Wittgenstein and Johnson: Notes on a Neglected Appreciation

Abstract

M. O’C. Drury and Norman Malcolm both report that Wittgenstein gave them copies of Samuel Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations, a book that he said he valued highly. Given that Wittgenstein’s commentators have mined the ideas of other religious thinkers he admired (Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and so on) in order to illuminate his ambiguous thinking about religion, it is perhaps strange that this voiced appreciation of Johnson’s prayers has not been further investigated. The purpose of this paper is to correct that neglect. This is done by way of an exploration of the nature and content of Johnson’s prayers, and an analysis of how these prayers reflect the tormented state of Johnson’s mind and his concerns about indolence, death and judgment. Wittgenstein had noted that Malcolm would only like Johnson’s prayers if he looked at them “from the angle from which I see them”, something which in the context of his letter to Malcolm suggests the very “human” quality of these prayers, and their origin in Johnson’s personal struggles. A description of Wittgenstein’s own struggles (which mirror to some extent those of Johnson in their worries about indolence, judgment, and a guilt that requires confession) can then form the background to an understanding, not just of Wittgenstein’s personal spiritual state of mind, but of his philosophical account of religious belief and the turbulent human passions from which religion arises. Significant points of contact are noted between the respective thinking of Wittgenstein and Johnson, suggestive of new avenues of research that might profitably be explored.

“I’ve been reading a good deal lately in a book called ‘Prayers and Meditations’ by Dr. Johnson. I like it very much.”1 These words are found in a letter written by Wittgenstein to Raymond Townsend in July 1940. Five years later, in a letter to Norman Malcolm, the same enthusiasm resurfaces: “As soon as I get to Cambridge I’m going to send you a little book ‘Prayers and Meditations’ by Johnson. You may not like it at all,—on the other hand you may. I do”.2 Finding the book to be out of print, Wittgenstein gave Malcolm his own copy. Some years before this—and maybe as early as 1930—Wittgenstein had gifted another copy of Johnson’s book, this time to M. O’C. Drury, who formed the “idea that it was a present that he gave to others too”.3 So here is something surprising. We find in the span of possibly fifteen years, Wittgenstein coming back to, recommending, and giving to others Samuel Johnson’s great work of devotional literature. Given the enduring interest in Wittgenstein’s scattered and enigmatic thoughts on religion, and the numerous attempts made by commentators to illuminate those thoughts by digging into the religious thinkers he admired (Augustine, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, William James, and so on), it is puzzling that so little attention should have been paid in this context to the Prayers and Meditations. Clearly it is a book that he found impressive, so the neglect of this appreciation is something overdue for correction. This article accordingly takes a sustained look at this matter. In addition to looking at the prayer book, a number of affinities between Wittgenstein and Johnson are explored in this article, not to demonstrate anything so strong as an influence, but simply to indicate the promise of investigation into similarities between these two thinkers, something that has received insufficient attention in Wittgenstein scholarship.

1. Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations

In the last year of his life, Johnson resolved to compose a book of prayers.4 Such a project had long been requested of him, but he finally felt “now in a right frame of mind, and as he could not possibly employ his time better, he would in earnest set about it”.5 His failing health would not permit this. Recognizing that his remaining days were few, and with “infirmities … growing fast upon him”,6 Johnson adopted a different design of composition. Instead of embarking upon a new production, he gave to George Strahan the set of notebooks in which he had copied prayers composed for his own use. It was these that constituted what Strahan would publish in 1785 as the Prayers and Meditations. Chronologically organized, the prayers date from 18 September 1738 (the date of Johnson’s 29th birthday) through to 5 December 1784 (eight days before his death). A consequence of Strahan’s editorial decision to publish the entire contents of these notebooks is that the formal prayers nestle alongside such matters as lists of resolutions made (and seldom enacted), notes upon both his state of health and his state of mind, diary entries and miscellaneous reflections. To the extent that these matters count as the “meditations” of the title, they fall into the third meaning of that word as defined in Johnson’s own Dictionary of the English Language: “A series of thoughts, occasioned by any object or occurrence.”

The prayers themselves are in the main composed for significant dates of the year—New Year’s Day, Good Friday (“this awful day”), Easter, his birthday, the anniversary of the death of his wife—and at the commencement of proposed projects (the “Study of Tongues”, “Before the Study of Law”, or more generally “Before Any New Study”). These latter are on occasion followed by doleful statements on the failure of the project to come to fruition: after a prayer “On the Study of Philosophy, as an Instrument of Living”, for example, Johnson adds the defeated little words, “This study was not pursued”. The form of his prayers resembles the structure of those in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, a book Johnson reverenced, and the same attention to human frailty and transience is found in his compositions. A couple of examples will suffice as illustrations. First, a prayer written for Easter 1777:

Almighty and most merciful Father, who seest all our miseries, and knowest all our necessities, look down upon me, and pity me. Defend me from the violent incursions of evil thoughts, and enable me to form and keep such resolutions as may conduce to the discharge of the duties which thy providence shall appoint me; and so help me, by thy Holy Spirit, that my heart may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found, and that I may serve Thee with pure affection and a cheerful mind. Have mercy upon me, O God, have mercy upon me; years and infirmities oppress me, terrour and anxiety beset me. Have mercy upon me, my Creator and my Judge. In all dangers protect me, in all perplexities relieve and free me, and so help me by thy Holy Spirit, that I may now so commemorate the death of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, as that when this short and painful life shall have an end, I may, for his sake, be received to everlasting happiness. Amen.

