Humour me a little history as I begin to conclude. This whole extended essay on that English knight, Thomas Browne, has been about history, and remarkably few historical facts have been mentioned. I have written at length about modernity in the abstract, an abstract I would not venture to assert exists, though I am certain many think it does, which is why it is so important; and I have hinted at antiquity, though no writer can summarise antiquity, for antiquity is everything, as everything is ancient. But now it is time to mention a few facts of biography, in the interests of reiterating my point, that Sir Thomas Browne was modern, but not too modern. I grant, I even maintain, that ‘biography’ is the part of a famous person that is irrelevant to them as a famous person. It is not what makes, say, Churchill great, but what makes him like someone who might not have been great, that makes up his biography. The following facts of biography, however, are more irrelevant to the honourable subject than most biographical facts are; it is not only not about Browne when he was being a great author, it is about Browne when he was scarcely even being Browne: when he was instead being born. For around the time when he was making his first infantile acquaintance with such scientific curiosities as the taste of his fingers and the sound that air makes when rapidly expulsed from the lungs, a number of oddly representative events were occurring in England. They gather like a zodiac above the Jacobean age; they serve as an omen on earth, as if Thomas Browne was born in the ascendant influence of this terrestrial constellation. They seem to box in the contents of the age. They events are the kind of thing we generally take, rightly or wrongly, for the making of modernity.
At this time Merry England was in a fervour of activity. Here sad Lear first trod the boards, and said such things as never a man has since said so well. There the papists were packing gunpowder in under parliament, and the crowned head of England tottered above, and the whole protestant church with him. In another part the presses rolled off the great manifesto of the great revolution, a pamphlet called The Advancement of Learning.
A better historian than myself might give his learned comment on all these events; to us who stand in the dark only the shadows of their significance can be divined. That Shakespeare should be at his apogee when Browne was born – and, mind you, Milton, three years later – is typical of the paradox of time: what is youngest is always oldest, the youth of the world is now many thousands of years old. And in fact, Shakespeare represents that youthful quality that burst from English soil in the age of Elizabeth, carrying with it all that went before, the Greek and the Roman and the Romantic, the last efflorescence of the middle ages, and then was seen no more. King Lear is a strange and fitting representative. It is the most hopeless of Shakespeare’s plays, darker even than Hamlet or Macbeth; for they are acted against the blood-red backdrop of a ghastly sunset, but before King Lear has started, the moonless night has already set in. Lear opens the play with his plans to ‘creep unburthened to the grave.’ All that is spiritual, all the makings of meaning, are cruelly purged from the play. For all that, it is in the end a fairytale: what we have here is the moral epyllion of ‘The King and his Three Daughters.’ And it is Elizabethan, lyrical and fluent, full of funereal foolery and theatrical flourishes. King Lear is not the Shakespeare’s modern end, the trembling realism he fell into in his sager years. It was written before, not after, the extravaganza of The Tempest. It is not a sign that the Elizabethan age was waning, or ripening, or over; it is rather a display of how deep the Elizabethan mode could cut.
But this was not to last. The Elizabethan age ended with Shakespeare, and in a sense all that Marlowe and Chapman, Daniel and Drayton, Sidney and Spenser were is carried into exile of the shoulders of the agèd king Lear. The spirit of romance, that had clung at last to Spenser and Mallory – Roland and the Paladins of Charlemagne, chivalry and dragons and crusades – all of these were on their way out. Though much more, the Elizabethan age is the last flowering of medieval merriment, and the last fruiting of medieval ignorance. They would return; but the Romantics and Preraphaelites were still a long way off, and not the same. For now it was to be the pulleys and levers of the metaphysicals, the seriocomic satires of the restoration, the drawing-room dramas of the regency – good literature, but not romances. Henceforth literature is modern; and only self-conscious revolutionaries can make it romantic. Within a few decades of King Lear the fact would be sealed and stamped, that Shakespeare was unquestionably of an age. For all time, maybe; but not from just any time. Shakespeare is an Elizabethan; in the seventeenth century, Shakespeare is a survival.
But Bacon is a prophet. Not long before or after the staging of King Lear, he published his best book, The Advancement of Learning. The idea, a defence of the profit to be had from learning, is not original; but it is thorough, and it was written at a perfect juncture in time, and for that it is remembered. Learning advanced. A good many of the common prejudices against the choices of Solomon that he dismembers in it are now of an unfamiliar vintage; which is as good as to say, he succeeded. But the time was yet to come when the universities would advance science, and the populace would embrace it; the poets still cried in dismay,
‘And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.’
