The Major Works (English Library)

by Sir Thomas Browne

  that terrible terme Predestination, which hath troubled so many weake heads to conceive, and the wisest to explaine, is in respect of God no prescious determination of our estates to come, but a definitive blast of his will already fulfilled, and at the instant that he first decreed it; for to his eternitie which is indivisible, and altogether, the last Trumpe is already sounded, the reprobates in the flame, and the blessed in Abrahams bosome. Saint Peter speakes modestly, when hee saith, a thousand yeares to God are but as one day; for to speake like a Philosopher, those continued instances of time which flow into a thousand yeares, make not to him one moment; what to us is to come, to his Eternitie is present, his whole duration being but one permanent point without succession, parts, flux, or division. (pp. 72–3)

  Browne was utterly fascinated by the concept of the Eternal Present. After its initial formulation here, he indulges in a number of paradoxical utterances which cumulatively assert the concept by upholding the unity of the created order in the omniscient eyes of God. On such occasions the tone rises steadily as Browne’s serene assurance in his own election yields to a triumphant proclamation of the contemporaneity of all events:

  That which is the cause of my election, I hold to be the cause of my salvation, which was the mercy, and beneplacit of God, before I was, or the foundation of the world. Before Abraham was, I am, is the saying of Christ, yet is it true in some sense if I say it of my selfe, for I was not onely before my selfe, but Adam, that is, in the Idea of God, and the decree of that Synod held from all Eternity. And in this sense, I say, the world was before the Creation, and at an end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive, though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise, and Eve miscarried of mee before she conceiv’d of Cain. (pp. 131–32)

  But the vision of the confluence of what is past and passing and to come, is not the prerogative solely of the omniscient God. The same comprehensive awareness is shared by the narrator on the model of the traditional association of the creative artist and the creating Word, the Divine Logos. Just as ‘God beholds all things’ (p. 124), so the narrator penetrates beyond history’s cunning passages to discern the pattern of time-bound yet time-less moments within the historical process, and without. Within, the sequential moments unfold in a straight line toward ‘that one day, that shall include and comprehend all that went before it, wherein as in the last scene, all the Actors must enter to compleate and make up the Catastrophe of this great peece’ (p. 119). Without, the artist transcends mere logic (itself a sequential mode of thought) to behold the entire play when, and especially when, time is suspended in the serenity of a nocturnal apprehension: ‘I close mine eyes in security, content to take my leave of the Sunne, and sleepe unto the resurrection’ (p. 157).

  ‘I was’, we have seen Browne remark, ‘not onely before my selfe, but Adam, that is, in the Idea of God’. The concept – echoed in the ‘Ideated Man’ of Christian Morals (p. 430) – compels us to suspect Platonism, and reach for our Plotinus. But Browne wore his Platonic cloak with casual abandon, preferring a disconcerting eclecticism where we would demand absolute consistency. His approach, however, is not unlike that of his contemporaries who had also fallen under the sway of the legendary Hermes ‘the Thrice Greatest’ (Trismegistus), the supposed Egyptian author of widely venerated works believed to have predated Plato although actually written in the second century A.D. The Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652) suggested the nature of the Renaissance commitment, and its implications: ‘Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian, who first instituted the hieroglyphs, thus becoming the prince and parent of all Egyptian theology and philosophy, was the first and most ancient among the Egyptians and first rightly thought of divine things’. This imaginative tradition of a ‘primitive theology of the Gentiles’ had already been formulated by the Neoplatonists of fifteenth-century Florence, notably Marsilio Ficino, who looked on Hermes as ‘the first author of a theology’ which, merging with Zoroastrianism, was inherited by Orpheus and Pythagoras among others to find its way ‘entire’ into the books of ‘our Plato’ – ‘the divine Philosopher’ of Browne’s own statement (p. 325). Hence the summary of Henry More in lines which he mistook (as usual) for poetry:

