“He was a zealous adherent to the faith of Christ. He lived in obedience to his laws, and died in confidence of his mercy.
There is no science, in which he does not discover some skill; and scarce any kind of knowledge, profane or sacred, abstruse or elegant, which he does not appear to have cultivated with success.”
So speaks Dr. Johnson on one of the now neglected great authors of 17th century, Sir Thomas Browne. A contemporary of rasher minds like Milton, Browne was a measured Anglican and an apolitical scholar, dedicated to academic study, work as a doctor, and to his devout faith.
In the height of his popularity Browne was most widely appreciated for his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), a great volume of errors and misapprehensions common in his time. To this day the book is a fun and fascinating read, written in a flowery, proto-Johnsonian style. It is evident Dr. Johnson learned many things from this great predecessor. Among the questions posed are: Do Jews really smell bad? Do unicorns exist? Do vipers burst out of the bellies of their mothers? Are bears born as formless lumps? How many people were there on Earth prior to the Flood? Do beavers bite off their own testicles when chased?
Characteristic to Browne’s analysis is his empirical mind that admires but does not pay undue respect to the ancients. Sometimes Aristotle may be plain wrong, and Browne won’t be afraid to say so. On the the other hand, his thinking represents the epitome of humility before Divine Revelation. He will never challenge the Biblical account. Furthermore, he followed a kind of anti-cynicism. When multiple theories are on offer, he always chooses the most pious, positive one, believing God always arranges things to ‘the best advantage of goodness’.
“Let virtuous considerations state your determination. Look upon opinions as thou doest upon the Moon, and choose not the dark hemisphere for thy contemplation. ‘Tis better to think that there are Guardian Spirits, than that there are not Spirits to Guard us.”
In addition to a piles of fascinating trivia, the book includes many wise observations, and never lets go of the didactic style so typical of Browne. It is that didactic wisdom of his that I find most valuable, which is why I find his other books especially gratifying. In Pseudodoxia the pieces of wisdom are like gems in the midst of facts, but in some of his other works, they constitute the whole fabric.
Hold thou onto old morality
Browne’s first book, written when he was 30 years old, is a deep, personal and theological meditation on matters of faith, called Religio Medici (1642). It became a pan-European best-seller.
A good way to describe the general attitude of the author is a sense solid orthodoxy without rashness, without a wish to cause any rancor or rock the boat of Protestant England. He has little negative to say about the Catholics, and simultaneously avoids conflict with the puritans.
“Better to enjoy truth in peace than to hazard her in battle.”
Dr. Johnson agrees with this principle, and expounds on it:
“To play with important truths, to disturb the repose of established tenets, is too often the sport of youthful vanity, of which maturer experience commonly repents.
There is a time when every wise man is weary of raising difficulties only to task himself with the solution, and desires to enjoy truth without the labor of hazard or contest.”
Both men, reminiscent of modern thinkers like C.S. Lewis, focus on the shared fundamentals of Christianity, and remain reluctant to take part in internecine fighting among believers. Yet both are without compromise towards the humanists, deists, atheists or secularists.
Some have argued Browne was a proponent of predestination, but in Religio Medici he makes it clear he rather believes in the ‘Eternal Present of God’, i.e. the orthodox notion that God is above time and space. For Him all moments of the story are equally present. God knows what you are going to do in the same way Tolkien is the author of his characters, but as author would be first to admit he does not ‘control’ them, or force them into anything. Frodo is completely free to refuse or take on the quest of the Ringbearer. And on every re-read, we never doubt that his choice was free, even though we know it is coming.
Philosophically, Browne sides somewhat more with Plato than with Aristotle, believing that Aristotle was too focused on the visible order of things, and placed too little emphasis on the world beyond. Furthermore, he is dissatisfied by the Aristotelian ethics of happiness, which he finds are a secular cope. For Browne, the only real summum bonum can be God.
But it is clear that despite these qualms Aristotelianism had a place of prominence in Browne’s thinking. This is revealed by the central position he gives to teleology. To Browne, everything in the world has a final cause, an ultimate purpose. To reveal it is the final cause of all science and study.
“This is the cause I grope after in the works of nature, on this hangs the providence of God. To raise so beauteous a structure as the world and the creatures thereof, was but his Art. And their sundry and divided operations with their predestinated ends, are from the treasury of his wisdom.”
