The Major Works (English Library) (3 page)

be is a quiet and sublime Enthusiast with a strong tinge of the Fantast, the Humorist constantly mingling with & flashing across the Philosopher, as the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye. In short, be has brains in his Head, which is all the more interesting for a
little Twist
in the Brains
.

Coleridge

I

I
T
was a remarkably uneventful life. Even the knighthood was gained by default: for when Charles II on his visit to Norwich in 1671 decided with his usual magnanimity to bestow a knighthood on the city’s mayor, the latter declined, Browne was proposed as a substitute, and found himself a knight. Yet half-way to that unlikely episode, Browne had already described his life as ‘a miracle of thirty yeares’ – a claim dismissed by one critic as a ‘typically grandiose assertion’.
¹

But it may be that we have misread the ‘miracle of thirty yeares’ as a statement of fact when it was intended in the way Browne expressly delineates in the preface to
Religio Medici
:

Within
Religio Medici
the principle is reiterated in accordance with the time-honoured theory that God has in the Bible ‘so far tempered the language of his utterance as to enable the weakness
of our nature to grasp and understand it’.
²
In Browne’s words,

This approach is by no means characteristic of every sentence penned by Browne. But to the extent that it is present in
Religio Medici
in the first instance, it encompasses several implications of fundamental importance. It suggests capitally that it is an error readily to identify the narrative voice of
Religio Medici
with its author, in that the thoughts and experiences recounted are drawn less from any palpable ‘fact’ than from the equally palpable life of Browne’s imagination. In consequence, to eschew the ‘soft and flexible sense’ might lead us – as it has led us – to decline into reflections in diametric opposition to Browne’s actual intent.

The palpable life of Browne’s imagination, I am suggesting, deserves the same response we are habitually prepared to extend to Marvell. Like Marvell, Browne refuses to be contained within the narrow circumference we impose on him, ‘the Humorist constantly mingling with & flashing across the Philosopher’ as Coleridge sagely observed. The infinite undulations of Browne’s fertile mind dictate conclusions beyond mere appearances, calling attention to issues further afield. As he himself reminds us, ‘Men that look upon my outside perusing only my condition, and fortunes, do erre in my altitude; for I am above
Atlas
his shoulders’ (below, p. 153). To ascend to Browne’s level is to sympathise with that over-enthusiastic nineteenth-century critic who described him, with understandable hyperbole, as ‘our most imaginative mind since Shakespeare’.
³

II

Religio Medici
– ‘The Religion of a Physician’ – was composed in the mid-1630s, and circulated for a time in several manuscripts before the publisher Andrew Crooke issued it in 1642 without Browne’s permission. Less than distressed, Browne revised the clandestine edition and offered it to the same Crooke. Coincidentally, however, the unauthorised edition had been thrust upon Sir Kenelm Digby, ‘the most accomplished cavalier of his time’ according to Aubrey but (in Evelyn’s judgement) ‘an arrant mountebank’. Digby’s hasty and rather pompous
Observations upon ‘Religio Medici’
helped, initially at least, to advertise the original work. But
Religio Medici
soon commanded respect for its own sake, best evident in the array of imitations extending from
Religio Laici
– Dryden’s poem as well as a treatise by Lord Herbert of Cherbury – to improbable works like
Religio Stoici, Religio Jurisprudentis
, and even
Religio Bibliopolæ
! (
BTB
, pp. 234 ff.). The favourable responses were indeed legion. They range from Aubrey’s brief but eloquent remark (‘Religio Medici… first opened my understanding’) to the touching tribute of a Yorkshire poet in these thumping verses:

But wonder and delight were, in some instances, rather limited. Oddly enough, Browne was even accused of being an ‘atheist’ – a term that in his time comprehended sceptics, agnostics, deists, and materialists.
⁵
Suspect among Catholics, at any rate,
Religio Medici
was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books three years
after its publication; and equally suspect among extreme Protestants, it elicited an attack by a militant guardian of orthodoxy, Alexander Ross, whose tirades were hurled not only against Browne (‘this may be indeed
religio Medici
, the religion of the House of
Medicis
, not of the Church of
England
’) but against Bacon, Hobbes, and all the disciples of Copernicus.

