the threads of reasoning, on which truth is suspended, are frequently drawn to such subtility, that common eyes cannot perceive, and common sensibility cannot feel them” (3:72–73). Johnson mutes the metaphor of the Cartesian rationalist spinning his spider’s web of specious argument from the waste of his entrails, for he does not wish to dismiss casuistry out of hand, as modern commentators frequently do. In fact, in his concluding paragraph, which is somewhat unusual among Johnson’s periodic essays in that it actually does conclude most of the issues discussed earlier, Johnson proposes three specific rules concerning secrecy, much in the manner of a Renaissance casuist: “Never to solicit the knowledge of a secret. Not willingly, nor without many limitations, to accept such confidence when it is offered. When a secret is once admitted, to consider the trust as of a very high nature, important as society, and sacred as truth” (3:73).
Situations involving sexual impropriety were as difficult to weigh in Johnson’s day as they are today, but for very different reasons. A circumstance very important in eighteenth-century England and virtually nonexistent today is the potentially disruptive effect of promiscuity on inheritance. Indeed, this is the backdrop of the two anecdotes that follow, each illustrating Johnson’s working once again in a casuistic fashion. On Good Friday, 5 April 1776, after morning service at St. Clement’s, Boswell and Johnson begin talking about Roman Catholicism and then prostitution. Boswell directs the conversation to a different but related topic: “I stated to him this case: — ‘Suppose a man has a daughter, who he knows has been seduced, but her misfortune is concealed from the world: should he keep her in his house? Would he not, by doing so, be accessary to imposition? And, perhaps, a worthy, unsuspecting man might come and marry this woman, unless the father inform him of the truth.’” Johnson’s answer, at first, is blunt and narrowly legalistic (“Sir, he is accessary to no imposition. His daughter is in his house; and if a man courts her, he takes his chance”), but then it broadens with additional circumstances: “If a friend, or, indeed, if any man asks his opinion whether he should marry her, he ought to advise him against it, without telling why, because his real opinion is then required.” So silence or equivocation is not permitted in the face of direct questioning from someone with every right to ask the question, but a narrow response is allowed. Next Johnson moves to the possible moral impact of the father’s actions on others within the family: “Or, if he has other daughters who know of her frailty, he ought not to keep her in his house.” These circumstantial exceptions aside, Johnson’s main argument favors the preservation of the secret: “You are to consider the state of life is this; we are to judge of one another’s characters as well as we can; and a man is not bound, in honesty or honour, to tell us the faults of his daughter or of himself. A man who has debauched his friend’s daughter is not obliged to say to every body—‘Take care of me; don’t let me into your houses without suspicion. I once debauched a friend’s daughter: I may debauch yours’” (Life, 3:18). That we are under no moral compunction to incriminate ourselves is a consistent stance for Johnson. In Sermon 2 he writes, “No man is obliged to accuse himself of crimes, which are known to God alone” (Sermons, 20), and goes on to note that the auricular confession required by the Roman church is not essential for repentance in the Church of England.
So a guilty party is not required to accuse himself. But others may accuse, and, in fact, are morally obliged to do so under certain circumstances. When the topic of “making women do penance in the church for fornication” comes up during his travels to the Western Islands of Scotland, Johnson states flatly that this is right, but adds, “as soon as it is known. I would not be the man who would discover it, if I alone knew it, for a woman may reform; nor would I commend a parson who divulges a woman’s first offense; but being once divulged, it ought to be infamous.” Johnson states the reason as straightforwardly as can be: “Consider, of what importance to society the chastity of women is. Upon that all the property in the world depends” (Life, 5:208–9). Five years later in a three-way conversation among Boswell, Johnson, and Mrs. Thrale, Johnson continues to refine the circumstances that would dictate a violation of the laws of secrecy in sexual matters. Boswell suggests that Othello’s remark that he was happy not knowing of his wife’s infidelity is a “plausible” doctrine, but both Johnson and Mrs. Thrale disagree. Boswell asks Johnson, “Would you tell your friend to make him unhappy?” Johnson replies, “Perhaps, Sir, I should not; but that would be from prudence on my own account. A man would tell his father.” Boswell and Mrs. Thrale continue by mentioning the implications for inheritance, and Johnson adds, “You would tell your friend of a woman’s infamy, to prevent his marrying a whore: there is the same reason to tell him of his wife’s infidelity, when he is married, to prevent the consequences of imposition” (Life, 3:347–48).
