The Major Works (English Library)

by Sir Thomas Browne

  34. The next section (# 8) was not in UA.

  35. Matthew 24.11: ‘many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many’.

  36. The disciples of Arius, who denied the divinity of Christ.

  37. Temperamentally inclined.

  38. Organisation. Also used of the divine government of the world.

  39. i.e. medieval scholastic philosophy.

  40. ‘The inmost skin which incloseth the braine’ (Bullokar). Throughout this section, ‘mystery’ is used in its theological sense as ‘a truth beyond the reach of human reason but divinely revealed and hence a part of human knowledge’ (§260).

  41. Cf. Romans 11.33: ‘O the depth [in the Vulgate O altitudo] of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgements, and his ways past finding out!’ The verse is quoted by Bacon in The Advancement of Learning: ‘in divinity many things must be left abrupt, and concluded with this: O altitudo sapientiae et scientiae Dei!’ etc. (II, xxv, 13).

  42. Browne invariably deploys ‘recreation’ in its twofold meaning of creation anew, and of pleasure (§§31, 272). See above, p. 41.

  43. ‘It is certain because it is impossible’ (Of the Body of Christ, V).

  44. i.e. of the crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14.15 ff.).

  45. John 20.29.

  46. i.e. prefigurations of Christ in the Old Testament. Cf. below, p. 376, note 61.

  47. St Paul in Ephesians 6.16 (‘the shield of faith’).

  48. Browne consistently opposes ‘definition’ – a term suggesting limitations – to mysteries, metaphors, enigmas, and the like (§260). ‘Platonick’ is used not only in the sense of a generalised mystical abstraction; it suggests also Plato’s direct implication in the mysteries here recounted: ‘it is not improbable, he learned these and other mystical expressions in his Learned Observations of Ægypt’ (below, p. 378).

  49. The description of God as ‘a sphere whose centre is everywhere, and circumference nowhere’ (Browne marg., quoted in Latin) is a time-honoured commonplace frequently quoted during the Renaissance and certainly much favoured by Browne (§199; cf. §98). On Hermes Trismegistus see above, p. 30.

  50. ‘… that the soul is man’s angel and God’s body [according to Paracelsus], rather than entelechy [i.e. the essence of actual being, according to Aristotle’s On the Soul, 412a]; that Light is the shadow of God [according to Ficino], rather than actual transparency [as in On the Soul, 418b]…’ The statements demonstrate Browne’s distaste for definitions (see previous page, note 48).

  51. Circumlocution.

  52. Genesis 2.5 and 17.

  53. Genesis 3.14 (‘upon thy belly shalt thou go’) was occasionally said to imply that, before the Fall, the serpent went upright.

  54. ‘Maidenhood’ (Coleridge).

  55. Deuteronomy 22.13 ff.

  56. Genesis 3.16.

  57. ‘when I have retired to the colonnade or the couch, I do not neglect my true interests’ (adapted from Horace, Satires, I, iv, 133–4).

  58. i.e. time came into existence on the first day of creation, while man was made on the sixth.

  59. i.e. the awareness of God’s incomprehensible ways (as in Romans 11.33, above, p. 69, note 41).

  60. Exodus 3.14.

  61. Foreknowing. But some MSS. read ‘previous’.

  62. i.e. Heaven (cf. Luke 16.22).

  63. 2 Peter 3.8. On Browne’s partiality to the concept of the Eternal Present, see above, p. 29. The most important precedent is Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V, Prose IV et seq.

  64. In the sense of ‘instants’ (MSS.).

  65. i.e. of the visible world, and of the invisible. Aristotle maintains the world’s eternity in On the Heavens, I, 10–12.

  66. i.e. the vegetative, the sensitive, and the rational. The argument extends Aristole’s discussion in On the Soul, II, 3.

  67. Especially the number five (see The Garden of Cyrus, below, pp. 317 ff.). On the lore surrounding Pythagoras consult § 56.

  68. Cf. Colossians 2.8: ‘Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men’.

  69. ‘Shorthand’ (Coleridge). The metaphor – like the related allusions to letters, manuscripts, and books – is fundamental to the metaphoric structure of Religio Medici (§198).

  70. i.e. ladders and rungs.

  71. On this crucial generalisation – adapted from the ‘Smaragdine Table’ attributed to Hermes Trismegistus – see above, p. 31.

  72. The ten lines immediately following (through ‘… to know him’) were not in UA.

  73.1 Kings 3.9–10.

  74. ‘Know thyself’ (Browne marg., quoted in both Greek and Latin) was inscribed on the temple of the oracle at Delphi. Browne, like most of his contemporaries, habitually associates pagan deities with the devil: see below, pp. 253 ff.

