1639
First Bishops’ War. Racine born.
1640
Donne’s LXXX Sermons published. Death of Burton. Wycherley born.
1641
Browne marries Dorothy Mileham. Second Bishops’ War. The Long Parliament (to 1660). Laud and Strafford impeached. Irish Rebellion. The ‘Grand Remonstrance’ issued. Joseph Hall appointed Bishop of Norwich; defends episcopacy against Milton.
1642
Religio Medici: 1st and 2nd unauthorised editions; Sir Kenelm Digby’s Observations composed (published 1643). Browne’s son Edward born, the first of twelve children. Charles I raises his standard at Nottingham: the Civil War begins. Theatres closed. Death of Galileo. Newton born.
1643
Religio Medici: 1st authorised edition. The Westminster Assembly of Divines. ‘Solemn League and Covenant’.
1644
Milton’s Areopagitica published.
1645
Alexander Ross attacks Religio Medici in Medicus Medicatus. Laud executed. Rise of the New Model Army. Milton’s ‘minor poems’ published.
1646
Pseudodoxia Epidemica published; also Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple. Episcopacy abolished.
1647
Parliamentary army occupies London.
1648
Peace of Westphalia; end of the Thirty Years War.
1649
Execution of Charles I; abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords. Charles II, proclaimed in Scotland, escapes to France in 1651. Death of Crashaw.
THE INTERREGNUM (1649–1660)
1649
The Irish Rebellion crushed by Cromwell.
1650
Pseudodoxia Epidemica: 2nd revised edition (others in 1658, 1659, 1672).
1651
Hobbes’s Leviathan published.
1653
The Protectorate established under Cromwell. Isaac Walton’s Compleat Engler published.
1656
Death of Joseph Hall.
1657
Death of William Harvey.
1658
Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus published. Death of Cromwell; the Protectorate passes to his son Richard.
1659
Richard Cromwell obliged to abdicate; the Protectorate ends. Purcell born.
THE REIGN OF CHARLES II (1660–1685)
1660
Charles II is recalled by Parliament. The House of Lords restored. The theatres reopened. The Royal Society founded. Defoe born.
1661
The Cavalier Parliament (to 1679). Louis XIV assumes full powers in France. Death of Saint-Amant.
1662
‘Act of Uniformity’. Death of Pascal.
1664
Browne elected Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians; testifies at the witch trial at Bury St Edmunds. Vanbrugh born.
1665
Outbreak of the Great Plague (to early 1666). Death of Sir Kenelm Digby.
1666
The Great Fire of London.
1667
Browne’s son Edward admitted to the M.D. at Oxford, elected to the Royal Society. Paradise Lost published; also Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society. Death of Jeremy Taylor. Swift born.
1670
Congreve born.
1671
Browne knighted by Charles II at Norwich. Milton’s Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes published. Shaftesbury born.
1672
Addison, Steele born.
1673
Death of Molière.
1674
Death of Milton, Herrick, Traherne.
1677
Dryden’s All for Love first performed. Death of Spinoza.
1678
The fictitious ‘Popish Plot’. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress published (Part II in 1684). Death of Marvell. Farquhar born
1679
Death of Hobbes.
1681
Marvell’s Poems published.
1682
19 October: death of Sir Thomas Browne on his 77th birthday.
[Browne’s posthumously published works include Certain Miscellany Tracts, ed. Thomas Tenison (1684); A Letter to a Friend (1690); Posthumous Works (with John Whitefoot’s Some Minutes for the Life of Sir Thomas Browne, 1712); and Christian Morals, ed. John Jeffery (1716; with Samuel Johnson’s Life, 1756).]
‘ABOVE ATLAS HIS SHOULDERS’:
AN INTRODUCTION
TO SIR THOMAS BROWNE
be is a quiet and sublime Enthusiast with a strong tinge of the Fantast, the Humorist constantly mingling with & flashing across the Philosopher, as the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye. In short, be has brains in his Head, which is all the more interesting for a little Twist in the Brains.