New learning stills struck fear: ‘’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;’ Pope’s exultation is still some way off – ‘God said, Let Newton be, and all was light.’
Let us leave the literati, and turn to the sober politicians. They are, as usual, neatly divided into parties, and operating (in this case quite literally) at different levels. Up above, we have the new king and his parliament – he, a Scotsmen, they, not yet fully apprised of their significance; their policy is Protestant England, and the peace and prosperity of the realm. Down below, we have the Catholics with a quantity of gunpowder, doing exactly what one does with a quantity of gunpowder; their policy is Catholic England, and the peace and prosperity of the realm. As is usual, chance and treachery carried the election, and on this occasion the Catholics fell afoul of it, the King escaped unharmed, the Catholics felt his wrath. The moral? Politics was then, as it had always been and is still today, an incendiary thing. The peace of the realm is pendent on the precarious survival, and equally precarious benignity, of those in power. On the narrower stage of the seventeenth century, though, conspiracy carries with it an irony too. For though the Papists failed to kill the king for being too much a Protestant, the Protestants soon succeeded in killing the king for being too much a Papist. But that was decades later, around the time that Browne was publishing (somewhat against his will) his little self-portrait. That would be a proper revolution, a civil war and a government overthrown: it would be all that the conspirators off 1605 had wished for, but in a far different cause.
Each of these events – the play, the plot, and the publication – suggests something of the age. Shakespeare represents something that was on its way out, Bacon represents something that was on its way in, and the gunpowder plot represents something that is common to all ages. They set Browne not quite in, but on the cusp of the world we live in today. Let these events stand for the background against which Browne placed himself; they are nearly comprehensive, but they miss something, and he himself is captured by none of them. If the decline of romance and the rise of science, with all the political turmoil that accompanied them, make up modernity as Browne knew it, then he is not quite modern. If he is not behind his time he is ahead of it.
How modern he is of course matters very little, and we are probably still too modern ourselves to judge whether he was ahead of or behind modernity. What matters is how he stands in relation to certain conceptions of modernity, and what he makes of them. This is how we always judge historical characters: not by how they relate to history, but by how they receive the ideas and ideals of their corner of history. In a similar way, it hardly matters how Roman Caesar was, or even what he thought of Rome; what matters is what he thought of the Roman idea of Rome. He doubtless understood as well as we that Rome was a complicated reality, but he had opinions on the Roman idea that Rome was a republic, and it was these opinions that made him Caesar, and these opinions that had him ushered offstage. Sir Thomas Browne likewise knew a thing or two about the modern world, and knew enough to know that the modern world was much more than a thing or two. But he knew there were certain ideals and generalisations regarding what it means to be modern – for instance that romance was dying and science was taking its place, and that Papists and Puritans had a spiritual urge to extrapolate each other materially with a theology of gunpowder. It is his opinions on these ideals and reactions to these generalisations that interest us most.
More particularly, he had opinions on the ideal of the modern intellect. I speak of it as an ‘ideal:’ as I have observed above, it was in his day not considered ideal. At that time, modernity was really new – nowadays there is nothing so worm-eaten and fusty as modernity – new enough to be viewed with hostility. But the picture is the same, if the colours are different: the sceptical scientist, the agnostic empiricist, accompanied by reason far out of earshot of anything mysterious or inexplicable, far beyond the reach of mysticism (which he despises) or religion (which he has no need for). This hypothetical figure, which some had supposed to be a sketch of Browne himself, is the antagonist in Religio Medici. It is Browne’s projected self, the Thomas he is trying to dispel from the minds of his friends: doubting Thomas, to borrow the name that has unfortunately attached itself to trusting Thomas, who doubted indeed, but took up faith when he saw and believed. But some that had seen that Browne was ‘modern’ in some respects had assumed he must be ‘modern’ in all respects; and as they knew him for a scientist, they had picked him for a sceptic.
That this kind of assumption is still common today is reason enough for us to find Browne’s response interesting. On that ground alone it is genuinely worth considering. There is also another, and a better ground. Perhaps – if we are for a moment unduly cynical about the capacity of our kind – perhaps no one has ever really reached this pitch of prosaic enlightenment. Never mind; the idea is good enough to consider, even if just as a myth. It is an extravagant extrapolation of rationalism, and an extravagant extrapolation is always worth considering. That is what it means to philosophise.