To Browne, all nature is both God’s instrument and his work of art. This approach also allows us to look at the perceived dichotomy between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ in a different light. Following Browne, in the end everything is artificial, as all of nature simply represents the Art of God. This is connected to Tolkien’s idea of sub-creation.
Browne had an appreciation for mysticism, which made him think Aristotelianism a bit arid on its own. Some have gone as far as to argue Browne was a fideist – i.e. believed one cannot defend or explain Christianity by reason, but that it is all based on a great leap of faith. Again, reading him reveals that instead he was very much both and.
“Me thinkes there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith; the deepest mysteries ours contain, have not only been illustrated, but maintained by syllogism, and the rule of reason.”
Though reason is to be loved, there is also cause to be careful. Browne describes the human mind as an unruly Triumvirate of reason, passion, and faith, where the first two members keep conspiring against the third. But internal discord is not our only enemy. Browne takes Satan and his demons very seriously, and he sees both demonic and (perhaps even more notably) angelic influences as key to understanding our lives, and even the fates of nations.
“I think at first a great part of Philosophy was Witchcraft. We doe surely owe the discovery of many secrets to the discovery of good and bad Angels. I doe think that many mysteries ascribed to our own inventions have been the courteous revelations of Spirits, for those noble essences in heaven bear a friendly regard unto their fellow natures on earth; and I therefore believe that those many ominous prodigies which forerun the ruins of States, Princes, and private persons, are the charitable premonitions of good Angels, which more careless inquiries term but the effects of chance and nature.”
Our ashes shall enjoy the fruits
Perhaps a bit paradoxically a key theme for the ever positive Browne is that of death. In his personal life he approached death with a confidence and serenity which was proven warranted in the final moments of his deathbed. The hardships we encounter in our earthly lives were to him no great dilemma. After all, what we all deserve is Damnation. But if what we now receive is merely temporal suffering and loss and disappointment, aren’t we greatly blessed and treated with incredible mercy?
Following the same vein, the death that ends our sufferings is a great release. Christ has stripped death from all its real power, it is now only an ugly looking ghost. In fact, looking at the matter through a doctor’s eyes, death is the universal medicine: there is no disease it cannot cure. Ever the lover of paradox, he goes as far as to call death the nectar of immortality.
“My life is a miracle of thirty years. The world I count not an Inn, but a Hospital, and a place not to live, but to die in.”
Like all the great moralists in the Western tradition, Browne understood the crucial importance of immortality to all morality. We may try to be virtuous for the sake of virtue, and honest without a thought of Heaven or Hell, and Browne admits that that he does notice within the human heart an inborn loyalty to virtue which ‘we could serve without a livery’. However:
“but that the frailty of my nature, upon an easy temptation, might be induced to forget virtue. The life therefore and the spirit of all our actions, is the resurrection, and the stable apprehension that our ashes shall enjoy the fruit of our pious endeavors. Without this, all religion is a fallacy.”
The noble notion of virtue for virtue’s sake is a beautiful thing, but too much should not be made of it. Because reasoned virtue is core to the natural telos or goal of man, it is ‘nothing special’. The virtuous pagans shall burn in Hell, because it is not virtue that saves us. We must remember that in the end our reason is only something that is natural to us, hence not laudable in itself, and certainly it has no salvific power on its own.
Yet even the pagans felt they were not at home in the material world. As Browne puts it, “There is a piece of divinity within us that owes no homage to the Sun.” We are somehow greater than the material world itself. This gives us an instinctive understanding that the laws of thermodynamics have no ultimate hold on the divine spark within us. In our heart of hearts we recognize we hail from another country, and are not subject to the laws of this one.
And if it is of any further consolation, Browne finishes his book by pointing out that everyone of us tries out dying every single evening, when we fall asleep. Traditionally, sleep has been considered the half-brother of death, and it is around this understanding that Sir Thomas Browne formulated his personal evening prayer:
Sleepe is a death, O make me try,
By sleeping what it is to die.
And as gently lay my head
On my Grave, as now my bed.
How ere I rest, great God let me
Awake againe at last with thee.
And thus assur’d, behold I lie
Securely, or to wake or die.