SOURCE: Cunningham, Andrew. “Sir Thomas Browne and his Religion Medici: Reason, Nature, and Religion.” In Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, edited by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, pp. 12-61. Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Cunningham explores the relationship between Browne's role as a physician and his contributions to the understanding of religion; also includes an overview of Browne's life and works, focusing in detail on his Religio Medici.]

THE MAN, HIS MIND AND HIS BRAIN

Sir Thomas Browne was the first to use the expression Religio Medici for the title of a book. Ever since its first publication in 1642 his little book has claimed an attention out of all proportion to its size. It made the religion of physicians an issue, and made Browne himself the most famous physician to have had a religion. It has in recent centuries generally been interpreted as a brave and laudable call for toleration in religion, put forward in a period of great religious strife, and simultaneously as an argument for the compatibility of devout Christian faith with the free investigation of nature. Thus in the twentieth century Sir Thomas is presented as a physician who on the one hand was tolerant in the domain of religion, and who on the other also claimed that faith and reason—for which people have read religion and science (in the modern sense of that term)—are separate domains which can and should take their proper, complementary roles in one's understanding of the structure and functioning of the universe. This view of Religio Medici, and of its author's attitudes to reason, nature and religion will all be explored in this chapter.

Browne has fascinated many scholars, and there are many possible legitimate ways of exploring his thinking and writing to bring out different facets of this complex man. By far the greatest scholarly interest in Browne's writings today is sustained by students of English literature, and he is by some considered to possess one of the best styles of any writer of the seventeenth century: one modern critic has suggested it is ‘possibly the most beautiful English prose that has been written’.¹ The Romantics loved his style. Charles Lamb described it as ‘obscure but gorgeous’; Coleridge wrote that ‘the style throughout is delicious’;² De Quincey thought his rhetoric was ‘deep, tranquil, and majestic as Milton’.³ Browne's writing is fantastical, rhetorical, complex, ornate, baroque, extravagant, exquisite, paradoxical (very), devious, ecstatic, playful, whimsical even. These qualities were deliberate, for Browne worked hard at his prose style. In his own age his style and literary mannerisms meant he was taken as a writer of great wit, meaning primarily not humour but a sort of admirable cleverness.⁴ Although Stanley Fish managed to put the cat amongst the pigeons with his dismissive remarks on Browne's literary achievement a few years ago, Browne's reputation has since been retrieved by literary scholars.⁵ I mention these literary qualities at the beginning, because although Browne's prose will appear frequently in the course of the chapter its merits as prose will not be a direct concern of mine here. It is important to acknowledge that in the case of Browne above all, the medium is a great part of the message (which is very appropriate for the man who coined the English term ‘literary’).⁶ But it is also important to remember that the medium is not the whole message. What Browne is saying about the religion of a particular physician—himself—in the England of the early seventeenth century is at least as significant as the sonority of the language in which he says it.

It is irresistible when discussing Thomas Browne to quote him constantly, both in and out of context, and thus catch his voice which says such quotable things and in such quotable ways. But although the persona is dominant, Browne is actually rather elusive as a person-in-the-text, for even though it is written largely in the first person it nevertheless remains tantalizingly ‘open but inscrutable’,⁷ and perhaps deliberately so, Browne believing that it is not open to the vulgar to see inside the minds of the wise.⁸ So it is also irresistible with Thomas Browne to start by trying to catch his image. The portraits, one hopes, might give one a view of Sir Thomas which is solid and dependable. But, even in his portraits he may be elusive too. For as Joseph Heller has taught us in Picture This, paintings can have many afterlives. This picture (Figure 2.1), now in the National Portrait Gallery, has had a number of identities in the twentieth century alone, portraying at least two different sets of people, and painted by three different artists. In 1922 it was a picture of Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria, and was by Van Dyck. Later it was of Sir Thomas Browne and his wife, painted from life by Joan Carlile. Now it is of Sir Thomas Browne and his wife, and the painter has become anonymous. If this is Thomas Browne then, as he wrote in Religio Medici: ‘The face reveals the soul; there are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read A.B.C. may read our natures’. But Browne also wrote, and in the same book, it is different in pictures: ‘in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes’ (RM [Religio Medici], I.12).

But there is another way for us to see Browne in, one might nearly say, the flesh, and that is through his death. Death is a great concern of Browne's, and he writes about it a great deal in Religio Medici. Indeed, as we shall see, that book is in part a meditation upon death, and the Christian's response to it. Browne calls himself ‘as wholesome a morsel for the worms as any’ (RM, I.40), and he talks about wanting to quit the world and leave no memorial behind him. ‘At my death’, he writes, ‘I mean to take a total adieu of the world, not caring for a monument, history or epitaph, not so much as the bare memory of my name to be found anywhere but in the universal register of God’ (RM, I.41). In Urn Burial he asked rhetorically ‘Who knows the fate of his [own] bones or how often he is to be buried?’ In his own case the answer to this curious question was, twice; for his fate was to have his skull removed from his grave and at large in the world for almost 80 years, long after he had died. And the consequence of this, in turn, was that his skull and the fantastical brain which had been within it came to be investigated more thoroughly and more scientifically than, perhaps, that of any other seventeenth-century figure, in order, in part, to investigate the seat of his genius. The results were, as he might have liked, paradoxical in the extreme. As we shall see later, Sir Thomas's skull in its afterlife would again serve as a focus of the question of the relationship of religion and physicians, by serving as a quasi-religious icon for physicians in the early twentieth century.

What happened was this.⁹ Sir Thomas Browne was buried in the church of St. Peter Mancroft in Norwich in 1682 and for 158 years his body, like that of a later Brown, lay a-mouldering in its grave. Then, in 1840, the coffin was accidentally disturbed. His coffin-plate was found to say, in Latin, that ‘sleeping in this coffin, by the dust of his alchemical body he converts the lead into gold’,¹⁰ and one of those who saw it claimed that the lead of the coffin had been ‘completely decomposed and changed into a carbonate which crumbled at the touch’, so there might indeed have been an alchemy of some kind at work here. When the coffin was opened, a local paper reported that the features of Sir Thomas Browne ‘were perfect, and especially the beard’. But the next week a witness begged to correct this: ‘such was not the case, nothing more was found than in ordinary instances, the bones being perfectly bare; the skull was of the finest conformation, the forehead being beautifully developed’. But the next week another witness claimed that the beard had been in a good state of preservation ‘and of a fine auburn colour’; moreover, the forehead was not ‘beautifully developed’ as it had been the week before, but ‘remarkably small and depressed; the head unusually long’. The editor of the rival Norfolk weekly paper reported that the beard did indeed exist ‘profuse and perfect’, while the forehead ‘was remarkably low, but the back of the cranium exhibited an unusual degree of capaciousness’. Quite remarkably it was also reported that the brain was still present, ‘considerable in quantity but changed to a state of adipocere—resembling ointment of a dark brown hue’. This is remarkable, because adipocere, ‘grave wax’, is the one thing Sir Thomas Browne supposedly was the first to discover (he discusses it in Urn Burial). The obsessive concern of local observers with the shape of the skull seems to have been due to a recent visit to Norwich of a lecturer on phrenology.

Meanwhile someone filched the skull, and the coffin was resealed before it could be returned. After spending five years in mysterious circumstances, the skull was presented to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Museum in 1845. There it stayed for many years. The churchwardens of St Peter Mancroft continued to be anxious to rebury the skull with the body. In 1922 the authorities at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Museum decided that before they gave the skull back they wanted it scientifically investigated. So they sent it by special messenger to the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Sir Arthur Keith, Conservator of the Surgeons' Museum, and forger of Piltdown Man, was to do the job. Sir Arthur was still hoping for a scientific—an evolutionary—science of phrenology. ‘It was my ambition’, Sir Arthur said, ‘to make the skull of Sir Thomas Browne a text from which I might preach a sermon concerning the forces which mould the skull and brain into their several forms, and to illustrate the methods I had devised to measure and elucidate the nature of the forces which are involved’.¹¹ He was indeed to speak about this issue a couple of years later (though rather inconclusively), but illness meant Sir Arthur had to pass the investigative task to a student of Karl Pearson, Miriam Tildesley. She had, according to Keith, ‘been trained in the exact methods of the Biometric Laboratory of University College [London], and had already made an excellent contribution to the literature of racial craniology’.¹²

Miriam Tildesley was interested in the study of skulls in order to study racial characters. But she also thought that the study of the skull of someone like Sir Thomas Browne might tell us something about the mind of the man, and in such a case ‘we know the cranial cavity from our casts, and the mind of the man from his books’.¹³ Are there valid correlations between, for instance, a receding chin and weak character or between a receding brow and low mentality? This was the problem Tildesley confronted: the association of ‘the low forehead of Sir Thomas Browne with the high intellectual capacity he evidences’.¹⁴ Sir Thomas might be said to have been prophetically sympathetic to such an experiment, for in Urn Burial he had written that ‘the dimensions of the head measure the whole body, and the figure thereof gives conjecture of the principall faculties; Physiognomy outlives our selves, and ends not in our graves’.¹⁵

Detailed measurement of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, and comparison with the skulls of series of seventeenth-century males led Tildesley to conclude that yes, the forehead of Sir Thomas's skull was somewhat low by comparison with other males, and yes again the back of the head was significantly broader than usual. Thus her conclusion ultimately had to be that ‘the correlation of superficial head and brain characters with mentality is so low as to provide no basis for any prognosis of value’.¹⁶ So after all the work in the laboratory, Sir Thomas Browne, paradoxically, remains a man of intellect and genius—a highbrow—even though in cranial terms he was unmistakably a lowbrow. As Coleridge wrote about Browne in a slightly different context: ‘In short, he has brains in his head, which is all the more interesting for a little twist in the brains’!¹⁷

After this last adventure in the laboratory, the skull was reinterred in St. Peter Mancroft, where it remains today.

‘A MIRACLE OF THIRTY YEARS’: THE LIFE AND THE BOOK

Was Sir Thomas Browne's life as interesting as his afterlife? Not according to Lytton Strachey, who wrote that ‘Everyone knows that Browne was a physician who lived at Norwich in the seventeenth century; and, so far as regards what one must call, for want of a better term, his “life”, that is a sufficient summary of all there is to know’.¹⁸ But other commentators have seen Browne's life, though short on incident, as nevertheless full of interest.¹⁹

Thomas Browne was born in London, son of a mercer and his wife, in 1605. He had very early memories of simpling for plants and seeing a comet. Tom Browne's schooldays were spent at Winchester, and he was an undergraduate at Broadgates Hall, Oxford—transformed while he was there into Pembroke College—where, as part of the necessary study for the degree he would have read natural philosophy from Aristotelian texts. He took his BA in 1626, his MA in 1629. Then, in 1630, he started the peregrinations necessary to construct an up-to-date medical education for himself, going (it is believed) to Montpellier, then Padua, and finally to Leiden where he graduated in medicine in 1633. He took the opportunity to acquire languages on his journeys: ‘besides the Jargon and Patois of several provinces, I understand no less than six Languages’, he says in a passage celebrating the fact that he has escaped ‘the first and father sin … Pride’ (RM, II.7). The languages were French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Danish (the Danish was to be very important), not to mention Latin which he spoke fluently, and he also had Greek and Hebrew. These travels Browne really seems to have enjoyed. As he wrote in Religio Medici:

I am of a constitution so general that it consorts and sympathises with all things; I have no antipathy, or rather Idiosyncrasy, in diet, humour, air, anything; I wonder not at the French for their dishes of frogs, snails and toadstools, nor at the Jews for locusts and grass-hoppers [presumably he is here referring to the occasional diet of the Jews mentioned in the Old Testament], but being amongst them, make my common viands; and I find they agree with my stomach as well as theirs … [Similarly] national repugnances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard or Dutch; but where I find their actions in balance with my countrymen's, I honour, love, and embrace them in the same degree … All places, all airs, make unto me one country; I am in England everywhere and under any meridian …

(RM, II.1)

Returned to England, Browne seems first to have gone into medical practice in Oxfordshire. It is here that he is thought to have composed Religio Medici, as it seems to have been finished before October 1635, since he wrote in it ‘as yet I have not seen one revolution of Saturn, nor hath my pulse beat thirty years’ (RM, I.41), and he makes reference to visiting patients (RM, II.6).

He incorporated MD at Oxford in 1637; by which time he had already moved to Norwich, at the exhortation of his old Oxford tutor, Dr. Lushington, recently appointed chaplain to the Bishop of Norwich, and Browne settled in practice there, where he could ‘imbibe the pure Aerial Nitre’ of East Anglian air,²⁰ and here he was to remain for the rest of his life. Norwich, of course, was at that date the second city of the kingdom after London. In 1641, aged 36, Browne took a 19-year-old bride, and although in Religio Medici he had expressed the wish that humans could procreate like trees—without coition—he nevertheless immediately proceeded to start a family of 12 children, of whom six survived to adulthood.