(Johnson 1786, pp. 155–56)

The characteristic theme of human vulnerability and divine protection appears also in the touching “Bed-Time” prayer from 1768:

Almighty God, who seest that I have no power of myself to help myself; keep me both outwardly in my body, and inwardly in my soul, that I may be defended from all adversities that may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(Johnson 1786, p. 78)

Several prayers are also specially composed upon the death of friends, such as Henry Thrale and Kitty Chambers, in the latter case prompting Johnson to ask of God that “by the help of thy Holy Spirit, after the pains and labours of this short life, we may all obtain everlasting happiness”. (Johnson 1786, p. 77)

Johnson’s prayers provide consistently telling insights into his tormented life. This is especially so when he calls to account the actions and resolutions of each passing year. A not uncharacteristic example, from New Year’s Day of 1766:

Almighty and most merciful Father, I again appear in thy presence the wretched misspender of another year, which thy mercy has allowed me. O Lord, let me not sink into total depravity, look down upon me, and rescue me at last from the captivity of sin. Impart to me good resolutions, and give me strength and perseverance to perform them.

(Johnson 1786, p. 67)

His meditations augment the formal prayers on that theme, providing painful details of his perceived failures:

I have now [18 September 1768] begun the sixtieth year of my life. How the last year has past, I am unwilling to terrify myself with thinking.

I am now [2 April 1779] to review the last year, and find little but dismal vacuity, neither business nor pleasure; much intended, and little done. My health is much broken; my nights afford me little rest. I have tried opium, but its help is counterbalanced with great disturbance; it prevents the spasms, but it hinders sleep. O God have mercy on me.

This [3 April 1779] is the time of my annual review, and annual resolution. The review is comfortless, little done. Part of the Life of Dryden and the Life of Milton have been written; but my mind has neither been improved nor enlarged. I have read little, almost nothing. And I am not conscious that I have gained any good, or quitted any evil habits.

(Johnson 1786, pp. 80, 171, 172–73)

The theme of indolence, and of “repentance of the days misspent in idleness and folly” (Johnson 1786, p. 35), hangs with immovable heaviness over Johnson’s prayers. It is present in the book’s very first prayer, in which he begs God to enable him “to redeem the time which I have spent in sloth” (Johnson 1786, p. 2), all the way through to its final “Ejaculation Imploring Diligence”: “O God, make me to remember that the night cometh when no man can work.”7

2. The Quality of Being Human

Those who have followed the development of a Wittgensteinian tradition in philosophy of religion will be aware of how often prayer has been made a topic of reflection. It makes appearances, indeed, in Wittgenstein’s own work. In the early Notebooks 1914–1916, for example, reference to prayer features when Wittgenstein equates the “the meaning of life” with God, a move which has consequences for his conception of prayer: “To pray is to think about the meaning of life” (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 73). This somewhat rarefied conception becomes more grounded in daily practice in the Philosophical Investigations. There, prayer is listed among a “multiplicity of language-games”, and the lengthy enumeration ends with these cases: “Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying” (Wittgenstein 1953, §23). To characterize prayer as a language-game achieves two things. It highlights that the uttering of a prayer is “part of an activity, or of a form of life”,8 and it also asks us to think about the distinctive nature of prayerful utterance, how it differs from other language-games and has its own character, its own rules. It was this attempt to illuminate the distinctive nature of prayer that was the focus of D. Z. Phillips’s (1965) The Concept of Prayer, while Peter Winch chose the language of prayer to illustrate the need to pay attention to an utterance’s context in order to avoid conflating its sense with that of deceptively similar realms of discourse: “[Prayer] cannot be elucidated by starting simply with the function ‘making requests to x’, substituting ‘God’ for ‘x’, and then asking what difference is made by the fact that God has different characteristics from other xs” (Winch 1987, p. 119). Given the prominence of prayer as an illustrative topic within Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, it will be illuminating to have our attention directed to real examples of prayers that Wittgenstein admired. Hence the promise of Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations.

We may accordingly ask why Johnson’s prayers resonated so deeply with Wittgenstein. Drury suggests one possibility: “I believe the reason why this book appealed to him so strongly was because of the shortness of the prayers, their deep seriousness, and Johnson’s repeated appeal that he might have grace to amend his life” (Drury 1981b, p. 109). Against this, it can be said that Johnson’s prayers are not unusually short (and are generally longer than the Lord’s Prayer, which Wittgenstein held to be “the most extraordinary prayer ever written” (Drury 1981b, p. 109)), while their “seriousness” is not a peculiarly distinctive characteristic. Drury is right to emphasize the element of grace, however. Johnson’s appeals for God’s assistance to help amend his floundering life are a memorable feature of the Prayers and Meditations and capture the notion of a flawed humanity desperately in need of unearned divine aid. It is a quality which would surely have resonated with Wittgenstein. Still, Johnson’s appeals gain much of their haunting power from a feature of his writing that Drury passes over. This feature can be brought into prominence if we take note of Wittgenstein’s own words when gifting Johnson’s book to Norman Malcolm:

This is the little book I promised to send you. It seems to be out of print so I’m sending you my own copy. I wish to say that normally I can’t read any printed prayers but that Johnson’s impressed me by being human. Perhaps you’ll see what I mean if you read them. As likely as not you won’t like them at all. Because you will probably not look at them from the angle from which I see them. (But you might.) If you don’t like the book throw it away.

(Malcolm 1984, p. 99)

It is to be regretted that Malcolm—who wrote extensively on Wittgenstein’s approach to religion (see for example, Malcolm 1993)—says nothing more about this matter. If an understanding of Wittgenstein’s appreciation of Johnson’s prayers is sought, it is to this emphasized feature—their quality of being human—that we should turn.

