Samuel Johnson, Unbeliever

Abstract

To judge by recent literary scholarship, the world is in a bad way, and has been for a long time. Everything, it seems, is in crisis: the world has lurched from one crisis to another from Homer to yesterday. Browsing the MLA International Bibliography turns up the word crisis in over a thousand titles from the last decade — political crises, economic crises, civil crises, cultural crises, crises of gender, crises of desire, crises of history, crises of modernity, crises of subjectivity, crises of objectivity, crises of identity, crises of alterity. With all these crises, it is amazing we have somehow managed to muddle through. Samuel Johnson, always impatient with hyperbole, would be the fi rst to discourage this sort of thoughtless cant. The word crisis, in fact, appears nowhere in his original published writings except The False Alarm (1770), where it is used ironically: “‘Alarming crisis,’ ” notes Donald Greene, “was one of the favourite expressions of the Wilkites,” and Johnson wields it to ridicule their bad-faith fretting.1 The things we like to imagine kept the world on tenterhooks would not have kept Johnson from his dinner. One thing may, however, deserve the term “crisis” more than most. It might fairly be called a crisis of belief — not strictly a Christian belief in God, though that is part of it. It is a crisis of belief in anything. How do we know that we know? This question quite literally kept Johnson awake at night. The problems raised by the philosophical skeptics of the sixteenth and sev-