Dueling and Casuistry
The morality of fighting a duel was a clear and present issue to Johnson, and this was one of two reasons we find him discoursing on the topic. Perhaps the last duel to be fought in Scotland occurred in 1822, thirty-eight years after Johnson’s death, and provides an ironic footnote to the subject since Alexander Boswell, James Boswell’s eldest son, lost his life therein. Further ironies include the victor’s name (James Stuart), his politics (Whig), the cause of the dispute (a political satire penned by Alexander), and the result (Stuart was found not guilty by a unanimous jury). G. B. Hill glosses one of the discussions of dueling in Boswell’s Life by quoting Horace Walpole’s lament that in 1773 “the rage of duelling had of late much revived, especially in Ireland” (Life, 2:226n5). But more than the prevalence of dueling occasioned and informed Johnson’s thought on the subject. Just as it did for De Quincey in 1841, the subject triggered in Johnson a vein of associated casuistic arguments that extended backward hundreds of years.16
Jonsen and Toulmin survey this topic (and its slightly broader variant of taking of a life in self-defense) in a chapter titled “Pride: The Case of the Insulted Gentlemen,” and find that “the casus of ‘killing for a slap’ appeared in the history of casuistry for a brief moment, was entertained as a probable opinion, and quickly vanished” (216). Although this suggests more transience to the topic than it seems to have had, at least so far as Johnson’s thought is concerned, their treatment usefully outlines the debate between the Judeo-Christian “absolute prohibition against killing of all kinds” and the Roman law principle that permitted “forceful defense against forceful aggression against one’s body” (220). For our purposes, the details and nuances of the debate are highly significant. For example, St. Augustine shows a qualified acceptance of the taking of human life under specific circumstances, including “a soldier or a public official who is permitted to kill in the course of his duties,” an idea he further developed within the context of the “just war.”17 Even though he decried vengeance as a motive for killing, Augustine “made room for legitimate self-defense” by speaking of motive (219). In his examination of self-defense, Aquinas introduced into moral literature the doctrine of the “double effect.” Here is Jonsen and Toulmin’s summary: “A single act . . . may have two effects, one of them intentional and the other going beyond intention. The moral quality of the act depends on the nature of the effect that was intended. Thus the two ‘effects’ of an act of killing in self-defense are the saving of one’s own life and the death of the attacker. Self-defense is legitimate because the defender seeks to save his own life. This is in accord with natural law, in that each thing seeks to preserve itself in being” (221–22). Aquinas prefaced his argument with the text of Exodus 22:2 (“If a thief is found breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there shall be no murder; if the sun has risen on him, there will be murder”). Jonsen and Toulmin point out the long-standing association of this and similar texts to discussions of the morality of killing: “The rabbinic interpretation of Exodus allowed the householder to kill a nighttime intruder because in the darkness of night there was doubt about the intruder’s intentions. . . . Roman law also allowed the killing of a thief in the night but not a daytime thief. . . . The canon ‘Si perfodiens’ also permitted the killing of a nighttime burglar, based on a comment of St. Augustine on the Exodus text” (222). Yet another nuance, and the one that joins views of killing in general with the duel-specific issue of defense of one’s honor, was introduced into the debate in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the social status of the individuals involved began to carry import.18 A quotation from a seventeenth-century Jesuit casuist suggests the direction the argument had taken: “It is permitted for a gentleman to kill an aggressor who attempts to calumniate him, if the shame cannot otherwise be avoided; similarly, he may kill one who slaps or beats him, then flees.”19
Johnson’s discussions of the morality of dueling, as related by Boswell, may ramble, but they ramble within the traditional parameters defined above. For example, after Boswell has heard the views of Oliver Goldsmith and James Oglethorpe on the subject, and after Johnson has maintained that the question has not been “solved,” Boswell presses him to settle “whether duelling was contrary to the laws of Christianity.” Johnson’s response focuses mainly on the recent increased refinement of society that modern scholars locate from the late Middle Ages onward:
As men become in a high degree refined, various causes of offence arise; which are considered to be of such importance, that life must be staked to atone for them, though in reality they are not so. A body that has received a very fine polish may be easily hurt. . . . In a state of highly polished society, an affront is held to be a serious injury. It must, therefore, be resented, or rather a duel must be fought upon it; as men have agreed to banish from their society one who puts up with an affront without fighting a duel.
