[In the following essay, Caldwell observes that the Religio Medici derives its sense of unity from its fine melding of the personal and the eccentric, in terms of Browne's thoughts and ideas.]

Browne was once revered for a quaint willingness to share with his reader the aimless, eccentric privacies of his informal thought. The ellipses and protean divagations of his style, the chatty asides and apparent confessions of endearing prejudice, were thus viewed as inevitable marks of a personality escaping the restrictive boundaries of rational discourse. “Fond of the curious,” Coleridge said, “he loved to contemplate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he found … that they, too, were curiosities; and so, with a perfectly graceful interesting ease, he put them, too, into his museum and cabinet of rarities, … reading nature neither by sun, moon, or candle-light, but by the light of the fairy glory around his own head.”¹ And such attitudes have persisted. As late as 1959, for example, Margaret Bottrall argued that the elusive penetralia of the Religio Medici were ultimately wound together by “Browne's vivid sense of his own uniqueness.”²

But in fact delightful inconsistencies and tidbits of vivid uniqueness don't loom large in the Religio itself. The alert reader who, following Coleridge, anticipates an arrestingly warm and cranky personal presence is bound to be disappointed. Glimpses of the intimate workings of Browne's “real” personality are rare and brief; the sweet, solemn, subtly crafted prose and the sinuously shifting thought conceal personality at least as often as they reveal it.

Hence we have recently begun to unwedge the Religio from its once-firm place in the ranks of English autobiography. There is a growing consensus that the “I” of the text is not a simple personal pronoun, but rather, as the late Joan Webber remarked, a persona through which Browne works at “creating himself for public scrutiny.”³ The seventeenth century lacked, after all, a ready-to-hand idiom for the expression of the self, and did not recognize secular autobiography as an established literary form. The prospective autobiographer could therefore expect no wide audience accustomed to the language of self-revelation. The writer determined to put himself into his prose, unprovided with literary conventions which could be relied upon to kindle in the reader an illusion of direct confrontation with a real human being, was thus forced to hatch, ab ovo, the forms that would serve his aim.

Such conventions came into existence, indeed came to be taken for granted, with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hence, whenever in the twentieth century we use the “I”, we are inclined to create around it patterns of language which reinforce its personalness, metamorphosing the objective neutrality of work and sentence into icons of subjective experience. These patterns of language can convey the revelation of a “real” self, or they can, properly transformed, serve fiction as devices for the realistic evocation of an invented character. In either case the “I” exerts a tidal pull on the surrounding language, drawing it into configurations amenable to the expression either of the writer's own ego or to a convincing, if false, image of it. So pervasive and universal has the hunger for personal revelation become that we run the danger of seeing autobiography where it doesn't exist.⁴ The mere presence of the “I” in any work not calling itself fiction may ignite so instinctive an expectation for confession that one ignores a glaring lack of it in the text. We may see self-portraiture where the writer intends something else, or mistake an elaborate but subtle fictive artifice for a diarist's random scribblings.

This is, it seems to me, exactly the case with the “I” in much seventeenth-century prose. Browne in the Religio Medici, Donne in the Devotions, Burton in the Anatomy of Melancholy, clothe first-person expression in an idiom alien to much in the current understanding of autobiographical form. All enthrone the “I” at the center of their work, yet none approaches closely either the matter or manner of most modern first-person discourse, whether fictional or ostensibly factual. The Religio Medici in particular has, as the Coleridge passage shows, been particularly subject to praise for a personalness which in fact it deliberately avoids. So to appreciate Browne, we must first learn what he does not attempt to do, what he lacks that we often take for granted in contemporary autobiography. Then, having cleared the air, I shall try to determine what in fact he does aim at, by drawing some analogies between the Religio and a little-explored seventeenth-century mode, formal prayer.