Coleridge
I
IT was a remarkably uneventful life. Even the knighthood was gained by default: for when Charles II on his visit to Norwich in 1671 decided with his usual magnanimity to bestow a knighthood on the city’s mayor, the latter declined, Browne was proposed as a substitute, and found himself a knight. Yet half-way to that unlikely episode, Browne had already described his life as ‘a miracle of thirty yeares’ – a claim dismissed by one critic as a ‘typically grandiose assertion’.1
But it may be that we have misread the ‘miracle of thirty yeares’ as a statement of fact when it was intended in the way Browne expressly delineates in the preface to Religio Medici:
There are many things delivered Rhetorically, many expressions therein meerely Tropicall [i.e. figurative], and as they best illustrate my intention; and therefore also there are many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason. (below, p. 60)
Within Religio Medici the principle is reiterated in accordance with the time-honoured theory that God has in the Bible ‘so far tempered the language of his utterance as to enable the weakness of our nature to grasp and understand it’.2 In Browne’s words,
unspeakable mysteries in the Scriptures are often delivered in a vulgar and illustrative way, and being written unto man, are delivered, not as they truely are, but as they may bee understood. (below, p. 117)
This approach is by no means characteristic of every sentence penned by Browne. But to the extent that it is present in Religio Medici in the first instance, it encompasses several implications of fundamental importance. It suggests capitally that it is an error readily to identify the narrative voice of Religio Medici with its author, in that the thoughts and experiences recounted are drawn less from any palpable ‘fact’ than from the equally palpable life of Browne’s imagination. In consequence, to eschew the ‘soft and flexible sense’ might lead us – as it has led us – to decline into reflections in diametric opposition to Browne’s actual intent.
The palpable life of Browne’s imagination, I am suggesting, deserves the same response we are habitually prepared to extend to Marvell. Like Marvell, Browne refuses to be contained within the narrow circumference we impose on him, ‘the Humorist constantly mingling with & flashing across the Philosopher’ as Coleridge sagely observed. The infinite undulations of Browne’s fertile mind dictate conclusions beyond mere appearances, calling attention to issues further afield. As he himself reminds us, ‘Men that look upon my outside perusing only my condition, and fortunes, do erre in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders’ (below, p. 153). To ascend to Browne’s level is to sympathise with that over-enthusiastic nineteenth-century critic who described him, with understandable hyperbole, as ‘our most imaginative mind since Shakespeare’.3
II
Religio Medici – ‘The Religion of a Physician’ – was composed in the mid-1630s, and circulated for a time in several manuscripts before the publisher Andrew Crooke issued it in 1642 without Browne’s permission. Less than distressed, Browne revised the clandestine edition and offered it to the same Crooke. Coincidentally, however, the unauthorised edition had been thrust upon Sir Kenelm Digby, ‘the most accompli
shed cavalier of his time’ according to Aubrey but (in Evelyn’s judgement) ‘an arrant mountebank’. Digby’s hasty and rather pompous Observations upon ‘Religio Medici’ helped, initially at least, to advertise the original work. But Religio Medici soon commanded respect for its own sake, best evident in the array of imitations extending from Religio Laici – Dryden’s poem as well as a treatise by Lord Herbert of Cherbury – to improbable works like Religio Stoici, Religio Jurisprudentis, and even Religio Bibliopolæ! (BTB, pp. 234 ff.). The favourable responses were indeed legion. They range from Aubrey’s brief but eloquent remark (‘Religio Medici… first opened my understanding’) to the touching tribute of a Yorkshire poet in these thumping verses:
I have not seen, (let me speak modestlie,)
A finer Peice of Ingenuitie,
Then in these Leaves laide out. When I survay
This Bodie, I am rapt, and loose my way
With wonder and Delight…4
But wonder and delight were, in some instances, rather limited. Oddly enough, Browne was even accused of being an ‘atheist’ – a term that in his time comprehended sceptics, agnostics, deists, and materialists.5 Suspect among Catholics, at any rate, Religio Medici was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books three years after its publication; and equally suspect among extreme Protestants, it elicited an attack by a militant guardian of orthodoxy, Alexander Ross, whose tirades were hurled not only against Browne (‘this may be indeed religio Medici, the religion of the House of Medicis, not of the Church of England’) but against Bacon, Hobbes, and all the disciples of Copernicus.