At this point, in 1642, a London printer, Andrew Crooke, printed, without Browne's knowledge, a first edition and a second (corrected) edition of Religio Medici, from a manuscript copy circulating amongst and beyond Browne's circle of friends. The work was put out without an author named, and the printer gave the work an entirely appropriate engraved title-page. Even before Browne knew about this publication the Catholic virtuoso, Sir Kenelm Digby, under arrest by the Parliamentary army in Southwark, was recommended to read it by his patron, the Earl of Dorset, and in two amazing feats he read the book in a sitting (having already gone to bed), and then wrote a 124 printed-page (16 pp. MSS) commentary or Animadversions on it the next day and night.

When Browne learnt of the publication of his work, he produced a corrected, or at least authorized, version which was put out by the same printer in 1643. The title-page was the same (except for the date) (see Figure 2.4). It shows what is probably an Icarus-figure seeking to reach heaven by his own efforts, and in his fall being rescued by the hand of God.²¹ The man calls out: ‘a caelo salus’: ‘salvation from heaven’.²² The hand of God and His fingers—most especially His little finger²³—feature largely in Religio Medici, guiding the life of the true Christian and divine providence. Ardolino points out that reference is probably also being made to the healing capacities of God's hand: ‘In short, the numinous Hand of God represents divine providence, healing, and salvation’.²⁴ In particular, and this is significant in Browne's case, falling from the rock has an ancient Stoic meaning: to plummet from tranquillity, steadfastness and self-control into the storms of tempestuousness and despair; Christian symbolism used the same image of falling from the rock to express the loss of salvation by falling from God's church.²⁵ All in all the picture makes a nice summary of many of the themes of the book.

Religio Medici became a bestseller. It received a total of 12 editions in Browne's life-time, with 62 more in English up to 1966, and several since. It was first translated into Latin in 1644, into Dutch in 1665 and into French in 1668.²⁶

Having had a taste of published authorship thrust upon him, Browne published three further significant works, all in English, and became an internationally known author. In 1646 appeared Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a large work also commonly known as Vulgar Errors, whose subtitle is Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths. Two rather more esoteric works appeared together in 1658: Hydriotaphia: Urne-Burial or, a Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk, together with The Garden of Cyrus or, the Quincunciall, Lozenge, or Net-Work Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered. Posthumously appeared A Letter to a Friend (1690), and a much extended version of the same under the title of Christian Morals (1716). Our concern here will be primarily with the works of the 1640s: Religio Medici and Vulgar Errors, but with reference also the ethical arguments of Christian Morals.²⁷

Internationally known as he was, Thomas Browne hardly seems to have stirred from Norwich and Norfolk for the rest of his life. However, he had an extensive correspondence with other learned men, swapping information and objects of natural-historical interest. Moreover, he built up at his Norwich home a large collection and a workshop of experiments. John Evelyn, who had been in correspondence with him over his own book on gardens, visited him in October 1671. He recorded that Browne's

whole house and Garden being a Paradise and Cabinet of rarities, and that of the best collection, especially Medails, books, Plants, natural things, did exceedingly refresh me … Sir Thomas had amongst other curiosities, a collection of the Eggs of all the foule and birds he could procure, that Country (especially the promontorys of Norfolck) being (as he said) frequented with severall kinds, which seldome or never, go farther into the Land, as Cranes, Storkes, Eagles, &c, and variety of Water foule.²⁸

Through his fame as an author Browne received the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians in London 1664. Towards the end of his life Browne's quiet support of the royalist position had its accidental reward. In 1671, after the Restoration, Charles II made a visit to Norwich, where a dolphin was dissected in his honour.²⁹ It occurred to the king to mark his visit by conferring an impromptu knighthood on some worthy and loyal citizen. The mayor declining the honour, Thomas Browne was lighted on as Norwich's internationally famous author, and knighted.

Religio Medici is a personal document, ‘an exercise to myself’ as Browne says in the Preface, written for the eyes of its author and, as its highly wrought style indicates, written with the expectation that it would reach the eyes of others too. It is a personal credo, a musing on what the author believes with respect to the Christian religion, and on the grounds on which he believes it. Since Browne was the master of the linguistic conceit we can expect the title to have had multiple meanings. The first phrases of the long opening sentence of the book show Browne drawing attention to the double theme of the book: the fact that he could be held doubly guilty of atheism. So this book on the religion of a physician starts by raising the issue of this physician having no religion:

For my Religion, though there be several circumstances that might persuade the world I have none at all, as the general scandal of my profession, the natural course of my studies, the indifferency of my behaviour and discourse in matters of Religion, neither violently defending one, nor with that common ardour and contention opposing another: yet in despite hereof I dare, without usurpation, assume the honourable style of a Christian …

(RM, I.1)

Yet, Browne claims, he dares assume the honourable style of a Christian, and the rest of the book concerns the grounds on which he does so. The book thus takes the reader from suspected double atheism to the author's firm Christianity.

One of its very earliest readers, Sir Kenelm Digby, correctly remarked to Browne that Religio Medici ‘is of so weighty subjects, and so strongly penned, as requireth much time and sharp attention but to comprehend it’.³⁰ Many commentators have even despaired of locating any principle of structure in the text. It is probably impossible adequately to summarize Religio Medici (I have tried). For it is not a closely argued treatise, nor a piece of polemic, but a sequence of linked thoughts. However, it is recognized nowadays by some historians that the book is organized round the successive themes of faith, hope and charity.³¹ As a cluster of themes these were, of course, first brought together by St. Paul in I Corinthians 13: 11-13. St. Paul's context is a discussion of charity and of the veils, or dark glass, of knowledge in this life, compared to the afterlife, all of which is highly pertinent for Browne's message in Religio Medici:

When I was I child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things. For now we see as through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

(I Corinthians 13: 11-13)

For a good Christian like Browne, of course, hope is about death and the prospect of an afterlife; hence death takes up a great deal of Religio Medici. This faith-hope-charity structure of Religio Medici is itself part of Browne's argument: for it announces that these are the proper concerns of the good Christian. That in this world we see only ‘as through a glass darkly’, is in particular a key to his view of the roles of reason and faith, of authority and experiment, in religion as much as in the exploration of nature.

THE RELIGION …

BROWNE'S CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY

Interpretations by historians of Browne's religious position have been extraordinarily diverse, with the most common views being directly contradictory: that he either had no serious religious commitment, or that everything was religious for him, including the supposed ‘science’. One commentator, Dewey Ziegler, has suggested that Browne had an ‘indifference to truth’, that he did not really believe anything about religion: he couldn't, because ‘the science Browne was practising cut off nature from the divine’. Thus Browne has only a ‘religious imagination’ severed from dogma and hence severed from the real problems of his day. His religious position is thus, in Ziegler's opinion, purely ‘aesthetic’, and Browne is simply amused by the paradoxes evident in religion. Hence Ziegler can take literally Browne's phrase about living in ‘divided and distinguished worlds’, and read one of them as a world of both reason and belief (nature, science), and the other as mere amused aesthetics (religion).³² By contrast, Stanley Fish claims the opposite: that ‘Browne's commitment to the devaluing of rational thought and the subsequent exaltation of knowledge through faith is evident on every page’.³³

It is also particularly striking how frequently commentators have chosen to see Browne as making some kind of out-of-time or eternal statement. Joan Webber, for example, has suggested that Religio Medici is a work so personal that it is remote from the religious and political concerns of the day. She says:

Written in 1634 and published in 1642, the Religio Medici has civil war for its context, but we only know that because we know its dates … Active in the world though [its first readers, the Earl of Dorset and Sir Kenelm Digby] were, these good Royalists saw nothing to criticize in Browne's abstraction from the world.³⁴

Yet it is in fact quite clear that Browne has a position on religious and political matters—not a non-position—and the exigencies of religious and political affairs called his expression of this position into being. It was certainly clear to contemporaries that Religio Medici dealt with controversial issues, and that it took strong positions on a number of important matters. In their instant responses, both the Catholic virtuoso Sir Kenelm Digby and the Protestant Alexander Ross (schoolmaster, pedant and anatomy writer) thought it needed taking down a peg or two. Ross in particular attacked Browne's apparent tolerance of Catholics: ‘if our faith be all one with that of Rome: this may indeed be religio Medici, the religion of the House of Medicis, not the Church of England’.³⁵

All three of the organizing themes of Religio Medici (faith, hope and charity) were potentially controversial, since what Browne said about hope and death, and of the fate of the soul and body after death, and about man's duties of charity in this world, was of as great interest to the atheist-hunters as what he said about faith. The figures assembled by D. C. Allen, the genial historian of intolerance, indicate that, taking Europe as a whole, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was an average of one published attack on atheists every 30 days. Browne was to be accused of expressing atheistic opinions in Religio Medici in his own time and in later years of the seventeenth century by self-appointed atheist-hunters, but he was usually let off with a caution.³⁶

This period when Browne was writing his Religio, up to and including the time (1643) it was published with his collaboration, was when the struggle was at its height between the ‘high’ Church of England and the Puritans: between the extremes of the Roman Catholic Council of Trent and the Calvinist Synod of Dort, as Browne saw it. William Laud had been made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, and the Puritans in England were vociferous against his policy of ‘thorough’, that is, of purging Puritans from clerical livings, and ensuring that Puritan practices in church arrangement (such as removing the altar from the east end) and worship (the rejection of the cross in baptism, etc.) were rooted out, and the uniformity of Church of England practices followed. To Puritans this threatened the restoration of popery. In 1641, in the early meetings of the Long Parliament, the members, heavily Puritan and Presbyterian, were talking passionately about abolishing the bishops and the Book of Common Prayer, basic elements of the Church of England. Laud, guiding star of the Church of England, was impeached in 1641, eventually to be executed in 1645; the Civil War began in 1642.

To find the elements of Browne's actual religious position we can start from the sketch of his life by John Whitefoot, his first biographer, who was his friend for 50 years. There are three short passages from Whitefoot's biographical note which are significant.³⁷ In the first, Whitefoot associates Browne's views with those of Hugo Grotius (who did indeed, as Whitefoot claims, think that the Church of England was the best model of a church in Christendom, as we shall discuss further below):

In his religion he continued in the same mind which he had declared in his first book, written when he was but thirty years old, his Religio Medici, wherein he fully assented to that of the church of England, preferring it before any in the world, as did the learned Grotius.

Then, on his deathbed Whitefoot heard Browne submit himself to God's Providence with a courage both rational and religious:

His patience was founded upon the christian philosophy, and a sound faith in God's Providence, and a meek and humble submission thereunto, which he expressed in few words … when his own turn came, he submitted with a meek, rational, and religious courage.

In the third pertinent passage Whitefoot reports that Browne was able to make the rational faculty dominant over the affections and passions; this was to behave like a true Greek philosopher of the Stoic school.

He had no despotical power over his affections and passions … but as large a political power over them, as any Stoick, or man of his time, whereof he gave so great experiment, that he hath very rarely been known to have been overcome with any of them. The strongest that were found in him, both of the irascible and concupiscible, were under the controul of his reason.

It is clear from these comments by Whitefoot that what Browne was trying to do was to fulfil the role of a true Christian philosopher in the modern age. His position was philosophical, in the ancient Greek sense, in that he was seeking the true goal of philosophy: peace of mind, ataraxia, by placing his passions beneath the control of his reason. The position was typically Stoic, amongst the various forms of Greek philosophy, in that tranquility of soul is what is being sought, through an active process of philosophizing, with positive submission of the self to fate, and in that the investigation of nature, seen as something rational rather than irrational, plays a significant role in understanding and reaching the divine for a Stoic. The position was Christian in that Christianity was taken by Browne to be the fulfilment of Greek philosophy; and hence the peace of mind which philosophy seeks can be found through the revealed religion of Christianity, as interpreted through the judicious use of reason.

The essential thing to notice is that Browne's position as a philosopher was one which we have now lost. It involved the whole of life and how one led one's life. Thus for Browne the issues of passion against reason and reason against faith (RM, II.9), were intimately involved with living the ethical life—which is the whole of one's life. For in Religio Medici Browne is teaching what he elsewhere calls ‘the Divine Ethicks of our Saviour’: a Christianized Stoic ethics.³⁸ And in this divine ethics, reason and conscience are intimately linked. For Christian ethics demands the right use of reason, enabling one to master one's unruly passions:

And therefore while so many think it the only valour to command and master others, study thou the Dominion of thy self, and quiet thine own Commotions. Let Right Reason be thy Lycurgus, and lift up thy hand unto the Law of it; move by the Intelligences of the superior Faculties, not by the Rapt of Passion, not merely by that of Temper and Constitution. They who are merely carried on by the Wheel of such Inclinations, without the Hand and Guidance of Sovereign Reason, are but the Automatous part of mankind, rather lived than living, or at least underliving themselves.³⁹

And in actively living the life of the true Christian philosopher, this right use of reason is linked with the proper deployment of one's conscience:

Mean while there is no darkness unto Conscience, which can see without Light, and in the deepest obscurity give a clear Draught of things, which the Cloud of dissimultation hath conceal'd from all eyes. There is a natural standing Court within us, examining, acquitting, and condemning at the Tribunal of our selves, wherein iniquities have their natural Theta's, and no nocent is absolved by the verdict of himself.⁴⁰

Thus the life of the proper Christian for Browne involves control over the self, not being swayed by the world, cleaving to virtue for its own sake, not for earthly reward. One should be calm, quiet, satisfied with one's own lot and thankful for it, envying no one, exercising virtue, a model of fortitude and resilience, hearkening to one's conscience, giving to those in need.