Johnson elaborates the final clause, glancing at the Augustinian position of dispassionate self-defense but also hinging the justification on the avoidance of ostracism: “It is never unlawful to fight in self-defence. He, then, who fights a duel, does not fight from passion against his antagonist, but out of self-defence; to avert the stigma of the world, and to prevent himself from being driven out of society” (Life, 2:179–80). A year later Johnson advanced another defense of dueling, again with an Augustinian cast. Boswell writes, “[he] put his argument upon what I have ever thought the most solid basis; that if publick war be allowed to be consistent with morality, private war must be equally so” (Life, 2:226).
Ten years later on the occasion of having a “near relative” wounded in a duel in which he ultimately killed his antagonist, Boswell reintroduces the topic. Johnson begins, “I do not see . . . that fighting is absolutely forbidden in Scripture; I see revenge forbidden, but not self-defence.” To this Augustinian distinction Johnson adds comments on the mistake of taking the text of scripture too literally, and then leaps to a familiar parallel: “No, Sir, a man may shoot the man who invades his character, as he may shoot him who attempts to break into his house” (Life, 4:211). Boswell’s lengthy note at this point essentially undercuts Johnson’s statement by suggesting it is not “his serious and deliberate opinion on the subject of duelling.” He further refers to a passage from his Journal of the Tour to the Hebrides where Johnson admits “he could not explain the rationality of duelling” (Life, 4:211n4). Boswell could well have quoted Johnson against himself, for in Idler 19 we read, “It is common for controvertists, in the heat of disputation, to add one position to another till they reach the extremities of knowledge, where truth and falshood lose their distinction” (59–60).
Against the Johnson carried away by the heat of disputation we must weigh the Johnson advancing interrelated positions from the corpus of an argumentative tradition with which he was both conversant and comfortable. The following passage, although not specifically about dueling, is a beautifully balanced example of Johnson working within the casuistic tradition, yet coming to a conclusion that suggests there is a germ of truth in Boswell’s analysis as well. One evening Johnson considers traveling to Streatham Park, and his friend John Taylor dissuades him: “You’ll be robbed if you do: or you must shoot a highwayman. Now I would rather be robbed than do that; I would not shoot a highwayman.” Johnson responds, “But I would rather shoot him in the instant when he is attempting to rob me, than afterwards swear against him at the Old-Bailey, to take away his life, after he has robbed me. I am surer I am right in the one case than in the other. I may be mistaken as to the man, when I swear: I cannot be mistaken, if I shoot him in the act. Besides, we feel less reluctance to take away a man’s life, when we are heated by the injury, than to do it at a distance of time by an oath, after we have cooled.” The thief in the night is here a highwayman rather than a housebreaker, but the issue is the same. Johnson then detours to a path that allows some indirect criticism of the numerous capital offenses in England at the time, giving Boswell a chance to introduce the concept of motive into the act of killing: “So, Sir, you would rather act from the motive of private passion, than that of publick advantage.” Boswell, it seems, knows a bit of Augustine, but Johnson trumps him with Aquinas’s double motive: “Nay, Sir, when I shoot the highwayman I act from both.” Boswell admits rhetorical defeat—“Very well, very well.—There is no catching him”—yet Johnson continues, “At the same time one does not know what to say. For perhaps one may, a year after, hang himself from uneasiness for having shot a man. Few minds are fit to be trusted with so great a thing.” Boswell presses for conclusiveness—“Then, Sir, you would not shoot him?”—but Johnson has none to offer: “But I might be vexed afterwards for that too” (Life, 3:239–40).