Early in Part I, we encounter a passage which Browne's nieteenth-century admirers were wont to produce as an example of his quaint confessional immediacy:

Holy water and [the] Crucifix (dangerous to the common people) deceive not my judgement, nor abuse my devotion at all: I am, I confesse, naturally inclined to that, which misguided zeale termes superstition; my common conversation I do acknowledge austere, my behaviour full of rigour, sometimes not without morosity; yet at my devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hands, with all those outward and sensible motions, which may express or promote my individual devotion. I should cut off my arme rather then violate a church window, then deface or demolish the memory of Saint or Martyr. At the sight of a Crosse or Crucifix I can dispence with my hat, but scarce with the thought and memory of my Saviour; I cannot laugh at, but rather pity, the fruitlesse journeys of Pilgrims, or contemne the miserable condition of Friers; for though misplaced in circumstance, there is something in it of devotion: I could never hear the Ave Maria Bell without an elevation, or thinke it a sufficient warrant, because they erred in one circumstance, for me to erre in all: that is in silence and dumb contempt.⁵

At first the language here does seem intimate, familiar, conversational. The thought develops loosely, apparently casually. Simple points arise and pass without haste or compressed economy, as if Browne were determined to unbrace and speak informally. A few words could accurately summarize the whole passage: “I have a real sympathy for the palpable manifestations of Roman piety, even those an English protestant might find debased.” Browne's asides, his leisurely, even lax, pursuit of the main point, suggest a desire to record random thoughts, not because they are noteworthy as thoughts, but because they are his.

Yet a closer look shows much that formidably interposes itself between reader and narrator. The content, for example, is general and unrevealing. The past, the medium by which the modern autobiographer roots personal experience in real events, is utterly absent, here and throughout the text. Many phrases imply specific occasions (“I confesse,” “I could never hear the Ave Maria Bell,” etc.), for which supporting details never appear. The narrator's admissions are always of habit and custom, unembodied in the concrete specifics of anecdote. Even the present is not an immediate here and now, but a capacious collection of undifferentiated moments: “I love to use the civility of my knee,” “I cannot laugh at, but rather pity, the fruitlesse journeys of Pilgrims,” “I can dispence with my hat.”

Now the particularizing of time and place has become a staple, indeed a near-obsession, in modern autobiography. The tone of selfrevelation habitually produces a fireworks display of specifics in content, which have in turn become the furniture both of first-person discourse and of our response to it. We run the danger of imposing on Browne our own after-images of the rich anecdotal panoply we have seen elsewhere, distorting our response to the Religio. Thus it will prove useful to analyze here some twentieth-century first-person narratives, both autobiographical and fictional, exploring hidden assumptions whose absence in Browne is significant. In, for example, Speak, Memory, Nabokov, reversing Browne, tells us at the outset that he means to recall only a general, repeated experience, not a particular occasion.⁶ But his instinct, wide though his memory sweeps, is to specify, to surround his evocation of the habitual with minutely observed images of time and place, so exactly caught as to seem not general, but of one date and one place:

On a summer morning, in the legendary Russia of my boyhood, my first glance upon awakening was for the chink between the white inner shutters. If it disclosed a watery pallor, one had better not open them at all, and so be spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for its picture in a puddle. How resentfully one would deduce, from a line of dull light, the leaden sky, the sudden sand, the gruel-like mess of broken brown blossoms under the lilacs—and that flat, fallow leaf (the first casualty of the season) pasted upon a wet garden bench!

But if the chink was a long glint of dewy brilliancy, then I made haste to have the window yield its treasure. With one blow, the room would be cleft into light and shade. The foliage of birches moving in the sun had the translucent green tone of grapes, and in contrast to this there was the dark velvet of fir trees against a blue of extraordinary intensity, the like of which I rediscovered only many years later, in the montane zone of Colorado.⁷

Details here are so acutely rendered that, metonymously, they conjure up for the reader a vivid image of the whole scene in which the experience took place. In spite of Nabokov's disclaimer, it has the specificity of a single, preserved moment of perception, not a general recollection. The insistent mixture of color and taste (the “gruel-like mess of broken brown blossoms,” the “translucent green tone of grapes”) is striking on its own, but the synaesthesia also serves to incarnate the narrator's personal presence, by imitating in language the esemplastic ability of a human consciousness to gather and interweave the scattered data of sense, rendering them into a coherent whole. And the act brings before the reader an image of the mind that generated it. Synaesthesia functions mainly as the sign of a working human mind, and not as a device native to and contained by written language. It has no place in classical rhetoric; it was first named, if not invented, in the nineteenth century by psychologists seeking to isolate the fountainheads of individual consciousness.⁸