Browne’s response to Ross marks his difference from the approach of, say, Milton. Where Milton would have trampled Ross underfoot with iron sarcasm, Browne conducted himself in line with his disarming confession in Religio Medici that ‘I have no Genius to disputes in Religion’ (p. 65). Tolerant of the intolerant, he was like the Cambridge Platonists among the least contentious spirits in an age of violent strife, and among the least dogmatic in an age of aggressive and factious doctrine. Irenic by nature, he looked askance upon the claims of his contemporaries whose multiplied divisions seemed to him to undermine the Christian faith:
those who doe confine the Church of God, either to particular Nations, Churches, or Families, have made it farre narrower than our Saviour ever meant it. (p. 129)
True, Religio Medici gives the impression that its author was so detached from the upheavals of his age as to display less a disinterest than a lack of interest. Yet its preface supplies both the immediate context and the degree of personal involvement – ‘the name of his Majesty defamed, the honour of Parliament depraved’ (p. 59) – which Browne later elevates into a more general condemnation of ‘the sinister ends of Princes, the ambition & avarice of Prelates, and the fatall corruption of times’ (p. 62). The burden of the argument is borne by a personal predilection even as it was sustained by Browne’s experiences on the Continent, especially his studies at Padua which, a generation after William Harvey had studied during the era of Galileo and the eminent biologist Aquapendente, was still ‘famous for the Study of Physick’ (i.e. medicine): cosmopolitan as it was liberal, sceptical of inflexible approaches, and consistently responsive to novel ideas. Closed minds at home would protest, and did protest, that ‘we send our children beyond the Seas into Fraunce, Italy, Spaine, Germany; they returne not Englishmen from thence, but Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards, Germans’.6 But Browne would have regarded the charge as a compliment, providing inter alia one of the most good-natured passages in Religio Medici on the reprehensible culinary habits of the French (p. 133). Merely to observe the oddities of human behaviour is not very difficult, and to censure them easier still; but sympathetically to respond to multiform reality is the prerogative of the truly perceptive mind.
If the irenic disposition in Religio Medici could be misunderstood, so might the apparently sharp dichotomy between faith and reason. The reputed ‘split’ between the two7 is certainly warranted so long as we confine ourselves to one or the other of Browne’s explicit statements. Sometimes, however, one of the components in the expected opposition is quietly removed, e.g.: ‘though there bee but one [world] to sense, there are two to reason; the one visible, the other invisible’ (p. 104). The claim here that reason is operative equally in the physical as in the metaphysical realm, appears to contradict the role assigned to faith elsewhere. But might Browne have meant to alert us to the existence of a transcendent unity while we tend to compartmentalise human experience? For it is unlikely, we have been assured authoritatively,
It is unlikely that grace would prompt him to do one thing and reason to do another. Browne’s definition of reason was not our modern one. The enlightenment left us with the view of reason as the principle of individual autonomy; for Browne, reason was recta ratio, first implanted by God in Adam, and still present, albeit less lustrous, in fallen man. Dimmed by the Fall, reason needs to be complemented by faith, and Browne considered it the mark of a wise man to walk in their combined light.8
Browne’s ‘reason’ is the reality espoused by the Church Fathers at the invitation of the Neoplatonists, who held, according to St Augustine, that ‘the light of the mind giving power to conceive all… is God that created all’.9 Its actual description by Plotinus as ‘something greater than reason, reason’s Prior, as far above reason as the very object of that thought must be’, is not unlike the ‘Divine Sagacity’ celebrated in the seventeenth century by Henry More the Cambridge Platonist, that is to say the dynamic power of mind to encompass ‘the close connexion and cohesion’ of the diverse aspects of the universe.10 Granted, Browne does not always deploy ‘reason’ in this sense; but where he does, the term should be regarded as suggestive of the cosmic unity he constantly aspires to, a unity evident horizontally across the historical process, and vertically through the Scale of Nature.