The Sermons and Casuistry
The difficulty that casuistry has caused the Protestant has been neatly explained by John Henry Cardinal Newman: such books of moral theology “are intended for the Confessor, and Protestants view them as intended for the Preacher.”20 Since all of Johnson’s sermons were written to be preached (albeit by someone else) and since they all, consequently, participate fully in what the Yale editors have called “the central homiletical tradition of established Christianity” (Sermons, xli; my emphasis), it may be surprising to find in them many traces of the casuistic tradition. Johnson admonished us that we need more often to be reminded than informed, and certainly he felt that the role of the speaker from the pulpit was to exhort proper behavior rather than establish moral subtleties: “It is therefore no less useful to rouse the thoughtless, than instruct the ignorant; to awaken the attention, than enlighten the understanding” (Sermons, 5). In another sermon Johnson makes a similar point when he writes, “For few men have been made infidels by argument and reflection; their actions are not generally the result of their reasonings, but their reasonings of their actions.” In the next sentence, moreover, he suggests how argumentation may even become deleterious: “Yet these reasonings, though they are not strong enough to pervert a good mind, may yet, when they coincide with interest, and are assisted by prejudice, contribute to confirm a man, already corrupted, in his impieties, and at least retard his reformation, if not entirely obstruct it” (Sermons, 54). Nevertheless, even in the sermons we come upon occasional passages that an awareness of the casuistic tradition can enlighten; some have been mentioned earlier and there are more.
In Sermon 3 Johnson’s topic is the fear of God. The third paragraph begins, “On the distinction of this fear, into servile and filial, or fear of punishment, or fear of offence, on which much has been superstructed by the casuistical theology of the Romish church, it is not necessary to dwell. It is sufficient to observe, that the religion which makes fear the great principle of action, implicitly condemns all self-confidence, all presumptuous security” (Sermons, 30). The Yale editors note Johnson’s tendency to contrast negatively the Roman with the Anglican Church, an emphasis somewhat different from Boswell’s. They find a source in Aquinas for the distinction of types of fear, and they point out that John Rogers, whom Johnson had read and quoted in his Dictionary, had made a similar distinction in one of his sermons (30n5–6). But the passage clearly indicates Johnson’s awareness of another thread in the casuistic cloth, even while suggesting when casuistic distinctions are “not necessary.” A fear of God, regardless of its type or source, is for Johnson of overarching importance in moving man toward his salvation. Here, then, specific casuistic arguments are passed over because they would not further the specific purpose of the sermon.
In another sermon Johnson states that “it is indeed very hazardous for a private man to criticise the laws of any country” (Sermons, 279), but that does not stop him from doing so, in what the Yale editors call “the vivid and untypically long illustration . . . of the orphan and the perjuring guardian” (273n9). They may well be correct in spotting a parallel in subject matter to the treatment of Richard Savage by his mother, but the form of this illustration owes much to the casuistic pattern of piling on extenuating circumstances, or chains of cases of increasing complexity, or both, for a case under consideration. Johnson begins by contrasting the application of the death penalty to both a parricide and a petty thief who had “taken from a stranger, a small piece of money.” We find this argument frequently in Johnson’s writings, but note what comes next: “Let us suppose yet farther that [an indifferent spectator] saw the guardian of an orphan called before the courts of justice for the violation of his trust, that he heard him charged with oppression and with fraud, oppression aggravated by proximity of blood, and fraud heightened by that confidence which enabled him to commit it.” The victim of a heinous crime, the murdered father, has given way to the surrogate father-criminal who steals not from a stranger but a blood relative, and presumably a virtually helpless one. Mere restitution does seem an inadequate punishment for a guilty verdict, certainly in comparison with “him who for stealing a single piece of money was sentenced to dye” (278).