Browne never uses such devices. Though suggesting his habits and customs have traffic with space and time, he always withholds the concrete example that would answer to the suggestion and blend the casual allusions into the coherent representation of a single experience. Nabokov's “I” is far less obstreperously frequent than Browne's, yet the latter is less convincingly personal. Browne, upon hearing the Ave Maria Bell, for example, instinctively resists, as he would not were he a modern autobiographer, the temptation to anecdote. Such specific information as there is occurs, significantly, in a marginal note,⁹ as if Browne were determined rigorously to purge his text of niggling fact.

Nor is it simply the flight from specifics in time and place that at first seems to evoke, but ultimately conceals, the Religio Medici's narrator. Connections between thoughts in Browne are loose, suggestive rather than logically explicit:

Holy water and [the] Crucifix (dangerous to the common people) deceive not my judgement, nor abuse my devotion al all: I am, I confesse, naturally inclined to that, which misguided zeale termes superstition; my common conversation I do acknowledge austere, my behaviour full of rigour, sometimes not without morosity.

The components here don't follow each other in strict sequence. That the trappings of popery fail to deceive the narrator's judgment should lead him to conclude not for but against the superstition which he subsequently acknowledges. Superstition, on the other hand, does not normally imply rigour in behavior or austerity in conversation. The statements are oddly suspended, neither contradicting each other flatly nor forming linked steps in a reasoned discourse.

This might well tempt one to read Browne as a seventeenth-century harbinger of stream-of-consciousness style. But the temptation should be resisted. Browne's logical prolapses are not at all analogous to, say, that passage toward the end of Joyce's Ulysses where Molly, recalling an eventful afternoon in the arms of Blazes Boylan, lets her thoughts drift in apparent disarray from the sound of thunderbolts in Gibraltar to “the candle I lit that evening in Whitefriars street chapel,”¹⁰ to the incongruous good luck that votive offering brings afterward in Blazes' bedroom pyrotechnics. Molly's vertiginous leaps from subject to subject help define the “I” of her soliloquy, because her non sequiturs imitate the jumps of real thought, nimble, capricious, but firmly rooted in the concrete sense impressions of the lived moment, the thunder suggesting God, God the chapel, the chapel the votive candle, the candle its answering good luck. Browne's prose lacks that kind of immediacy.

Nor does it substitute for that lack the independent coherence of reasoned discourse, compelling attention through the self-evident adherence of each step to the next, logic and not the speaking personality its organizing principle. The Religio is a hybrid, a tantalizing middle case, its language a curiously and deliberately disconcerting marriage between formal logic and informal illogic. This in turn provokes in the reader an odd perception of the narrator. By suggesting the possibility of illogic, Browne hints the unapologetic waywardness of a personal voice. But by avoiding explicit contradictions, thus preserving the possibility that his discourse may be impersonally reasoned, he suppresses that voice. In the comment on superstition the connection between ideas is, as we saw, loose. But the grammar implies logic. Parenthesis “(dangerous to the common people)”¹¹ used here and often, serves to persuade us that the writer has mastered digression, that he can recognize and mark off elements only marginally related to the main thrust of his argument. The device is infrequent in genuine stream-of-consciousness prose: where everything is parenthetical, nothing must be, in fact nothing can be, marked off as such. Again, even gaps in the argument can imply logic. For the narrator discloses neither how holy water and the crucifix might deceive a faulty judgment, nor how they come short of hoodwinking an acute one, implying that the reader can supply the necessary links by an appeal to right principles and sound reason, without mediation by the narrator. The statement is thus given its proper shape and structure by something independent of the speaking voice.

Where the aim is to imitate a self, the “I” is far more intrusive, subjugating everything that comes into contact with it. Whenever, for example, Molly Bloom thinks of anyone else her pronouns at once become vague: “and they come and tell you theres no God.”¹² Molly leaves the “they” unidentified, for the illusion is that she is not addressing a third party for whom names have to be named. The ego of the speaker has filled the page and dominates it.

