JENYNS, JOHNSON, AND THE CONFLICT OF LEGITIMATIONS

The uneasy relationship between the traditional eschatological consolation, on the one hand, and the Great Chain, on the other hand, is a salient feature of Soame Jenyns's A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil and of Johnson's famous, devastating review of Jenyns's book. Although Johnson characterized the Free Inquiry, at least in part, as "little more than a paraphrase" of Pope's Essay on Man, "yet less than a paraphrase, a mere translation of poetry into prose,"9 Jenyns had in fact gone beyond Pope insofar as he had made a greater attempt to correlate the doctrine of the Great Chain with traditional Christian doctrines:

the Supreme Being, infinitely good as well as powerful, desirous to diffuse happiness by all possible means, has created innumerable ranks and orders of beings, all subservient to each other by proper subordination. One of these is occupied by man, a creature endued with such a certain degree of knowledge, reason, and freewill, as is suitable to his situation, and placed for a time, on this globe, as in a school of probation and education. Here he has an opportunity given him of improving or debasing his nature, in such a manner, as to render himself fit for a rank of higher perfection and happiness, or to degrade himself to a state of greater imperfection and misery; necessary, indeed, towards carrying on the business of the universe, but very grievous and burdensome to those individuals who, by their misconduct, are obliged to submit to it.10

The reward for obedience to the divine will is here characterized not as eternal heavenly bliss but as elevation in the next life to a higher rank in the Chain of Being, one above that occupied by mere mortals; and the torments of hell are here translated into "a state of greater imperfection or misery." It is to be noted that in this

merger of the Great Chain—which, by its nature, does not allow movement from one rank to another—with the Christian view of eternal rewards and punishments, Jenyns, while explicitly placing humankind in one rank, seems to be implicitly presupposing that there are not different ranks of being or perfection within the species. For the role of earthly existence as a "school of probation or education," as a testing ground for souls, would make sense in a Christian culture only if souls, qua souls, were on an equal footing, and it would be vitiated if differential rankings were handed out before the test had even begun. All this would seem to be consistent with the.traditional Christian idea that social stratification, however necessary or laudable it might be, is not tied to ontological differentia or to the eternal disposition of souls.

Johnson, despite the fact that he repeatedly casts doubt on the general plausibility of the Great Chain, does not offer a critique of the passage from the Free Inquiry just quoted; indeed, he himself quotes it approvingly.11 Perhaps Johnson sees the notions that heavenly reward is elevation to a higher rank on the Chain of Being and that infernal punishment is relegation to a lower one as basically consistent with the doctrines of heaven and hell and is here willing to pass over Jenyns's metaphysical special pleading. In any event, since Johnson believes in the necessity of social subordination as well as in its independence from the eternal disposition of souls, he has reason to be tolerant of Jenyns's formulation.

He is much less tolerant, however, when Jenyns, elsewhere in his treatise, undertakes to defend enforced ignorance as an opiate of the poor. Jenyns had invoked divine providence in justifying depriving the poor of education: "Ignorance, . . . the appointed lot of all born to poverty, and the drudgeries of life, is the only opiate capable of infusing that insensibility which can enable them to endure the miseries of the one, and the fatigues of the other. It is a cordial administered by the gracious hand of providence; of which they ought never to be deprived by an ill-judged and improper education. It is the basis of all subordination, the support of society" (FIE, 49-50).12

In response, Johnson undertakes, in effect, to remind us of the availability of another opiate besides ignorance—namely, the "knowledge" that comprises Christianity's traditional consolation:

Concerning the portion of ignorance necessary to make the condition of the lower classes of mankind safe to the publick, and tolerable to themselves, both morals and policy exact a nicer inquiry than will be very soon or very easily made. There is, undoubtedly, a degree of knowledge which will direct a man to refer all to providence, and to acquiesce in the condition with which omnisdent goodness has determined to allot him; to consider this world as a phantom, that must soon glide from before his eyes, and the distresses and vexations that encompass him, as dust scattered in his path, as a blast that chills him for a moment, and passes off for ever. ("Review," 55-56)

Johnson's invocation of the traditional view that this earthly existence is a transitory phantom is not so resolutely otherworldly as it seems. For Johnson also insists on the need for some degree of social mobility. Just as all souls need to be equally eligible for salvation, people, in their earthly existence, Johnson feels, should not be condemned to inescapable poverty. Although Jenyns refrained from claiming that the imposition of this opiate on the poor is connected to their intrinsic inferiority, Johnson recognizes that to condemn the poor to ignorance is, so to speak, to lock them into their social status for all eternity:

Though it should be granted, that those who are born to poverty and drudgery, should not be deprived, by an improper education, of the opiate of ignorance; even this concession will not be of much use to direct our practice, unless it be determined, who are those that are born to poverty. To entail irreversible poverty upon generation after generation, only because the ancestor happened to be poor, is, in itself, cruel, if not unjust, and is wholly contrary to the maxims of a commercial nation, which always suppose and promote a rotation of property, and offer every individual a chance of mending his condition by his diligence. ("Review" 56-57)

Johnson thus embraces the traditional notion that earthly poverty, like the phenomenal world itself, is a mere phantom, a blast that chills for but a moment; but he also embraces an early version of the capitalist dogma that poverty can be overcome by education and hard work. The wretchedness of poverty, in this double perspective, is something essentially escapable, whether in this world or in the next. Seen in this light, social mobility appears as a secular pendant to the equality of souls before God.

Johnson's rejection of Jenyns's justification of the opiate of ignorance, along with his rejection of the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being, does not imply any opposition on Johnson's part to the necessity of social hierarchy. There is no doubt that Johnson, like most of his literary and philosophical contemporaries,13 believed that subordination is a precondition for social harmony and that a leveling of social distinctions would give rise to discord and strife.14 What Johnson could not accept is a justification of social inequality that told individuals that their class status was necessary and inescapable. The Great Chain of Being, of course, justifies the cosmic rank of humankind in general precisely in fatalistic terms—insofar as one's rank is fixed simply because that particular link in the chain needed to be filled—and provides metaphysical arguments against any attempt to raise oneself above the rank to which one has been assigned. Johnson's unease with a caste system is thus consonant with his rejection of the Great Chain.

It might seem as if Jenyns, conversely, embraced both the Great Chain and a fatalistic caste system because the two are part of the same general way of looking at things. But it needs to be noted that even Jenyns himself, while embracing the Great Chain and many other ideas that Johnson considered dubious or silly,15 and while treating the poor in terms that Johnson found objectionably fatalistic, still held back from arguing that social inequality was grounded in the ontology of the Great Chain. He refrained, that is, from claiming that those who are higher in the social order are more perfect or closer to God.

Given the disjunction between the Christian providential justification of social inequality—with its equal access to eternal bliss—and the rigid inequality decreed by the Principle of Plenitude, we may observe that Jenyns employed two different techniques in bringing two traditions of legitimation together.16 Sometimes, as in the notion that, after death, the virtuous soul rises in the Chain of Being and the vicious soul descends, he attempts to bridge the differences. In other instances, the ones that elicit most of Johnson's scorn, he simply ignores the differences.

Meanwhile, Johnson, as we have seen, does not merely content himself with attacking Jenyns from the standpoint of orthodoxy. Rather, while he does not offer his own solution for the general problem of evil, he does proffer positive justifications for social

inequality—by cunningly linking the upward mobility of the soul in the next world to an upward mobility of the body in this one. By thus linking Christian eschatology to the worldly social mobility that is consonant with the needs of a "commercial nation," Johnson is bridging metaphysical gaps—between a world that is a mere phantom and a world in which the requirements of commerce are of pressing importance—that are not less formidable than those faced by Jenyns. But he does so in a manner that is more ideologically consistent than what is found in Jenyns's Free Inquiry. In place of Jenyns's more or less feudal conception of social hierarchy, in a word, Johnson offers a capitalistic fluidity that both expresses Christian sympathy with human misery and legitimates the structural inequality of the status quo.17