He who is thus his own Monarch contentedly sways the Scepter of himself, not envying the Glory of Crowned Heads and Elohims of the Earth. Could the world unite in the practise of that despised train of Virtues, which the Divine Ethicks of our Saviour hath so inculcated unto us, the furious face of things must disappear, Eden would yet be found, and the Angels might look down not with pity, but Joy upon us.⁴¹

Browne finds this Stoic Christian philosophy, this view that true Christian charity consists in the practice of the highest personal virtue supported by reason and conscience, in St. Paul's writings on charity.⁴² It is to that same chapter of the first Letter to the Corinthians in which Paul uses the faith-hope-charity metaphor, that Browne is referring when he writes:

where Charity is broke the Law it self is shattered, which cannot be whole without Love, that is the fulfilling of it. Look humbly upon thy Virtues, and tho thou art rich in some, yet think thy self poor and naked without that crowning Grace, which thinketh no Evil, which envieth not, which beareth, believeth, hopeth, endureth all things.⁴³

But while this attitude is unmistakably Stoic, it has been fully Christianized by Browne, with the Stoic rules of living adopted, but their doctrines rejected:

Rest not in the high strain'd Paradoxes of old Philosophy supported by naked Reason, and the reward of mortal Felicity, but labour in the Ethicks of Faith, built upon Heavenly assistance, and the happiness of both beings. Understand the Rules, but swear not unto the Doctrines of Zeno or Epicurus. Look beyond Antoninus [i.e. Marcus Aurelius], and terminate not thy Morals in Seneca or Epictetus. Let not the twelve, but the two Tables be thy Law … Be a moralist of the Mount, an Epictetus in the Faith, and christianize thy Notions.⁴⁴

The ‘ethics of faith’ need to be adopted over the ethics of reason: one should be not just a philosopher, but a Christian philosopher.⁴⁵

So if we return to the issues of faith, hope and charity, which constitute the immediate themes of Religio Medici, it is now clear that Browne is interpreting St. Paul as saying that if you have faith (which comes through God's grace), then faith gives you hope of salvation and eternal life. And the expression of having faith and hope is nothing less than the practical exercise of Christian charity through correct living.

And, even more important for our present purposes, the proper Christian should deploy faith where he cannot see, and reason where he can. Reason is constantly contrasted with faith by Browne, but not opposed to it: they complement one another, they do not contradict one another. They are both necessary. Each has its role in the life of the Christian philosopher, and each has not just a role for which it is suitable, but a role for which it is necessary:

How the dead shall arise, is no question of my faith; to believe only possibilities, is not faith, but mere Philosophy; many things are true in Divinity, which are neither inducible by reason, nor confirmable by sense, and many things in Philosophy conformable to sense, but not inducible by reason. Thus it is impossible by any solid or demonstrative reasons to persuade a man to believe the conversion of the Needle to the North; though this be possible, and true, and easily credible, upon a single experiment unto the sense. I believe that our estranged and divided ashes shall unite again, that our separated dust after so many pilgrimages and transformations into the parts of minerals, plants, animals, elements, shall at the voice of God return unto their primitive shapes, and join to make up their primary and predestine forms.

(RM, I. 48)

It can hardly be sufficiently emphasized that this distinction between faith and reason on Browne's part is not the same as the distinction between faith and reason we might make today. For in making such a distinction today we would be unavoidably invoking a conflict (or, at the very least a contrast) between religion and science. These are not the categories within which Browne is thinking. The contrast is not a seventeenth-century one. The discipline category ‘science’ as used by us in such a contrast was unknown to Browne, since it was a creation of the nineteenth century, when indeed the supposed age-old historical conflict between religion and science was also brought into existence. The intellectual domain analogous to our ‘science’ was, for Browne, natural philosophy, itself a branch of philosophy.

So in religion we should expect to find Browne making distinctions between those issues of doctrine (belief) and of discipline (practice) which are or ought to be matters of faith, and those which are matters of reason and conscience; we should also expect him to be distinguishing between those matters of doctrine and discipline which are essential to good Christian belief and ritual, and those which are adiaphora (as Erasmus called them), things indifferent. And this we find. This resorting to reason and conscience (wherever appropriate) is a God-given duty, for ‘there is a natural standing Court within us, examining, acquitting, and condemning at the Tribunal of our selves’.

In brief, where the Scripture is silent, the Church is my text; where that speaks, 'tis but my comment: where there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not the rules of my religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own reason.

(RM, I.5)

Thus, in Browne's view, the Christian has a duty to use his own reason and conscience to enquire into the truth of his religion and its foundations, and into the grounds on which he should trust authority. In querying the tenets of one's faith, reason is for Browne a natural (and God-given) resource to use; this put Browne's position at odds with both Catholics and Calvinists. Thorough querying of the tenets of faith allows one to focus on the essentials: you end with a nucleus of faith, which is true, which has to be believed. Having distinguished between what is essential in faith and what is not, you are able to tolerate those who disagree with you on ‘things indifferent’.

For our purposes here, the most important distinction between a Christian philosopher of Browne's persuasion and a Christian tout court, is that the Christian philosopher allows a great role to reason and reasoning in coming to his understanding of divine truths and in his concept of what the proper practice of Christianity should be: he does not lean on authority in either area. For authority is mere authority. As Browne was to point out: in both religion and nature, to lean on authority without the use of reason and conscience, leads many times not to truth but to its opposite.

Reason and faith have distinct roles for Browne. In the domain of religious mysteries, reason is misplaced; such was the case, says Browne, when scholastic logic was used to illustrate and defend Christian mysteries ‘by syllogism’. But religious mysteries are there to be experienced as mysteries:

Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith … I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an oh altitudo.⁴⁶ Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with Incarnation and Resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan, and my rebellious reason, with that odd resolution I learnt of Tertullian: Certum est quia impossibile est [It is certain because it is impossible]. I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point, for to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but persuasion … and this I think no vulgar part of faith to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to reason, and against the arguments of our proper senses.

(RM, I.9)

It has to be said also that when it came to religious experience itself, Browne was an adherent of a mystical, a neo-Platonic, version of spirituality, and the term ‘mystical’ constantly recurs in positive contexts in Religio Medici. In neo-Platonic vein Browne bursts into verse (RM, I.32) in order to lament

O how this earthly temper doth debase
The noble soul, in this her humble place!
Whose wingy nature ever doth aspire
To reach that place whence first it took its fire …

The last words of his Christian Morals clearly locate what Browne regarded as the highest religious experience:

And if, as we have elsewhere declared [in Hydriotaphia], any have been so happy as personally to understand Christian Annihilation, Extasy, Exolution, Transformation, the Kiss of the Spouse, and Ingression into the Divine Shadow, according to Mystical Theology, they have already had an handsome Anticipation of Heaven; the World is in a manner over, and the Earth in Ashes unto them.⁴⁷ Indeed, for Browne, nature itself presented ‘mystical letters’ for the Christian with eyes to see and who cared to ‘suck Divinity from the flowers of nature.’

(RM, I.16)

The position of Christian philosopher was not easy. Exercising this duty, and finding the right balance for the Christian between passion, reason and faith, created much inner turmoil for Browne, which he relished: ‘Let me be nothing if within the compass of myself, I do not find the battle of Lepanto, passion against reason, reason against faith, faith against the Devil, and my conscience against all. There is another man within me, that's angry with me, rebukes, commands and dastards me’ (RM, II.9). The significance of the 1571 battle of Lepanto in this simile is that it had looked like the ultimate battle between defensive Christendom and offensive unbelief, and in which, after great loss of life, the united Christians were ultimately victorious over the Turks. While the Christian philosopher was, Browne believed, thus morally obliged to concern himself with the respective roles of reason and faith, yet Browne experienced a constant inner dialogue within himself over them: ‘Thus the Devil played at chess with me, and yielding a pawn, thought to gain a queen of me, taking advantage of my honest labours; and whilst I labour'd to raise the structure of my reason, he striv'd to undermine the edifice of my faith’ (RM, I.19).

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IS BEST

The position of Christian philosopher, with its combination of reason and faith, had been available for over a millenium and a half, but it was resorted to only from time to time over that period, and only by certain individuals. Thus while it was far from new with Browne, it was still a relatively unusual position to take. It is clear that Browne's particular formulation and application of this position, and the reasons why he adopted it, lie in his personal responses to the religious crises of his own day, both in England and on the Continent. By looking at this response, we will also be able to see why the ideal Christian philosopher could see the Church of England in particular as the ideal form of church, if it were only free from its current troubles.

It was on the grounds of reason and conscience (not passion or prejudice) that Browne favoured Anglicanism: there is no church, he wrote, ‘whose every part so squares unto my conscience, whose articles, constitutions, and customs seem so consonant unto reason; as the Church of England (RM, I.5). The issue of the grounds of authority in religion exercised many Englishmen's minds in the 1630s, though they were a minority who found in favour not of authority, but of reason and conscience. Amongst such men were a number who flirted with—or were believed to be flirting with—those difficult-to-define but dangerous-to-hold religious positions: Arminianism and Socinianism. And these were amongst the firmest Anglicans of the period. Browne was one of them.

In the 1630s the ‘Arminians’ in England were the remnant of the liberal ‘Erasmian’ Protestants of the sixteenth century, and who took (or were given) their name after the Dutchman Jacob Harmensen (or Hermanzoon, or Hermandszoon, d. 1609).⁴⁸ ‘Arminianism’ was a reaction to strict Calvinism, and especially to its doctrines of predestination and election. Its essence, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘was that God's grace was universal, that Christ died for all men, and that all men, therefore, were capable of salvation; by the exercise of their free will, they could benefit by that freely offered grace’.⁴⁹ As none had the guarantee of election, the Arminians claimed, none had the monopoly of truth, and hence none had a divine mandate to impose their religion on others. Thus persuasion, not persecution, should be the approach toward other religions. Hugo Grotius, a follower of Arminius, preached the universal application of Arminius's views as a way of reuniting the Protestant churches. As Trevor-Roper describes the situation, Grotius

believed that it could provide a basis upon which liberal Calvinists in the Netherlands, Anglicans in England, Gallicans and liberal Hugenots in France, could unite leaving the extremists of popery and Puritanism to wither gradually away. He also believed that the leadership in such a movement naturally belonged to England … To Grotius, the court of James I offered hopes comparable with those which the court of Henry VIII had offered to Erasmus.⁵⁰

In 1613 Grotius visited England where, he believed, the learned King James would lead the Protestant princes in reuniting Christendom, at the head of a centralist, comprehensive church, situated in both doctrine and discipline between Rome and Geneva, returned to true primitive Christianity.⁵¹ With its peculiar compromise of Catholic and Reformed Protestant doctrines and discipline, and headed by a monarch, the Church of England was indeed uniquely appropriate for this purpose. As Grotius wrote to his own brother in 1645, ‘Liturgia Anglicana ab eruditis omnibus habita semper est optima’, the Anglican liturgy has always been held by all learned men to be the best. At the end of his life, Grotius even said that he wanted to die, and his wife to live, in the Anglican communion.⁵²

However, it is typical of compromise institutions that times of stress lead to one or other of the parties coming to the fore, and finding the other wing insupportable. And this was the case in the early decades of the seventeenth century with the Anglican Church. A turning point came with the victory of the Dutch Calvinists at the Synod of Dort in 1618. For this condemnation of all the Arminian positions led, in England, to the Calvinists of the Anglican Church becoming highly wary of the ‘Arminians’ in their midst. With their openness to church ornament and ceremony and their view that grace was available to all, these ‘Arminians’ now looked, to the eyes of the church Puritans, as though they were half-way to popery. As the Puritan wing came under increasing pressure in the 1630s from the Laudian leadership of the church in its campaign for uniformity in discipline and doctrine, so the Puritans came to see the ‘Arminians’ in their midst as authoritarian and absolutist, while the association of some of these ‘Arminians’ with Archbishop Laud made them also seem tyrannical and episcopal if not actually papist.