The Religio Medici never allows such a dominant “I”. The pronoun occurs as frequently as it does in Joyce, but the narrator always speaks as if familiarity with his thoughts could not be presumed, as if creating an image of himself specifically aimed at a reader. The famous passage from Part II,

I was never yet once married, and commend their resolutions who never marry twice; not that I disallow of second marriage; as neither in all cases of Polygamy which considering some times and the unequall number of both sexes may bee also necessary,¹³

does not, for all its seeming intimacy, really show us the ontogeny of the narrator's thought, only its end products. Browne's narrator does not dive without warning into his own experience without providing a map by which the reader can follow. Instead he presents the thought as a finished process, and we see the uncluttered store window, not the littered rag and bone shop behind.

Compare an excerpt from one of Browne's private commonplace books, comprising a series of pious resolutions noteworthy for its likeness in theme to the Religio Medici passage we have been examining. Yet the tone is strikingly different:

To bee sure that no day passe without calling upon god in a solemne formed prayer seven times within the compasse thereof, that is in the morning & at night and five times between, taken up long ago from the example of David & Daniel, and a compunction & shame that I had omitted it so long, when I heedfully read of the custome of the Mahometans to pray five times in the day.

To pray and magnifie god in the night & my dark bed when I could not sleep. To have short ejaculations when ever I awaked, & when the four aclock bell awaked mee, or my first discoverie of the light, to say the collect of our liturgie, Aeternall god who hath safely brought mee to the beginning of this day, &c.

To pray in all places where privacy inciteth; in any howse, high way, or streete, & to knowe no street or passage in this citty which may not witnesse that I have not forgott god & my saviour in it, & that no parish or towne where I have been may not say the like.¹⁴

Here the “I” is firmly fixed in place and time. The resolutions to “knowe no street or passage in this citty which may not witnesse that I have not forgott god,” or, more strikingly, “to pray and magnifie god in the night & my dark bed when I could not sleep,” both suggest immediate, real, lived experience: a town, a room, a time of day.

Analogously, when Browne thinks of a new idea not strictly part of his train of thought he obtrudes it anyway, even at the expense of grammar: “to bee sure that no day passe without calling upon god, … taken up long ago from the example of David & Daniel, and a compunction & shame that I had omitted it so long.” The thought is regularly punctuated by concrete details like the “four aclock bell.” And even the overall structure as a list of resolutions enhances the personalness of its “I”. We instinctively connect such a list with a resolver, jotting down worthy habits, then suddenly recalling with remorse occasions on which he has let such habits slip. This creates a dramatic situation, a context in which we imagine a personal presence thinking and acting. Yet such subtexts of personal revelation are rigorously excluded from the Religio. It thus seems that its peculiarly disembodied “I” is a conscious choice, a strategy. But to what end?

I think we can hazard an answer by examining briefly a literary form which, in the seventeenth century at least, used the “I” in a manner different from anything we see in poetry, drama or fiction: formal prayer. Though an analysis of the “I” in meditation, or even in the essay as far back as Marcus Aurelius might illumine the use of it in the Religio, the history of formal prayer in the Renaissance is such that it yields more that can be applied conveniently and usefully to Browne. Written meditation was explored as a form by a number of writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but their emphasis fell typically not so much upon the “I” as upon what it considers. Properly speaking a meditation is, as Francis de Sales says, “an attentive thought iterated, or voluntarily intertained in the mynd, to excitate the will to holy affections and resolutions.”¹⁵ But prayer was a source of bitter controversy in the later seventeenth century, and the pressure of disagreement led those who approached it in new directions. The Anglican reaction against the Puritan predilection for ex tempore prayer, invented by the utterer on the spur of the moment as an expression of individual prophetic afflatus, fostered a strict appreciation of the nature of the “I” or “we” in prayer as very different from anything found in the essay or the meditation, and different as well from anything familiar to twentieth-century thought. The theory is applicable to our understanding of the first-person voice in the Religio Medici, as nothing in the literature of meditation or the familiar essay is.