Certainly, it is a just charge against that philosophy, that it deals in unrealistic and even irrelevant abstractions. I am willing to concede that, but I am forced to confess it does not bother me. All that is poetic in philosophy springs form its cavalier attitude towards plausibility. It might be dull to debate for hours whether we ought to doubt the freshness of a loaf of bread, when a bite could resolve the issue instantaneously; but it is not dull to debate for hours whether we should or can doubt everything. The loaf of bread may be real, the idea of an uninhibited doubter impossible, but that does not matter. Indeed, the sense of freedom, the real discovery to be had in the exploration of imaginary worlds adds to the excitement. And at the end of the day, the debate on doubt is likely to have a more lasting impact on my character than the debate on the bread. Still, that discussion won’t be worth a groat if I am fully out of sympathy with the doubter, any more than if I were fully decided that the doubter must never be doubted. There has to be a real question; even if both options are bad, there must be no easy and obvious way out. In this regard we profit from one great similarity between the seventeenth century and our own century: that to us as to Browne’s contemporaries, the idea of enlightenment – in the sense of a purely scientific worldview – seems as though it could be necessary, yet it is not wholly satisfactory. More of them inclined to reject it, more of us incline to accept it, but all of us are capable of questioning and qualifying even our own extreme. Whether or not each of us thinks they have found a happy medium, we can feel the tension, and therefore find some interest in the way this antique knight resolves the difficulty. This dispute provides the argument of Religio Medici. And, if only incidentally, it is the omnipresent theme of his scientific works. Just as important as what he says in relation to the elusive enlightened modern, is what he is in relation to it. He practice as much as his preaching is what wins him readers. Hence I have taken it as the theme of this introduction: in the first chapter I have attempted to give some indication of his approach to science, and in the second I have attempted to give some indication of his attitude towards scepticism.
One of the most significant implications of his personality that we have had occasion to reflect on his the he makes proper agnostic or atheistic scepticism unnecessary. The myth for him was in most respects the same as it is for us: the enlightened man, following a career in science, not too vociferous on moral matters, tolerant and open minded, cool and collected, and decisively dissociated from anything religious. But Browne, while emphatically claiming for himself a dogmatic, primitive Galilean religion, is all these things, not in spite of, but because of, his refusal to be a sceptic. He is so successful that he puts sells scepticism off the market. He is a scientist, because he thinks he owes that to God. He is enlightened, because in God there is no darkness. He is not cantankerous or bigoted, because he believes that would be a breach of Christian ethics. He is open minded, because his faith opens his mind. In short, when we ‘see and examine all,’ we find that he is ‘obliged to the principles of grace,’ for everything for which a sceptic feels he is obliged to his scepticism.
Browne’s ideological successes do not answer whatever philosophical questions the idea of cold enlightenment poses. After all, offering solutions to questions is not the same as definitively answering them. It does suggest something about the myth, though, even for those who are not willing to follow Browne along his path. It is a perfect picture of the crime of scepticism: the old spiritual crime of simony. Scepticism seeks to purchase the offices of God with material wealth. While the physician can find reason for his values in his Christianity, the sceptics, doubting everything relating to values and the metaphysical, still confidently expects to find them, though they leave themselves nowhere to find them. Rejecting out of hand everything that is spiritual is hardly the way to establish things so spiritual as the value of universal tolerance or intellectual honesty. An extreme scepticism might create a kind of makeshift, a sincere apathy, and that would serve well enough, since apathy doubtless makes one very tolerant and removes every motive for deception. But it also removes every motive for insisting that others should be apathetic. An real apathetic sceptic is so tolerant that they are ready to tolerate intolerance: it simply does not matter to them.
The idea that scientific enlightenment produced modern ethics is absurd; if anything, scientific enlightenment produced only modern existentialism. The attempt to derive ethical principles from scientific principles is a kind of alchemy that makes the old alchemists look childish. They thought, not without justice, that under the right conditions, it was possible to turn one metal into another, a fact that succeeding centuries has confirmed. The ideal enlightened modern would have us believe that, given sufficient data, it is possible to transform any or all metals (and whatever else remains to bulk out the periodic table) into the most spiritual of all substances, morality. And morality has not increased. Thus the failing centuries have proven that either this is not possible, or not enough enlightened people are interested in doing so.
Browne, like most scientific men of his generation, cannot be wholly acquitted of the charge of material alchemy, but he never attempted an alchemy like that. He did go this far, however: if not to transmute matter into morality, at least to find his morality confirmed and instructed by science. ‘What smattering I have of the philosopher’s stone,’ he says, referring to science, ‘has taught me a great deal of divinity.’ And he is right enough. If you have a religion, science might inform it; if you have none, science cannot create it. If you have a religion, it makes sense to call science ‘the philosopher’s stone,’ for it is a ladder whose end is in Heaven; but if there is no Heaven for if to end in, it is something like ideological witchery to try to make it that.