  75. Exodus 33.23.

  76. Corrected from: ‘the impressions of divinity hee hath left on’ (MSS.).

  77. Holy of Holies (in the Vulgate’s version of Exodus 26.33–4): ‘The holiest place of the Jewes temple, where the Arke was kept, and whither none entred but the high Priest every yeere’ (Bullokar).

  78. Corrected from ‘onely’ (MSS.).

  79. The rest of this section was not in UA.

  80. The allusion is to the myth of Icarus whose wings melted on flying close to the sun. But equally relevant is the common pun sun/Son.

  81. ‘used for any winged insect, particularly a bee’ (§198).

  82. Matthew 7.21.

  83. i.e. material, formal, efficient, final (Aristotle, Physics, 198a 23 ff.).

  84. Chaos (as below, pp. 80–81), out of which the universe was created.

  85. Galen’s medical treatise, especially its paean to the wisdom of God (Book III, Ch. 10), was the first endeavour to relate medicine and religion. Similar efforts during the Renaissance included the treatises by Fernel (1548), Suarez (1597) – and of course Religio Medici (see § 254).

  86. The reference is probably to the treatise On the Heavens (§ 241). Browne regards Aristotle’s singular concern with the world of sense as paradigmatic of the failure to grasp the mystery at the heart of the created order (§ 260). See above, p. 34.

  87. ‘Nature does nothing in vain’ (Aristotle, On the Heavens, 271a; Generation of Animals, 744a36; etc.).

  88. ‘It was commonly held that small animals, such as flies and mice, were spontaneously generated by the action of the sun on decaying matter; and consequently these animals had not to be included in the six-days creation’ (M).

  89. Cf. Proverbs 6.6–8.

  90. Regiomontanus was said to have constructed an iron fly and a wooden eagle, alike capable of flight.

  91. Of man’s three ‘souls’ or faculties (above, p. 73, note 66), plants were thought to possess only one (the vegetative) and animals two (the vegetative and the sensitive).

  92. ‘The flood was widely held to occur on precisely the same date each year’ (R).

  93. Probably a reference to Church Fathers like Lactantius, who was said to have been born in Roman Africa, and St Augustine, who was Bishop of Hippo in the same (§198).

  94. ‘This is the true characteristic of Genius – our destiny & instinct is to unriddle the world, & he is the man of Genius who feels this instinct fresh and strong in his nature – who perceives the riddle & the mystery of all things even the commonest & needs no strange and out of the way Tales or Images to stimulate him into wonder & a deep Interest’ (Coleridge).

  95. The idea inclusive of the metaphor is a commonplace adapted to Browne’s purposes. Cf. Humphrey Sydenham in Natures Overthrow (1626), p. 2: ‘Man [is] the Epitome, and compendium of that huge tome, that great Manuscript and worke of nature, wherin are written the characters of Gods omnipotencie, and power’. See also below, note 97.

  96. i.e. when the sun ‘stood still in the midst of heaven’ (Joshua 10.13).

  97. Hieroglyphs, widely accepted as symbols of hidden moral and religious meanings (
§135), were thought to have been instituted by the legendary Hermes Trismegistus (above, p. 30). Metaphorically affirmed as here, they were considered to be ‘the understood language of the Almightie, whose Hieroglyphical Characters, are the unnumbred Starres, the Sunne, and Moone, written on these large volumes of the firmament: written also on the earth and the seas, by the letters of all those living creatures, and plants, which inhabit and reside therein’ (Ralegh, p. 86). Cf. Romans 1.19 f.: ‘The invisible things of [God]… are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made’.

  98. ‘All this is very fine Philosophy, & the best & most ingenious Defence of Revelation’ (Coleridge).

  99. Aristotle, Physics, II, 1.

  100. Exodus 15.25.

  101. A commonplace notion, based on the confluence of Plato (to whom the idea is attributed by Plutarch, Symposiacs, VIII, 2) and the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon 11.20 (‘thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight’). As William Bedwell noted in 1636, ‘Plato saith, That God doth alwayes worke by Geometry, that is, as the wiseman doth interpret it,… Dispose all things by measure, and number, and weight… Now who, I pray you, understandeth what these termes meane, but he which hath some meane skill in Geometry?’ (§69). See also below, pp. 343 ff.

  102. Corrected from ‘past with approbation’ (MSS.).

  103. So Dante in Of Monarchy (II, 2) speaks of artis divinae ‘which men generally call Nature’ (§ 187). But the claim encompasses in particular the traditional metaphor of God as a poet (§56).