Jonsen and Toulmin have written that “gradual movement from clear and simple cases to the more complex and obscure ones was standard procedure for the casuist; indeed, it might be said to be the essence of the casuistic mode of thinking” (252). Johnson does not disappoint, as he adds yet another crime to the rap sheet of the guardian, that of employing “hired witnesses to support his usurpations and secure his robberies from detection.” Johnson’s third-person observer, just two paragraphs earlier described as “indifferent” and, we assume, calmly disinterested, has been transformed greatly:
[W]ould not the stranger pant to see the accomplices of wickedness brought to their trial, would not his heart glow with impatience, for vengeance against wretches, who had in the highest and most emphatical sense, taken “the name of God in vain”. . . to give credit to a lye, a lye intended only for the support of villany, of villany heightened by perfidy and cruelty; and when he saw them punished only with ignominy, which they very little regarded, would he not wonder that they found greater indulgence than he that steals a sheep? (Sermons, 278–79)
Here the casuistic mode of thinking that builds simple cases into complex ones is not working at cross-purposes with the homiletic purpose of the sermon; instead it contributes to the observer’s (and perhaps the preacher’s) justifiable righteous indignation.
A Concluding Case
When I first noticed what I have argued is a strong connection between Johnson’s thought and traditional casuistry, I was unaware that Cardinal Newman had made the same observation, implicitly, in Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865). “I cannot think what it can be,” he writes, “which keeps up the prejudice of this Protestant country against us, unless it be the vague charges which are drawn from our books of Moral Theology” (208–9). Despite his disclaimer that “casuistry is a noble science, but it is one to which I am led, neither by my abilities nor my turn of mind” (264), in the discussion that follows (including a note, really a small essay, titled “Lying and Equivocation”), Newman rehearses most of the casuistic topics we have just reviewed. Although his discussion is at times delightful (for example, after his definition of evasion he notes that “the greatest school of evasion . . . is the House of Commons” [265]), for our purposes it is of interest mainly for the identification of Johnson as a major participant in the English casuistic tradition. Newman begins, “Great English authors, Jeremy Taylor, Milton, Paley, Johnson, men of very different schools of thought, distinctly say, that under certain extraordinary circumstances it is allowable to tell a lie. . . . Johnson [says]: ‘The general rule is, that truth should never be violated; there must, however, be some exceptions. If, for instance, a murderer should ask you which way a man is gone.’” (209) Newman returns to Johnson later, telling us much more about the mid-nineteenth-century view of Johnson’s personality than anything else: “As to Johnson’s case of a murderer asking you which way a man had gone, I should have anticipated that, had such a difficulty happened to him, his first act would have been to knock the man down, and to call out for the police; and next, if he was worsted in the conflict, he would not have given the ruffian the information he asked, at whatever risk to himself” (268). The great Victorian editor of Johnson and Boswell, George Birkbeck Hill, quotes Newman’s second passage at even greater length in a note glossing Johnson’s discussion of this “case” in Boswell’s Life, but, not surprisingly, does not mention the first passage (Life, 4:305n3).
