In the nineteenth section of Religio Medici we find the physician in a striking pose. It is so ludicrous, yet so thoroughly representative, that we feel as though we might at last have found the secret double spring of his sanity and his insanity. He appears before us as an exhaustive scholar, an inexpert layman, a revolutionary of sorts, though a dogmatic conservative, an unyielding fideist and a prying sceptic, a spiritualist and a materialist, a kind of sober extravagance, a walking paradox. In short, he appears before us as an emblem of free thought: and it looks strangely narrow-minded.
This is the situation. He is ready to confirm that ‘religion’ is open to many doubts. With the simple savagery of a monk, he assures us that these doubts are the assaults of the Devil in hell against ‘the edifice of our faith’. Browne is a scholar; he is a deep historian and a scrupulous scientist: we believe him when he tells us that he knows these ‘sturdy doubts’ and ‘boisterous objections’ better than anyone. It must be a struggle to be so intelligent and yet so credulous. He tells us that he had to conquer his doubts ‘on his knees’ – no wonder. It’s the miracles he’s struggling with. Of course.
And then the nature of the doubts bursts out like a bolt from the blue – though the doctor sets about it simply, without the slightest sense of incongruity. The whole thing turns itself on its head and he doesn’t seem to notice. With some surprise we find ourselves in the book of Numbers. For it is the miracle of the bronze serpent in the wilderness, that the Israelites looked on and were healed, that he starts with. His Paracelsian science tells him that such things are not wholly impossible. What if it was just a natural phenomenon, and there was no miracle? Or, he says, take the manna in the wilderness – or Elijah’s altar, that burned with fire from heaven, though it was soused with water. He explains that, alas, they are not entirely beyond the bounds of reason either. And what if the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was natural too – was there perhaps ‘an asphaltic and bituminous nature in that lake before the fire of Gomorrah’? What if none of these were miracles? The Devil! Browne is in deeper than we thought. He doesn’t doubt the historicity of scripture for one moment. He steps out of his laboratory to declare, not that the miracles are too implausible, but that they are too cruelly plausible. It is too easy for whole cities to be engulfed in raging flames: it is too easy for food to fall from the sky. His doubts are not even of the nature of those that think that faith healings might be psychological rather than miraculous. No: he had to beg the Lord for faith that the most impossible miracles were really impossible. I suppose the Almighty has not had such prayers very often. ‘Thus the Devil played at chess with me’. Has he ever played such a game with such a man before or since?
It is Browne’s method to show his orthodoxy by making a clean slate of his unorthodoxy, just as here he shows his faith by confessing his doubts. Doubtless we get a great deal of enjoyment from the comic side of this. Thomas Browne is an eccentric. But he is a reasonable eccentric, and a very sharp eccentric, and it is easy to miss the breadth of his mind, the towering and almost tottering enlightenment he displays in passages like this. He has an astonishing clarity in his murky scholastic mind. When you can get amusement out of a philosopher, you have found something worthwhile, but when you can get amusement out of a good philosopher, you have found something worth a great deal more.
But what is broad-mindedness, and why do we approve of it? Mainly, I suppose, because we disapprove of narrow-mindedness. There is a slight injustice in this. A person might narrow their mind for a number of reasons, many of them quite sane. They might narrow their mind because they are trying to concentrate, or because they do not want to admit something into their head that will unbalance it. They might narrow their mind because they have stretched it and don’t want to break it. There is no point making pointless problems for oneself, after all. Broad-mindedness is like honesty: it is criminal to lack it when it is called for, but it can be dangerous to give it a long leash when it is uncalled for. I do not think we would much like someone who was resolved to think every thought imaginable.
But if we are fixed on appreciating thinkers, we might well pause to admire the open-mindedness of the physician. He is a Christian – an orthodox Anglican, bound by the rule of his creed. But he is not for that reason narrow-minded. A narrow-minded Christian would not rummage so deeply for problems in the Bible, nor would he confess them so candidly. He has an infinite unconcern about the idea of questioning his faith; he allows absolute himself liberty to scrutinise scripture, to catalogue implied or apparent inconsistencies, and to weigh up the pros and cons of heresies. He also gives himself the freedom to be ignorant, a liberty that the haughty few despise, but every sensible person respects: it is the one who always has an answer for everything that is narrow-minded, not the one whose general good sense extends to the point of admitting occasional uncertainty. True, the Christian faith rests on the correctness and consistency of scripture. But the Christian character rises to a capacity for acknowledging doubts about the details of that vast and varied book.
