The wonder of it is that, being a man of his time, the humble physician can call it ‘uncharitable to fall upon those popular scurrilities and opprobrious scoffs at the Bishop of Rome,’ or say that, not forgetting the ‘general charity he owes to humanity,’ he rather pities than hates ‘Turks, infidels’ and (most maligned of all) ‘Jews.’ He does not think the virtue of orthodoxy overrides the virtue of charity – as if those two high gerents of heaven, Faith and Love, were at odds. He is not flexible in his convictions, but he is most firm on the principle of politeness. Like the great doctors of the church, he is first and foremost a doctor of virtue – and being English, we may translate that, for him, as doctor of decency. It seems to him uncivil to call the Pope the Antichrist, though he is confident in separating himself on the whole from the Pope’s church.
Browne is far from the only charitable spirit in his age, though this certainly does not mark him for the majority. There is a tendency now to praise his peaceable temperament and to say, where he did not take it further, that he was nevertheless far ahead of the standards of his time. And that is true. But something must be said of the standards of his time, if we are to understand the true import of his improvement on them. Even a scientific man of the age of Galileo is likely to be worlds away from us in worldview. The seventeenth century seems to us so modern that we forget that it is the direct heir of the sixteenth century, which seems to us so medieval. For all the previously unthinkable changes that had bent and broadened the world, the seventeenth century gentleman with his tophat and curled mustachios, his frock-coat and his Queen’s English, was mentally still dripping with the weeds of that barbaric age.
It was the time of the clearing of the temple: the wrath of God was now at last visiting itself on the crimes of Christendom. The sins of sinful popes cried out against them, and the degeneracy of popular superstition, imposed on the peasants as much from above as from within, had become so clear as to be decried by all who beheld it. There was, besides, buying and selling in the house of God: the buying and selling of salvation, the simony of prelates and the indulgences that were to become a lasting infamy. And as a result there was schism. This is the background of the Protestant Reformation; but it is also the background of most medieval theology. It was not the protestants who first despaired of the church, or started the vicious game of assigning popes to hell. The greatest Catholic poet of all times had several popes squished together in the inferno centuries before the reformation. Later the foremost Catholic – and anti-protestant – scholar of an age had another pope locked out of heaven: ‘bene est quod porta habemus adamantina,’ says St Peter in disgust, ‘It’s a good thing our doors are made of adamant.’ It was universally agreed that one might justly consign a Pope to hell if they had assigned themself to hell. It was hardly novel when the reformers started calling the pope the antichrist. Everyone agreed that the church had problems: everyone agreed that someone was to blame, and that whoever was guilty of disfiguring the face of God on earth was guilty of a grave and terrible sin. It is hard to argue. Where they disagreed was on the nature of the disfigurement, and who had done the most disfiguring. By the time the Protestants had established themselves and the Romanists had swept out the most outrageous officials in their hierarchy, there were two major camps. The radicals thought it was the conservatives, and the conservatives thought it was the radicals. The Catholics undoubtedly represented a system that had been very corrupt – whether they had mended it sufficiently was still in question. The Protestants were undoubtedly responsible for splintering the church, and whether they had been sufficiently justified was a matter of contention. The Protestants hated oppressive superstition with all the fury of today’s atheists, and the Catholics hated defiant and exclusive sectarianism with all the fury of today’s anti-discrimination lobbyists. The Catholics insisted that they had cleaned up their church, but the Protestants still spied strange stalagmite of stuff, which the Catholics called artistic and the Protestants called grotesque. Everyone believed in ‘one holy, catholic and apostolic church’, and the whole justification for the Protestant position was that the church that called itself ‘Catholic’ was neither holy nor apostolic. Otherwise – they knew it – they were guilty of tearing to pieces the robe of the Lord, dividing what God had made one. The only way to justify Protestantism was to claim that there was reason to protest. If it was not virulently anti-Romanist, it had better not have been born.
If one lights one’s living-room on fire, he does well to expect the rest of the house to join in. There is no use in restraining something whose very essence is to defy restraint. And it is unreasonable to ask Protestants not to protest. In those days it was not a virtue to be conciliatory on the matter of Luther’s schism. Everyone realised this and everyone agreed on it. It could not be a virtue; to play down the grievances would mean making light of the most sacred things in the world. No reasonable Catholic would ask a Protestant to suggest that the differences between them were not so large as to cause tension, though they would of course ask them to become a Catholic. No reasonable Protestant would ask a Catholic to say that the Protestant religion was not heretical – until, of course, the Catholic had repented of his own popish heresies. The matter was not helped by the fact that religious divides tended to coincide with political divides, and that the kings of the West took too active an interest in the religion of their subjects; unsurprisingly swords were had out on religious issues, as were stakes and torches. We might blame them for hating and killing each other for the sake of religion. I do not think we would be wrong to do so. It damages peoples souls. It is, in itself, cruel and irreligious. But they would have a very reasonable retort, and we do well to remember it. They would reply that throughout history, and every bit as much in our own day as in the past, people have done something, if not worse, at least more vile and reprehensible: they have hated and killed each other without reference to anything so important as religion, out of simple greed and malice.
These being the divisions within western Christendom, it is small wonder that the outer walls were manned by an equally ferocious hostility. The Muslim Turks made no secret of their ambition to kill the prince of Europe and heave their yoke upon the shoulders of the Christians, and the Jews remained obstinate that they had done well to kill Christ – and they hated Christians because they feared them. On all sides there was hatred because on all sides there was fear and danger.
But Sir Thomas Browne’s peaceability is not the peaceability of someone who has given up on fighting, or refuses to see the danger. The vigour of it springs from the fact that he has not; the fact that he is able to understand the concerns of his age more fully than we who do not live in it. The critics find what they call his ‘irenic temperament’ the most genial thing about him. They say that he has almost fully extricated himself from the bigoted assumptions of his age. He is, so to speak, a far better historian than them: so much better that he seems to have fully entered into the mindset of the seventeenth century. If he complains about the violence with which his own views are defended, it is not because, like his encomiasts, he has wavered in his faith or is disillusioned about religion. It is because he is a rational man.
Witness the very first paragraph. He assures us that he has given some consideration to the matter of his religion; he finds the Christian faith most worthy of acceptance, and is earnest enough on that count that he fervently wishes all others could attain the blessings of the same faith – he pities them if they do not. There is no sense in hating someone for a misfortune like that. And the Christian virtue of love forbids it. He would share their misfortune of unchristianity if he hated them for their unchristianity. How can one do less than love the unbelievers if one is a fervent believer? This is the first sally of Browne’s logic in Religio Medici. He expresses it with a simple solemnity, and it is clearly the work of a rational mind, but he hints by certain words like ‘zeal’ and ‘glory’ that this is not the reasoning of a cold and calculating mind.
In the same vein you will find that he sufficiently regrets the damage done by ‘the ambition and avarice of prelates’ to be a confirmed protestant, and that he quite recognises that the Pope considers him an heretic, but – the virtue of love still holds good – he considers it unchristian to curse the Pope in turn. He has no problem with worshiping in a Catholic church, because he finds nothing in his protestant convictions to suggest that Catholics, whatever their faults, worship the wrong God. Or again, he is ready to believe, with all protestants, that many Roman Catholic rituals are ‘dangerous to the common people’ – but to call all ritual ‘superstitious’ is misguided, because even those who are safe from any trace of superstitious belief may be – Browne is – brought into a deeper devotion by rituals. The physician does not need to resort to any stronger arguments, though they would be ready to hand. He does not say, as others have said, that the stars seem ritually inclined, and the seasons seems to have a liking for spectacle; he does not descant upon the practice of the early church, or assert the importance of tradition; in defending the practice of the Catholics, he makes no Catholic arguments. It is as a protestant that he approves of them. The logic of his lenience is the same logic that makes him reject the Roman Church in the first place: he rejects the Roman rituals because he believes they lead to superstition, and therefore he accepts them where he sees that they do not. All this – his attitude towards rituals, towards the Romanist Church, towards the Pope – is good sense. It is religious good sense. It is seventeenth century good sense, even though the seventeenth century generally lacked it: the kind of good sense that could only be had by someone who had not ceased to believe in pope and protestant and ritual and superstition alike. No one now praises the physician like this: ‘he was such a narrow fundamentalist that he loved even Catholics and Jews.’ No one pays tribute to him by saying, ‘he was so far beyond his generation in his devotion to the church that he would welcome all people, regardless of their religion.’ But really, that is the only accurate way to praise him.
theparsnipoftime 