The humanity that Wittgenstein here admired is in part a consequence of Johnson’s keen awareness of the danger of prayers becoming merely formulaic (see Gibson 2014, p. 222; Quinlan 1964, pp. 15–17). Johnson’s religious sensibility was profoundly influenced by his early reading of William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life,9 in which the recitation of formal prayers (at church, say) should only be a small part of the Christian’s prayerful activity. The greater part may be the spontaneous prayers that arise from what Law calls “the accidental difference of your state”, namely the variable conditions of “sickness, health, pains, losses, disappointments, troubles, particular mercies or judgments from God, all sorts of kindnesses, injuries or reproaches from other people” (Law [1733] 1818, p. 186). This is clearly in view in Johnson’s prayers, which frequently arise in response to occasions in which his sense of sickness, of lassitude, and of loss is deeply felt. Strahan’s editorial decision to publish the prayers in an unedited form, together with the deeply personal materials in Johnson’s notebooks, brings these “accidental differences” still more clearly into focus, as might be seen by the following selections

1 January 1745: “Let me remember, O my God, that as days and years pass over me, I approach nearer to the grave, where there is no repentance…” November 1752: “Grant, O Lord, that I may not lavish away the life which Thou hast given me on useless trifles, nor waste it in vain searches after things which Thou hast hidden from me…” Good Friday, 1764: “I have made no reformation; I have lived totally useless, more sensual in thought, and more addicted to wine and meat. Grant me, O God, to amend my life, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.” “I hope to put my rooms in order…” 18 September 1764: “I have outlived many friends. I have felt many sorrows. I have made few improvements…” 1 January 1767: “Enable me, O Lord, to use all enjoyments with due temperance, preserve me from unseasonable and immoderate sleep…” 18 September 1769: “I have grown fat too fast…” 18 September 1771: “Perhaps Providence has yet some use for the remnant of my life…” Easter, 1772: “Almighty God, merciful Father, who hatest nothing that Thou hast made, look down with pity upon my sinfulness and weakness…” 20 April 1778: “I am now, with the help of God, to begin a new life…” 18 September 1781: “Relieve the diseases of my body, and compose the disquiet of my mind. Let me at last repent and amend my life…” 22 March 1782: “I spent the time idly. Mens turbata. In the afternoon it snowed…” 5 December 1784: “Almighty and most merciful Father, I am now, as to human eyes it seems, about to commemorate, for the last time, the death of thy Son Jesus Christ our Saviour and Redeemer … Bless my friends; have mercy upon all men. Support me, by thy Holy Spirit, in the days of weakness, and at the hour of death; and receive me, at my death, to everlasting happiness, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.”

(Johnson 1786, pp. 4, 16, 49, 56, 71, 84, 105, 113, 168, 197, 205, 219–20)

The temptation to compare these meditations with the contents of Wittgenstein’s own diary entries is hard to resist:

17 January 1931: “I find it difficult to work… I must ask God that he lets me work…” 12 October 1931: “Uncover what you are. I am for example a petty, lying rogue & yet can talk about the grandest things…” 16 February 1937: “God! let me come into a relation to you in which I ‘can be cheerful in my work’!... Sustain my intellect pure & unblemished!... I am writhing under the torment of not being able to work, of feeling feeble, not being able to live undisturbed by temptations…” 16 March 1937: “Yesterday I thought of the expression, ‘a pure heart’; why don’t I have one? That means, after all: why are my thoughts so impure! In my thoughts there is again and again vanity, swindle, resentment. May God steer my life so that it becomes different.”10

It is not impossible to imagine that Johnson’s painful struggle with himself struck a chord with Wittgenstein. The man who sought a religious solution to a life he once described as “one nasty mess so far”11 could well have felt an affinity with Johnson’s prayerful struggles through what, on his sixty-second birthday, he called “the general disease of my life”.12

If the foregoing is correct, what Wittgenstein saw as the “human” quality of Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations rests on their very rawness, on their being a document of one man’s set of intense and personal struggles with himself and his flawed humanity.13 Not all of Johnson’s readers would feel the same way. In his heavily edited and restructured edition of the prayers, for example, Elton Trueblood laments Strahan’s decision to publish the prayers along with Johnson’s other notebook entries. That decision, he says, was “not fair to Doctor Johnson”, for the autobiographical elements are fragmentary and overly intimate, and they detract from the “polished” glory of the prayers themselves (Trueblood 1947, pp. 22–23). In Trueblood’s edition the prayers “stand alone, with no encumbrances” Trueblood 1947, p. 23). It might be felt, on the contrary, that it is those “encumbrances” that contribute much of the power to the Prayers and Meditations, for they reveal the troubled life conditions within which Johnson’s religious yearnings operate. This point has an application beyond the individual case of Johnson. In Zettel, Wittgenstein remarks that words have meaning only “in the stream of thought and life” (Wittgenstein 1967, §173); such must be true of the words used in prayers, the sense of which only comes from being connected intimately with the anxieties and hopes and general hurly-burly of human life. This observation may be especially useful for the Wittgensteinian approach to religion, suffering as it has done from the oft-voiced suspicion that it logically cuts off religious beliefs from all other aspects of human life (see Phillips 1986, pp. 5–10). That was, of course, a consequence of the introduction of the idea of the “language-game” into the characterization of religion’s distinctive nature. Wittgenstein’s appreciation of Johnson’s very human prayers, rooted and intermingled as these are in the author’s daily and ongoing concerns, reveals a clear and full understanding of the non-compartmentalized nature of religious life.

3. Indolence and Judgment

Of the thoughts anxiously expressed in the Prayers and Meditations, concerns about both indolence and judgment are prominent. It will be instructive to pause a little over each of these themes, as this will reveal further affinities between Johnson and Wittgenstein, in terms both of their personal characteristics and of their thinking about questions in philosophy and religion.