Freedom of mind shows itself in the ability to change an opinion, but someone whose opinions are constantly changing is not open-minded but unstable. We might charitably grant that they are free to enter and exit the narrow confines of the room, and that they give good evidence of it; but we would subjoin, apologetically, that they seem to be trapped in the narrower confines of a revolving door. For freedom of mind also shows itself in the ability to keep an opinion. When someone can rest their confidence in the superior rationality of their position, while regarding the rationality of other opinions, deliberately, without lowering their eyes, they may be said to be truly broad-minded. That is what makes the discussion of heresies in Religio Medici so splendid: Browne distinguishes himself with his ability to defend and excuse his own past opinions, even though he has long since cast them aside. This one had good motives, another was, after all, reasonable enough. His comments about heresy in the abstract are clear: he is resolved to rule himself by the church, even when it overrules his own idea of plausibility. (He has already told us that it was reason that led him into the church, so we need not fear the implications of this too much.) But he also thinks that every individual is free to form their own opinions: he does not blame himself for his former peculiarities, though neither does he trust his own mental faculties enough to maintain them against the witness of the church. The result? All sorts of philosophies live lively and lifelike in his mind, other than the one he actually holds.
This quality of the physician can be seen in another way. The axolotl of philosophy is the idea that freethinking means original thinking. It is an idea so unfounded and absurd that security is still being grilled for answers as to how it got in. It is a heavy chain that does not allow one near old and unoriginal ideas; when there are so many old ideas on the table, a philosopher might resent the insistence that he does not touch them. He might also starve. Now, the theological doctor’s meditations on God are very unoriginal – and very good. They show that he is a superlatively free thinker. He tells us that his favourite topic is a particular quality of God, his eternity. It is surely one of the most astonishing facts in history that people have, at various points in the past, had original thoughts about eternity. It is almost on a level with telling tall tales about short people, or taking a wrong turn that is a right turn: only it is more like making a square sphere or eating a green orange. There is nothing older than eternity, so it seems monstrous that people should be able to say anything new about it; it has always been the same, so it is almost too much to ask that they should say something different about it. So if we excuse his unoriginality as inevitable, we will readily grant that, if one has the freedom to think about eternity, one does have rather a lot of freedom.
By comparison atheism, and agnosticism when it is simply a bashful atheism, has a tiny amount of freedom. Its universe is too small. It cannot deny it: its point of pride is that it is so simple as to be almost simplistic. Atheism has no qualms in applying Occam’s razor to whole limbs of human thought, and the more limbs lopped, the less room for thought there is. As an historical fact, it did not add science to the human mind, but as an eternal fact it does subtract theology. There is no speculating about God and the beyond and the meaning of life, or indeed about eternity and the eternal, if such things do not exist – if the universe and life within it are simply the incidental bumblings of an absent-minded void, or the apathetic throwaways of a deity that we cannot know. Practically every philosopher in history has to be sent straight out the window, as fundamentally irrelevant to reality. In such a context, Plato is basically wrong, as was Aristotle, and Plotinus; certainly Aquinas, definitely Descartes and Locke and Leibniz and Spinoza. Only at the latter end of history do people start popping up who share enough of the secular worldview to say things of any value to the modern atheist or agnostic, and even they have to admit that their philosophy is largely an effort of the imagination. ‘Life has no meaning, so it must be made,’ ‘there is no God, so we have to invent him.’ The Christian finds in the old philosophers a great deal to disagree with; but the Christian does not think they are talking nonsense when they say that God is everything, or God is the Devil, or man is God, or man is an imprisoned ghost. The Christian thinks they are wrong: but he thinks they are talking about realities. Anyone of Browne’s stripe has a field of thought more expansive than an atheist can ever have: the atheist might be right in the end, and if so they are right to call the philosophers and the Christians deluded. But they cannot call them narrow.
