When I came to writing this chapter, I had in my mind’s eye swathes of lofty exposition on Platonism and its heir Hermeticism; and I looked forward to it, and I was all the more sure because such good scholars have approached Browne with excellent histories of that philosophy. Only, the idea never left my mind’s eye. It’s not that Browne is not exactly a Platonist, nor that he talks of Stoicism quite as much, or is influenced equally by Aristotle, though all of these are true. It’s not that he knows his stuff well enough to attribute his Platonic ideas to Hermes Trismegistos, who is (above all) not Plato, and also (incidentally) a myth. No; but to my surprise, I found that, in writing an introduction to Browne, Platonism was almost irrelevant. It stocks his imagination – it is a source for many of his ideas – but it is not essential as background. His Christianity is more important, because his object is to discuss Christianity; Christianity is essential to the logic of his thoughts, but Platonism is simply the background to them. You will go completely wrong if you mistake the meaning of his faith, but you will get along tolerably well if you know nothing more of Plato than what Thomas Browne’s own comments make clear.
I would have discussed Puritanism and Arminianism too; and again, I would have been in good company. These are the two conflicting protestant parties that divided Browne’s England, and he seems to steer deliberately between them. Here too I found myself diverted to broader and simpler topics. The author of Religio Medici seems generally resolved to avoid direct comment upon the party struggles of his day, though many of his ideas have some bearing on the issue; and on the whole I found it necessary to respect his resolve. It goes without saying, scholars explain these matters of context precisely because he was consciously avoiding them; but for the same reason they skipped further and further down the list of my priorities until I realised that they were in the end beyond the scope of my work. For Browne succeeds: the book is still read to good effect by people who know little or nothing of the ancient Anglican divide between high church and low church. On the other hand, one does need to know something of the nature of Christianity to understand it; hence this chapter is not about Browne’s relation to the religious ideas of his age, but rather about his relation to the religious ideas he affiliates with. That comes first: the rest is a suitable sequel. For the sources of Browne’s philosophical and religious ideas I commend to you people who have handled them better than I am qualified to do. Meanwhile I have approached this introduction the way I have because I think it is the best way to start; though I could wish a better scholar and a better writer had undertaken the task.
So far I have discussed the opening pages of Religio Medici, which say things that must be understood before the rest of the book can be judged. If my approach differs in any way from better critics, it can be seen in the construction I place on these early pages. He says he is writing about Christianity; and I detect no irony in his voice. But now we move into the body of the work, which may be described as a rabbit’s warren of digression and distraction. Plenty of people have tried their hand at finding the secret structure of the whole, and plenty have given up in despair. For myself, I fancy that, with enough squinting, I can distinguish the diffuse outline of a very logical order framed within the broader masses of the three theological virtues, broken by only two or three major digressions – but I fear Thomas Browne might have been surprised to hear that. The book is full of the kinds of signposts that you find in a rambling conversation: they make sense in their context but they do not make sense of it, and they do not explain the trajectory of the whole. Religio Medici was made to be read, not studied: it is better discussed than analysed. What follows therefore is a summary that does not pretend to present the sum. It will be superficial, in this sense: that it is an attempt to present merely the major landmarks of the book. It is an attempt to give some idea of the contents of the book without getting tangled in the details – the contents of a book that lives in the details.
Ithas two halves. The second is about ‘that other virtue charity’. There are inferences you can draw from this. But the first part, whatever its actual or imagined agenda, is hung upon the inscrutable mystery of Deity, where Browne, who revels in the discovered mysteries of nature, finds his greatest delight. He tells us that he loves to ‘confound his understanding’ with meditations upon God; and to this end he has learnt many valuable lessons from the ancient philosophers and divines. It is only fitting to speak of God in superlatives. Even his mildness is unutterable. The physician writes fantastic paradoxes on these topics: old paradoxes, perplexing exclamations about eternity beyond time and the holy Trinity and the power of God. In all, and above all, about the simplicity of God, the simplicity of God that is more manifold than man. The physician revels in the sheer face of simple but incomprehensible concepts. There are no better words for his attitude than those words of his I have already quoted in part: ‘I know that (God) is wise in all, wonderful in what we conceive, but far more in what we comprehend not, for we behold him but asquint upon reflex and shadow.’
This part of the book is full of surprising twists and turns: not, like other sections of it, because Browne is a paradoxical person, but because he realises that God is paradoxical. Nor only in his nature: his actions too are full of mystery and obliquity. The physician disserts on chance, God’s secret way of working. Like his theology, his reflections on this submerged thread of Divine providence give him a strange joy, precisely because it is inaccessible. The same goes for the miracles and reversals of the Old Testament. In short, everything that belongs to the supremacy of God, whereby he is not only beyond our powers, but even beyond our understanding, exercises his fascination. He is too mature to be a mystic; but his God is mystical.
He is too grounded to be a mystic. He has that kind of reverence that restrains him from losing himself utterly in things that are too high for him. He will walk where he can tread safely, at least some of the time. He feels he ought to. There is a danger in reflecting too much on how God is beyond the reach of our human minds: the danger that we put our human minds beyond the reach of God. Browne expresses the conviction that God does not want to be worshiped in a wholly irrational way. So he steps down to pursue what can be known of God. He does not allow himself to forget God in his rational activities, and he studies God through his science, his ‘humble speculations’. This means that his science is primarily the study of a person, as I noted above; the laws of nature are God’s artistic cannons, which he is free to break, but on the whole chooses to keep, that ‘he may effect his obscurest designs’ in an ingenious and roundabout way. The world is the work of a virtuoso. That is why the scientist is as fascinated by ants as elephants: the sublimity, the majesty of nature do not touch him so much as its flare and artistry. Sublimity and majesty do move him, but in God, not nature. Nature is intricate; God is infinite. Thus even as his study of God through nature winds its way upstream it finds itself brought to a halt by an abrupt crag whence the river falls, and he cannot follow further: the first miracle, the act of creation, beyond which lie ‘the forelaid principles of God’s art,’ the mysterious patters and designs in the mind of God, that no man can scrutinise, except through their reflections.