We have already noted Johnson’s regrets about his indolent manner of life. “My reigning sin,” he confessed, “to which perhaps many others are appendant, is waste of time, and general sluggishness” (Johnson 1786, p. 144). Johnson’s notorious inability to rise early from bed—the topic of frequent (and rarely kept) resolutions—was one conspicuous manifestation of that “reigning sin”. Noting, moreover, “how often I have sat down to write and rejoiced at interruption”, Johnson—writing as The Idler and clearly speaking from experience—sought not to be denied “a place among the most faithful votaries of idleness”.14 Wittgenstein’s letters and notebooks document his own battles with indolence. He described himself variously as “a shirker”, “a bum worker”, “sluggish”, and “a bloody bad worker”, lamented being “completely stupid and full of bad thoughts”, and told W. H. Watson not to send him a copy of the book he had just published since “I shan’t read it … I hardly read anything at all (practically nothing)”).15 The verdict: “I’m lazy and I’m stupid.” (McGuinness 2008, p. 334) Such punishing thoughts were especially galling to Wittgenstein, for whom “nothing [was] tolerable except producing great works”,16 and for whom happiness and unhappiness were usually measured “by ability or inability to work” (McGuinness 1988, p. 130). Both Johnson and Wittgenstein had a keen sense of how their sluggish activity had eaten away at the time granted them to work: Wittgenstein noted in the preface to Philosophical Investigations that “the time is past” in which the book could have been improved (Wittgenstein 1953, p. x), while Johnson continually bewailed the fact that although he had spent years “forming schemes of a better life”, nothing had resulted: “I have done nothing; the need of doing therefore is pressing, since the time of doing is short” (Johnson 1786, p. 57).

These details may largely be of biographical and psychological interest only, and they are at any rate to be qualified by the extraordinary creative output and achievement of each man. But they do indicate the type of matter that can be central in a person’s prayer life: the faults that, with God’s help, are to be amended. It was this, as noted earlier, that Drury believed had informed Wittgenstein’s admiration of Johnson’s prayers. It may also be of interest briefly to note how the idea of indolence was employed by each thinker to illuminate the problems pressing upon them, in Johnson’s case the problem of human nature and in Wittgenstein’s the nature of philosophical problems themselves.

Johnson’s indolent disposition provided him with an insight into the wellsprings of human motivation and action. As Nicholas Hudson has shown (see Hudson 2014, pp. 241–61), Johnson’s periodical essays—from The Rambler (1750–1752) through The Adventurer (1753–1754) to The Idler (1758–1760)—reveal a notable development in his account of human nature. The view advanced in the earlier essays pictures the busy human soul yearning for projects and employments so as to “relieve the vacuities of our being”.17 Johnson suggests that the forward drive of the soul may on occasion be retarded by what he calls “the vis inertiae, the mere repugnance to motion”,18 and this idea takes greater hold on him in the essays of the later—and aptly named—Idler. The inclination towards idleness comes here to be seen as a more prevalent force in human life than he had previously imagined, human nature now being seen to gravitate towards “a state approaching to that of brute matter”.19 Idleness is, for Johnson, a condition to be lamented, and this for three reasons. Firstly, it is worse even than a pure state of rest since it involves, he thinks, empty bustling and an uncritical acceptance of all that is presented to it. Having no “determination of will”, the idle “awake in the morning, vacant of thought, with minds gaping for the intellectual food, which some kind essayist has been accustomed to supply”.20 It should be stressed in this context that Johnson is not condescendingly condemning a specific class of people but pointing to the presence in each person of competing impulses, one towards autonomous achievement and the other in the direction of idleness. As a man “incorrigibly, constitutionally lazy” (Hibbert 1971, p. 11), Johnson knew this struggle from the inside. The second injurious quality of idleness is that it counteracts a great source of human happiness, namely the self-directed fulfilment that results from intellectual struggle and active questing: “To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity”.21 Finally, a further danger of indolence is that it fosters madness and melancholy. Johnson, ever fearful of insanity, sought to avoid its clutches by immersion in activity and company, taking to heart Robert Burton’s closing words of advice in The Anatomy of Melancholy: “Be not solitary, be not idle.”22

In Wittgenstein’s prefaces to his two major works, we can detect a Johnsonian-type division between works designed to fill minds with information and those designed to provoke active intellectual engagement. Wittgenstein states at the very outset of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that it is “not a text-book” and that it “will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts” (Wittgenstein 1922, p. 27). Philosophical Investigations likewise begins with Wittgenstein’s declaration that he should not like his writing “to spare other people the trouble of thinking” but rather “to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own” (Wittgenstein 1953, p. x). The opposition between passive indolence and active employment arises still more dramatically, of course, in Wittgenstein’s account of the nature of philosophical problems themselves. These, he says, arise from “a misinterpretation of our forms of language” (Wittgenstein 1953, §111). The philosopher—when occupied with philosophy, though not when engaged in his or her everyday life—tends to ignore the context of a word’s customary employment, disregarding the use which frequently constitutes its meaning (Wittgenstein 1953, §43). The imagery Wittgenstein marshals to illustrate this point is, tellingly, the imagery of indolence: “The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work” (Wittgenstein 1953, §132); and thus “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday” (Wittgenstein 1953, §38). The task, accordingly, is to rescue words from the artificial state of idleness which philosophy has imposed upon them, and to bring them back to their natural home, in which they are doing work (Wittgenstein 1953, §116). Philosophical problems are in this manner dissolved.23 It should again be stressed that, unlike an indolent person, language is never actually idle: it only appears to be so when the philosopher ignores its everyday uses. In this case, the blame lies with philosophy, rather than with language.