This you will see if you turn to the passage where he says ‘I had as lief you tell me that anima est angelus hominis, est corpus Dei, etc.’ The old philosophers who said that ‘man is a thinking animal’ would doubtless have recognised that one could with equal justice define man as an unthinking animal. Ostriches and Ibises may not philosophise, but neither do they romanticise. No species makes such delicious nonsense as humanity. The maker of proboscis monkeys laughed in a way that proboscis monkeys never have, and he only let one species in on the joke. Further, it seems terrible to deny that our reason is much the richer for its access to unreason: we would beg the magmatic core of the earth to drink us in through its fissures, if we ever found ourselves faced with the prospect of constant and unmerciful rationality void of poetry. It is impossible not to concede the justice of Browne’s tastes when he says, ‘where I cannot satisfy my reason, I love to humour my fancy’. It is one of the healthiest comments a philosopher ever made. As a result, freedom of thought means, not just the freedom to follow reason, but freedom of fancy: it means a broad and brilliant imagination. And Browne’s imagination is remarkably free, in two respects. One is that it is so concrete: there are uncounted striking details in the world, and to have ready access to each is one the height of freedom. Every true poet is a scientist: to be a poet is to observe copiously. The other respect in which Browne’s imagination is liberal is the topic touched on above: that his universe is so broad. When he grows weary of the cold light of Aristotelian logic – he knows how to enjoy it in its place, for he says in a much-ridiculed passage, ‘nothing became something, and omniety informed nullity into an essence’ – he can contemplate such thoughts as that ‘soul’ is ‘a person’s angel’ and ‘God’s body’; or that light is God’s shadow. Elsewhere he tells us that nature is ‘the scripture of the heathen,’ and cries, ‘Lucifer keeps his court within my breast;’ these are spiritual metaphors, in which he reaches a height no naturalist can reach; nor is he trapped there, for he tells us that human nature is ‘an amphibian’, and takes ‘all flesh is grass’ to its literal extreme; he says we exist (when compared to God) ‘but by a distinction’, and talks of our faces bearing the ‘mottos’ of our personalities. These are earthly metaphors. To be able to draw images from heaven and hell and all in between – that is breadth. Where there are no religious concepts there is little poetry. It pines.
But since we have touched on Browne’s irrationality, we should discuss one respect in which Browne really does find his religion narrowing his mind. It has been said that Browne is an original character though he is not an original thinker. There is justice in this, if we make allowance for the validity of the physician’s own remark, that ‘every man is not only himself’ since ‘men are lived over again’. But he is unusual, and the orthodoxy of his beliefs restrains a rather wild character. He might well boast this way: ‘in philosophy, where truth seems double-faced, there is no man more paradoxical than myself, but in divinity I love to keep the road’. Not unnaturally, there is some tension as a result: and that is not bad, for a soul that is not in tension is a slack soul. We catch him complaining that it seems ‘there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith’.
He has several outlets for he somewhat thwarted absurdist tendencies; one is his ‘solitary recreation’ of ‘posing his apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with incarnation and resurrection.’ Another is contemplating the eternity of God. A third is his bizarre way of ferreting out problem passages in scripture, so that he can ‘believe a thing not only above, but contrary to reason, and against the argument of his proper senses.’ The philosopher in him is more ardent for faith per se than the fideist. If it is benighted to shy away from the thought of complete rationalism, it is the philosopher in him, not the Christian, that is benighted. But I do not think it is benighted to like the idea of faith. It is benighted to dislike the idea of reason, which no one can seriously accuse physician of doing. It is not that rationalism is not a sign of maturity, or that faith is not a sign of immaturity. More important is the fact that we are immature; we are in fact children in the universe. There are lizard tribes that are more mature than us, that have undoubtedly attained a greater maturity than us; but they do not seem to have attained the distinction of a thoroughgoing rationalism yet. If, as is the wont in our corner of history, we insist that humankind is no better than any other kind of animal, the logic holds: rationalism is not a sign of maturity. Even if you grant that the alien bipeds that style their hair and expend an intriguing amount of precious time preparing their provender (among other distinctions) do serve some slightly different purpose from the rest of the animal world, you might observe that they are – spite of their best efforts – every bit as feeble and dependant, subject to the tutelage of their elders and their betters, of such distinguished individuals as Lord Death and Dame Fortune, as well as Time, Space, Reality, Psychology, and a host of others that will insist on making their own rules and are perpetually trying petulant experiments on us the individuals of the human race. If, in this context, we are such infants as to be subject to doubts, ignorance, hopes and fears, desires and tastes and preferences and regrets, there is no reason why we should not prize these things as virtues in their proper places; and there is no reason why we should not also prize faith in its proper place, and to allow that it is not at all vulgar to do what we are all constantly doing anyway, and ‘believe a thing not only above, but contrary to reason.’ Meanwhile Browne is narrow enough to acknowledge the restraints religion imposes on his paradoxical tendencies, and free enough to indulge them very variously within those limits.
‘Within those limits’: that is to say, the strait confines of a universe bordering on the infinite at one end and the eternal at the other, a universe inexhaustibly complex in its physical dimensions, while the physical dimensions are themselves a mere shadow of the boundless spiritual edifice that rests above it, the hosts of heaven and hell, the principalities and forces and natures and qualities; open to endless speculation and full of infinite suggestion, because it is all the careful craft of the wisdom of the Immortal Mystery; who, though a mystery, has himself been so plentifully revealed that a lifetime would not suffice to know all that may be known. This author has not erred in his intent. It is not at all impossible to reconcile free thinking and faith. Orthodoxy does not make people close-minded. It is more likely to give them vertigo.
theparsnipoftime 