I have not sought specific sources for Johnson’s casuistic ideas for two reasons: first, I have often been tracing a mode of thought rather than a specific idea; and second, the tradition is so broad and Johnson’s reading so wide that such a hunt for sources could well have proved either highly speculative, or futile, or both. Newman mentions Johnson in the same breath as Jeremy Taylor, whom the Yale editors of Johnson’s sermons list as one of six major influences on the style and substance of those texts. Two others they name, Richard Baxter and Robert Sanderson, like Taylor, were authors of famous works of casuistry. According to the admittedly incomplete Sale Catalogue, Johnson’s library contained Taylor’s and Baxter’s works, as well as casuistic tomes by Francisco Suarez, St. Jerome, and Hugo Grotius.21 In addition, Johnson stated his admiration for the writings of Sanderson and Samuel Pufendorf, both relatively contemporary sources of casuistic thought, and his knowledge of classical and early Christian sources like Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, and Aquinas needs no demonstration.22
An examination of the lengthy paragraph in Boswell that Newman highlights will serve as an appropriate conclusion for this essay. It is a purple passage from the Life of Johnson, and perhaps one that we can view in a somewhat altered light after what has been presented above. Boswell introduces a topic as follows: “We talked of the casuistical question, Whether it was allowable at any time to depart from Truth?” Newman’s statement of Johnson’s response is condensed but accurate: generally truth is inviolate but exceptions exist; for instance, if “a murderer should ask you which way a man is gone, you may tell him what is not true, because you are under a previous obligation not to betray a man to a murderer” (Life, 4:305). Johnson’s mind naturally moves to a variation on what Jonsen and Toulmin have called “the classical case about the immorality of lying up to the time of Kant: An innocent man, who has been unjustly condemned, is hidden in your house. May you lie to the authorities who come to arrest him?” (196). St. Augustine took a very rigorous line and forbade a lie in this case, but subsequent casuists (for example, Raymond of Pennafort) sought a way to modify Augustine’s position; moreover, the details of the case often changed, as in the example cited earlier of the Dominican Sylvester Mazzolini of Priero writing, “If someone seeking to kill another person asks you, ‘did he go this way?’ you may answer, ‘no, not this way,’ meaning ‘his feet did not tread the very ground you are pointing at.’”23 By the way, Johnson’s version (lying to the murderer) conveniently avoids a difficulty that Augustine’s version (lying to the authorities) would present, for presumably the authorities have the right to ask such questions.
Boswell persists with the casuistical question but now turns the discussion somewhat when he asks, “Supposing the person who wrote Junius were asked whether he was the authour, might he deny it?” As we have seen above, Johnson earlier had dealt with the question of authorship of the Junius letters by accepting Burke’s “spontaneous” denial and shifting to the issue of the prerogative of the questioner. Here his treatment is more detailed and deserves to be quoted at length, not only for its intricacies but also because of what we will now recognize as the general source of those intricacies:
If you were sure that he wrote Junius, would you, if he denied it, think as well of him afterwards? Yet it may be urged, that what a man has no right to ask, you may refuse to communicate; and there is no other effectual mode of preserving a secret, and an important secret, the discovery of which may be very hurtful to you, but a flat denial; for if you are silent, or hesitate, or evade, it will be held equivalent to a confession. But stay, Sir; here is another case. Supposing the authour had told me confidentially that he had written Junius, and I were asked if he had, I should hold myself at liberty to deny it, as being under a previous promise, express or implied, to conceal it. Now what I ought to do for the authour, may I not do for myself? (Life, 4:305–6)
Here, as Johnson strings case to related case, we see mention of two of casuistry’s commonplaces: the conflict between secret-keeping and truth-telling, and the methodological means of avoiding lies through silence and evasion.
The final turn in the discussion is Johnson’s doing, in a passage partly informed by the casuistic tradition and partly by his own immediate personal circumstances: “But I deny the lawfulness of telling a lie to a sick man for fear of alarming him. You have no business with consequences; you are to tell the truth. Besides, you are not sure what effect your telling him that he is in danger may have. It may bring his distemper to a crisis, and that may cure him. Of all lying, I have the greatest abhorrence of this, because I believe it has been frequently practised on myself” (Life, 4:306). In both De Mendacio (AD 395) and Contra Mendacium (AD 422), St. Augustine had glanced briefly at the issue of lying to or attempting to withhold the truth from a very ill man, although the news in his examples was the death of the man’s son, not the seriousness of his illness. Augustine’s hard line on the culpability of lying under even these circumstances is identical to Johnson’s. Both adhere to the premise that it is wrong to do evil in the hope that good will come from it. Although Johnson states somewhat wistfully a possible physical benefit from a dose of the truth, it is not too great a surmise to read in these lines the potential downside of a dying man being deluded into thinking he had plenty of time to attain the requisite state of grace necessary for his salvation. Boswell dates this conversation on 13 June 1784, and Johnson, who had been ill for some time, was dead exactly six months later.