  Plato’s school

  …well agrees with learned Pythagore,

  Egyptian Trismegist, and th’ antique roll

  Of Chaldee wisdome, all which time hath tore

  But Plato and deep Plotin do restore.15

  Browne’s loyalty to ‘Plato’s school’, at best tentative, centres on three concepts alike adapted to his temperament. The first, writ large in Religio Medici, transmutes the hieroglyphs of Hermes into so many symbols of the mysteries of the created order in accordance with the generalisation ventured in Christian Morals: ‘The Hand of Providence writes often by Abbreviatures, Hieroglyphicks or short Characters’ (p. 428). The second concept endeavours to account for these mysteries on the basic premise that God is a single entity while ‘All others doe transcend an unity, and so by consequence are many’ (p. 153). This in turn suggests that history from the creation to the Last Judgement and beyond, is the history of the diversification of the One into the Many: ‘As at the Creation, there was a separation of that confused masse into its species, so at the destruction thereof there shall bee a separation into its distinct individuals’ (p. 120). The third concept is the familiar one of the Ideas of God, interpreted by Browne along the lines sketched by one of his contemporaries:

  Philosophers and Divines call the first Images of things, as they rise up from the Fountain of eternity in the bosome of this universal and eternal Image, Ideas. The Idea, in this sense, is the first and distinct Image of each form of things in the Divine Mind.16

  Acceptance of this commonplace led Browne not merely to ‘Ideated Man’ but to the more comprehensive generalisation posited early in Religio Medici that ‘this visible world is but a picture of the invisible’ (p. 74). Utterly crucial to Browne’s thought, it reverberates across his several works to inform the persuasion he voices in Hydriotaphia that ‘Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us’ (p. 313). In Religio Medici, significantly enough, the concept is articulated in terms not of theology or philosophy but of art. The ‘idea’, he argues, defies annihilation in that it is by nature imperishable, not subject even to the terminal fires of the final conflagration; for ‘to a sensible Artist’ – that is to say the creative man of sense who perceives the truth – ‘the formes are not perished, but withdrawne into their incombustible part, where they lie secure’ (p. 121). The archetype here as elsewhere is always God, himself a ‘Composer’, ‘an excellent Artist’ (pp.149 and 79).

  The concepts adapted from ‘Plato’s school’ as well as the other patterns of thought in Religio Medici – the Christian view of history inclusive of the Eternal Present, the Scale of Nature, the confluence of faith and reason, the all-inclusive tolerance, the irenic disposition – all these merge into an eloquent affirmation of ‘the close connexion and cohesion of things’, ‘the common harmony’ said to permeate the created order in spite of the apparent ‘Antipathies and contrary faces’ (p. 146). The aspiration is far from unrealistic. Fully aware that to eschew paradoxes is to deny our common experience, Browne placed them centrally within his vision of coincident opposites,17 itself not merely paradoxical but miraculous. Miracles, we should remind ourselves, were generally regarded as the acts of God performed ‘above’ or ‘against’ nature; but Browne resolutely maintained that everything is a miracle, ‘the extraordinary effect of the hand of God’ (p. 95). The attitude is firmly Augustinian: ‘is not the world a miracle, yet visible, and of his making? Nay, all the miracles done in this world are less than the world itself, the heaven and earth and all therein’ (The City of God, X, 12). Miracles and paradoxes are merely apparent. A higher reality absorbs both, arresting dualistic tendencies in the reconciliation of discrepancies ‘unto both beings, that is, of this World and the next’ (p. 452).

>   III

  Pseudodoxia Epidemica– ‘Vulgar Errors’ according to its running title – was first published in 1646 and extensively revised five times to 1672.18 Stylistically the revisions display an increasing devotion to a simpler form of discourse in order to conform, so far as it was possible for Browne to conform, to the acceptable style of the dawning scientific age; while thematically his periodic amendments and substantial additions suggest an unfailing commitment to the latest developments in several fields. The colossal work is testimony to Browne’s breathtaking range of interests and stupendous learning. It hardly hindered him to have known ‘no lesse then six languages’ as he proudly states in Religio Medici (p. 147) – that is to say six modern languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Danish), not to mention Hebrew and especially Latin and Greek. Thus fortified he advanced through a catholic range of interests which, amply confirmed in several posthumously published tracts,19 include in alphabetic order: anatomy, antiquities, astronomy, Biblical scholarship, botany, cartography, chemistry, cosmography, embryology, folklore, geography, history and historiography, law, literature both English and Continental,20 medicine, mineralogy, ornithology, philology, philosophy, physiology, rhetoric, seamanship, theology, travel literature, zoology – and no doubt others. Sir Thomas Browne was, it appears, curious.