Browne’s response to Ross marks his difference from the approach of, say, Milton. Where Milton would have trampled Ross underfoot with iron sarcasm, Browne conducted himself in line with his disarming confession in
Religio Medici
that ‘I have no Genius to disputes in Religion’ (p. 65). Tolerant of the intolerant, he was like the Cambridge Platonists among the least contentious spirits in an age of violent strife, and among the least dogmatic in an age of aggressive and factious doctrine. Irenic by nature, he looked askance upon the claims of his contemporaries whose multiplied divisions seemed to him to undermine the Christian faith:

True,
Religio Medici
gives the impression that its author was so detached from the upheavals of his age as to display less a disinterest than a lack of interest. Yet its preface supplies both the immediate context and the degree of personal involvement – ‘the name of his Majesty defamed, the honour of Parliament depraved’ (
p. 59
) – which Browne later elevates into a more general condemnation of ‘the sinister ends of Princes, the ambition & avarice of Prelates, and the fatall corruption of times’ (
p. 62
). The burden of the argument is borne by a personal predilection even as it was sustained by Browne’s experiences on the Continent, especially his studies at Padua which, a generation after William Harvey had studied during the era of Galileo and the eminent biologist Aquapendente, was still ‘famous for the Study of Physick’ (i.e. medicine): cosmopolitan as it was liberal, sceptical of inflexible approaches, and consistently responsive to novel ideas. Closed minds at home would protest, and did protest, that ‘we send our children
beyond the Seas into
Fraunce, Italy, Spaine, Germany
; they returne not Englishmen from thence, but Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards, Germans’.
⁶
But Browne would have regarded the charge as a compliment, providing
inter alia
one of the most good-natured passages in
Religio Medici
on the reprehensible culinary habits of the French (
p. 133
). Merely to observe the oddities of human behaviour is not very difficult, and to censure them easier still; but sympathetically to respond to multiform reality is the prerogative of the truly perceptive mind.

If the irenic disposition in
Religio Medici
could be misunderstood, so might the apparently sharp dichotomy between faith and reason. The reputed ‘split’ between the two
⁷
is certainly warranted so long as we confine ourselves to one or the other of Browne’s explicit statements. Sometimes, however, one of the components in the expected opposition is quietly removed, e.g.: ‘though there bee but one [world] to sense, there are two to reason; the one visible, the other invisible’ (p. 104). The claim here that reason is operative equally in the physical as in the metaphysical realm, appears to contradict the role assigned to faith elsewhere. But might Browne have meant to alert us to the existence of a transcendent unity while we tend to compartmentalise human experience? For it is unlikely, we have been assured authoritatively,

Browne’s ‘reason’ is the reality espoused by the Church Fathers at the invitation of the Neoplatonists, who held, according to
St Augustine, that ‘the light of the mind giving power to conceive all… is God that created all’.
⁹
Its actual description by Plotinus as ‘something greater than reason, reason’s Prior, as far above reason as the very object of that thought must be’, is not unlike the ‘Divine Sagacity’ celebrated in the seventeenth century by Henry More the Cambridge Platonist, that is to say the dynamic power of mind to encompass ‘the close connexion and cohesion’ of the diverse aspects of the universe.
¹⁰
Granted, Browne does not always deploy ‘reason’ in this sense; but where he does, the term should be regarded as suggestive of the cosmic unity he constantly aspires to, a unity evident horizontally across the historical process, and vertically through the Scale of Nature.