Notes
1. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht Strauss, vols. 3, 4, and 5 in the Yale Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 3:55; hereafter cited in the text.
2. Samuel Johnson, The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 112; hereafter cited in the text.
3. Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 1–2. See my discussion of Rambler 13, below.
4. Jonsen and Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988; 1st paperback ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 238; hereafter cited in the text.
5. Hudson, Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 165–66; Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 234n10. Jack Lynch found Johnson “impatient with what he regarded as casuistry” in the online text of his paper delivered at the Johnson Society of the Central Region in 2001, but excised the comment from the subsequently published version, “Samuel Johnson, Unbeliever,” Eighteenth-Century Life 29 (2005): 1–19. Tom Keymer correctly recognizes, in my opinion, Johnson’s understanding of the “double face” of casuistry; see Richardson’s “Clarissa” and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 88–89.
6. Tyers, “A Biographical Sketch of Dr. Samuel Johnson,” cited from Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill (1897; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966 and 1970), 2:366; hereafter cited as Miscellanies.
7. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), 1:436; hereafter cited in the text as Life.
8. Cited by Starr, Defoe and Casuistry, 210n39.
9. Ibid., 47–48. De Quincey’s essay first appeared, without a title, in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (February 1841).
10. Leslie and Taylor’s Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1865), 2:458; cited from Life, 2:6n3.
11. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Mary Lascelles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 118.
12. “Swift,” in Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 3:43–44.
13. Samuel Johnson, Sermons, ed. Jean Hagstrum and James Gray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 181; hereafter cited in the text as Sermons.
14. See Starr, Defoe and Casuistry, especially 9–33.
15. Of course, the casuistic situation in Johnson’s periodic essays did not always involve the word “case.” See Idler 13 and Idler 55, where the correspondent lays before the periodical writer a “controversy” and a “complaint,” respectively, but with the same expectation of a moral judgment or moral advice. And the word “case” can be used in its narrowly legal sense, as in Idler 54, where Sukey Savecharges presents her case “in as juridical a manner as [she is] capable” (168).
16. Johnson seems not to have been influenced by the most prominent antidueling view in eighteenth-century letters, that of Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), where the hero not only repeatedly refuses to duel but also explains his position at great length.
17. Jonsen and Toulmin, Abuse of Casuistry, 218–19, quote from Augustine’s Letters, letter 47, “Ad Publicolam.” Recall Johnson’s views of the judge’s role as expressed in Rambler 81, discussed above.
18. Jonsen and Toulmin here rely on and agree with Shaun J. Sullivan, Killing in Defense of Private Property (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press for the American Academy of Religion, 1976), 27.
19. The words of Martin Becanus, as quoted by Jonsen and Toulmin, Abuse of Casuistry, 226, who point out that Becanus’s view was censured by the theology faculty of Louvain, a censure upheld by Pope Innocent XI.
20. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. David J. DeLaura (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 208–9; hereafter cited in the text.
21. Donald Greene, Samuel Johnson’s Library: An Annotated Guide (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1975).
22. Johnson counted Pufendorf among “the great writers on law” and recommended his “Introduction to History” (Life, 2:430, 4:311). Sanderson was praised by Johnson for his letter writing, and G. B. Hill’s explanation is interesting: “Bishop Sanderson, I suppose, was selected on account of ‘his casuistical learning’ and of ‘the very many cases that were resolved by letters,’ when he was consulted by people of ‘restless and wounded consciences’” (Miscellanies, 2:130n2). Hill is quoting from Izaak Walton’s Life of Dr. Sanderson, which was in Johnson’s library (Greene, Samuel Johnson’s Library, 115). For more on Sanderson’s importance as an English casuist, see Camille Wells Slights, The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 43–59, and passim.
23. Jonsen and Toulmin, Abuse of Casuistry, 196–98; Mazzolini’s work is Summa Sylvestrina (1516).