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“How shall the dead arise, is no question of my faith; to believe only possibilities, is not faith, but mere philosophy.”

Religio Medici, Section 48

In an essay on Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), the great Victorian critic John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) remarks on a salient feature of Religio Medici (1642–43): “There is a sustained paradox in his thought which does not seem to belong to the man so much as to the artist.”1 Here Symonds verges on—but, as we shall see, just misses—a profound insight, characteristic of the Aesthetic Movement and the followers of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and Walter Pater (1839–1894). He removes the burden of analysis from psychology and biography to form and style. That he should do so reflects the aversion of Symonds’s time to religious orthodoxy and its distrust of writers, such as Browne, who profess strong religious faith.

In Browne’s case, one cannot immediately fault the critics for turning to his writings and giving only an impatient, sidelong glance at the author’s life and beliefs. After all, Browne’s uneventful career offers precious few insights into his writings. He was neither an iconoclastic pamphleteer turned epic poet nor tormented cleric who charted the dark nether regions of despair. Instead, he was a contemplative, variously learned country doctor, who devoted the leisure hours of his short-lived bachelorhood to the composition of his spiritual autobiography. Symonds’s remark seems appropriate, then, and justified. Justified also then are the many studies of Browne’s prose style. Inspiring many of these efforts is the formalist credo which states the impossibility of discussing the religious beliefs and moral values underpinning much serious literature: “something which, in its very essence, is too subtle and elusive to admit of definition.”2 This is an untenable position to defend. However difficult or offensive it might be, for some, to discuss these issues, only in so doing does one acquire the means of judging the suitability of the style adopted by the author and of unriddling what might otherwise remain a torturous labyrinth of language surrounding a mysterious web of ideas. Many forget that a supremely successful style is usually accompanied by equally compelling thoughts. Indeed, one is the “litmus test” of the other; a writer could not be said to employ a “good” or “interesting” style if his thoughts are muddled, or vice versa. Therefore, it is indefensible to justify, as many critics have, a preference for formalist criticism by appealing to the catch phrases of the “know-nothing” school of literary criticism. It is a fool’s errand to assert that “the medium is the message” or that style is “the last most detailed elaboration of meaning” and expect to make oneself understood or arrive at a deep understanding of a literary work.3 To do so is to abandon the primary responsibility and the raison d’etre of the literary critic: the elucidation of meaning in a work of art.

For obvious reasons, it is easier to discuss an essay or a poem of more recent vintage than an older one. The latter case requires a more strenuous exercise of the sympathetic imagination and the historical understanding than the former. Moreover, it may also involve a consideration of such “difficult” matters as belief and value, which still retain importance for writers of an age perhaps more innocent than ours. Attempts at bridging the gap between “the divided and distinguished worlds” of the past and present are often regarded by partisans of formalism as essays into the “history of ideas,” as if to imply purity of motives as well as it has become an act proscribed by rigid taboos. Making an excursion into the sensitive areas of thought and belief is to venture into forbidden territory. Of course, there is no denying that the task facing historical-humanistic scholarship becomes increasingly beyond our strength. It is not that, over time, the burden of historical facts becomes ever more cumbersome, but rather the longer ideas are allowed to lie fallow the more difficult it is to restore them imaginatively to common usage as accoutrements of the modern mind, even for as long as a brief literary exercise. But even a failed attempt to treat an idea sympathetically, infusing it with the credibility and the truth it enjoyed in the writer’s mind, is preferable to a stylistic analysis which avoids the ideas expressed on the printed page, or treats them with derision or condescension.

Let us return to Symonds’s remark on the probable source of paradox in Religio Medici: It “does not seem to belong to the man so much as to the artist.” In the preface “To The Reader” in the authorized edition of 1643 Browne seems to support this conclusion by inserting the following proviso: “There are many things delivered Rhetorically, many expressions therein merely Tropicall, and as they best illustrate my intention; and therefore also there many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason.”4 Browne wrote this, no doubt, to avert the criticism of those who might take exception to his “sundry particularities and personall expressions.” (3) Just to be safe he reminds the reader that “what is delivered therein was rather a memoriall unto me than an example or rule unto any other,” whose “intention was not publick.” (3) Instantly, one wonders how seriously these qualifications are meant to be taken. Should the reader not beware of falling prey to Browne’s ironic, conciliatory manner in the “To The Reader” (which follows the composition of Religio Medici by a decade), thereby suspending his judgment before examining the main body of meditations? That Browne dons a shy, self-effacing mask is not owing to his embarrassment over a callow enterprise of his youth. Undoubtedly, he is aware of the difficulties involved in appreciating some of his conclusions, which are based on the immaterial foundation of religious conviction and tend to follow the suprarational dictates of faith. What are Browne’s half-ironical strictures if not warnings to the reader that a supernatural logic has endued his meditations?

The reader has, it seems, two choices. Either they take Browne at his word and agree not to submit these “private conceptions” to scrutiny. This is the stance of formalism. Or, if the reader has it in mind to ignore Browne’s mature proviso and sets out to identify the pattern in Browne’s skein of thoughts, they risk getting caught in the snares of Browne’s paradoxes. That is, unless the reader succeeds beforehand in ferreting out the source of paradox in Browne’s meditations.

Perhaps, “the sustained paradox in his thought” has its origin not in Browne the artist, but rather in Browne the religious thinker? All great art (and, for that matter, every human order stabilized by tradition) rests on a fundamentally fixed correspondence between the answers that may be given on varying levels of profundity and with varying degrees of precision, but they are all recognizable by their basic color as the more or less right answers. Indeed, the imagination seeks out new waters in lands which have long remained inaccessible and unexplored, but there will be a place for them, hitherto left blank, on the maps of the familiar world. In Religio Medici we confront one such remote sphere where we survey the inner landscape of religious experience. To be sure, there are some important resemblances shared by aesthetic and ethical-philosophical (or religious) modes of expression and understanding. Both depend on the synthesizing power of the imagination, “the faculty . . . by which we unite the broken and dispersed images of the world into a harmonious poetic symbol . . . . The power of subjecting the less to the greater reality, of associating the outer with the inner, and thus of finding through the many that return to the one.”5

In Religio Medici, the “religion of a physician,” the strands of poetry and philosophy are woven together to form a double-layered fabric, which shows on one side the pattern of paradox, and, on the other, the union of contraries. W.P. Dunn ascribed this power of integration to Browne the “natural believer, who really knew that the intellect is not the only road to truth, and who by virtue of that instinct managed to unify the world.”6 The synthetic tendency of Browne’s mind, which first isolates and then yokes such opposites as faith and reason, good and evil, art and philosophy, Christianity and paganism, the universal and the particular, angel and human being, is captured in a memorable passage in Section 34 of Religio Medici:

We are only that amphibious piece between a corporall and spirituall essence, that middle forme that linkes those two together, and makes good the method of God and nature, that jumps not from extreames, but unites the incompatible distances by some middle and participating natures . . . (32)

Human beings occupy the middle position between heavenly benediction and earthly squalor. Equidistant from resurrection and damnation, each person is “that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to life not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds.” (32)

It is necessary only to cite the Dialogues of Plato or the biblical parables of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) in order to suggest the rich allusiveness, the play of irony, and the dramatic tension that belong to both strictly literary works and some philosophical tracts. Even if Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s appraisal of Browne’s metaphysics is not the last word on the subject, his famous remark on Religio Medici underscores its uncertain position in the hierarchy of literary genres. Coleridge (1772–1834), the great Romantic poet and critic, argues that Browne’s book should be considered “in a dramatic, and not in a metaphysical view, as the sweet exhibition of character and passion, and not as an expression or investigation of positive truth.”7 That is to say that one may still find pleasure in reading Religio Medici in spite of Browne’s obtruding philosophical preoccupations. It is neither to deny the importance of Browne’s ideas nor relegate them to a dark lumber room in the mansion of literature.

The case of Kierkegaard offers an especially illuminating parallel to Browne. Not only does he disclaim responsibility for his books far more vehemently than Browne; he goes so far as to disguise them as anonymous epistles and religious parables, and then published them under a pseudonym. Nevertheless, no one would dispute the seriousness or the enduring relevance of the disinherited offspring of his mind. In addition, Kierkegaard is recognized as one of the masters of Danish prose. And yet, at the first sign of ambivalence—just a sentence or two written in a tone of mild reproof against the enthusiasms of his youth—many English critics are prepared to ignore Browne’s meditations altogether, as though unaware that the style and tone of Religio Medici are derived from his religious temperament and concerns. For example, Edward Dowden argues that Browne’s work is “not modeled on the articles of a creed, but is far more the exposition of a religious temper; it concerns itself with the Christian graces.”8 Furthermore, Kierkegaard knew the contradictions of logic and willing lodged in faith as well as the difficulties encountered in sustaining the irrational premises of belief against the visible evidence of natural laws. For Kierkegaard, “faith is not an aesthetic emotion, but something far higher . . . it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence,” the yoking of the particular and the universal in the relationship of worshipping believer and adoring God.9 Kierkegaard’s faith, as well as Browne’s, rests upon “a paradox, inaccessible to thought.” For, in Browne’s phrase, “to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but perswasion.” (11) In his parable of Abraham and Isaac upon Mount Moriah, Kierkegaard identifies the man of faith as him “whose life is not merely the most paradoxical that can be thought but so paradoxical that it cannot be thought at all. He acts by virtue of the absurd,”10 as Browne does when he pursues his reason “to an O altitudo.” (11)

Kierkegaard defines the “absurd” as “not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding.” It is a mystery. And the mystery of faith is comprehended in the paradox that “with God all things are possible.”11 Browne is aware that the intoxicating anthropomorphism of Parmenides, who taught that “man is the measure of all things,” blinds us to God’s omnipotence. “We doe,” Browne scolds the reader, “too narrowly define the power of God, restraining it to our capacities.” (28) Indeed, “our understanding,” in Browne’s epistemology, “is dimmer than Moses’s Eye.” (14) Unwavering faith is impossible without first submitting reason to rigorous discipline. In Section 10 of Religio Medici Browne describes the reinforcement of faith as the process of taming the unruly flights of reason: “For by acquainting our reason how unable it is to display the visible and obvious effects of nature, it becomes more humble and submissive unto the subtleties of faith; and thus I teach my haggard and unreclaimed reason to stoope into the lure of faith.” (12) Browne does not believe in what is believable to his senses. He believes in the apparently preposterous. According to him, it is “no vulgar part of faith, to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to reason and against the arguments of our proper senses.” (12) And it is his believing itself that becomes believable in the act of worship. In a different sense from that which is cited by his critics, like John Addington Symonds, Browne’s ideas are utterly false. This sense of falsity is, however, not derogatory. There is a kind of falseness which, quite legitimately, affords the most refined aesthetic pleasure: it is enjoyed at that point where consistently sustained belief in the absurd assumes the semblance of spontaneity, and the most elaborate magical procedure, Browne’s prose style, conjures the appearance of the naively miraculous.

1 Quoted by Austin Warren, “The Style of Sir Thomas Browne,” Kenyon Review (13): 674–687 (678).

2 Norton R. Tempest, “Rhythm in the Prose of Sir Thomas Browne,” Review of English Studies (3): 308–318 (318).

3 The latter is William K. Wimsatt, the former is Marshall McLuhan.

4 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (New York: Collier, 1909), The Harvard Classics, Vol. 4, 3–4. Hereafter intra-textual references are to this edition.

5 Paul Elmer More’s description of the “esemplastic power” of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s imagination, in Shelburne Essays, Studies of Religious Dualism, Sixth Series (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company/The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1909), 167.

6 W.P. Dunn, Sir Thomas Browne: A Study in Religious Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950), 46.

7 Quoted by Robert Sencourt, Outflying Philosophy: A Literary Study of the Religious Element (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1923), 250.

8 Edward Dowden, Puritan and Anglican: Studies in Literature (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1901, 2nd ed.,), 46.

9 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton UP, rev. ed., 2013), 59.

10 Ibid., 47.

11 Ibid., 67.