The vertical dimension is well attested by Browne as by his contemporaries. Browne’s formulation – ‘there is in this Universe a Staire, or manifest Scale of creatures, rising not disorderly, or in confusion, but with a comely method and proportion’ (p. 101) – appeals to the widely disseminated belief that all levels of existence are tightly knit through an elaborate hierarchical system of analogies and correspondences extending, it was said, ‘from the Mushrome to the Angels’.
¹¹
The scheme was vastly enriched by recurrent metaphoric associations with music and the circle, the one intended to sustain the persuasion that ‘there is a musicke where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion’ (p. 149), the other to confirm belief in the omnipresence of God ‘whose center is every where, and circumference no where’.
¹²
Browne in resorting to these time-honoured
commonplaces, however, often transformed them into novelties by the unexpected twists in the course of their articulation. For instance:

It is an astonishing utterance; but I think intentionally so. The logic is of the singular order so favoured by Browne: might not a denial of the existence of witches lead to a denial of the existence of spirits, and eventually of God? Smile though we may, Browne expresses his concern that to remove one rung from the Scale of Nature were to dismantle the entire scheme, and abrogate order. The intention, certainly, was by no means to harden hearts against the victims of misguided fanatics. ‘We are no way doubtfull that there are wiches’, he wrote elsewhere, ‘butt have not been alwayes satisfied in the application of their wichcrafts or whether the parties under such affliction suffered from such hands’. Accordingly, when invited in 1664 to testify at the trial of two ‘witches’, he accepted that witchcraft was in evidence but ventured no opinion on the charge itself.
¹³
In theory and practice alike, his exclusive interest was to maintain the principle articulated in the penultimate paragraph of
The Garden of Cyrus
: ‘All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven’ (p. 387).

The cosmic unity intimated vertically by the Scale of Nature, Browne also discerned on the horizontal plane of historical
events. In broad outline, his approach is not distinguished by originality since it embraces another great commonplace of Occidental thought, the expressly Christian view of history as progressively apocalyptic of the Divine Purpose in a linear pattern enclosing all events from the creation to the Last Judgement.
¹⁴
Superficially observed, the pattern can be readily detected in the ever-expanding movement of the first part of
Religio Medici
that ends in ‘those foure inevitable points of us all, Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell’ (
below, pp. 116 ff.
). The same pattern also informs
Christian Morals
, for example the invitation to ‘Look beyond the World, and before the
Æra
of
Adam
’ (p. 425), as well as the memorable aphorism: ‘The created World is but a small
Parenthesis
in Eternity’ (p. 471). But as it is not Browne’s adherence to a mere commonplace that matters, we should be cognisant of his simultaneous extension of it in a variety of directions and with an impressive opulence of detail. Perhaps most significant in this respect is his emphatic reiteration of the contrast between time which we aspire to comprehend, and the Eternal Present which we cannot.
Christian Morals
again provides the appropriate aphorism: ‘The Divine Eye looks upon high and low differently from that of Man’ (p. 429). Imaginatively applied in
Religio Medici
, the generalisation issues in several resonant passages whose undulating rhythms suggest the excitement of the slowly apprehended conclusion, thus:

Browne was utterly fascinated by the concept of the Eternal Present. After its initial formulation here, he indulges in a number of paradoxical utterances which cumulatively assert the concept by upholding the unity of the created order in the omniscient eyes of God. On such occasions the tone rises steadily as Browne’s serene assurance in his own election yields to a triumphant proclamation of the contemporaneity of all events:

But the vision of the confluence of what is past and passing and to come, is not the prerogative solely of the omniscient God. The same comprehensive awareness is shared by the narrator on the model of the traditional association of the creative artist and the creating Word, the Divine Logos. Just as ‘God beholds all things’ (p. 124), so the narrator penetrates beyond history’s cunning passages to discern the pattern of time-bound yet time-less moments within the historical process, and without. Within, the sequential moments unfold in a straight line toward ‘that one day, that shall include and comprehend all that went before it, wherein as in the last scene, all the Actors must enter to compleate and make up the Catastrophe of this great peece’ (p. 119). Without, the artist transcends mere logic (itself a sequential mode of thought) to behold the entire play when, and especially when, time is suspended in the serenity of a nocturnal apprehension: ‘I close mine eyes in security, content to take my leave of the Sunne, and sleepe unto the resurrection’ (p. 157).