Thus all creation is cast into sharp perspective by the mystery of divinity. It is the kind of lurid perspective that painters use to warp familiar objects into bizarre and foreign forms, to triangulate torsos, to throw limbs out of joint and all parts out of proportion. ‘Time we may comprehend, it is but five days elder than ourselves, and hat the same horoscope with the world’ – does he realise the audacity of this informality with the fabric of the universe? Even Scripture falls afoul of the immortal God – ‘St Peter speaks modestly’ – ‘St John’s description is too weak’. He soberly assures us – Browne the historian – that he as little respect for archaeology, God being the only real antiquity, and everything else modern by comparison. It is a strange lens he looks through! It has been said that he lacks historical perspective; the fact is that he has almost too much: when the background is eternity, all time has to crowd into the foreground. He estimates all things in history against his certainty that there will come a day when ‘all things confess their ashes’ to God: hence he – Browne the scholar – admits to a wish that all unnecessary books were banished or burnt as mere vanities. He is not wholly sure the invention of the press was a good thing, and he is not in complete sympathy with those still weeping over the loss of the library of Alexandria. History lies flat and prostrate before the infinite majesty of God: the past repeats itself, not even in an upward spiral, but in a simple circle: ideas come and go and return, in all essentials the same, while the truth remains unchanged. Let us be fair; this is probably what was meant by his lack of perspective. Only, he is quite right. Someone bent the trajectory a little after Browne’s time, and a steep and sudden burst of progress left us with the illusion that history has always been climbing at a rapid rate in some direction or another. Browne was far closer to the Spartans than to the Sputniks; he can be excused for sharing the wisdom of Solomon.
One reason it might be thought he lacks historical perspective is that he believes the ancient pagan gods were demons, and it is inferred that his historical judgements must have been deathly black and white. That they weren’t can be established quite easily; it can be seen in his astonishing way of referring to the precept attributed to the Apollo of Delphi, ‘know yourself’. He says, ‘I honour my profession and embrace the counsel even of the Devil himself; had he read such a lecture in Paradise as he did at Delphi, we had better known ourselves, nor had we stood in fear to know God.’ Perhaps he lacks historical perspective here, but only in a special sense – only in the sense that he fails to explain ancient occurrences in modern terms. He believes the principle ‘know thyself’ is a good one, so he cites it as such; he believes as the Greeks did that the oracle was supernatural, so he cites it as such.
This is not his only reference to demons. Were it not for his dizzying discursions into theology, Religio Medici might seem overwhelmingly dark, there is so much about demons and death. And these demons and proper evil spirits: they are dangerous, malevolent, and unruly. He tells us precisely what he believes they are and aren’t able to do; it is an appalling anatomy. They seduce people; there are witches, and witchcraft; and devils spoke to mortals through oracles until they were driven out by the advent of God’s kingdom. ‘The clouds of horror, fear, sorrow, despair’ are ‘the mists of hell,’ the devil makes attempts on the soul of Browne’s own self. There is one reassurance; that the Spirit of God exists too. And if hell is the force of despair, and Demons may carry it about with them, then heaven is the joy of the Lord, and all that is lively and jolly comes from it.
Death too fascinates the physician: death and the end of all things, death that shows the vanity of the world and makes us ashamed of our nature. Yet Browne is not afraid of death. He believes in the resurrection. The fact of mortality cuts two ways for him: it is a comfort as well as a humiliation. The twenty odd pages allotted directly to death are, to be sure, sombre: but, if the paradox may be permitted, they are not morbid. Death is of the two most purely spiritual acts in human life – the other, of course, is birth – and it is on the spiritual that Browne shows his talent to best advantage. His descriptions of the substance of angels are some of the most splendid things he wrote. They are mysterious without being meaningless – indeed, they are astonishingly lucid. This same quality he brings to his discussions of death: he even improves upon it. As a doctor, he has seen enough of the physical face of death; as a Christian and a philosopher, he feels its spiritual significance. Years later, he would write a whole tract on the topic of death, expanding and maturing the insights of Religio Medici, and death has never been more fully and subtly characterised as in this tract Urne Buriall.
These prodigies – death and doom, the rampages of demons, miracles and the mysterious twists of providence – are essential to Browne’s worldview and writing. They are at the back – or front – of Browne’s mind whenever he reasserts the structure and stability of the universe. For example: he talks about a ladder of creatures, ascending in perfect order and proportion from insects through man to God himself – but the inference he draws from this is that, to maintain the proportion, there must be some beings between the divine and the human, and these doubtless can wreak preternatural havoc or bring cataclysmic benefits on earth. Once again, he develops the idea in a tract of its own; this one too audacious for the taste of scholars or dilettantes: The Garden of Cyrus. It proclaims the geometry of nature, its neatness and consistency: but it displays all the while the riotous profusion of nature in plants and beasts and birds and constellations and symbols of all kinds. This is the same kind of logic as that behind his identification of chance with providence: it means that everything has a reason, but that only justifies the unpredictability of the world we live in. He keeps coming back to the idea that man is a microcosm – something equivalent to a snow-globe, with a little more sophistication. Man is an amphibian, spiritual and physical, and in both his physical and his spiritual nature he is a motely encyclopaedia of all things. The same explosive complexity writ large is the universe. When Browne compares the orderly architecture of the world to harmony and music in the ears of God, mark what kind of music he means: tavern music.
theparsnipoftime 