As earlier noted, his idle disposition produced in Johnson a sense of wretchedness and a gnawing fear of divine judgment. In the earliest prayer recorded by Johnson (though not included in most editions of the Prayers and Meditations), he asks for God’s strength to spend the upcoming year “in such a manner that I may receive comfort from it at the hour of death, and in the day of judgment”,24 while in a prayer composed “After Time negligently and unprofitably spent”, Johnson begs God to “Forgive me, that I have this day neglected the duty which Thou hast assigned to it, and suffered the hours, of which I must give account, to pass away without any endeavour to accomplish thy will, or to promote my own salvation” (Johnson 1786, p. 17). A conversation on this topic recorded by Boswell illuminates Johnson’s understanding of divine judgment. Six months before his death, Johnson acknowledged to William Adams, the Master of Pembroke College, that he was “much oppressed by the fear of death”. The “amiable Dr. Adams”, as Boswell calls him, tried to assuage Johnson’s fears by referring to God’s infinite goodness, but this was ineffective. True, Johnson responded, God is “infinitely good, as far as the perfection of his nature will allow”, but some individuals must nonetheless be punished “for good upon the whole”. He then sadly reflected that he may not have done enough to be granted salvation, and must therefore face the possibility of damnation. To Adams’s subsequent question as to the meaning of damnation, Johnson (“passionately and loudly”) answered, “Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly.” (Boswell [1791] 1934, vol. IV, p. 299).

The centrality of judgment and punishment in Johnson’s conception of God marches closely with Wittgenstein’s thoughts on that matter: “The thought of God, [Wittgenstein] said, was above all for him the thought of the fearful judge” (von Wright 1982, p. 32), while the idea of “the coercive power of an absolute judge” (Wittgenstein 1965, p. 7) hovers around in his 1929 “Lecture on Ethics”. Most tellingly, perhaps, it is the question of the believer’s attention to judgment that is uppermost in Wittgenstein’s “Lectures on Religious Belief”:

A man would fight for his life not to be dragged into the fire. No induction. Terror. That is, as it were, part of the substance of the belief.

(Wittgenstein 1966, p. 56)

These words might almost serve as a commentary on Johnson’s morbid final days, in which he fought desperately against his coming dissolution (“I will be conquered; I will not capitulate”) (Boswell [1791] 1934, vol. IV, p. 374) and urged his doctors to take increasingly extreme measures to prolong what little time was left: “I want length of life, and you fear giving me pain, which I care not for.”25 Johnson’s zest for life in part accounts for his unwillingness to quit the world, but his fear of afterlife punishment (of being “Sent to Hell, Sir”) should not here be underestimated: towards the end he told Sir John Hawkins that “he had the prospect of death before him, and that he dreaded to meet his Saviour”. “‘Shall I … myself be a castaway?”, he fretted (Hawkins 1787, pp. 564–65). Terror was certainly part of the substance of Johnson’s belief system. Importantly for our purposes here, these connections regarding the idea of divine judgment will lead us to consider an aspect of religion that is—just like Wittgenstein’s appreciation of Johnson—often neglected.

4. The Element of the Terrible

The intersecting ideas of judgment and punishment stand as an opposing force to a rather familiar interpretation of religion, one in which it functions to soften the pains and difficulties of human life. This interpretation is clearly outlined in Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. Religion is there presented as one of the “palliative measures” used to lessen the incurable pain of existence (Freud 1930, pp. 23–42; see also Clack 2014, pp. 1–31, 59–84). The mechanism of religion, and of its appeal, operates here on a distinction between the harshly unsatisfying nature of reality and the consoling power of religious ideas. These ideas possess something of an analgesic quality, numbing the sufferings and disappointments of life, and producing in the believer a sense of peace: “life and the universe”, as Freud puts it in The Future of an Illusion, are in this way “rid of their terrors” (Freud 1928, p. 28). Whatever the strengths of Freud’s view of religion, it is surely inapplicable to the case of Johnson’s faith. In his case the Freudian picture is reversed. Johnson was at his happiest when religious ideas were not present in his mind, when he was at the tavern or conversing with friends.26 When the day drew to its close and he was left alone, he would feel bereft, and the qualms of his religious sensibility would gather in the dark hours and haunt him. As E. J. Roscoe rightly observes, “religion brought little comfort to Johnson”, and was instead “a distressing factor in his life”: “so little consolation, so little comfort, so little peace.” (Roscoe 1928, pp. 33, 37, 39).

At the core of the Freudian view lies the suspicion that, like intoxicants (another of the palliative measures that he enumerates), religion expresses a cowardly and frivolous desire to withdraw from the awful seriousness of reality. But what both Wittgenstein and Johnson draw to our attention is the precise opposite of an infantile withdrawal. Such is the import of Wittgenstein’s musings on the “frightful seriousness” of the religious requirement:

The demand is high. That is, whatever may be true or false in regard to the New Testament, one thing cannot be doubted: that in order to live right I would have to live completely differently from what suits me. That life is far more serious than what it looks like at the surface. Life is frightfully serious.27

Living “completely differently from what suits me” was evidently a feature of Johnson’s religion. He recognized the chasm between those things that promised delight and those very different things that religion demanded of him. Such a recognition animates a memorably zesty reflection: “If (said he) I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.”28 But worries about futurity and about his own wretchedness were inescapable. “Surely I shall not spend my whole life with my own total disapprobation”, he agonizes in the Prayers and Meditations, (Johnson 1786, p. 182) while the anxieties he voiced to Hawkins about being one of the damned included a reflection that would have earned Wittgenstein’s approval: Johnson worried that “he had written as a philosopher, but had not lived like one”.29