The essence of Catholic and Anglican theory on the subject is defined concisely in a sixteenth-century treatise Of Prayer and Meditation, by Luis de Granada, a Portuguese Dominican. Though Catholic, the treatise was Englished and widely circulated, its ideas seconded and developed by Taylor, South and other Anglican divines later in the seventeenth century:

Praier is a most convenient exercise for that man, that mindeth to reforme his maners, and life, and to change himselfe into an other man. As our Saviour hath plainly signified unto us, in the misterie of his glorious transfiguration, whereof S. Luke writeth thus: that as he was prainge in the mount, he sodeinlie transfigured him selfe in such wise, that his face shined verie brighte like the sonne, and his garmentes became white like snowe.

Our Savyour could right well have transfigured himselfe at other times, then at praier, if it had pleased him. But he would of verie purpose be tra[n]sfigured whiles he was at praier: to signifie unto us in the transfiguration of his bodie, what vertue praier hath to transfigure our soules: that is: to make them lose the customes of the old man, and to clothe them with the new man, which is created after the image of God.¹⁶

There is a significant ambiguity here. On the one hand, we seem in prayer to discard our first self, replacing it with a brand-new one: we “lose the customes of the old man.” But on the other hand we only “clothe them” with the new man, contradictorily implying the new man is only a costume, an assumed and not a real self.

This suggests that the identity taken on in the act of prayer is, paradoxically, at once identical with and distinct from the person praying. Since it is recited in the first person, we assume the identity of the “I” in the prayer as we speak it, playing a role, speaking deceptively in an idiom not naturally our own. Yet one doesn't enter upon the exercise of prayer anticipating this new identity to be cast aside when the utterance is over. We hope instead to make what begins as idealized artifice the essence of everyday habit, to adopt the disembodied, impersonal, universal language of prayer as a natural mode of personal expression:

To be short, we see that little children, by hearing their mothers speak, and pratling often with them, do come to learne their language: and so we continually conversing with our Saviour by meditation, observing and pondering reverently, his words, his works, & his affections, that soone, by the helpe of his grace, learne to speake, to worke, to will & desire as he did.¹⁷

Seventeenth-century Anglican divines took up the definition of prayer in a more politically charged context. But their treatises are clearly in the same tradition, which, after all, traces back to Paul. Jeremy Taylor, in his long Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgy, asserts that “the wisest nations, and the most sober persons, prepared their verses and prayers in set forms with as much religion as they dressed their sacrifices, and observed the rites of festivals and burials.”¹⁸ His explanation for the superiority of set over ex tempore prayer is a controversialist's version of the same point Luis and Francis make:

When the Holy Ghost hath taught us what to ask, and to as that as we ought, then he hath healed our infirmities, and our ignorances. … And, therefore, … concerning spiritual songs, when the apostle has twice enjoined the use of them in order to prayer, … in one place he calls [it] “being filled with the Spirit,” [Eph.v.18-19] in the other … “the dwelling of the work of Christ in us richly;” [Col.iii.16] plainly intimating to us, that when we are mighty in the Scriptures, full of the work of Christ, then we are filled with the Spirit, because the Spirit is the great dictator of them to us, and the remembrancer.¹⁹

Again, later in the seventeenth century, Robert South, the Oxford and London divine, delivered two sharp sermons against ex tempore prayer, attacking its impromptu slovenliness and its inordinate length. He argues the superiority of recited prayer because “as for a set form, in which the words are ready prepared to our hands, the soul has nothing to do but to attend to the work of raising the affectations and devotions, to go along with those words.”²⁰ The preordered words set an example which, reciting them, the utterer comes by God's grace to imitate.

The “I” in prayer is thus a perfect, universal self, more virtuous than the person who happens along to speak it can ever practically hope to be. Hence it resembles a persona in the modern sense of that word: the “I” is distinct from the person speaking. Yet the reciter hopes through the act of utterance to become the persona. So the “I” is also a vehicle for true self-expression, with the difference that this new self is being revealed as much to the narrator as to the listener.

