Superstition without Idolatry: Probable Strictures from Richard Johnson on Sir William Jones’s “Gods of Greece, Italy, and India”
Polytheism, superstition, idolatry: for eighteenth-century Europeans, these words were largely synonymous, as Tomoko Masuzawa explains in her excellent discourse history The Invention of World Religions (2005). Together, they named the fourth category, after Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in the “four-part classificatory system” by which Europeans demarcated the religionsof the world before the nineteenth-century advent of the concept of a world religion. But what about those few European experts who deviated from the fourfold schema? What did they have at stake when they did so? To begin an answerto that question, this paper reconstructs alikely conversation between the Orientalist Sir William Jones and his friend Richard Johnson. Johnson was an esteemed Orientalist within the circle of founding members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. In 1785 Jones wrote to Johnson, “You have been to me, in regard to my mental food in India, what your friend Croftes has been in regard to my animal sustenance; for, without you, I should have been ignorant of Indian mythology, and without him, I should not have had (while the Treasury was empty) either grain for my horse or rice for myself.” Yetone aspect of Jones’s firstessay on Indian mythology—“On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India,” initially drafted in 1784—was likely to have displeased Johnson. This was Jones’s use of “polytheism”, “superstition”, and “idolatry” as interchangeable terms. Johnson never published anything on Indian religion, but if he had done so, his main aim would have been to “account for personifying qualities in remote ages, without leaving the Legislators or contrivers open to the accusation of not knowing God or being Idolaters.” We can piece together Johnson’s defense of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism fromthe charge of idolatry fromfragmentary notes spread across seven of his journals and commonplace books held in the University of Minnesota’s Ames Library of South Asia. But why would he have wanted to carry out such a defense? This paperwill argue that, for the particularsecularism that Johnson espoused, superstition (isolated from idolatry) was the religious element with which government could work most effectively.The paper will conclude with an assessment of the degree to which Jones came around to Johnson’s view in the later 1780s/early 1790s.
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Minnesota
IHR Mellon Dissertation Fellow, 2011-12