Now the whole history of the modern mindset lies in a little unfortunate fumbling about that issue of science and the philosopher’s stone. It can be half seen in Browne’s ‘sceptic,’ but at that time it had not yet fully run its course. What happened was not simple that philosophy became a science, and people stopped believing things they couldn’t scientifically prove. That is what they thought happened; that is what the great enlightenment thinkers thought they were doing; but it has not happened yet. People still believe plenty of things they cannot prove, and a good argument could be made that there is as yet no such thing as scientific philosophy. The truly important fact is that science ceased to be philosophy before philosophy started to become scientific. People stopped thinking like Thomas Browne before they started thinking like Richard Dawkins. They stopped thinking like Pascal and Bacon and Newton and Descartes, who are all largely at one with Browne in their worldviews, before they started thinking how we moderns think all scientists should think. They took God out of science before they subjected God to the ruthless razor of science. What the world would look like today if the order of events had been reversed, I do not know. Perhaps that would not have been possible. Certainly, though, there is a modern tendency to try to treat science as if it were a philosophy, a worldview, and jars against another tendency, the modern tradition of treating philosophy as if it had to be a science, and no irrational leaps must be made. For science to be a worldview there must be a kind of godlessness of the gaps, those colossal leaps of inference that rest on nothing and underprop the secular worldview; and that is wholly at odds with the idea that philosophy must operate with scientific rationality. Something needs to change, we feel; the postmodern solution is to treat philosophy unscientifically, and believe what you will; but I’ll wager it’s safer to treat science philosophically, as I think the Jacobean physician does.
What stops us is too great a respect for history. Not, mind you, too great a respect for science: most modern people probably don’t respect science enough. But history we trust unstintingly. Conveniently, this can be measured by a simple barometric scale: our attitude towards history majors. We are so far beyond the point of respecting them that we disrespect them. So prodigious is our reverence for history that it has been generally decided that an Arts degree is a waste of time. For we are not satisfied with the imperfect revelations of history books, or the squabbles of the history school; we would rather set up a shrine for history’s magnum opus, the Present, and take it for the infallible word of God. Whether or not we like the past, we trust it; we admire and revere the productions of history so much that it hardly seems right to question whether history went the right way when it reached the present; we have terms for those heretics who believe we would be better off in the past, or in an alternate universe. We call them escapists, and their heresy wishful thinking. What history has done must be accepted; what it has undone must never be revived. ‘Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it,’ we say: heaven forfend we should so far disrespect the progress history of history as to repeat the past! So infectious is this cult of history that it is endemic even within the history school itself, where it takes the form of a strange apothegm I have heard now many times: that the chief value of history as a study is to show us how we got to be where we are today. That is, history’s final word is the pinnacle; it is the most worthy part of the past.
The great thing is to have a healthy suspicion of ‘history,’ but to admire what is admirable within history. We should study the past because there are lot of good things that bumbling and blustering history has stamped out or mangled or sidelined as it went. The instance we have in hand is the philosophy of a renaissance doctor. If I dote on history I must quench my admiration for his way of thinking, with the cold reality that time has moved on; if I, like a good student of the arts, am haughty enough to question history, I might resolve to learn a thing or two from him. I won’t – I can’t – agree with everything he says, for two reasons: the first, and less important, that a great deal has been said and done between Browne’s day and my own; the main reason, that I seldom agree wholly and unqualifiedly with anyone on everything. But I can at least go so far as to suggest that the solution to a decadent and declining culture is not necessarily the invention of a new culture, but may be the revival of an old one. And the solution to a fractured or stale worldview is not necessarily the invention of a new worldview, but may well be the restoration of those that have for the moment fallen afoul of the petulance of history. Let us not be so simple as to suppose history has never taken a wrong turn.
As regards Sir Thomas Browne, this is the whole substance of my argument: that he is not just a clever writer, or a notable eccentric, that his philosophy really is quite deep, deep enough that four hundred years have not submerged it. Its particulars are too many to discuss; I have confined myself to describing and characterising a few of them, with the sympathy that any candid reader of any decent book ought to strive for. For his philosophy taken collectively is as cogent as any on the market. Like any philosophy, if it is not correct, it is a simple matter of gargantuan delusion; but should that be the case, those who go insane with him, their heads full of Christianity and nobility and charity and science, have certainly not gone too far wrong. They are like another knight of Browne’s day, whose birth may stand as the fourth great event that closes the box of 1605, whose birth coincided with Browne’s. For the year that brought this ingenious gentleman of England into the world, to pursue the gallant career of a medicus, also brought forth, to the gallant career of chivalry, the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha.
theparsnipoftime 