This produces structures of language unfamiliar to modern autobiography. A prayer from a collection by Luis de Granada will reveal, in spite of a manifest difference in content, much that is similar in tone to the language of the Religio Medici:

All these praises and blessings do I owe thee (O father) yea, and farre more greater belong unto thee. For if I shall more neerely examine the matter, I not onely owe thee mine, but my selfe also. … I am thine, yea truly wholy thine, not tyed unto thee, under one name and title, but by infinite respects. … For without thee I can neyther stirre hand nor foote, without thy providence I can neyther breathe nor respire or act any thing: With what colour, then can I cast off thy dominion over me? … Most humbly therefore … I dedicate myself wholy unto thee, and intirely submit my selfe to thy perpetuall service and subjection. Neither do I onely offer my selfe unto thee, but also all that which is mine; whatsoever this day or in the remainder of my life, I shall thinke, speake, or doe, with all those things, which at any time for thy sake shall be offered me to admit or further: so that hence-forward I will neyther eate nor drinke, nor sleepe, nor doe any such like thing, whose end shall not be the honour and glory of thy most holy Name.²¹

This shares with the Religio elliptical and doubtful transitions between units of meaning. In “For without thee I can neyther stirre hand nor foote,” the introductory “For” implies logical development from something before. But the previous phrase merely says the same thing in different words. Thus the “For” functions doubly. On the one hand it promises objectively rational thought, applicable to all minds, in no way peculiar to the narrator. But, on the other, the promised logic never materializes, so the possibility of random thought, the sign of personal presence is conserved. A glance at the prayer reveals a repeated use of this stratagem (“For if I shall more neerely …”; “so that hence-forward”) rendering the prose at once informally loose and impersonally logical. If the discourse were too aggressively ratiocinative, the utterer would shrink into a mere functional device for the exposition of triumphant thought. Yet if it were too discursive, too eccentric, the utterer would, as he read the “I”, either mark himself off from it, or in assuming it put on the mask of a personal identity not his own.

Luis's prayer also repeats Browne's hybridization of an habitual with an immediate present, the unfulfilled suggestion of a single occasion sliding into a general statement of what is permanently true. Much in it (“Neither do I onely offer my selfe unto thee, but also all that which is mine; whatsoever this day or in the remainder of my life, I shall thinke, speake, or doe”) implies a specific moment in time outward from which the vows of the prayer radiate. But there are no observations of space and time to vivify the oath-taking. Details are absent; an indefinite present includes moment of utterance, the future and the past together: “without thee I can neyther stirre hand nor foote, without thy providence I can neyther breathe nor respire or act any thing.”

In Browne such devices express a self transfigured much as the self is transfigured in prayer. Browne does not want to accumulate and recreate either the important moments of his past life or the minute lineaments of his current thought. The Religio Medici's narrator aims for a form of utterance which, while appearing the speech of one moment in time, actually transforms the speaker's whole life into an emblem of all life, perfect and universal; which in short suppresses the individuating detail of personal speech while preserving its tone. If the language swept too wide the narrating “I” would lose its distinctive voice and sound merely abstract. Yet if the anecdotal detail were too rich, the equally essential tincture of universality would be diluted or lost. But the prose of the Religio Medici is, like that of formal prayer, teleological, infusing into the fleeting occasions of the moment something of the narrator's final significance in the whole scheme of creation. Browne's “I” is, as Taylor so insistently repeats of prayer, not only a marriage of real and ideal individual, but of individual and body politic. Beyond improving himself by reciting the prayer, the utterer hopes to join the company of the holy, for whom the prayer is no longer the expression of an unattainable ideal, but an accurate image of the self. Analogously, the “I” of the Religio Medici is both an individual physician and all physicians. The very title is ambiguous, translatable as either “The Religion of A Physician,” a private man speaking only for his own experience, or as “The Religion of the Physician,” every physician, quintessential, ideal, representative. We listen at once to Thomas Browne, private man, to all doctors, all men, and to the universal ideal of physician and man speaking behind all the limited shadows of the Form. Some of the passages most problematic when viewed through the expectation for autobiography make perfect sense when read as one reads the “I” of prayer.

Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty yeares, which to relate, were not a History, but a peece of Poetry, and would sound to common eares like a fable; for the world, I count it not an Inne, but an Hospitall, and a place, not to live, but to die in. The world that I regard is my selfe, it is the Microcosme of mine owne frame, that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my Globe, and turne it round sometimes for my recreation.²²

As the lucubration of a private man speaking only on his own behalf this would be extravagant, not to say egomaniacal. So, however, would many of the pronouncements in Luis's prayer. Taken out of context, they are arrogant even in humility: “I dedicate myself wholy unto thee, and intirely submit my selfe to thy perpetuall service and subjection.” But in a prayer it is a projective self that speaks, the self one hopes to be, the voice in which, if it could have private being, the universal would speak.

One reads in Browne not the exaggeration of megalomania, but the wonder of a humble man realizing in language his contact with the wondrousness of all mankind, at once discerning and actualizing the possibility of participation in the ideal of which man is potentially capable. Had Browne followed his “Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty yeares” with a string of self-aggrandizing anecdotes, we would indeed read him askance. But he remains so rigorously general, avoiding personal claim, that he grafts a compensatory celebration of common humanity on the potentially noxious stock of personal experience. Nothing is claimed that any reader might not equally easily claim. It is the narrator's life purely as life that he calls a miracle; he does not brag of anything proprietary to him. Yet, paradoxically, it is his life that he hails as a miracle illustrative of the miracle of life in general. The passage is at once thoroughly personal and entirely impersonal, universal and particular, eccentric and generic.

If, returning to the Browne passage with which I began this essay, you read it only as a personal statement, it is smug and self-congratulatory. But the language forestalls such a reading. It is carefully contrived to invite, in fact to demand, the reader's participation in the “I”. The first sentence, “Holy water and the Crucifix (dangerous to the common people) deceive not my judgement, nor abuse my devotion at all,” illustrates. The parenthetical “dangerous to the common people” works as an aside to the reader, including him in the knowledge thus imparted, assuming he already knows and agrees with what is being said. Otherwise the statement would have to be made in a less casual, more rigorously argumentative manner. We are thus subtly seduced into holding the same belief as the narrator, and when we proceed to the “deceive not my judgement” we don't read it as self-congratulatory or arrogant because we ourselves have, at least for the nonce, perceived the possibility of feeling the same way. The “my,” without the intimacy of personal speech, has been transformed into an implicit “our” by the surrounding language. And this potential universality in the language forestalls the semblance of presumption. This in turn suggests that the voice is not individual but universal.

But this impression is, immediately and cleverly, undercut again by the very next phrase: “I am, I confesse, naturally inclined to that which misguided zeale termes superstition.” This reads, at first, like the humble confession of a poor erring man, thus at first correcting the bias of the preceding clause toward the universal. But then we see that it is only “misguided zeale” which calls such behavior superstition; this qualifier is introduced so unobtrusively into the sentence that the reader is again subtly impelled to accept the opinion as his own and to join the narrator again in a transfigured, universal, certitude-pronouncing “I”. The balance between eccentricity and universality is held.

Description of the narrator's behavior, when the passage moves to it, is always telegraphed, distanced, without the intimate detail that would call up his image before us. Not “I kneel” but “I love to use the civility of my knee.” The ornateness of the trope draws interest away from the performer of the act, making it seem more a grand ritualized gesture than an individual impulse.²³ The more potentially striking the personal detail, the quicker Browne is to invite participation. When, for instance, later in the text he says “Nor can I thinke I have the true Theory of death, when I contemplate a skull, or behold a Skeleton,” lest we see the meditation as peculiar either to him or at best to the death-hardened brotherhood of his profession, he finishes the sentence by including the reader: “… with those vulgar imaginations it casts upon us; I have therefore enlarged that common Memento mori, into a more Christian memorandum, Memento quatuor novissima, those four inevitable points of us all, [italics mine] Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell.”²⁴

There are, of course, manifest differences between prayer and the Religio Medici. A prayer is usually brief; the Religio is, comparatively, long. Prayer is meant to be a solemn address from creature to creator; the Religio is a more relaxed affair, a familiar conversation between the “I”, personal and universal, of the narrator, and his reader. And we participate, or are meant to participate, energetically and wholeheartedly in the “I” of prayer; our participation in the “I” of Browne's treatise is casual, perhaps playful. Prayer eschews metaphor, which might distract the utterer; Browne pursues it.