  104. ‘a book of Astronomy (in use among such as erect figures to cast mens nativities) by which booke is shewen how all the Planets are placed, everie day and houre of the yeare’ (Bullokar).

  105. Literally ‘I kiss the hands’: a salute. The Spanish phrase anticipates the references first to the Gunpowder Plot reportedly encouraged by Spain, and next to the defeat of the Armada in 1588 (§198).

  106. The Biblical references are, seriatim: Genesis 22.13, Exodus 2.3 ff., and Genesis 37.2 ff. A Stoic would be converted had he realised that ‘fatall necessitie’ proceeds not from fate but from the ‘immutable Law’ of the divine will (below, p. 86).

  107. i.e. by means of the letter which, sent to Lord Monteagle, resulted in the discovery of the Plot. Cf. previous page, note 105.

  108. During Belshazzar’s feast (Daniel 5.5).

  109. The ‘successe’ is the independence gained by the Dutch from the Spanish in 1609. The saying of ‘the Grand Seignieur’ – i.e. the Ottoman emperor – may be apocryphal.

  110. Foreordained.

  111. The angels who were believed to move the celestial orbs.

  112. Spiral.

  113. Divination by casting lots.

  114. Cf. the proverb ‘Fortune favours fools’.

  115. ‘counting or reckoning’ (Blount).

  116. The chain suspended by Zeus from heaven (Iliad, VIII, 18 ff.) was frequently regarded as symbolic of God’s supervision of the creation’s unity. Cf. §§ 251–2.

  117. i.e. immediately apprehensible (§199).

  118. ‘accumulated argument’ (Coleridge).

  119. i.e. fortune and providence.

  120. i.e. the triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus.

  121. Corrected from ‘Reason’, an obvious error.

  122. The rest of this section was not in UA.

  123. The title of Paracelsus’s treatise on cures by means of amulets.

  124. Numbers 21.9.

  125. Leviticus 6.13 and 1 Kings 18.35–38.

  126. Genesis 19.24–28.

  127. In Jewish Antiquities, III, i, 6.

  128. Persuasive.

  129. In the sense that the gods are indifferent to human affairs (as reported by Diogenes Laertius, X, 139:1).

  130. i.e. the Socinians.

  131. ‘Moses, Christ, and Mahomet’ (MSS. marg., in M). The anonymous De tribus impostoribus – composed long after it was first rumoured to exist and rarely if ever seen – was said to be a notorious attack on the three figures named (see §1: App.).

  132. In The Qualities of the Mind depend on the Corporeal Temperament, III.

  133. ‘There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing. Death is indivisible, destructive to the body and unsparing of the soul… We die wholly, and no part of us remains’ (Browne marg., quoted in Latin). So Seneca in Troades, ll. 397, 401–2, 378–9.

  134. Whose works are largely uncritical compilations.

  135. i.e. to resemble Samson (Judges 14.5 ff.).

  136. So Bacon had in The Advancement of Learning proposed a ‘calendar of doubts and problems’ (§190) to which Browne responded, nominally, in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (see above, p. 35).

  137. The question was later taken up in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, IV, 5 (‘Of the right and left Hand’).

  138. i.e. rabbis, or Jewish authorities on law and doctrine generally.

  139. Further discussed in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, VI, 2 (‘Of mens Enquiries in what season or point of the Zodiack it [the world] began…’).

  140. ‘Browne is adopting Rabelais’s jibe at Tartaretus, who was a doctor of the Sorbonne notorious for his refinements on the subtleties of Duns Scotus’ (§196). The title of the reputed treatise involves (as a Latin dictionary tactfully reports) ‘to go to stool’.

  141. Corrected from ‘forcible’ (MSS.), no doubt because of St Augustine’s discussion of the matter in The City of God, XV, 27.

  142. St Augustine (ibid., XVI, 7).

  143. i.e. Europe, Asia, and Africa.

  144. Where Noah’s ark landed after the Flood (Genesis 8.4).

  145. Smooth over; as in ‘to salve (save) the phenomena’, i.e. resolve apparent contradictions.

  146. The Flood was believed to have occurred 1500 years after the creation, itself dated c. 4000 B.C. (see below, p. 439, note 31). The question is reconsidered, with other matters here discussed, in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (VI, 6; VII, 3, 6, and 11).

  147. The next few lines read (in P only) thus: ‘That Judas hanged himselfe, tis an absurdity, and an affirmative that is not expressed in the text, but quite contrarie to the words and their externall construction. With this paradoxe I remember I netled an angrie Jesuite who had that day let this fall in his sermon, who afterwards, upon a serious perusall of the text, confessed my opinion, and prooved a courteous friend to mee, a stranger, and noe enemy; These…’