Abstract
The first critic of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici was Sir Kenelm Digby1 — virtuoso, duellist, renegade Catholic, swashbuckler, romantic lover, Fellow of the Royal Society, and ‘Mirandula of his Age’ according to Aubrey.2 In a sense, Browne’s early reputation stood on Digby’s shoulders: the Religio Medici had been written by an obscure country doctor, and the pirated printing which occasioned the critical Observations did not even include Browne’s name. It took the attentions of a celebrity (Digby consorted with the likes of Descartes and Mersenne, and was a friend of Hobbes) to thrust the country doctor into the limelight.3 And, yet, doing Browne a favour was not Digby’s whole intent, for he did not entirely approve of what he read. The Religio was, he thought, too fanciful and airy, and without sufficient judgement (p. 37); however, he did admire Browne for making right use of that kind of religious zeal in which bigots lose themselves, and for his sense of mystery.
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Notes
Sir Kenelm Digby, Observations upon Religio Medici (London, 1644). Page numbers are cited in the text. For a full account of Digby, see R. T.
Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby. The Ornament of England 1603–1665 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956).
Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) p. 187.
See Frank Livingstone Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne. A Biographical and Critical Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962) p. 146: ‘Thanks to the Latin translation of Religio in 1644 by John Merry weather, and to the inevitable linking of the names of Dorset, Digby, and Howell to his own, Dr Thomas Browne gained a European reputation.’
Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roberta Florence Brinkley, intro. by Louis I. Bredvold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1955) p. 438. Page numbers are henceforth cited in the text.
Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800, new edn (London: G. Bell, 1957; first published 1949) p. 118.
Browne, Religio Medici, i.33. All quotations from Browne are from Geoffrey Keynes’s rev. edn, The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, 4 vols (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), referred to as Works and cited by volume and page, except in the case of Religio Medici, which is cited by part and section number.
See Leonard Nathanson, The Strategy of Truth. A Study of Sir Thomas Browne (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1967) p. 6: ‘And the issue is further complicated by Browne’s explicit distrust of imaginative literature and his continual inveighing in Vulgar Errors against metaphorical language as one of the deadly enemies of truth.’ For the same suspicion of rhetoric in Religio Medici, see John R. Mulder, The Temple of the Mind. Education and Literary Taste in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Pegasus, 1969) pp. 54ff.
Browne might not have approved of the title, which appears in the 1642 edns, but is dropped in 1643. But after 1643 the book was republished or reissued numerous times, and the title stayed with it. See Sir Thomas Browne. Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964) p. xv.
Browne warns against atheism, which he sees as a consequence of too much concern for secondary causes (Religio Medici, i.19). On the physician as atheist, see Paul H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1953) pp. 239–57.
For a further development of this position, see Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts. The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1972) pp. 353ff. Leonard Nathanson, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and the Ethics of Knowledge’, in Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne. The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays, ed. C. A. Patrides (Columbia, Miss.: University of Missouri Press, 1982) pp. 12ff., argues that Browne’s paradoxical balance is a way of validating intellectual activity itself. John R. Knott, Jr, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and the Labyrinth of Truth’, ibid., pp. 19–30, suggests that the truth lies in the labyrinthine search.
There is some debate about how modern and Baconian Browne was. Almonte C. Howell, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and Seventeenth-Century Scientific Thought’, Studies in Philology, 20 (1925) 61–80, along with Alwin
Thaler, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and the Elizabethans’, Studies in Philology, 28 (1931) 87–117, and Egon Stephen Merton, Science and Imagination in Sir Thomas Browne (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1949), argues for a strong Baconian and modern cast to Browne’s thinking. William P. Dunn, Sir Thomas Browne (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950; first published 1926) pp. 7ff., holds that Browne inherited the weaknesses of the mediaeval scholastic method which Bacon analyses so well, and this view is maintained by Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964; first published 1934) p. 47. More recent studies tend to confirm this opinion, seeing Browne as caught up, willy-nilly, with new scientific trends but maintaining assumptions out of character with them. See Joan Bennett, Sir Thomas Browne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962) pp. 127–38; Frank L. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne, esp. pp. 86ff.; Nathanson, The Strategy of Truth, p. 156; Achsah Guibbory, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica and the Circle of Knowledge’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 18 (1976) 486–99, shows that, although Pseudodoxia Epidemica seems at first to be Baconian, it is based on certain epistemological assumptions which undermine Bacon’s ideal advancement of learning. Marie Boas Hall, ‘Thomas Browne Naturalist’, in Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne, pp. 178–87, claims that Browne is a collector of facts, and that he had no interest in Baconian progress or in current methodological debate.
There are thus good reasons for placing Browne among the Baconians. Browne’s early critic Alexander Ross, in Arcana Microcosmi — with a Refutation of Doctor Browne’s Vulgar Errors, the Lord Bacon’s Natural History, and Doctor Harvey’s Book de Generatione (London, 1652), places him in such company. Browne’s home laboratory was visited and described by John Evelyn on 17 October 1671: The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. De Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955) iii, 594. The Pseudodoxia Epidemica joins with those ‘who endeavour the advancement of Learning’ by means of ‘experimentall and judicious knowledge’ (‘To the Reader’, Works, ii, 6), and is evidently touched by Baconianism. In a letter, Browne praises Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood (Works, iv, 255), and F. Huntley, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’s Early Reputation as a Scientist’, Seventeenth Century News, Spring 1978, pp. 22–3, indicates that by 1652 Browne was known outside England for scientific enquiry.
Anne Drury Hall, ‘Epistle, Meditation, and Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, xciv (1979) 231–46.
Laurence A. Breiner, ‘The Generation of Metaphor in Thomas Browne’, Modern Language Quarterly, 38 (1977) 261–75, argues, I believe correctly, that Browne’s tropes share ‘a covert “master figure”’. C. A. Patrides, ‘“The Best Part of Nothing”: Sir Thomas Browne and the Strategy of Indirection’, in Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne, pp. 43–4, argues that order is a ‘major preoccupation’ in Religio Medici, and that Browne already anticipates the Garden of Cyrus.
Columbia: University of Victoria, 1979), ch. 2, ‘Religio Medici: The Paradox of Faith and Works’, pp. 261f., discusses the Religio Medici in terms of Browne’s paradoxical oppositions becoming elaborate circular arguments, so that the tension between opposites is resolved. The circle, which suggests this resolution, can, however, threaten constriction. The chapter does not deal with the cross, but the reading of Browne’s relation of faith to works in terms of doctrinal paradox resolved by circular figures is, I believe, correct. See also N. J. Endicott, ‘Some Aspects of Self-Revelation and Self-Portraiture in Religio Medici’, in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age. Presented to A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964) p. 93: ‘It is only from the whole effect of the circling movement of his mind, as we follow and participate in the exact phrasing, that we find (or think we find) the author.’
Ibid., p. 122. See Marjorie Nicolson, ‘The Early Stage of Cartesianism in England’, Studies in Philology, 26 (1929) 357.
Sir Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises, in the One of Which, the Nature of Bodies; In the Other, The Nature of Mans Soule; is looked into: in Way of Discovery, of the Immortality of Reasonable Soules (Paris, 1644). All quotations from the Two Treatises are from this edn, and are cited in the text.
Sir Kenelm Digby, Of the Sympathetic Powder (London, 1669). See Lester S. King, The Road to Medical Enlightenment 1650–1695 (London: Macdonald, 1970) pp. 140–5.
Ibid., p. 124. For Descartes’s remark, see Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, 11 vols (Paris: J. Vrin, 1969; first published 1897–1909) 398.
See Dominick Grundy, ‘Scepticism in Two Essays by Montaigne and Sir Thomas Browne’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 34 (1973) 529–42; Bennett, Sir Thomas Browne, pp. 66, 129, 184; Endicott, in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age, p. 89.
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© 1985 Patrick Grant
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Grant, P. (1985). Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici: Baconian Method and the Metaphysical Cross. In: Literature and the Discovery of Method in the English Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07655-0_5
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