  The learning displayed by Pseudodoxia Epidemica is not exceptional to Browne, however. Jonson, Donne, Burton, Milton, Ralegh in his appropriately entitled History of the World, alike share that spectacular breadth of knowledge represented on a lower level by Samuel Purchas’s inability to resist the invocation of ‘seven hundred Authors, of one or other kind’ (the kinds: ‘Sacred, Prophane, Learned, Unlearned, Ancient, Moderne, Good, and Bad’).21 Browne’s attitude to his own countless authorities is eminently pragmatic, and certainly not indiscriminate. He cites them, it has been said, ‘for purposes of confirmation as for those of confutation’,22 fully cognisant that the naturalist Gesner and the anatomist Rondelet are reliable witnesses but that Aristotle, for instance, may not be accepted without qualification. Browne’s view of Aristotle coincides rather with Ralegh’s (‘I shall never bee persuaded, that GOD hath shut up all light of Learning within the lanthorne of Aristotles braines’) than with Dryden’s more sweeping condemnation:

  The longest Tyranny that ever sway’d,

  Was what wherein our Ancestors betray’d

  Their free-born Reason to the Stagirite,

  And made his Torch their universall Light.23

  In Pseudodoxia Epidemica, accordingly, Aristotle is frequently and necessarily praised as a biologist even while he is corrected in the light of a ‘singular discloser of truth’ like William Harvey.24 So, too, in Christian Morals he is extolled as the author of Nicomachean Ethics, yet everywhere else – for example in Religio Medici (p. 77) – he is reprimanded because of his exclusive concern with the visible order. In the understatement of John Smith the Cambridge Platonist, Aristotle was ‘not over-zealous of Religion’.25

  ‘Authority’ is in any case the third pillar supporting Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the other two being ‘experience’ and ‘reason’. These, alike commended in Christian Morals (‘Joyn Sense unto Reason, and Experiment unto Speculation’ [p. 439]), involve in the main the approach endorsed with equal enthusiasm in The Garden of Cyrus as to ‘sense and ocular Observation, which seems to me the surest path, to trace the Labyrinth of Truth’ (p. 386). Browne’s actual scientific contributions are hardly numerous since he may only be credited with the identification of ‘adipocere’ (in Hydriotaphia, below, p. 295, note 79), and possibly with the first experiments in chemical embryology.26 But no matter; for Browne’s stature as an experimental scientist should be measured not by any immediate practical results but, as in Bacon’s case, by method. This is not to say that Browne’s method is an extension of Bacon’s, since the catalogue of ‘vulgar errors’ in Pseudodoxia Epidemica is only nominally a response to the ‘calendar of popular errors’ enjoined in The Advancement of Learning, their respective authors differing in temperament and therefore in aim.27 Even so Browne shares with Bacon a commitment to that ‘sense and ocular Observation’ patiently progressing through prejudice and misconception towards the truth. Hence Browne’s omnivorous curiosity in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, evident also in his several letters with which he pursued his son Edward across the Continent:

  Take notice of the various Animals, of places, beasts, fowles, & fishes; what the Danow [i.e. Danube] affordeth, what depth, if conveniency offers, of mines, minerall workes &c.…

  Beside naturall things you may enquire into politicall & the government & state & subsistence of citties, townes & countries…

  observe how the Dutch make defences agaynst sea inundations…

  (K, IV, 31, 36–7, 45)

  – and so on. Browne himself certainly practised what he preached, whether through his ceaseless reading and voluuminous correspondence, his expeditions personally to examine a whale in spite of its ‘abominable scent’ (p. 219), or his studies at home amidst the collected rarities seen by John Evelyn in 1671:

  [the] whole house & Garden [is] a Paradise & Cabinet of rarities, & that of the best collection, especially Medails, books, Plants, natural things… [and] amongst other curiosities, a collection of the Eggs of all the foule & birds he could procure.28