Browne held similar views to these ‘Arminians’. For instance he deals with questions dividing Calvinists from others, questions as vexed as predestination, more particularly of ‘double predestination’, the doctrine that some have been elected by God to eternal salvation, the rest to eternal damnation. ‘I believe’, Browne says, ‘many are saved who to man seem reprobated, and many reprobated who in the opinion and sentence of man, stand elected’ (RM, I.57). Thus, as we cannot know who are to be ultimately saved, we have no sanction for using election to decide who the saints are in this life. And Browne clearly believes equally in the saving grace of God.⁵³

Socinianism is the other half of this pairing of difficult and abusive terms which became associated with the position that Browne held. Socinianism, named after Faustus Socinus (d. 1604), was regarded as an arch-heresy—as bad as Anabaptism—by both Catholic and Protestant, including as it did denial of the Trinity, of the divinity of Christ, of predestination and of Christ's atonement for sin. Socinians were opposed to the punishing of heretics and against the alliance of Church and State. The approach that Socinus and his followers had taken in reaching these positions was particularly striking. For they had founded themselves on the twin bases of scrupulous biblicism and the right to reason in religion. Without scriptural support no belief was mandatory on a Christian (as with the case of the Trinity). Scripture was revealed truth, but, as a modern scholar has written, ‘in order to perceive the truths of revelation a man had of necessity to seek the guidance of reason, without which revelation was not self-evidencing … Right reason and divine truth must, of necessity, agree’.⁵⁴ Insisting on the necessity of deploying one's reason when reading scripture, and of refusing to persecute those of other beliefs, came to be taken as the two marks of Socinianism. In an anxious age, anyone advocating either or both of these approaches to ascertaining religious truth, could be held guilty (rightly or wrongly) of holding Socinian doctrines as well, of adhering to what Laud called ‘that foul heresy and the most dangerous that ever spread itself since the beginnings of Christianity’.⁵⁵ ‘Socinian’ was therefore a very handy term of abuse to be used against anyone who claimed in matters of religious faith that reason and conscience were to be preferred over adherence to authority. As we have seen, Browne's views on the use of reason and his apparent toleration of Catholics could look remarkably like Socinianism in the eyes of a hostile observer.

Very few persons in England actually were thorough-going Socinians, but many were charged with it. Thomas Browne, however, may have come closer to it than most. For his tutor at Oxford, whom he followed to Norwich, was Thomas Lushington, who actually translated two genuine Socinian works from Latin into English, The Expiation of a Sinner (1646), which he distributed widely round Norwich, and The Justification of a Sinner (1650); however, Lushington took care to keep his identity hidden.⁵⁶

Both Arminian and Socinian views would generally lead one to being in favour of toleration in religion. It was in the England of 1642 still invidious and potentially dangerous to call for toleration. Although a modern historian of toleration such as Nicholas Tyacke can find the occasional English person calling for toleration before this date—such as Thomas Helwys, a Baptist, arguing in 1612 that ‘men's religion is betwixt God and themselves’ and there should be no compulsion yet, Tyacke concludes, ‘Intolerance remained the English order of the day’. It remained so until the later 1640s, when some of the sectaries of the New Model Army, and especially the Baptists, called for every man to have ‘the free liberty of their own conscience in matters of religion, or worship, without the least oppression or persecution, as simply upon that account’.⁵⁷ But even then, the Baptists were a minority voice, and what most Christian denominations and sects continued to want was uniformity of belief—uniformity of everyone, that is, with themselves.

The view that toleration was desirable in religion, and reason is essential to faith, were particularly dangerous in the period when Religio Medici was published, for toleration seemed to many to mean atheism. Francis Cheynell, a Puritan minister and academic, had appointed himself as the scourge of Arminians and Socinians, whom he saw as equivalent to atheists and papists. He found them everywhere, including on the Archbishop of Canterbury's throne, but especially in and around Oxford. Cheynell did not sleep in his persecuting rage. Such persons had, be believed, created obstacles to him getting a theology degree, and had obliged him to leave his fellowship at Merton College. In the 1630s some of them were gathered around the young Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, in a grouping known to historians as the ‘Great Tew Circle’, after Falkland's country house near Oxford.⁵⁸ While Browne was not a member of this circle, for he was seeking his continental education during the years of its flourishing, the characterization of their opinions that has been made by Hugh Trevor-Roper reveals that Browne's views were virtually identical to theirs. They too sought a church founded on reason as well as faith, in which points of controversy were subjected to the test of reason, a church which sought a middle way between the extremes of Catholics and Calvinists, a church with room for both altar and pulpit. Like Browne, they saw Hugo Grotius as their presiding genius, and like Browne and Grotius, saw the Church of England as the embodiment of such an ideal church.

In Oxford and Great Tew there were (amongst others) Lord Falkland himself, Christopher Potter, Provost of Queen's College, John Hales, Henry Hammond and Thomas Lushington, who could all plausibly be accused of Arminianism and Socinianism. But Cheynell's special wrath was reserved for William Chillingworth (1602-44) whom Cheynell pursued, literally, to the grave.

Chillingworth's major work, dedicated to Charles I, was The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation (1636) in which he called for free judgement, toleration in religion, support of the Church of England as the church of uniformity and not contrary to truth or to the Bible, and in which he indicated that relative certainty is the best we can hope for:

Let all men believe the Scripture and that only, and endeavour to believe it in the true sense, and require no more of others, and they shall find this not only a better, but the only means to suppress Heresy, and restore Unity … And if no more than this were required of any man, to make him capable of the Churches Communion, then all men so qualified, though they were different in opinion, yet notwithstanding any such difference, must be of necessity one in Communion.⁵⁹

Chillingworth's case was indeed somewhat unusual, and almost intentionally calculated to rouse the ire of a zealous Presbyterian minister. For Chillingworth had converted from the Church of England to Catholicism in 1630, then had instantly became a ‘doubting papist’, and reconverted to the Church of England!⁶⁰ Obviously, from a Puritan point of view, Chillingworth had held several damnable opinions, but the last is the worst, the call for toleration and the use of reason.

Mr. Chillingworth (your friend) [Cheynell wrote] did run mad with reason, and so lost his reason and religion both at once. He thought he might trust his reason in the highest points; his reason was to be judge, whether or no there be a God; whether that God wrote any book; whether the books usually receiv'ed as canonical be the books, the scriptures of God: what is the sense of those books; what religion is best; what church purest.⁶¹

As if playing out some awful Greek tragedy, in his last days Chillingworth, injured fighting for the royalist forces, fell into the hands of his greatest enemy, both personal and theological, Francis Cheynell, now fighting for the Parliamentary cause. Cheynell harangued Chillingworth for days to get him to recant, but without success. Cheynell published a record of the deathbed exchanges, and of his attendance at Chillingworth's funeral, in a book on ‘The last days of Chillingworth’, which John Locke described as ‘one of the most villanous Books that ever was printed’. Cheynell was particularly proud of the fact that he buried Chillingworth's book, throwing it into the grave with a dreadful curse and a half: ‘Get thee gone then, thou cursed book, which hast seduc'd so many precious souls; get thee gone, thou corrupt rotten book, earth to earth, and dust to dust; get thee gone into the place of rottenness, that thou mayst rot with thy author, and see corruption.’⁶² This was in 1644, the year after the authorized edition of Religio Medici was published.

Chillingworth advocated reason in religion in two differing senses, according to the analysis of Robert Orr.⁶³ First, in the traditional Thomist sense of the mind being a receptacle of divinely implanted truths plainly written for all to see: when we consult our reason, we discover divine truths within, on which we all agree. And second in a novel sense, as a critical faculty which scrutinizes and appraises the evidence for propositions; this sense of the term calls for the weighing of evidence and of authorities, it is ‘right reason’ (in Chillingworth's words), the God-given safeguard against ‘prejudices and popular errors’. The rational and reasonable in scripture and church practice can be accepted. The irrational can be discovered and discarded; while the suprarational, things above reason, in a word religious mysteries, can be recognized for what they are, and be accorded the faith they deserve. Chillingworth invoked this new sense of reason as he argued simultaneously against extreme Puritans who believed that the things one should believe are plainly revealed (via ‘private revelation’) directly in reading the scriptures, and against Jesuits and other Catholics who believed they are plainly revealed by the infallible Church.

These positions on reason and its use in religion are identical to those of Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, though no direct connection between Browne and Chillingworth is known. So it is no surprise to find that the scourge of Chillingworth, Francis Cheynell, attacked Browne's Religio Medici too, for what looked to him like its learned atheism, characterizing it as a work fit to corrupt the religion and morals of the gentry and aristocracy, and by implication a Socinian work. He condemned it in a fast sermon to the House of Lords in March 1645, reproving their lordships for not knowing what constitutes proper honourable life and belief for Christian lords and gentry. In the course of his sermon Cheynell turned to attacking Archbishop Laud as an Arminian, Socinian, papist and atheist:

Machiavel himself could not but censure, such grosse corruption, and abominable contempt amongst those that call themselves Christians. Summopere vituperandi sunt Religionis contemptores & corruptores, Disp. de repub. I.c.10. Take heed of such Chaplains which poyson Noble Families with Socinianism, leaven them with Atheism, or corrupt them with Prophanenesse: Beware of them that have no more Religion, then is to be found in that unworthy Book, called Religio Medici, A Book too much applauded by Noble-men.⁶⁴

Cheynell also saw the dangers to Christianity of the Platonist position that Browne favoured, for Cheynell saw this as merely another veil for atheism. In his work on The Rise, Growth and Danger of Socinianism (1643), again attacking Archbishop Laud, Cheynell wrote:

I know the Socinians doe talk much of the offices of Christ, but they receive nothing from the Scripture, concerning Christ's offices, but what is as they say agreeable to Reason … Reason by its own light did discover unto them that the good and great God had prepared eternall happinesse for our immortall soules: if this then be enough (as the Socinians say it is) to receive all the things as Principles of Religion which Reason by her own light can discover to be true, (and how neer the Arch-Bishop comes to them, let the Reader judge) then the Philosophers, especially the Platonists, were in an happy condition, & it will be lawfull for a man to cry out aloud, Sit anima mea cum Philosophis, and he shall never be thought an Atheist, nay shall passe for a good Christian …⁶⁵

One can see what a narrow path Browne walked in Religio Medici in calling for the application of reason and conscience in religion, while avoiding the accusation of being a Socinian or atheist.

So in what sense is Browne an advocate of toleration in religion in Religio Medici? The modern sense of religious toleration is based on a view of rights: every individual has a right to his or her own opinion, and therefore should not be forced against their will to profess or practise any particular religion. In this sense, Browne was certainly not tolerant. But he was tolerant in a seventeenth-century sense, which may perhaps (in contrast) be described as based on a view of duties: on each person lay the duty of discovering and practising true Christianity. In Browne's view, this meant that all men had an obligation to investigate the grounds of Christian religion for themselves, and to seek its validity using reason and scripture. In arguing that the difficulty—even the impossibility—of gaining certitude in religion means that no one has a divine mandate to persecute anyone else in the name of religious belief or practice, Browne was saying that it is the Christian's duty to be tolerant over ‘things indifferent’. But that does not mean that he was particularly open-minded or forgiving with respect to either Catholics or Puritans.

Nor indeed did his toleration extend to him thinking that all men had a right to their own point of view on the grounds that all men are equal. Indeed he thought the opposite, holding to what one might call a doctrine of the two comprehensions. For he made a distinction between the wise, on the one hand, and rude heads—the vulgar—on the other, and this runs like a refrain through Religio Medici. It is something of an obsession for Browne, this distinction between the wise and the unlearned, between the reasonable and the unreasoning, between the gentleman and the mob. It is a traditional Stoic viewpoint; and it is a distinction, of course, about social hierarchy, and politics.

If there be any amongst those common objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, virtue and religion, the multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity, which taken asunder seem men, and the reasonable creatures of God; but confused together, make but one great beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra.⁶⁶

(RM, II.1)

This distinction between the wise and the rude is also about belief and the right role of reason. And Browne regards the extreme Protestant sects—the Puritans—as the product of vulgar enthusiasm and vulgar (that is, inadequate) reasoning.

Michael Wilding has shown that, in producing the ‘authorized’ version of 1643, Browne made many small alterations to the text to adjust his position to the present circumstances.⁶⁷ He shows that, if one reads the text in the context of 1643, then Browne is actually extending his famous toleration only to Catholics: he dislikes the sects, he dislikes the religious/political radicals. Even one of the ‘ancient heresies’ which Browne claimed to have suffered as a young man, mortalism, Wilding shows was hardly obsolete, but current in the 1640s, and in particular associated with the radical sects. That Browne had rejected it is significant. Browne's view on the Antichrist (that he doesn't exist, and certainly hasn't been identified) and the dating of the millennium (it can't be dated, so is not just round the corner) both place him squarely against the radical millenarians.

Indeed, in contrast to the views of some modern commentators on Browne such as Joan Webber, it is clear that Religio Medici is a strongly conservative work in political terms, as well as religious ones, with Browne's views being expressed in a vocabulary atuned to the troubled times in which he was writing, and critical of current changes toward a less hierarchical society. For instance, Browne speaks of social hierarchy as natural: there is a ‘natural dignity, whereby one man is ranked with another, another filed before him, according to the quality of his desert, and pre-eminence of his good parts’ (RM, II.1). Today, alas, this natural state has been perverted:

Though the corruption of these times, and the bias of present practice wheel another way, thus it was in the first and primitive Common-wealths, and is yet in the integrity and cradle of well-ordered polities, till corruption getteth ground, ruder desires labouring after that which wiser considerations contemn, every one having liberty to amass and heap up riches, and they a license or faculty to do or purchase anything.