In this same conversation with Hawkins, occurring in the year before he died, Johnson reveals the cause of his immense self-censure. While every man, Johnson says, knows his own sins intimately and internally, the extent and the contributing circumstances of the sins of others remain opaque: “he is, therefore to look on himself as the greatest sinner he knows of”, for there may be none worse (Hawkins 1787, p. 565). This was an argument that Johnson had learned decades before, during his religiously formative reading of Law’s Serious Call, with the term “greatest sinner that you know in the world” appearing there (Law [1733] 1818, p. 330). Law’s point, as was Johnson’s recitation of it to Hawkins, was that each of us knows our pride, folly and deceitfulness intimately, and can only infer in others the existence and extent of these traits. It is vital, accordingly, to examine and take an account of our own sinful characteristics, to expose them to the light, and to try as hard as we can to expunge them. Law’s attention to even the most apparently insignificant of misdeeds impressed itself on Johnson’s mind, and accounts for the guilt over small things that so many of his friends and commentators found mysterious and even absurd. The types of things that formed the focus of Johnson’s many resolutions in the Prayers and Meditations—to rise early, for example—and the “little venial trifles” (Boswell [1791] 1934, vol. IV, p. 397) that Boswell refers to: under the harsh light of Law’s instructions for self-examination, these had become “frightfully serious” matters. And Law’s criticisms would touch on some of those things most enjoyed by Johnson, including sleep itself: “Sleep is such a dull, stupid state of existence, that even amongst mere animals, we despise them most, which are most drowsy.” (Law [1733] 1818, p. 174) Small wonder that Johnson’s prayers include such frequent and pained appeals to be preserved from “immoderate sleep” (Johnson 1786, p. 71). With his religious sensibility profoundly shaped by Law’s severe and perfectionist views, Johnson’s faith was serious, comfortless and distressing.30

One notable way in which the frightful seriousness of life manifested itself in both Johnson and Wittgenstein was in their earnest attempts at penance for the wrongs each felt they had committed. A well-known incident in Johnson’s life illustrates this most clearly. Explaining an unannounced absence from his host’s house during a visit to Lichfield (the town of his birth), Johnson described an act of filial disobedience which weighed heavily on his conscience, decades after its occurrence:

“Madam, I beg your pardon for the abruptness of my departure from your house this morning, but I was constrained to it by my conscience. Fifty years ago, Madam, on this day, I committed a breach of filial piety, which has ever since lain heavy on my mind, and had not till this day been expiated. My father, you recollect, was a bookseller, and had long been in the habit of attending Uttoxeter market, and opening a stall for the sale of his books during that day. Confined to his bed by indisposition, he requested me, this time fifty years ago, to visit the market, and attend the stall in his place. But, Madam, my pride prevented me from doing my duty, and I gave my father a refusal. To do away the sin of this disobedience, I this day went in a postchaise to Uttoxeter, and going into the market at the time of high business, uncovered my head, and stood with it bare an hour before the stall which my father had formerly used, exposed to the sneers of the standers-by and the inclemency of the weather; a penance by which I trust I have propitiated heaven for this only instance, I believe, of contumacy toward my father.”31

Johnson’s felt need for penance and expiation is mirrored in the episode of the “confession” made by Wittgenstein to numerous people in 1936 and 1937. His confession centered on two instances of weakness and dishonesty: allowing people to believe that he was more Aryan than Jewish when the reverse was true, and having falsely denied striking a little girl in his class during his time as an elementary school teacher (see Monk 1990, pp. 367–73). As with Johnson revisiting the scene of his misdeed, Wittgenstein returned to the village of Otterthal to apologize in person to the pupils he had physically hurt.

The ideals of perfection and seriousness are clearly on display in these episodes of expiation. Fania Pascal, in her account of hearing Wittgenstein’s confession, recounts at one stage crying out to him, “What is it? You want to be perfect?”, to which he vigorously responded, “Of course I want to be perfect” (Pascal 1981, p. 50). Here we find again that which had tormented Johnson: the painful clash between a severe requirement to be perfect and the frail reality of being human. Wittgenstein describes the effect of making his confession in a diary entry when he complains again of being “cowardly beyond measure”:

Last year with God’s help I pulled myself together and made a confession. This brought me into more settled waters, into a better relation with people, and to greater seriousness. But now it is as though I had spent all that, and I am not far from where I was before.32

Three things are of note here. Firstly, as with the sense of personal weakness expressed in Johnson’s prayers, Wittgenstein emphasizes how “God’s help” was required to make his act of confession. Secondly, the constant battle against (in this case) cowardice is stressed: there had been a post-confession improvement, but this is now all “spent”. And thirdly, there is once more that emphasis on seriousness. Once this type of religious sensibility is adopted, life becomes—to use that phrase again—frightfully serious.

That fear and fright are central to Johnson’s religion can be seen in the declaration contained in one his sermons that “the whole system of moral and religious duty is expressed, in the language of Scripture, by the ‘fear of God’” (Johnson 1978, p. 30 Sermon 3). This fear extended even to the rituals and sacraments of Christianity, as we frequently see in the Prayers and Meditations: “Shall I ever receive the Sacrament with tranquillity?”, he asks one Easter Day.33 Commenting on this, W. B. C. Watkins is surely right to state that “There was an element of the terrible in Johnson’s Christianity, oppressed as he was by the fear of God and a profound sense of his own frailty” (Watkins 1939, p. 57). This “element of the terrible” is conspicuous also in Wittgenstein’s thoughts on religion, not only in the aforementioned preoccupation with the “fearful judge”, but in his disconcerting Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. What motivates these fragmentary Remarks is Wittgenstein’s desire to correct what he sees as Sir James Frazer’s misunderstanding of the rule of the King of the Wood at Nemi, a priest-king who can only maintain his rule until he is slain by his successor, who will eventually succumb to the same fate. Frazer’s explanation ultimately appeals to the mistaken view of causality which brought about this awful custom, and it is that which provokes Wittgenstein’s ire. By presenting the rule at Nemi as something mistaken, as laughable even, the terrible quality of that rule is overlooked. But it is precisely this, Wittgenstein thinks, that lies at its heart, at its origin even:

When Frazer begins by telling the story of the King of the Wood at Nemi, he does this in a tone which shows that something strange and terrible is happening here. And that is the answer to the question “why is this happening?”: Because it is terrible. In other words, what strikes us in this course of events as terrible, impressive, horrible, tragic, &c., anything but trivial and insignificant, that is what gave birth to them.