  Many besides Evelyn were equally impressed, witness the munificent eulogies like Robert Boyle’s commendation of Browne as a trustworthy naturalist.29

  But the naturalist who responded to the scientific spirit in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, was also the believer who had penned Religio Medici; nor were the two experiences, for Browne, mutually exclusive. We tend as a matter of course to sever the scientific mind from the religious, thinking it odd that Boyle was at once a scientist and a theologian, that Newton advanced to the forefront of science even as he laboured over commentaries on the Book of Revelation, or that in Kepler astronomy cohabited with astrology, and mathematics with superstitious mysticism. But perhaps we have not yet perceived that scientists unite what we sever, and bind what we sunder, ever conscious as they are that appearances must by definition cohere in a higher reality. So Kepler in Harmonices mundi (1619) had no sooner formulated the third law of planetary motion than he exploded in praise of the music of the spheres, even as his discovery of the geometric patterns of the supralunar regions was merged with a celebration of the Creator as ‘Geometriæ fons ipsissimus, et, ut PLATO scripsit, aternam exercens Geometriam’. The implications are clearly to be observed: as Einstein said, ‘without the belief in the inner harmony of the world, there could be no science’.30 For like reasons, I would submit, the earth-bound naturalist of Pseudodoxia Epidemica cannot be distinguished from the believer who in Religio Medici endorses the music of the spheres (p. 149) and in The Garden of Cyrus remarks at length on ‘how nature Geometrizeth, and observeth order in all things’ (p. 356). Style apart, Browne’s assumption is the assumption of Einstein: ‘God does not play dice with the world’.31

  But temperamentally incapable as Browne was to treat a grave subject gravely, the irrepressible humourist flashes across the philosopher in Pseudodoxia Epidemica as he did in Religio Medici. He approaches man’s boundless credulity not so much with censorious disapproval as with sympathetic understanding. The humour on such occasions is entirely good-natured, whether he examines the belief that the sun dances on Easter Day (p. 241), or ‘the other conceit that a Peacock is ashamed when he looks on his legges’ (p. 222). But where credulity leads to prejudice, and prejudice to injustice, it is another matter: thus, in arguing the implausibility that the Jews ‘stinck naturally’ (pp. 226 ff.), he remarks on their sheer numbers in order to conclude triumphantly: ‘could they be smelled out, would much advantage, not only the Church of Christ, but also the coffers of Princes’.

  In another respect, however, Pseudodoxia Epidemica responds to the very ‘vulgar errors’ it censures, especially the harmless popular beliefs now lovingly reiterated only to be dismi
ssed. Implicit at the core of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, in other words, is a sense of qualified despondency because fabulous yet enchanting beliefs – that the beaver when hunted bites off its testicles, that the lamprey is endowed with nine eyes, that man alone possesses an upright stature, and so on – all these must be sacrificed on the altar of demanding truth. But if Browne upholds through his rhythms what he must condemn through ‘sense and ocular Observation’, the final impression is of a tension arising not from divided loyalties as from calculated ambiguities – ambiguities not unlike those inherent in Spenser’s dissolution of the Bower of Bliss or Milton’s dismissal of the pagan deities in the Nativity Ode, Lycidas and Paradise Lost. Pseudodoxia Epidemica is a vastly learned contribution to scientific methodology; but it is articulated, all too consciously, in aesthetic terms.

  IV

  Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus were published jointly in 1658. Hydriotaphia – ‘Urn Buriall’ according to its alternative title – has withstood much praise articulated with extravagant rhetoric. John Addington Symonds, for instance, hailed Browne ‘as one who improvised solemn cathedral voluntaries upon the organ of our language in its period of cumbrous and scholastic pomp’. No less impenetrably, Charles Lamb praised Hydriotaphia thus:

  When I look at that obscure but gorgeous prose-composition… I seem to myself to look into a deep abyss, at the bottom of which are hid pearls and rich treasure; or it is like a stately labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation, and I would invoke the spirit of the author to lead me through it.

  Thomas De Quincey also multiplied Browne’s sentences to furnish this singular example of euphonious verbiage: