I have argued just now against the view that the reflections in Religio Medici are ‘arranged in the haphazard order of rumination’. Yet the claim rather accurately describes not so much the consequence of Browne’s design as his actual intent. The thoughts flow freely, apparently disconnected, in a manner akin to the stream of consciousness technique of the modern novel; and so far, therefore, we may speak of Browne’s ‘series of impressions or associations, closer to the way in which mental experiences actually take place’.51 How consciously Browne pursued this effect can be gathered from the tintinnabulary echoes in Religio Medici which cumulatively intimate connections beyond logic. Thoughts which in one instance are expressed casually through a seemingly accidental phrase, are later reiterated with a backward glance to their first appearance. Thus the ‘definitive blast’ of the Divine Will in the passage quoted earlier (p. 28), is recalled in the subsequent assertion of ‘the blast of his mouth’ (below, p. 105); the hope that the narrator ‘may outlive a Jubilee’ or fifty years (p. 112), is eventually transferred to ‘the great Jubilee’ of universal history (p. 119); the hell within – ‘Lucifer keeps his court in my brest, Legion is revived in me’ (p. 125) – is echoed in the later statement of ‘that unruly regiment within me that will destroy me’ (p. 152); and so on. As with the details, so with the overall structure. Part I of Religio Medici is wedded to Part II in that they are alike structured in the light of the three cardinal virtues, the first part more concerned with faith and hope, and the second with charity, in a distinct echo of the similarly twofold divisions of formal theological treatises like Milton’s De doctrina christiana.52 It is clearly less than accurate to maintain that Religio Medici has ‘no clear sense of progression’, or that its second part is ‘an afterthought’.53
We are all, Browne asserts in Religio Medici, ‘naturally inclined unto Rhythme’ (p. 150). The generalisation, as so often in Browne, is ‘meerely Tropicall’, and should be accepted in ‘a soft and flexible sense’ (as above, p. 21). Applied to his prose, it suggests above all that its ‘ordered sequacious reflections’54 mirror a reality beyond appearances, the ultimate reality of cosmic order. In this sense Browne’s style may finally be described as sacramental in that its several units inclusive of words are sufficiently allusive, emblematic or ideographic to suggest the divine through the profane. The attitude is indebted in part to the Augustinian-Protestant view of a sacrament as signum visibile gratiae invisibilis, ‘the visible sign of an invisible grace’.55 But it was wholly transformed, for Browne, under the impact of the Neoplatonic concept of the Ideas of God which provided him with opportunities imaginatively to correlate words and The Word. Words as individual realities, and the form they are obliged to yield, are never accidental but determined – even predetermined – by the artist, exactly as The Word predetermined the shape and course of the created order. Moreover, just as The Word impressed variety upon the created order, so the artist introduces variable rhythms into his prose in order to reflect the infinite beauties of the visible world and, by extension, of the invisible. Language can of course mislead, and Browne often alerts us to its perils (e.g. p. 65). But his aim in prose, like Milton’s in poetry, was to discriminate between unaccommodated language which hovers on the brink of chaos, and language committed as visible sign to ‘ideated’ rhythm. The one partakes of the cacophonous sounds of chthonian behemoth, but the other aspires after the ultimate harmony imposed upon the sacramental universe by the archetypal composer.
VI
Browne’s reputation has never suffered any serious setbacks. While Donne was ostracised by the end of his century as Milton was at the outset of ours, and Herbert was annihilated by piety as Marvell was by nescience, Browne has remained a constant and vital presence. We have had occasion to quote the favourable judgements of Dr Johnson and Coleridge among others. But equally suggestive of the range of responses Browne elicits, is the reaction of Melville.
Melville’s enthusiasm on first reading Browne was immense. For a time, indeed, his imitation of Browne’s style bordered on ventriloquism; but in the end it was Browne’s thought that proved of vital importance, for he found in it elements which reflected predilections innate to himself. He admired Pseudodoxia Epidemica, for instance, because it merged the scientific and the transcendental by exploding ‘vulgar errors’ even as it ‘heartily hugged all the mysteries in the Pentateuch’ – i.e. the first five books of the Bible.56 Even more tellingly, Melville is said to have regarded Browne as a kind of ‘crack’d Archangel!’57 The remark argues an imaginatively eclectic reading of Browne, encompassing in particular an adaptation of the concept of the Eternal Present (‘The Divine Eye looks upon high and low differently from that of Man’ [above, p. 28]) to the demands of Moby Dick. This adaptation centres mainly on Melville’s interpretation of the chapter on the spermaceti whale which Browne added to the third edition of Pseudodoxia Epidemica (below, pp. 216–20). For us, I expect, the chapter testifies to Browne’s vast curiosity and his insistence of the primacy of experimental knowledge, ‘ocular Observation’. But for Melville the crucial factor was less the obvious difference in the sizes of diminutive man and the immense whale (‘this Leviathan’) than the striking contrast between the whale’s massive head and its limited vision: ‘that strange composure of the head, and hillock of flesh about it’, on the one hand; ‘the eyes but small’, on the other. The irony is of course writ large in Moby Dick,58 yet it may not have been intended by Browne who rather delighted constantly to shift our perspective for the reasons he suggests in Christian Morals:
Faces look uniformly unto our Eyes: How they appear unto some Animals of a more piercing or differing sight, who are able to discover the inequalities, rubbs, and hairiness of the Skin, is not without good doubt… If things were seen as they truly are, the beauty of bodies would be much abridged. (below, p. 443)
Here, of course, we are no longer in the world of Moby Dick: we are with Gulliver his travels. It need not surprise that so many diverse minds have responded to Browne; but it should, that many more have not.
Browne’s catholic appeal may be attributed largely to his invisibility, an attitude he adopted as if by anticipation of the counsel of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus that the artist should remain ‘within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’.59 This is not to say that we are not conscious of a definite personality in each of Browne’s works. Indeed we are; but that personality is by no means identical with Dr Browne of Norwich, witness his express reminder that he was ever ‘above Atlas his shoulders’ (as before, p. 22). The implied principle must have proved an awesome burden, for it meant the subordination of his personal tragedies to his artistic integrity, even such harrowing tragedies as the deaths of eight of his twelve children. It may well be that to be vexed by contraries, as Donne was, defines the human condition; but to experience those contraries and yet transcend them, is no less an accurate definition of that condition. Browne had seen the devil at high noon and averted his gaze because as an artist he trusted that the worst might return to laughter.
We protest because such a vision appears to negate reality. But where we might be obsessed with the problem of evil, and pain, Sir Thomas Browne explored with eager thought the equally complex problem of the existence of goodness, and joy. The diverse masks he assumes in his various works while playing ‘in one person many people’, confirm through their common protagonist the central role he allotted to ‘recreation’. So far, certainly, it could be said of Browne’s prose what Robert Frost claimed of the figure a poem makes: ‘it begins in delight and ends in wisdom’. The figure, Frost added, is the same as for love.
Facsimile of the title page of the 1643 edition of Religio Medici
Religio Medici
[Composed in the mid-1630s, Religio Medici – ‘The Religion of a Physician’ – was first published in an unauthorised edition in 1642 (hereinafter abbreviated as UA) and in an authorised one in 1643. See
also the discussion above, pp. 23 ff.; and for further bibliographical details: below, p. 551.
The editions of 1642 and 1643 have the same engraved title page, save that the authorised edition carries the additional statement ‘A true and full coppy…’ etc. The engraving shows a man falling headlong from a rock into the sea; but his fall is arrested by a hand issuing from the clouds, confirming the man’s exclamation à cælo salus (‘from heaven, salvation’). The engraver was William Marshall, who had already ventured the portraits for Donne’s Devotions (1643), Shakespeare’s Poems (1640), and Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1640), even as he later did the portraits of Milton for the Minor Poems (1645) and Charles I for the frontispiece of Eikon Basilike attributed to the executed monarch (1649).]