(Wittgenstein 1979, pp. 2–3)

Wittgenstein would be wrong to think that Frazer does not recognize the terrible quality of such a rite (and others). Frazer certainly does, but there is a censure at work in that recognition, with the history of magic and religion being seen as part of “a melancholy record of human error and folly” (Frazer 1922, p. 711), hopefully now banished to the past. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, seems entranced by what is terrible in the rule at Nemi, seeing greater depth in this than in gentler and more pleasant expressions of religion: “Frazer cannot imagine a priest who is not basically an English parson of our times with all his stupidity and feebleness” (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 5).

Before moving on, it might be instructive to note some points of affinity between the Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough and Johnson’s very first book, his translation of Father Jerónimo Lobo’s A Voyage to Abyssinia (1735). Wittgenstein criticizes Frazer for overly exoticizing the peoples whose ritual practices he describes. By contrast, Wittgenstein stresses “our kinship to those savages” (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 10), and seeks to illuminate apparently exotic rites (burning in effigy, say) with practices “we” commonly perform (kissing the picture of a loved one) (see Wittgenstein 1979, p. 4). In a comparable manner, Johnson, in his Preface to the Lobo translation, praises the author for consulting “his senses not his imagination” (Johnson 1985, p. 3), resisting the lure of populating a foreign and mysterious land with basilisks and monsters, and exaggerating neither the barrenness nor the fecundity of the land. Nor are the peoples Lobo encounters portrayed in exotic and fantastical colours: the reader, Johnson writes, “will discover, what will always be discover’d by a diligent and impartial enquirer, that wherever human nature is to be found, there is a mixture of vice and virtue, a contest of passion and reason, and that the Creator doth not appear partial in his distributions, but has balanced in most countries their particular inconveniences by particular favours” (Johnson 1985, pp. 3–4). As we shall now see, this most Johnsonian of observations connects with other aspects of his thought and may reveal another set of affinities with Wittgenstein.

5. The Rough Ground of Sublunary Nature

Prayers and Meditations was not the only one of Johnson’s works that Wittgenstein admired. “The other day”, he wrote to Malcolm in September 1945, “I read Johnson’s ‘Life of Pope’ & liked it very much.” (Malcolm 1984, p. 98). Nothing more is indicated as to why he liked it so much. Some further investigation may, however, prove to be of value.

The “Life of Pope” forms a part of Johnson’s last major work, The Lives of the Poets (full title: The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works), first fully published in 1781. Presumably it was Wittgenstein’s admiration for the Prayers and Meditations that led him into a further exploration of Johnson’s work, but there appears to be no evidence as to whether he read any other of the Lives or why he chose the life of Alexander Pope, rather than that of Milton, say, or of Swift. There is much in Johnson’s account of Pope’s life and work that may have appealed to Wittgenstein, however. Alongside details of Pope’s struggles with poor health (“My whole life has been but one long disease”)34 and with his experience of “the gradual abatement of kindness between friends” (Johnson 1905, p. 128)—sentiments and phrases that may have resonated with Wittgenstein—Johnson reveals aspects of Pope’s manner of writing with which Wittgenstein, laboriously at the time putting together the Philosophical Investigations, would surely have felt an empathy. Johnson documents the slow progress of Pope’s work, noting how the impedimentary causes of this slowness, in this as in other cases, must be various: “Indolence [that familiar theme!], interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted” (Johnson 1905, p. 117). Pope’s progress was also slowed by his scrupulous quest for correct expression, with nothing sent to the press “till it had lain two years under his inspection”, his pieces kept “very long in his hands, while he considered and reconsidered them” (Johnson 1905, pp. 220–21). Such diligence Pope shared with Wittgenstein, who (it might also be said) “was never content with mediocrity when excellence could be attained” (Johnson 1905, p. 217).

These possible sources of Wittgenstein’s enjoyment relate to Pope’s work and character. But Johnson’s own thoughts may also have given rise to approval. Alongside memorable psychological observations (“every man is of importance to himself, and therefore, in his own opinion, to others”) (Johnson 1905, p. 147), some of Johnson’s criticisms of Pope contain the kind of careful clarificatory work that characterizes Wittgenstein’s own philosophical method. For example, Johnson offers a fairly lengthy critique of Pope’s theory of the “ruling passion”, namely some dominant occupying interest that overrides reason and drives a person’s actions. Condemning that doctrine as both pernicious and false, Johnson aims to show how it originates in part from a failure to differentiate “passions, appetites, and habits”, this conflation giving rise to Pope’s confused theory (see Johnson 1905, pp. 174–75). Here we may detect parallels between Johnson’s critical work and Wittgenstein’s examination of the “abominable mess” produced by Freud’s confounding of reasons and causes (Moore 1959, p. 316). In both cases (Pope and Freud), the task is to unravel the knots of confusion that have produced abominable messes of one kind or another. Johnson’s withering assessment of an unfinished collaborative work of satire, the Memoirs of Scriblerus, may also have appealed to a philosopher who thought that philosophical problems were in some sense not real problems, but confusions generated by language: “he raises phantoms of absurdity,” Johnson writes, “and then drives them away. He cures diseases that were never felt.” (Johnson 1905, p. 182) To be noted finally is Johnson’s estimation of “the two most engaging powers of an author: new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new” (Johnson 1905, p. 233). When Wittgenstein asks his readers not to take it “as a matter of course, but as a remarkable fact, that pictures and fictitious narratives give us pleasure, occupy our minds” (Wittgenstein 1953, §524), he is—with a particular philosophical goal in mind—also making the familiar new.

Perhaps the biggest affinity we find here is in the very idea operating at the heart of The Lives of the Poets, namely Johnson’s respect for the particularities necessary for writing biography. Abstractions and generalizations are eschewed, in favour of attention to individual lives and to what Johnson in his account of the life of Sir Thomas Browne calls “those minute peculiarities which discriminate every man from all others” (Johnson 2016, p. 330). Such attention to individual particularities was characteristic of Johnson’s work, a point emphasized by Thomas Reinert: “He told stories in his moral essays designed to illustrate the complexity of real experience and the necessity for careful attention in particular cases.” (Reinert 1996, p. 1). This attention to complexity, to difference, and to sheer messiness is a distinctive feature of Johnson’s unsystematic work, and shows itself beautifully in his thoughts on the character of Shakespeare’s plays:

Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.

(Johnson 1968, p. 66)

Hand in hand with this respect for life’s variety goes a warning not to generalize from favoured instances or from one’s own case: “For nothing,” declares a character in Rasselas, “is more common than to call our own condition, the condition of life.”35

Johnson’s focus on real “sublunary nature”, as opposed to some artificially pure vision of things, clearly parallels features of Wittgenstein’s later work. He too resists the “contemptuous attitude towards the particular case” flowing from “our craving for generality” (Wittgenstein 1958, pp. 17–18), and he too stresses difference, variety, and the need to rest content with the roughness of the sublunary as opposed to the abstract purity of what he calls the “sublime conception”:

The “sublime conception” forces me to move away from the concrete case since what I say doesn’t fit it. I now move into an ethereal region, talk of the real sign, of rules that must exist (even though I can’t say where & how)—& find myself “on thin ice.”

(Klagge and Nordmann 2023, p. 79)

This same imagery reappears in Philosophical Investigations, when Wittgenstein talks of the seductive appeal of “crystalline purity” in his earlier account of logic and language. Pursuing the sublime ideal (rather than the sublunary reality), we find ourselves on “slippery ice”, the smoothness of which seems perfect in the abstract but is unsuitable for walking, an activity which requires friction: “Back to the rough ground!” (Wittgenstein 1953, §107) The emphasis on looking at things, experiencing things, as opposed to simply thinking about things, is central in both Wittgenstein and Johnson also: “don’t think, but look!” (Wittgenstein 1953, §66), Wittgenstein commands us, while Johnson, in his sensitive critique of Soame Jenyns’s theodicy, remarks of life that it “must be seen before it can be known” (Johnson 2004, p. 407). The lack of neatness in the world when we actually look at it—rather than merely think or theorize about it—is on full view in the title of the final chapter of Rasselas: “The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded.”36

A great many more striking connections might be mapped between these two men, both of whom compiled dictionaries, were absorbed by questions of language, and dramatically failed in their careers as schoolmasters.37 But one final admiring mention of Johnson, which will lead us to recognize one more point of affinity, will suffice. It comes from Drury’s recollections of Wittgenstein:

Remembering how he had often commended Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations to me and had given me a copy, I sent him a copy of Boswell’s famous Life. In reply he said that there must have been something remarkable about Boswell if Johnson was able to feel such a close friendship with him. That in quoting Johnson Boswell would say when he may not have got the exact words right—this Wittgenstein praised especially.

(Drury 1981a, p. 169)

As is the case in the many memoirs of Wittgenstein produced by his friends and acquaintances,38 Boswell’s Life of Johnson reveals to us a magnetic personality, dominant in conversation and drawing around himself a set of reverential and sometimes cowed friends. It would seem to those who knew both Johnson and Wittgenstein that these entirely singular individuals, with their distinct mannerisms and peculiar perspectives, were unparalleled and irreplaceable. Fania Pascal expressed this feeling when she wrote of Wittgenstein that “he formed a class, a category of his own” (Pascal 1981, p. 50), while the parliamentarian William Gerard Hamilton voiced comparable sentiments in the extraordinary epitaph he offered on Johnson: “He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up.—Johnson is dead.—Let us go to the next best:—there is nobody;—no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.”39

6. Conclusions (In Which, Naturally, Nothing Is Concluded)

After these excursions, we may return briefly to the Prayers and Meditations. The main purpose of this paper has been to draw attention to Wittgenstein’s strangely neglected admiration of Johnson’s remarkable prayers. The modesty of these findings is to be emphasized. There has been no attempt to establish Johnson’s influence on Wittgenstein. Similarities and affinities are all that have been charted. One may hope that others may investigate further the terrain that has here been spied. At the same time, some vital elements of Wittgenstein’s view of religion have been brought to prominence. Prayer has here been seen, at least in some of its forms, to be the expression of a desire for personal moral improvement combined with a felt sense of human frailty. This frailty means that appeals for divine assistance are essential if the required amendments are to be achieved. Alone, the human flounders. We have also seen that the element of the terrible was as central to Wittgenstein’s thinking as it was to Johnson’s, and rather than functioning constantly as a consoling palliative, we see in the troubled thoughts of these two men what Jeffrey Meyers has called “the pain of religious belief”.40 The manner in which religious ideas operate within a person’s “stream of life” has been a major theme, and against Trueblood’s desire to strip the turmoil from Johnson’s prayers and establish a kind of polished and crystalline purity to them, we find in Strahan’s original editorial decision things which allowed Wittgenstein to detect such a powerful vein of humanity in the book.41 In the structure and tormented production of Johnson’s prayers we see what Wittgenstein might himself have called “the environment of a way of acting” (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 16), and the rough, ragged quality of earthbound and deeply human religious life.