(RM, II.1)

And again: ‘Statists [political theorists] that labour to contrive a Common-wealth without poverty, take away the object of charity, not understanding only the Commonwealth of a Christian, but forgetting the prophecy of Christ [i.e. ‘the poor you shall have always with you’]’ (RM, II.13). And in this context Browne mentions medicine as a necessary and honourable profession, speaking of ‘Those three Noble professions which all civil Commonwealths do honour’ (RM, II.9), theology, law and medicine. As Charles Webster has taught us in The Great Instauration, some Puritans were at this period planning to abolish all professions in the cause of making a better and more egalitarian society. From such comments Browne's social and political conservation should be evident. Browne's famous tolerance was very limited.

We can conclude about Browne's religious commitment that it seems to have started, logically or chronologically or both, from philosophy, searching for the role of Christian philosopher. It ended in Anglicanism, to which he was persuaded by reason and conscience, those two great tests. His Anglicanism is a response to the situation of his life, and perhaps some of his devotion to it had been learnt abroad, particularly in that hotbed of Arminianism, Leiden.

So the religion of this particular physician does not come down to a matter of simple toleration; this is to make Browne far too much of a modern. And, as has been shown, the explicit rationality of his standpoint was an integral part of his religious position: we are not entitled to separate his religious beliefs and practices from his rational standpoint, and make him into a modern in our own image. His religion was thoroughgoing, it was a way of life, a commitedly Christian way of life, an attempt to practise ‘the Divine Ethicks of our Saviour’.

… OF A PHYSICIAN

The opening words of Religio Medici discussed the double dangers for Thomas Browne the physician of being suspected of atheism. Now we need to explore the other side of the problem: the danger of someone educated specifically as a physician being suspected of having no religion, and yet having the strongest Christian faith. ‘For my Religion’, Browne wrote, ‘though there be several circumstances that might persuade the world I have none at all, as the general scandal of my profession, the natural course of my studies …’ (RM, I.1). Like Browne's apparent toleration of those of other Christian persuasions, this too involves the potential charge of atheism, and is equally resolved into strong Christian faith. What Browne is claiming is that the physician is not doomed to atheism, but his natural studies should lead him to God, as much as his religious studies will do. This is the other side of the religion of a physician, the other meaning of the title of the book. It is certainly striking that Browne constantly talks about God via the mysteries of both scripture and nature at once: they are God's two books, in that familiar expression: ‘Thus there are two books from whence I collect my divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and public manuscript, that lies expansed unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other …’ (RM, I.16). This does not involve substituting the ‘natural’ path to God for the religious path: the two routes run to the same goal. Religio Medici, the religion of a physician, thus constitutes a double route to God.

But nature is always a potential problem for the good Christian. For in considering, contemplating, investigating or admiring nature one always runs the risk of attributing to nature the characteristics or the identity of God.⁶⁸ To claim that God was present everywhere in nature was heretical; to claim that nature had all the properties and qualities, such as goodness and providence, that Christians attributed to God was atheistical. Passion and misplaced reason were to blame for such confusions of God with nature, wrote Browne, in a matter where faith should be trusted: ‘The bad construction and perverse comment on these pair of second causes [i.e. nature and fortune], or visible hands of God, have perverted the devotion of many to Atheism; who, forgetting the honest advices of faith, have listened to the conspiracies of Passion and Reason’ (RM, I.19). It is essential to recognize, Browne urges, that nature is simply the hand or instrument of God, it is ‘that settled and constant course the wisdom of God hath ordained the actions of his creatures, according to their several kinds’ (RM, I.16). Then we can read it aright and use it as an additional route to God. This, Browne implies, will take one on a route away from the dangers of atheism, and toward true religion.

It was indeed the case in this period that the relation to faith of rational discussion of natural knowledge was being fervently discussed. Schoenveld has shown, for instance, that in Leiden, where Browne had graudated in medicine and possibly learnt his Arminianism, the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on Method (1637), especially its Latin verson of 1644, led to theological issues being put to methodical doubt. Later (1656) the members of the university had to be warned that there was a proper distinction of roles:

matters and questions which are proper to Theology and become known only by revelation through God's Holy Word—as being entirely separate from those questions that can and should be investigated and be known from nature through reason—should be left to Theologians alone, without allowing others, especially Philosophers to arrogate these to themselves in lectures and disputations in any way.⁶⁹

The physician was in a peculiar position in all this, due to his necessary exposure to the study of nature. There was indeed a popular belief that physicians were natural atheists, expressed in a medieval tag: ubi tres medici, duo athei—where there are three physicians there are two atheists. Physicians were all taken to be followers of Galen, the Greek physician of the second century ad. The Galenic soul of the physicians was thought to be not immortal. Browne gives an instance of a doctor he met in Italy ‘who could not perfectly believe the immortality of the soul, because Galen seemed to make a doubt thereof’ (RM, I.21). Paul Kocher, writing on ‘The physician as atheist’ has shown that the character of the atheistic physician was sometimes represented in print, even by physicians, as for example, by William Bullein in 1564. Kocher points out that Galen's irreligion came to attention because of doctors' actual irreligion in the sixteenth century. But he also shows that it was the case that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries adherents of Paracelsianism, conceived as a Christian medicine, used Galen's (and Aristotle's) ‘irreligion’—i.e. the fact that they were not Christians—to attack their Galenic rivals. As one such Paracelsian wrote: ‘surely such naturall Philosophie is the next way to make men forget thee, O God, and to become Atheists: for it teacheth men to cleave and sticke fast unto the nature of thinges, not ascending [to] nor considering the Creator’.⁷⁰

But what Browne is arguing in Religio Medici is that the physician is actually in an exceptional position to guide others, and that, properly managed, the studies of the physician lead not towards but away from atheism. For the physician has learnt natural philosophy, and studied the microcosm—man himself—at first hand. Browne himself has personally engaged in anatomizing, yet ‘by raking into the bowels of the deceased, continual sight of Anatomies, Skeletons, or Cadaverous reliques, like Vespilloes, or Grave-makers’ (RM, I.38) he has not, he says, been hardened against apprehension about his mortality, nor has he abandoned Christian hope. Rather, the reverse. ‘Without further travel’, he says, we can each contemplate God's wonders in miniature in the cosmography of ourselves: ‘we carry with us the wonders we seek without us: There is all Africa and her prodigies in us, we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume’ (RM, I.15). Indeed, we are the masterpieces of the Creator, we alone are ‘the amphibious piece between a corporal and spiritual essence, that middle form that links those two together, and makes good the method of God and nature, that jumps not from extremes, but unites the incompatible distances by some middle and participating natures’ (RM, I.32). Hence the physician is in a privileged position to appreciate divinity in nature, and also man's special pivotal role in the chain of being. Thus the investigation of nature is desirable on religious grounds and, for this, the use of reason is essential, indeed it is our duty. For

the world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man: tis the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts … The wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads, that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire his works;⁷¹ those [people] highly magnify him whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration.

(RM, I.13)

On this theme Browne lyricizes:

It is thy maker's will, for unto none
But unto reason can He ere be known …
Teach my endeavours so thy works to read,
That learning them, in thee I may proceed …

(RM, I.13)

Thus not only will nature lead us to God, but the exercise of reason in this domain will confirm our faith.

What the physician in his role as natural philosopher is looking for in nature is ‘final’ causes, ‘final’ because they express the final purpose of a thing, the explanation of why it is as it is, the purpose for which, as the Christian saw it, a thing had been created just as it is by the Creator himself, either directly, or indirectly through His servant, nature.

Every essence, created or uncreated, hath its final cause, and some positive end both of its Essence and operation: 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, but their sundry and divided operations with their predestined ends, are from the treasury of his Wisdom. In the causes, nature, and affections of the eclipse of sun and moon, there is most excellent speculation; but to profound further, and to contemplate a reason why his providence hath so disposed and ordered their motions in that vast circle, as to conjoin and obscure each other, is a sweeter piece of reason, and a diviner point of Philosophy; therefore sometimes, and in some things there appears to me as much divinity in Galen his books De Usu Partium, as in Suarez Metaphysics …

(RM, I.14)

The first cause is God; nature and fortune are the second causes, through which God works.⁷²

What was Browne's position with respect to medicine? He had enjoyed a conventional education on the Continent, and was certainly a mainstream Galenic physician, as his university degrees and honorary membership of the College of Physicians indicate. Moreover, his son Edward followed him into medicine, and his father encouraged him to travel and study on the Continent; Edward rose to being President of the College of Physicians, the height of institutional conformity. Sir Thomas's many letters to Edward in London, in which diagnosis, prescriptions and other medical matters are discussed, seem conventional for the time in their language and content, with Browne favouring Peruvian bark (cortex) in fevers, and diagnosing from the urine etc.

Yet from Religio Medici and from elsewhere in his published writings and letters, it is clear that Browne had a sympathy—at the very least a strong interest—in neo-Platonic and especially Paracelsian explanations. He also put this into practice: a series of chemical experiments on blackness that Browne pursued on Paracelsian principles has been studied by Allen Debus.⁷³ It is also clear, given Browne's belief in the presence and activity of spirits in the world, that adherence to Paracelsian medicine could have been seen as more religiously correct than adherence to the medicine of the pagan Galen. Moreover, Paracelsian medicine can be deeply mystical, and together with Browne's interest in Hermetic mysteries, his interest in mysticism in religion could have been perfectly complemented by an equivalent mysticism in medicine.⁷⁴

There is also a celebrated letter of Browne to Henry Power, son of an old friend, who was beginning the study of medicine.⁷⁵ Browne says that it is not possible to become a doctor out of books, so he will recommend authors ‘as tend less to ostentation than use, for the directing a novice to observation and experience’. The basic ‘fathers of the faculty’ are Hippocrates and Galen. Power should read anatomy, especially Harvey on the circulation; the knowledge of plants, animals and minerals should be pursued in gardens, fields and apothecary shops, while reading Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Matthiolus, Doedens, the English herbalists, Spigelius. ‘See chemical operations in hospitals, private houses … Be not a stranger to the useful part of chemistry. See what Chymistators do in their officines’. From the diversions of chemistry and surgery, turn to the business of medicine, that is to the institutes of medicine, reading Sennert.

This done, see how Institutes are applicable to practice, by reading upon diseases in Sennertus, Fernelius, Mercatus, Hollerius, Riverius … But in reading upon diseases satisfy yourself not so much with the remedies set down … as with the true understanding the nature of the disease, its causes, and proper indications for cure.

This is a balance of classical authors and modern writers. Everything should be turned to use and to medical practice. Chemistry should be studied, at least its useful part. But here Browne does not recommend Paracelsus or Van Helmont, but says: ‘begin with Tyrocinium Chymicum, Crollius, Hartmannus, and so by degrees march on’. Olivier Leroy, a twentieth-century commentator on Browne, cites this letter to Henry Power and asks: if this letter had not been known, which writers would we assume Browne would recommend for medicine, from the evidence of Religio Medici? Our list would include Cardan, Paracelsus, Van Helmont and Agrippa, but possibly not Galen!⁷⁶ So our first assumptions would be misplaced. The advice to Power might, however, have been given by Browne simply as to a beginner in medicine, and a more innovative and radical list of medical authorities might have been offered by him in other circumstances. At all events, this letter makes plain Browne's concern with observation and experience in medicine, while not rejecting ancient and more modern authority.⁷⁷

We have an extended published example of Browne applying reason, observation and experience to nature, and this is his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the Vulgar Errors of 1646, (hereafter VE), with several enlarged editions issued by him in the course of his lifetime. It has been claimed that this work was conceived by Browne following a suggestion by Francis Bacon that the advancement of learning needed ‘a calendar of falsehoods and of popular errors now passing unargued in natural history’.⁷⁸ Browne wrote this very large work, he says, ‘as medical vacations, and the fruitless importunity of Uroscopy would permit us’, and it must have taken up a lot of his spare time in his twenties and thirties, indicating the extent of his identification with the new learning of the seventeenth century.