The vertical dimension is well attested by Browne as by his contemporaries. Browne’s formulation – ‘there is in this Universe a Staire, or manifest Scale of creatures, rising not disorderly, or in confusion, but with a comely method and proportion’ (p. 101) – appeals to the widely disseminated belief that all levels of existence are tightly knit through an elaborate hierarchical system of analogies and correspondences extending, it was said, ‘from the Mushrome to the Angels’.11 The scheme was vastly enriched by recurrent metaphoric associations with music and the circle, the one intended to sustain the persuasion that ‘there is a musicke where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion’ (p. 149), the other to confirm belief in the omnipresence of God ‘whose center is every where, and circumference no where’.12 Browne in resorting to these time-honoured commonplaces, however, often transformed them into novelties by the unexpected twists in the course of their articulation. For instance:
I have ever beleeved, and doe now know, that there are Witches; they that doubt of these, doe not onely deny them, but Spirits; and are obliquely and upon consequence a sort, not of Infidels, but Atheists. (below, p. 98)
It is an astonishing utterance; but I think intentionally so. The logic is of the singular order so favoured by Browne: might not a denial of the existence of witches lead to a denial of the existence of spirits, and eventually of God? Smile though we may, Browne expresses his concern that to remove one rung from the Scale of Nature were to dismantle the entire scheme, and abrogate order. The intention, certainly, was by no means to harden hearts against the victims of misguided fanatics. ‘We are no way doubtfull that there are wiches’, he wrote elsewhere, ‘butt have not been alwayes satisfied in the application of their wichcrafts or whether the parties under such affliction suffered from such hands’. Accordingly, when invited in 1664 to testify at the trial of two ‘witches’, he accepted that witchcraft was in evidence but ventured no opinion on the charge itself.13 In theory and practice alike, his exclusive interest was to maintain the principle articulated in the penultimate paragraph of The Garden of Cyrus: ‘All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they be
gin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven’ (p. 387).
The cosmic unity intimated vertically by the Scale of Nature, Browne also discerned on the horizontal plane of historical events. In broad outline, his approach is not distinguished by originality since it embraces another great commonplace of Occidental thought, the expressly Christian view of history as progressively apocalyptic of the Divine Purpose in a linear pattern enclosing all events from the creation to the Last Judgement.14 Superficially observed, the pattern can be readily detected in the ever-expanding movement of the first part of Religio Medici that ends in ‘those foure inevitable points of us all, Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell’ (below, pp. 116 ff.). The same pattern also informs Christian Morals, for example the invitation to ‘Look beyond the World, and before the Æra of Adam’ (p. 425), as well as the memorable aphorism: ‘The created World is but a small Parenthesis in Eternity’ (p. 471). But as it is not Browne’s adherence to a mere commonplace that matters, we should be cognisant of his simultaneous extension of it in a variety of directions and with an impressive opulence of detail. Perhaps most significant in this respect is his emphatic reiteration of the contrast between time which we aspire to comprehend, and the Eternal Present which we cannot. Christian Morals again provides the appropriate aphorism: ‘The Divine Eye looks upon high and low differently from that of Man’ (p. 429). Imaginatively applied in Religio Medici, the generalisation issues in several resonant passages whose undulating rhythms suggest the excitement of the slowly apprehended conclusion, thus:
The Major Works (English Library) Page 2