TO THE READER
Certainly that man were greedy of life, who should desire to live when all the world were at an end; and he must needs be very impatient, who would repine at death in the societie of all things that suffer under it. Had not almost every man suffered by the presse; or were not the tyranny thereof become universall; I had not wanted reason for complaint: but in times wherein I have lived to behold the highest perversion of that excellent invention;1 the name of his Majesty defamed, the honour of Parliament depraved, the writings of both depravedly, anticipatively, counterfeitly imprinted; complaints may seeme ridiculous in private persons, and men of my condition may be as incapable of affronts, as hopelesse of their reparations. And truly had not the duty I owe unto the importunitie of friends, and the allegeance I must ever acknowledge unto truth prevayled with me; the inactivities of my disposition might have made these sufferings continuall, and time that brings other things to light, should have satisfied me in the remedy of its oblivion. But because things evidently false are not onely printed, but many things of truth most falsly set forth; in this latter I could not but thinke my selfe engaged: for though we have no power to redresse the former, yet in the other the reparation being within our selves, I have at present represented unto the world a full and intended copy of that Peece which was most imperfectly and surreptitiously published before.2
This I confesse about seven yeares past, with some others of affinitie thereto,3 for my private exercise and satisfaction, I had at leisurable boures composed; which being communicated unto one, it became common unto many, and was by transcription successively corrupted untill it arrived in a most depraved copy at the presse. He that shall peruse that worke, and shall take notice of sundry particularities and personal/ expressions therein, will easily discerne the intention was not publik: and being a private exercise directed to my selfe, what is delivered therein was rather a memoriall unto me then an example or rule unto any other: and therefore if there bee any singularitie therein correspondent unto the private conceptions of any man, it doth not advantage them; or if dissentaneous4 thereunto, it no way overthrowes them. It was penned in such a place5 and with such disadvantage, that (I protest) from the first setting of pen unto paper, I had not the assistance of any good booke, whereby to promote my invention or relieve my memory; and therefore there might be many reall lapses therein, which others might take notice of, and more that I suspected my selfe. It was set downe many yeares past, and was the sense of my conceptions at that time, not an immutable law unto my advancing judgement at all times, and therefore there might be many things therein plausible unto my passed apprehension, which are not agreeable unto my present selfe. There are many things delivered Rhetorically, many expressions therein meerely Tropicall,6 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. Lastly all that is contained therein is in submission unto maturer discernments, and as I have declared7 shall no further father them then the best and learned judgements shall authorize them; under favour of which considerations I have made its secrecie publike and committed the truth thereof to every ingenuous Reader.
THOMAS BROWNE
RELIGIO MEDICI
THE FIRST PART
1. For my Religion, though there be severall circumstances that might perswade the world I have none at all, as the generall scandall of my profession,8 the naturall9 course of my studies, the indifferency10 of my behaviour, and discourse in matters of Religion, neither violently defending one, nor with that common ardour and contention opposing another; yet in despight hereof I dare, without usurpation, assume the honorable stile of a Christian: not that I meerely owe this title to the Font, my education, or Clime wherein I was borne, as being bred up either to confirme those principles my Parents instilled into my unwary understanding; or by a generall consent proceed in the Religion of my Countrey: But having, in my riper yeares, and confirmed judgement, seene and examined all, I finde my selfe obliged by the principles of Grace, and the law of mine owne reason, to embrace no other name but this; neither doth herein my zeale so farre make me forget the generall charitie I owe unto humanity, as rather to hate then pity Turkes, Infidels, and (what is worse) Jewes, rather contenting my selfe to enjoy that happy stile, then maligning those who refuse so glorious a title.
2. But because the name of a Christian is become too generall to expresse our faith, there being a Geography of Religions as well as Lands, and every Clime distinguished not onely by their lawes and limits, but circumscribed by their doctrines and rules of Faith; To be particular, I am of that reformed new-cast Religion, wherein I dislike nothing but the name,11 of the same belief our Saviour taught, the Apostles disseminated, the Fathers12 authorised, and the Martyrs confirmed; but by the sinister ends of Princes, the ambition & avarice of Prelates, and the fatall corruption of times, so decaied, impaired, and fallen from its native beauty, that it required the carefull and charitable hand of these times to restore it to its primitive integrity: Now the accidentall occasion whereon, the slender meanes whereby, the low and abject condition of the person by whom so good a worke was set on foot,13 which in our adversaries beget contempt and scorn, fills me with wonder, and is the very same objection the insolent Pagans first cast at Christ and his Disciples.14
3. Yet have I not so shaken hands with those desperate Resolutions,15 who had rather venture at large their decaied bottome, then bring her in to be new trim’d in the dock; who had rather promiscuously retaine all, then abridge any, and obstinately be what they are, then what they have beene, as to stand in diameter and swords point with them: we have reformed from them, not against them; for omitting those improperations16 and termes of scurrility betwixt us, which onely difference our affections, and not our cause, there is between us one common name and appellation, one faith, and necessary body of principles common to us both; and therefore I am not scrupulous to converse and live with them, to enter their Churches in defect of ours, and either pray with them, or for them: I could never perceive any rationall consequence from those many texts which prohibite the children of Israel to pollute themselves with the Temples of the Heathens; we being all Christians, and not divided by such detested impieties as might prophane our prayers, or the place wherein we make them; or that a resolved conscience may not adore her Creator any where, especially in places devoted to his service; where if their devotions offend him, mine may please him, if theirs prophane it, mine may hallow it; Holy water and Crucifix (dangerous to the common people) deceive not my judgement, nor abuse my devotion at all: I am, I confesse, naturally inclined to that, which misguided zeale termes superstition; my common conversation I do acknowledge austere, my behaviour full of rigour, sometimes not without morosity; yet at my devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions, which may expresse, or promote my invisible devotion. I should violate my owne arme rather then a Church, nor willingly deface17 the memory18 of Saint or Martyr. At the sight of a Crosse or Crucifix I can dispence with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my Saviour; I cannot laugh at but rather pity the fruitlesse journeys of Pilgrims, or contemne the miserable condition of Frier
s; for though misplaced in circumstance, there is something in it of devotion: I could never heare the Ave Marie Bell19 without an elevation, or thinke it a sufficient warrant, because they erred in one circumstance, for me to erre in all, that is in silence and dumbe contempt; whilst therefore they directed their devotions to her, I offered mine to God, and rectified the errours of their prayers by rightly ordering mine owne; At a solemne Procession I have wept abundantly, while my consorts, blinde with opposition and prejudice, have fallen into an accesse of scorne and laughter: There are questionlesse both in Greek, Roman, and African Churches, solemnities, and ceremonies, whereof the wiser zeales doe make a Christian use, and stand condemned by us; not as evill in themselves, but as allurements and baits of superstition to those vulgar heads that looke asquint on the face of truth, and those unstable judgements that cannot consist in the narrow point and centre of vertue without a reele or stagger to the circumference.
4. As there were many Reformers, so likewise many reformations; every Countrey proceeding in a particular way and Method, according as their nationall interest together with their constitution and clime inclined them, some angrily and with extremitie, others calmely, and with mediocrity, not rending, but easily dividing the community, and leaving an honest possibility of a reconciliation, which though peaceable Spirits doe desire, and may conceive that revolution of time, and the mercies of God may effect; yet that judgement that shall consider the present antipathies between the two extreames, their contrarieties in condition, affection and opinion, may with the same hopes expect an union in the poles of Heaven.
The Major Works (English Library) Page 5