Reading the "religious" language of Samuel Johnson's Sermons

READING THE "RELIGIOUS" LANGUAGE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON'S SERMONS

THE importance and popularity that the sermon once held in the secular as well as in the religious life of England is often underestimated today. Samuel Johnson claimed that he wrote approximately forty sermons; of these, twenty-eight are extant and have been attributed to him.1 The only book-length study of the sermons available to date is James Gray's Johnson's Sermons. A Study. In addition to providing a history of the composition and printing of the Sermons, Gray's study traces Johnson's attitudes on human vanity, the brevity of life, suffering, repentance, charity, domestic happiness, friendship, the Atonement, the Incarnation, rewards and punishments with parallel themes found in Rasselas, The Vanity of Human Wishes, The Idler, and The Rambler.

Gray accurately argues for the integrated nature of Johnson's exhortations to right thinking and living. Moreover, Gray's study establishes numerous correlations between Johnson's Sermons and the rich English homiletic tradition. However, it does not examine Johnson's stylistic modifications of important elements within that same tradition which he found so praiseworthy. Johnson's modifications suggest his belief that religious faith is forged more by the realities of secular life and less by conventional religious ideals.

In contrast with English sermon style and especially with the metaphysical conventions dating from the seventeenth century which characterized some aspects of this style, Samuel Johnson's Sermons are remarkably free from other-worldly allusions, far-fetched symbolism, and ingenious imagery. He considered these tropes inappropriate for describing matters of religion and, more significantly, a corrupting influence on the practice of religion. Indeed, no legions of devils or choirs of angels inhabit Johnson's Sermons; they do not engage in interminable speculations on the abstract nature of the soul. The style of Johnson's Sermons always accentuates his efforts to examine the abstruse principles of religion against common human experience. By acknowledging the self-delusive propensities within human nature, the Sermons present religion as a pragmatic means to ascertain and make tolerable our basic helplessness.

Johnson's deviations in style from elements within the English sermon tradition is not an indication of his lack of esteem for the sermon as a genuine division of literature. On the contrary, his numerous observations on the English sermon reveal his appreciation of the oral, written homiletic, and literary dimensions of the genre. In a conversation concerning the posthumous sale of the Honorable Topham Beauclerk's library, Wilkes remarks on the irony that Beauclerk, a renowned rake, should have owned so many volumes of sermons:

Mr. Beauclerk's great library was this season sold in London by auction. Mr. Wilkes said, he wondered to find in it such a numerous collection of sermons; seeming to think it strange that a gentleman of Mr. Beauclerk's character in the gay world, should have chosen to have many compositions of that kind. JOHNSON: Why, Sir, you are to consider that sermons make a considerable branch of English literature; so that a library must be very imperfect if it has not a numerous collection of sermons. (Boswell 4:105-106)

IN the Dictionary, Johnson's first definition for a sermon is: "A discourse of instruction pronounced by a divine for the edification of the people." The illustrative quotation, taken from Hooker, suggests both the artistic and the didactic traditions of the sermon:

As for our sermons, be they never so sound and perfect, God's words they are not, as the sermons of the prophets were; no, they are but ambiguously termed his word, because his word is commonly the subject whereof they treat, and must be the rule whereby they are framed.

However, it is not Richard Hooker but Thomas Secker, the influential Archbishop of Canterbury (1758-1768), for whom Johnson "expressed a great opinion" (Boswell 4:524). Archbishop Secker was a royalist, high Anglican, Tory, and a man of robust common sense. Secker's theology, like his politics and social theory, was pretty much in the main stream of eighteenth-century thought. Indeed, his first concern as Archbishop of Canterbury was to defend Christianity (synonymous for him with the Church of England) from its three perennial foes-skepticism, enthusiasm, and Roman Catholicism.

In his Eight Charges Delivered to the Clergy of the Dioceses of Oxford and Canterbury, Archbishop Secker directs that a sermon should convince by its reason and persuade by its beauty; indeed, it is these commonplace aesthetic principles which Johnson embraces as normative for a sermon to be effective. Archbishop Secker believed that much of the disregard for religion was due to the speculative content and ornate style which characterized many contemporary sermons:

Smooth Discourses, composed partly in fine Words which they do not understand, partly in flowing Sentences which they cannot follow to the End; containing little that awakens their drowsy Attention, little that enforces on them plainly and home what they must do to be saved; leave them as ignorant and unreformed as ever, and only lull them into a fatal Security. Therefore, bring yourselves down to their level; for what suits the meanest Christian will suit the highest: Examine if they take in what you say, and change the form of it till they do. This I recommend for your first Study: and be assured, you will improve yourselves by it no less than your Hearers. (Eight Charges 275)