As with Religio Medici, Browne is here concerned with the need to base truth on reason and experience. It is desirable for us, he says, to ‘timely survey our knowledge, impartially singling out those encroachments, which junior compliance and popular credulity hath admitted. Whereof at present we have endeavoured a long and serious Adviso, proposing not only a large and copious list, but from experience and reason attempting their decisions’ (VE, p. 3). This work is aimed at the advancement of learning:

Nor can we conceive it may be unwelcome unto those honoured Worthies, who endeavour the advancement of Learning: as being likely to find a clearer progression, when so many rubs are levelled, and many untruths taken off, which passing as principles with common beliefs, disturb the tranquillity of Axioms, which might otherwise be raised …

(VE, p. 6)

The title of this work links it immediately to Browne's concerns in Religio Medici about the vulgar: the common people believe what is only pseudo-true. But the work is addressed not to the mob but to the gentry, although unfortunately vulgar thinking is not absent even from here, for amongst the gentry too there is a ‘rabble’, a sort of ‘Plebian heads’. If the gentry can be stopped from believing these vulgar errors, the erroneous beliefs will ‘wither of themselves’, for the gentry will be an example to the vulgar, and true knowledge will flow out from them.⁷⁹

Browne begins the book with an extensive section in which he inspects the grounds on which the vulgar, and indeed mankind in general, are subject to false belief. First, there is the common infirmity of human nature, which led Adam to sin and which we all inherit. The vulgar people are further characterized as suffering from feeble understanding, being incompetent to judge between the true and the false: ‘For the assured truth of things is derived from principles of knowledge, and causes which determine their verities. Whereof their uncultivated understandings, scarce holding any theory, they are but bad discerners of verity …’ (VE, p. 26). The vulgar are dominated by their brute appetites, and disdain ‘strict and subtle reason’ (ibid.); they are both credulous and incredulous, which is ‘not only derogatory unto the wisdom of God, who hath proposed the World unto our knowledge, and thereby the notion of Himself; but also detractory unto the intellect, and sense of man expressedly disposed for that inquisition’. (VE, pp. 37-8) Their supinity or neglect of enquiry means they ‘neither make Experiment by sense, or Enquiry by reason; but live in doubt of things, whose satisfaction is in their own power … ‘(VE, p. 39). People are too willing to rest on authority, especially that of the ancients, even though the ancients were so often and so obviously wrong, which we can recognize ‘not only by critical and collective reason, but common and country observation’ (VE, p. 42). Arguments from authority have no special virtue; by contrast ‘our advanced beliefs are not to be built upon dictates, but having received the probable inducements of truth, we become emancipated from testimonial engagements, and are to erect upon the surer base of reason’ (VE, pp. 47-8).

What is most striking to the modern reader in this catalogue of human weaknesses and this call for the investigation of nature to be based on reason, observation and experiment, is the central role played in it by God and His arch-foe Satan. This should warn us again against interpreting Browne either as someone trying to separate ‘science’ from religion, or as a proto-scientist, even in this book of his which deals so largely with nature and calls for observation and experiment. Browne repeatedly speaks here, as he had done also in Religio Medici, of it being a God-given duty for man to take up the role of natural philosopher and to investigate God's creation. But further, Browne places the intellectual weaknesses and fallibility of man firmly within the historic divine story: man is naturally intellectually weak because he is descended from Adam who fell; and the greatest incitement today to false belief is still the activity of Satan as the promoter of false opinion. Not only does Satan incite us constantly to atheism, the greatest form of false belief, by suggesting to us that God does not exist, or that He has no providential care for mankind, or that there are many gods, or that he himself (Satan) is God, or that he himself does not exist (and that therefore there is no evil in the world), but Satan also exploits nature itself both to deceive us with false miracles, and to interpret as natural his own perversions of nature. Only from a proper understanding of the hidden or secret workings of nature will we be able to distinguish the workings of the devil.

For many things secret are true: sympathies and antipathies are safely authentic unto us, who ignorant of their causes may yet acknowledge their effects. Beside, being a natural Magician he [Satan] may perform many acts in ways above our knowledge, though not transcending our natural power, when our knowledge shall direct it.

(VE, p. 67)

There is thus no separation here for Browne between the pursuit of truth in nature and the Christian's practice of true religion: the investigation of nature is literally an investigation of God, of ‘the notion of Himself’, of His creation, of His providence and His final causes. Experiment and observation, together with the deployment of our God-given reasoning faculty, are our tools in this investigation. God ‘hath proposed the world unto our disputation’ (VE, p. 20). The religion of a physician thus naturally, by his duty to God, leads him away from reliance on authority and toward experiment and observation: ‘In Natural Philosophy, more generally pursued amongst us, it [i.e. authority] carrieth but slender consideration; for that [i.e. natural philosophy] also proceeding from settled Principles, therein is expected a satisfaction from scientifical progressions, and such as beget a sure rational belief’ (VE, p. 48). That is to say, natural philosophy starts from settled principles and then proceeds by building firm knowledge on firm knowledge, thus making a progression in knowledge (‘scientifical progressions’), the kind of progression which begets ‘a sure rational belief’.

Browne's attitude here to authority needs comment, for he has been judged, for all his fine words, to be firmly in thrall to ancient authority figures in Vulgar Errors, and to have a very bookish approach to learning, which would seem inappropriate for someone talking about the investigation of nature. Browne was indeed highly academic by inclination, possessing a large library, and he was acquainted with an enormous range of writers ancient and modern on the most diverse and recondite of subjects. Many of his own minor writings are on the obscurest and the most antiquarian of topics. His own writing style is the most artificial and literary of anyone of his century. So Browne is obviously passionate about writers and writing, and thus deeply concerned with authors/authorities and their texts. But Browne was in no way in thrall to authors/authorities. Nor is he rejecting authority, especially not the classical authorities. The situation is this: authority/authors are for Browne a starting-point of research, indeed his favourite starting-point. As Marie Boas Hall has pointed out, Browne's ‘vulgar errors’ are all errors in books: ‘this work is in fact a natural history of learned error’.⁸⁰ Sometimes authorities are right, sometimes they are wrong. The only way to tell is to assess them by critical reason and, when it comes to questions about nature, by observation and experiment. For instance much of Browne's work on nature was a sort of commentary on Aristotle's History of Animals, a book Browne regarded as very erroneous (as his comments in his letters to his son Edward testify), but one which he also regarded as singularly important. A whole chapter of the introduction to Vulgar Errors is devoted to listing the most untrustworthy of the ancient writers ‘who, though excellent and useful Authors’ unfortunately were particularly prone to copying out errors from other writers without checking (VE, p. 52). So Browne does not follow authorities slavishly; but nor does he jettison them wholesale. Instead he subjects what they say, item by item, to critical reason, to observation and experiment: ‘Nor is only a resolved prostration unto Antiquity a powerful enemy unto knowledge, but any confident adherence unto Authority, or resignation of our judgements upon the testimony of any Age or Author whatsoever’ (VE, p. 47).

This is what we must avoid, Browne says: any ‘resignation of our judgements upon the testimony of any Age or Author whatsoever’. The parallels, the continuity, of Browne's views here in Vulgar Errors with his position in Religio Medici should require no underlining. In religion and in investigating nature—itself a duty given us by God—we should not follow authority blindly, but question it; we should instead rely on our reason and on our sense, on experience and experiment. In short, we should use our God-given judgements to attain ‘a sure rational belief’ in both areas. The expression ‘sure rational belief’, which sounds so odd in modern ears, neatly encapsulates Browne's aim in the pursuit of truth both in religion and in God's creation.

There is one particular area where the coherence of Browne's views of truth in both nature and religion has threatened to make his historical reputation notorious. Browne wrote in Religio Medici that he believed in witches: ‘I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are Witches’. His argument was that witches are spirits and are necessary to fulfil the Great Chain or Ladder of Being, from God down.⁸¹ It is a perfectly conventional argument for the time, and one which is both religious and natural-philosophical/medical: it typifies the religion of a physician that Browne advocated. We know that in his capacity as a physician Browne was called in to at least one witch trial to give an expert opinion. On 13-14 March, in 1664, at the assizes in Bury St. Edmunds, Rose Cullender and Amy Duny of Lowestoft were tried and convicted for bewitching children, and put to death. Dr. Browne of Norwich, ‘a Person of great knowledge’ (as a contemporary report called him), testified,

And his opinion was, That the Devil in such cases did work upon the Bodies of Men and Women, upon a Natural Foundation, (that is) to stir up, and excite such humours super-abounding in their [the victims'] Bodies to a great excess, whereby he did in an extraordinary manner Afflict them with such Distempers as their Bodies were most subject to, as particularly appeared in these Children; for he conceived, that these swouning Fits were Natural, and nothing else but that they call the Mother [i.e. hysteria], but only heightned to a great excess by the subtilty of the Devil, cooperating with the Malice of those which we term Witches, at whose Instance he doth these Villanies.⁸²

Apparently Browne cited fresh instances of witchcraft from Denmark (and this is where it was significant that Danish was one of his languages), where there had recently been ‘a great discovery of witches who used the very same way of afflicting persons, by conveying pins into them’. An eighteenth-century sceptic of witchcraft, Frances Hutchinson, was to write, ‘This was a case of blood, and surely the king's subjects ought not to lose their lives upon the credit of books from Denmark’.⁸³

This incident has been a great trial for admirers of Browne in all his historic disguises: Browne the apparent liberal proponent of toleration and moderation in religion, Browne the timeless exquisite writer, and Browne the open-minded proto-scientist jettisoning superstition in favour of cool rationality. Even Patrides, his most recent editor, calls Browne's statement of belief here ‘an astonishing utterance; but I think intentionally so’, and puts it down to Browne's sense of necessary cosmic order.⁸⁴ But it is actually at a more profound level of belief for Browne, a level we cannot share in our usual attempts to make Browne a modern liberal. For Browne claimed that it is an act of the devil to propagate in us the unbelief in witches—it is an instance of how the devil tries to make us interpret the natural as unnatural, it is a devilish encouragement to atheism.⁸⁵ And Browne is perfectly explicit in Religio Medici about the existence—the necessary existence if the great chain of being is to be complete—everywhere in this material world, of spirits, good and bad (RM, I.35), and hence of witches. Good spirits are our guardian angels (RM, I.33); possibly, as the Platonists say, there is a world spirit (RM, I.32); certainly there is the spirit of God active within us ‘the fire and scintillation of that noble and mighty Essence, which is the life and radical heat of spirits’ (RM, I.32). Witches are amongst the devil's scholars, and they delude us by making natural effects look like magic. ‘Thus’, he writes, ‘I think at first a great part of Philosophy was Witchcraft, which being afterward derived to one another, proved but Philosophy, and was indeed no more but the honest effects of Nature: What invented by us is Philosophy, learned from him [the devil] is Magic’ (RM, I.31). This is precisely what Browne also later maintained in Vulgar Errors, and what he is reported as arguing 20 years later at the trial in Bury: that these swooning fits were natural, ‘but only heightened to a great excess by the subtility of the Devil, co-operating with the malice of those we term witches’. The devil, through his pupil witches, uses natural means to achieve perverted, devilish ends, intending thus to undermine our ‘sure rational belief’ in God and His workings. Given Browne's general favouring of experiment to test authority and testimony, it is interesting to find that Browne did not join with some of the more cynical gentlemen at the trial who insisted on performing what they called ‘experiments’ to test the veracity of the children, as a result of which they concluded that ‘the whole transaction of this business was a mere Imposture’.⁸⁶

What I have been presenting above is a different picture of Browne's view of nature than that presented by some twentieth-century commentators who have suggested that Browne's predeliction for reason, experiment and the ‘new philosophy’ of the seventeenth century put him in a quandry with respect to religious belief—that he had, somehow, to justify the one if he wanted still to believe in the other, and that this is what he was doing in Religio Medici. Using John Donne's words they have asked: did the new philosophy ‘call all in doubt’ for Browne?⁸⁷ Or did he resign himself to a fideist position with respect to religion, believing what he was told to believe, without subjecting doctrine to the test of reason, and did he meanwhile conduct his natural philosophy wearing, as it were, another hat? The most common way in which historians have resolved this problem of their own making has been to argue that Browne was an early scientist or proto-scientist and, though he was manifestly religious, yet he managed to keep his religion and his science separate, and that this is to be admired in him. Gordon Chalmers, for instance, has claimed that we can legitimately distinguish in Browne's writings his ‘reasons for research’, which were clearly often religious, and ‘the reasons he uses in order to draw inferences from his observations’, which were not demonstrably religious, and Chalmers concludes from this that ‘on the whole Sir Thomas Browne did keep his particular scientific speculations free of theology and ethics … [which indicates] that in his scientific practice Sir Thomas Browne was really scientific’.⁸⁸ This whole problem, however, is predicated on the assumption that the science-religion antithesis of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be read back on to the religious-minded natural philosophers of the seventeenth century, as they went about investigating the creation as a God-given duty. Thomas Browne was not arguing for making any kind of separation between religion and natural investigation, but quite the reverse: he was arguing that the one reinforced the other, that exploration of nature was an appropriate and worthy undertaking for a Christian and led him ever closer to his creator. Both were to be conducted using our God-given reasoning faculty.

However, we need to bear in mind that in pursuing this argument Browne was not engaged in the exercise of ‘natural theology’. Some of his contemporaries were beginning to engage in such natural theological arguments in order to counter and win over the atheists that they were convinced were all around them seeking to undermine society and true religion. For instance in 1676, Thomas Tenison, later Archbishop of Canterbury but at this date minister at Browne's church, St. Peter Mancroft in Norwich, wrote a poem ‘contra hujus saeculi Lucretianos’ [Against the Lucretians of our age], illustrating Gods wisdom and providence from anatomy, and the rubric and use of parts in a manuscript … in Latin after Lucretius his style' and dedicated it to Thomas Browne himself and to a Dr. Lawson.⁸⁹ This is the key natural theology argument: it starts from the findings of natural philosophy, in this case from anatomy, and uses them to show that nature reveals the actions (and hence the existence) of a providential designer, the Christian God; hence atheism is misguided, and all the evidence of creation is against it. But in Religio Medici Thomas Browne by contrast is arguing that the study of nature is an additional and complementary route to God, rather than being a route to atheism. Both this argument and the natural theological argument are concerned with God, atheism and nature, but they are different arguments and we should not confuse them. However, we would certainly be correct to conclude that Browne wrote Religio Medici primarily because he was, like so many men of his age, obsessed with the dangers of atheism.

THE RELIGION OF PHYSICIANS: THE SKULL, THE MAN AND THE BOOK

Today there are three kinds of general response to Religio Medici. Two we have already touched on: that of the English literature scholar; and that of the historian of science and medicine, who uses Browne as a touchstone for the state of the supposed dispute between science and religion in seventeenth-century England. But there is a third continuing interest, one which is in a way more important than either of these two, and it is one which, unusually, links the world of the historian of medicine with the world of medicine itself. I am referring to the still-living response of certain physicians wanting some sort of model or ideal for their professional and private lives. This image of Browne as a model physician derives from the real dispute between the respective supporters of science and religion, which took place of course not in the seventeenth but in the nineteenth century, in the wake of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859).

This image of Browne was created by the most famous modern Brownian,⁹⁰ Sir William Osler, a physician who was very influential in setting his own life as a model for the ideal life of a physician and whose legacy is still with us, although he died as long ago as 1919. Osler rose to become successively professor of the Institutes of Medicine at McGill, of Clinical Medicine at Pennsylvania, Physician-in-Chief to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, and his book Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892), in which he sought to unite two discordant medical realms of his day—clinical medicine and laboratory medicine—became a classic and, in a modern guise, was still in print until recently.

Osler was introduced to Browne and Religio Medici while still at school. Religio Medici turned Osler to becoming a bibliophile and collector. He resolved to collect every edition of Religio Medici.⁹¹ But the book had a far greater significance for him than this. At 49 years of age, Osler could say of Religio Medici:

no book had has so enduring an influence on my life. I was introduced to it by my first teacher, the Rev. W. A. Johnston, Warden and Founder of the Trinity College School [in Toronto], and I can recall the delight with which I first read its quaint and charming pages. It was one of the strong influences which turned my thoughts towards medicine as a profession, and my most treasured copy—the second book I ever bought—has been a constant companion for thirty-one years—comes viae vitaeque …⁹²

Johnston, Osler's teacher, was a High Church Anglican, with strong sympathy for the Oxford Tractarians, and he might have moved over to Rome with Newman had he stayed in England.⁹³ Osler too was Church of England when he was a young man, for his father was an Anglican clergyman and missionary, sent to Canada by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.

Born in 1849, Osler was a young man making his life choices at the very time when the furore resulting from the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species was at its height. The Church of England of his father and his father's clerical colleagues was not only ‘high’ and ritualistic, but with respect to the issues raised by Darwin it was highly defensive, doctrinally rigid, and anti-science. Osler was introduced to Religio Medici at a moment when he was uncertain whether to become a minister of religion or a doctor, and he felt the book turned him to medicine. It thus enabled him, in his adolescent spiritual crisis, to take a first step away from the anti-science rigidities of the Church of England that he knew. But Religio Medici of course held for him still much religion, and thus permitted him to conclude that religion and an interest in nature could be compatible: that is, in nineteenth-century terms, that religion and science were really compatible, not incompatible. Gradually, Osler moved further and further away from mainstream Church of England Christianity, and in 1872 even spent 18 months as a student in the ‘godless’ environment of University College, London, which proved to be a ‘dangerous school’ for him.⁹⁴ Ultimately Osler became an agnostic, but he never rid himself completely of God and the religious mission: as late as 1910 he was still producing what he called ‘lay sermons’, such as the one of that year on ‘Man's redemption of man’. The relatively open and tolerant Church of England that Browne's Religio Medici presented to Osler's young eyes was obviously far more attractive to him than the Church of England that Osler knew from his own home environment. Browne's apparent tolerance presumably meant to Osler that one could be spiritual in a gentle, non-dogmatic way without being of an exclusive religious persuasion, or indeed even a Christian.

Osler learnt the text of Religio Medici off by heart. He frequently called Browne ‘my life-long mentor’, and recommended Browne's wisdom in many lectures. He described Browne as ‘that most liberal of men and most distinguished of general practitioners’, and ‘an even-balanced soul’, and called him one of his ‘old friends in the spirit’.⁹⁵ For Osler, Browne ‘presents a remarkable example in the medical profession of a man who mingled the waters of science with the oil of faith. I know of no one in history who believed so implicitly and so simply in the Christian religion, yet it is evident from his writings that he had moments of ardent scepticism’.⁹⁶ That is to say, in Osler's view, Browne had succeeded in mixing those two unmixables, science and faith, which Osler himself had found so hard to reconcile, and like Osler he had suffered ardent scepticism while retaining a core of simple faith (though Browne's faith was more explicitly Christian than Osler's). Osler's interpretation of Browne's religious position was always at this imprecise but idealized level. As he told students, Osler felt that the book was a moral guide to life: ‘Mastery of self, conscientious devotion to duty, deep human interest in human beings—these best of all lessons you must learn now or never: and these are some of the lessons which may be gleaned from the life and from the writings of Sir Thomas Browne.’⁹⁷ It obviously required the ear of someone who had himself struggled with the relation of science and religion to hear Browne teaching these lessons of a Christian morality in Religio Medici.

Osler's identification with his Sir Thomas Browne was as total as he could make it. He had discovered that Sir Thomas had written ‘On my coffin when in the grave I desire may be deposited in its leather case or coffin my pocket Elzevir's Horace, “Comes viae vitaeque dulcis et utilis” worn out with and by me’.⁹⁸ The Religio Medici had been Osler's own ‘gentle and valued companion of his way and life’. So in his turn, when he was laid out in the cathedral of Christ Church, Oxford in 1919 Osler lay, in the words of his biographer, ‘in the scarlet gown of Oxford, his bier covered with a plain velvet pall on which lay a single sheaf of lilies and his favourite copy of the “Religio”, comes viae vitaeque’.⁹⁹

In 1901, in anticipation of the Norwich celebrations of the three hundredth anniversary of Browne's birth, Sir William Osler presented a glass case in which to keep and display the skull of Sir Thomas, still out of its grave, with quotations from Religio Medici on the theme of death, mortality and immortality, engraved around the case (see Figure 2.5). The transformation was now complete: Sir Thomas's skull had been turned into a full religious relic and object of pilgrimage of the adherents of the Christian religion which Osler believed that Browne had taught in Religio Medici.¹⁰⁰

In his love of Browne and of Religio Medici in particular, Osler has been notably followed in modern times by another physician-bibliophile, practitioner-historian, Geoffrey Keynes, physician to the Bloomsbury Group, modern pioneer in blood transfusion, and brother of Maynard (though he hated being identified like that). Keynes was to produce the modern complete edition of Browne's works. Like everyone else in our story, he was to receive a knighthood. However, the initial religious dimension was absent in this case: Keynes was an agnostic from an early age. When at Cambridge as a student in 1908, Keynes was introduced to the poetry of John Donne by Rupert Brooke, and Keynes started to collect. Then Keynes ‘fixed on’ Sir Thomas Browne ‘as one of the greatest literary artists, as well as being a doctor, and therefore to be collected’.¹⁰¹ Keynes and another student, Cosmo Gordon, boldly wrote to Osler, then Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, who welcomed them. Keynes became a lifelong fan and promoter of what he described as ‘the Oslerian tradition’—a particular attitude to life, responsibility, history in medicine, and centred round the clinician's task.¹⁰² As we have seen, Osler for his part thought this was an attitude he had discovered in the life and religion of Thomas Browne—tolerant, international in outlook, being at once sceptical and full of simple faith, allowing equal legitimacy to the spiritual and the scientific, and deeply ethical. For a spiritually minded but sceptical physician of the scientific age, it was the perfect religion of a physician.

Notes

1. Hardin Craig, writing in 1950, cited in Frank Livingstone Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne, a Biographical and Critical Study, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1962, p. 105.

2. Letter of 1804, cited in Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne, p. 134.

3. From ‘Rhetoric’ in De Quincey's Collected Writings, D. Masson (ed.), Edinburgh, Black, 1890, vol. 10, p. 105.

4. William Petty said to Pepys in January 1664 that Religio Medici was one of the three books that during his life had been ‘most esteemed and generally cried up for wit in the world’. This was not a compliment: Petty went on to say that the wit lay ‘in confirming some pretty sayings, which are generally like paradoxes, by some argument smartly and pleasantly urged which takes with people who do not trouble themselfs to examine the force of an argument which pleases them in the delivery, upon a subject which they like …’(Robert Latham and William Matthews (eds), The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols, London, Bell, 1970-83, vol. 5, p. 27).

5. For detail on this see Frank J. Warnke, ‘A Hook for Amphibium: Some Reflections on Fish’, in C. A. Patrides, (ed.), Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays, London, University of Missouri Press, 1982, pp. 49-59.

6. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne, p. 169.

7. Joan Webber, ‘Sir Thomas Browne: Art as Recreation’, in her The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose, Madison, Milwaukee, University of Wisconsin Press, 1968, pp. 151, 153. As Browne says in the Preface, ‘there are many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason’.

8. Browne writes that wise and prudent men ‘so contrive their affairs that although their actions be manifest, their designs are not discoverable … for vulgar eyes behold no more of wise men than doth the Sun: they may discover their exterior and outward ways, but their interior and inward pieces he only sees, that sees into their beings’ (Vulgar Errors, Book III, ch. 20).

9. I follow the reconstruction presented by M. L. Tildesley, in her article, ‘Sir Thomas Browne: His Skull, Portraits, and Ancestry’, Biometrika, XV, (1923), 1-76.

10. Anthony Batty Shaw, Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich, Norwich Browne 300 Committee, 1982, caption to illustration 30. The inscription was by Sir Thomas's son, Edward.

11. Sir Arthur Keith, Phrenological Studies of the Skull and Brain Cast of Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich, delivered at Edinburgh, 9th May 1924, The Henderson Trust Lectures, no. III, Edinburgh, The Trustees, 1924, p. 2.

12. Tildesley, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, p. 1, Introductory Note by Sir Arthur Keith.

13. Tildesley, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, p. 4. Tildesley is such an amusing writer that one suspects her tongue was at times in her cheek.

14. Tildesley, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, p. 41. She found that none of the artists of the putative portraits of Sir Thomas ‘had been quite candid about the depressed forehead of the subject’: that is, the low forehead does not seem to be represented in any of the supposed portraits (ibid., p. 53). The current authentic portrait of Sir Thomas (Figure 2.1) was not available to her as a possibility.

15. C. A. Patrides (ed.), Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1977, pp. 296-7. All quotations are from this edition, with the spelling modernized; references to Religio Medici are to the numbered paragraphs of the text.

16. Tildesley, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, p. 68.

17. 1804 letter, quoted in Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne, p. 134.

18. ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, in his Books and Characters, French and English, London, Chatto and Windus, 1922, see p. 31.

19. I base my account of Browne's life on a number of works, including: Jeremiah S. Finch, Sir Thomas Browne: A Doctor's Life of Science and Faith, New York, Schuman, 1950; Joan Bennett, Sir Thomas Browne: ‘A Man of Achievement in Literature’, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1962; Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne.

20. Letter to a Friend, in Patrides, The Major Works, p. 392.

21. See Carlo Ginzberg, ‘High and Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ Past and Present, no. 73, 1976. My thanks to Dr. S. Kusukawa for bringing this to my attention.

22. Professor Michael McVaugh has kindly assured me, on the basis of a computer search, that this is not a quotation from classical sources. But he suggests that there might be an allusion being made to Psalm 19: 7, in the Vulgate version (Psalm 20: 6 in the Authorized): ‘Now I know that the Lord saveth his anointed: for he will hear him from his holy heaven with the saving strength of his right hand’, ‘Nunc cognovi quoniam salvum fecit Dominus christum suum. Exaudiet illum de caelo sancto suo, in potentatibus salus dexterae eius’.

23. See especially RM, I.21.

24. Frank Ardolino, ‘The Saving Hand of God: The Significance of the Emblematic Frontispiece of the Religio Medici’, English Language Notes, 15 (1977) 19-23.

25. Ardolino, ‘The Saving Hand of God’, p. 21.

26. On these see Sir Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Sir Thomas Browne Kt. M.D., 2nd edn, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968. The Latin, French and Dutch versions were all first published in Holland; on which see Cornelis W. Schoneveld, Intertraffic of the Mind: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Anglo-Dutch Translation with a Checklist of Books Translated from English into Dutch, 1600-1700, Leiden, Leiden University Press, 1983, ch. 1, ‘One Book: Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici in Holland’.

27. Editions used: for convenience, Patrides's edition of Religio Medici, Letter to a Friend and Christian Morals; all in Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works. For the complete Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the letters and the miscellaneous writings, I have used Sir Geoffrey Keynes's edition of The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, 4 vols, 1977, London, Faber and Faber.

28. The Diary of John Evelyn, John Bowle, (ed.) Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 241.

29. Letter, Browne to his son Edward, 14 June 1676, printed in Keynes, Works, vol. 4, p. 61.

30. Letter, Digby to Browne, 20 March 1642/3; printed in Keynes, Works, vol. 4, p. 236.

31. This triple theme is pointed out by Patrides, The Major Works, p. 133, but not explored by him; it has also been noticed by Joan Webber and Frank J. Warnke.

32. Dewy Kiper Ziegler, ‘In Divided and Distinguished Worlds’: Religion and Rhetoric in the Writings of Sir Thomas Browne, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1943, pp. 72, 35, 98; this rather silly thesis is, one should note, the work of a very young man.

33. Stanley Fish, ‘The Bad Physician: The Case of Sir Thomas Browne’, in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1972, pp. 353-73, see p. 363.

34. Webber, ‘Sir Thomas Browne: Art as Recreation’, p. 164.

35. Medicus Medicatus, or the Physicians Religion Cured by a Lenitive or Gentle Potion, 1645, p. 2. In a medical analogy, Ross wrote that he had written this criticism ‘to let green heads and inconsiderate young Gentlemen see, that there is some danger in reading your Book, without the spectacles of judgement; for, whilst they are taken with the gilding of your phrase, they may swallow unawares such pills as may rather kill then cure them’ (ibid., p. 80).

36. Don Cameron Allen, Doubt's Boundless Sea: Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964, pp. 7-8. Tobias Wagner in 1677, and D. Colberg in 1680 were to be troubled by Browne's doubts, Colberg calling him ‘a doctor who writes in contempt of God's Word’ (ibid., pp. 12-13 and notes); J. F. Reimann, writing in 1725, was to excuse Browne as a man ‘who confessed himself a skeptic in philosophy but not in religion’, whose ‘life and words are pure piety’ (ibid., p. 19).

37. Virtually the whole of Whitefoot's ‘Some Minutes for the Life of Sir Thomas Browne’, originally prefixed to Browne's Posthumous Works of 1712, are reproduced in Patrides, The Major Works, pp. 502-5; for the quotations below see pp. 504, 504-5, and 503 respectively.

38. Christian Morals, Patrides, The Major Works, p. 424.

39. Christian Morals, Patrides, The Major Works, p. 427.

40. Christian Morals, Patrides, The Major Works, p. 426.

41. Christian Morals, Patrides, The Major Works, p. 424.

42. This is somewhat surprising, at least if one thinks of Paul's sermon to the Stoics and Epicureans in the Acts of the Apostles, ch. 17.

43. This is 1 Corinthians 13; Letter to a Friend, Patrides, The Major Works, p. 411-12.

44. Christian Morals, in Patrides, The Major Works, p. 464. The ‘twelve tables’ are the tables of the Roman law, drawn up by the decem viri in 451 bc. The ‘two tables’ are the tablets of stone on which the Ten Commandments were given to Moses by God: in Christian exegesis, following Philo, the first tablet contained the religious commandments (love the lord thy God), the second the moral commandments (love thy neighbour), as characterized by Christ. The point Browne is making is that one should follow the Christian law rather than mere human law, as a basis for ethical living.

45. On these issues in general, see Roger French and Andrew Cunningham, Before Science: The Invention of the Friars' Natural Philosophy, Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1996, ch. 1.

46. Short for ‘O altitudo sapientiae et scientiae Dei’, O, the height of the wisdom and knowledge of God; see Romans 11: 33, the Vulgate reading (Authorized gives ‘depth’ rather than height).

47. Patrides, The Major Works, p. 472.

48. Here I follow Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Laudianism and Political Power’, in his Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays, London, Secker and Warburg, 1987, pp. 40-119.

49. Trevor-Roper, ‘Laudianism’, p. 93.

50. Trevor-Roper, ‘Laudianism’, p. 53.

51. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Hugo Grotius in England’, in his From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution, London, Secker and Warburg, 1992, pp. 47-82.

52. Trevor-Roper, ‘Laudianism’, p. 98 and note on p. 98.

53. J. van den Berg, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and the Synod of Dort’, Sir Thomas Browne M.D. and the Anatomy of Man, Leiden, Brill, 1983, pp. 19-24.

54. H. John McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth Century England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1951, p. 12.

55. Letter of 1639, quoted in McLachlan, p. 43.

56. The Expiation of a Sinner. In a Commentary upon the Epistle to the Hebrewes. By G. M., London, 1646; and The Justification of a Sinner: Being the Maine Argument of the Epistle to the Galatians. By a Reverend and Learned Divine, London, 1650. McLachlan, ch. 7, ‘Two Oxford Socinians’.

57. Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The Rise of “Puritanism” and the Legalizing of Dissent, 1571-1719’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 17-49, see p. 23-30.

58. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Great Tew Circle’, in his Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays, London, Secker and Warburg, 1987, pp. 166-230.

59. The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation …, Oxford, ?1638 edn, the final words of the first preface, ‘The Preface to the Author of Charity Maintained …’.

60. On Chillingworth, see J. D. Hyman, William Chillingworth and the Theory of Toleration, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1931.

61. Francis Cheynell, Chillingworthi Novissima: or, the Sickness, Heresy, Death, and Burial of William Chillingworth …, London, Noon, 1725, (originally published 1644), p. 27.

62. Francis Cheynell, Chillingworthi Novissima, p. 60.

63. This paragraph derives from Robert R. Orr, Reason and Authority: The Thought of William Chillingworth, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1967, ch. 6, ‘The law of reason’.

64. Francis Cheynell, The Man of Honour, Described in a Sermon, Preached Before the Lords of Parliament, in the Abbey Church of Westminster, March 26, 1645. The Solemn Day of the Publique Monethly Fast, London, Gellibrand, 1645, p. 65; emphasis as in original. I am indebted for this reference to David Harley.

65. Francis Cheynell, The Rise, Growth, and Danger of Socinianisme. Together with a Plaine Discovery of a Desperate Designe of Corrupting the Protestant Religion, Whereby It Appeares that the Religion Which Hath Been so Violently Contended for (by the Archbishop of Canterbury and His Adherents) Is Not the Pure Protestant Religion, but an Hotchpotch of Arminianisme, Socinianisme and Popery …, London, Gellibrand, 1643, p. 41.

66. This dislike of the multitude Browne may have got from his tutor, Lushington. In a celebrated sermon at Oxford in 1624 Lushington criticized the king for seeking a Catholic marriage for Prince Charles, and also referred to Parliament as ‘Now the peasant thinks …’. He was obliged to recant publicly on both counts. See Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne, pp. 43-4.

67. Michael Wilding, ‘Religio Medici in the English Revolution’, in Patrides, Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne, pp. 100-14.

68. On this recurrent problem see French and Cunningham, Before Science, ch. 4.

69. Schoneveld, Intertraffic, p. 4.

70. ‘R. B.’, 1585; P. H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England, New York, Octogon Books, 1969 (orig. publ. 1953), p. 251. On the general issue in England at this time, see John Henry, ‘The Matter of Souls: Medical Theory and Theology in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds), The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 87-113.

71. Compare Joseph Glanvill, Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion, London, 1676, p. 5: ‘His works receive but little glory from the rude wonder of the ignorant, and there is no wise man that values the applauses of a blind admiration’. I am indebted to Guido Giglioni for this reference.

72. William P. Dunn, Sir Thomas Browne: A Study in Religious Philosophy, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1951, is particularly valuable on the Platonic dimensions of Browne's argument here and in RM, I.14-I.16; see ch. 3, ‘The art of God’, esp. pp. 104-7.

73. Allen G. Debus, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and the Study of Chemical Indicators’, Ambix 10 (1962), 29-36.

74. See Charles Webster, ‘English Medical Reformers of the Puritan Revolution: A Background to the “Society of Chymical Physitians”’, Ambix, 14 (1967), 16-41; see esp. p. 27.

75. The letter is printed in Works, vol. 4, pp. 255-6, and is dated to 1646 by Keynes. Charles Webster has studied the relation of this advice to the career and investigations of young Power in ‘Henry Power's Experimental Philosophy’, Ambix, 14 (1967), 150-78.

76. Olivier Leroy, Le chevalier Thomas Browne (1605-1682) Sa vie, sa pensée et son art, Paris, Gamber, 1931, (thèse), pp. 212-16.

77. Webster says of this letter that ‘In each field of medicine a judicious selection of works by ancient, Renaissance and contemporary authors was given, together with an exultation [?exhortation] to observation and experiment’. ‘Henry Power’, pp. 152-3.

78. Dunn, p. 17, and others. In Vulgar Errors Browne does not claim that the concept of the book was built on Bacon's suggestion.

79. I have written in English rather than Latin, writes Browne, ‘Nor have we addressed our pen or stile [i.e. stylus] unto the people, (whom books do not redress, and are this way incapable of reduction) but unto the knowing and leading part of learning; as well understanding (at least probably hoping) except they be watered from higher regions, and fructifying meteors of knowledge, these weeds must lose their alimental sap and wither of themselves; whose conserving influence, could our endeavours prevent, we should trust the rest unto the scythe of Time, and hopeful dominion of Truth’ (Vulgar Errors, To the Reader).

80. ‘Sir Thomas Browne Naturalist’, in Patrides, Approaches, pp. 178-87, see p. 180.

81. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of Ideas, New York, Harper, 1960 (first published 1936).

82. A Tryal of Witches, at the Assizes Held at Bury St Edmonds for the County of Suffolk … Before Sir Mathew Hale, Kt …, London, Longman, 1835 (reprint of 1682 original), see p. 16. See also R. D. Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982, p. 62; and Works, vol. 3, p. 293, from Browne's commonplace books.

83. Stock, The Holy and the Demonic, p. 62.

84. Patrides, The Major Works, Introduction, p. 27.

85. Vulgar Errors, Book 1.

86. A Tryal of Witches, p. 17.

87. And new philosophy calls all in doubt, / The element of fire is quite put out; / The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit / Can well direct him where to look for it. / … 'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; / All just supply, and all Relation / … (Donne, The First Anniversary, 1611).

88. See Gordon K. Chalmers, ‘Sir Thomas Browne, True Scientist’, Osiris (1936), 2, 28-79, for quotation see p. 78; Almonte C. Howell, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and Seventeenth Century Scientific Thought’, Studies in Philology, 22 (1925), 61-80.

89. Works, vol. 4, p. 57; Browne to his son Edward, 25 February?1676; Browne mentions this in the context of warning Edward against reading Lucretius' poem, ‘there being divers impieties in it, and tis no credit to be punctually versed in it’. Tenison's poem was not published. Given that the argument is against that arch-atheist Lucretius, it is a nice joke that it is in his poetic style. In Vulgar Errors Browne also mentions that Raymund Sebund ‘hath written a natural theology, demonstrating therein the Attributes of God, and attempting the like in most points of Religion’; Works, vol. 2, p. 49.

90. I use this term in hope to distinguish admirers of Sir Thomas from ‘Brownists’, a sixteenth-century sectarian position, and Brunonians, followers of the eighteenth-century physician, John Brown.

91. See Osler's essay, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, an address delivered and first published in 1905; reprinted in Selected Writings of Sir William Osler 12 July 1849 to 29 December 1919, G. L. Keynes (ed.), London, Oxford University Press, 1951, pp. 40-61.

92. Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler, 2 vols, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1925, vol. 1, pp. 504-5; the first antiquarian book Osler ever bought was the Globe Shakespeare.

93. Cushing, Life, vol. 1, p. 27.

94. As Johnston warned his own son in 1876: ‘Suffice it to say if you go there [University College] you will find many excellent opportunities you can not find elsewhere most particularly infidel ideas. What would I give to be well versed in such ideas: but only to disprove them in other people. Probably it is a dangerous school for you my son. Unquestionably W. Osler shews it was so to him … Would that you had time to read Mivarts “Lessons from Nature” & you would say “woe to Darwin Huxley and Co”’. Quoted in Cushing, Life, vol. 1, p. 148.

95. The quotations are from 1902; Cushing, Life, vol. 1, p. 589; and vol. 2, p. 455. Osler's other ‘old friends in the spirit’ were Plutarch, Montaigne, Browne, Fuller, and Izaak Walton.

96. Cushing, Life, vol. 2, p. 25.

97. Osler, Selected Writings, p. 61.

98. Cushing, Life, vol. 2, p. 681. The quotation is not from Horace.

99. Cushing, Life, vol. 2, p. 686.

100. Though the skull was reinterred in St Peter Mancroft, a cast of it is still in the glass case, now in the Sir Thomas Browne Library of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.

101. Sir Geoffrey Keynes, The Gates of Memory, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981, p. 54. Keynes resolved to make a complete collection of Browne's works and prepare a bibliography, which he eventually completed. Keynes's collection of Browne's works is in the Cambridge University Library.

102. Keynes, The Gates of Memory, see esp. p. 51 and the Appendix ‘The Oslerian Tradition’.

Acknowledgement: I am very grateful to Ole Grell for his advice on matters theological and historical.