Yet the use of language in prayer is, though not identical, analogous with the language of the Religio Medici. In both cases we confront an idiom affected by a peculiar use of the “I” and thereby transformed into a language having little to do with the language of first-person discourse as we now know it. The “I” of the Religio Medici is a paradox. It is at once personal, the “I” of self-confession, and universal, the “I’ of, say, an allegorical figure who speaks for all of his kind, or the fictional “I” of a sonnet sequence, who speaks for all lovers even when commanding himself to look in his heart and write. The narrator of the Religio, speaking in his own voice, simultaneously speaks in the voice of all religious physicians, all men. If we respond only to the universality in the voice, we are missing the omnipresent individuality. If, overcome by autobiographical bias, we look only for the eccentric and personal we either miss or misinterpret the universal. The peculiar harmony of the Religio Medici lies in its ability to combine the two and make them an indivisible whole.

Notes

1. Quoted by William Hazlitt in Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth in The Complete Works, ed. P. O. Howe (London: Dent, 1931), vol. 6, p. 339.

2. Margaret Bottrall, Every Man a Phoenix (London: John Murray, 1959), p. 33.

3. Joan Webber, The Eloquent I: Style and Self in Seventeenth Century Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 160. The late Joan Webber's book remains to date the most comprehensive study of the relations between style and self in the age of Browne, and apart from a recent flurry of dissertations, critical discussion of Browne's prose has not flourished as much as one might expect from structuralist and deconstructionist critics, to whose methods Browne would seem on the face of it to be well-adapted. The most useful recent article is Dr. Anne Drury Hall's “Epistle, Meditation and Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (PMLA, 94, 234-46, 1979). Hall's aim is to place the Religio's style by comparing it with what are, in her view, the most immediate well-defined seventeenth-century genres, meditation and the anti-Ciceronian epistle. Her study, including its comprehensive notes, is very useful. Mine differs from it in attempting a less strictly historical, more phenomenological approach, reasoning from the Religio outward to its analogs rather than the reverse. At present the best theoretical study of seventeenth-century style is perhaps Brian Vickers's Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). Though not directly concerned with Browne, Vickers examines at length possible ways to talk about prose style, and his book is thus a sort of prolegomenon to any future critical theory of seventeenth century prose.

4. This also applies to the “I” in fiction or poetry. Though we know the “I” is an invention, we still expect it to imitate the workings of a real personality. We are inclined to reject the “I” that serves some more elaborately artificial purpose, as it does, say, in John Berryman's “Snow Line” in 77 Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1959), p. 32, where the narrator is a sheep.

5. This and all subsequent passages from Browne are from The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), henceforth B. This passage from the Religio Medici is in volume 1, pp. 12-13.

6. For confirmation that such was Nabokov's intention in Speak, Memory, see Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part (New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 8-9.

7. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: an Autobiography Revisited (New York: Putnam's, 1966), p. 119.

8. See OED under “synaesthesia”.

9. The note reads “A Church Bell that tolls every day at 6. and 12. of the Clocke, at the hearing whereof every one in what place soever either of house or street betakes him to his prayer, which is commonly directed to the Virgin” (B, vol. 1, p. 13). And of course it can't be assumed that the note is Browne's.

10. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: The Bodley Head, 1960), pp. 876-77.

11. The phenomenon has long been recognized as one key to the representation of the self. John H. Morris in Versions of the Self (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 177-8, analyzes it as a chief device in Boswell's journalistic habit of recording diverse “elements whose only unity is their presence in the consciousness of James Boswell at a certain hour.”

12. James Joyce, op. cit., p. 877.

13. B, vol. 1, p. 83.

14. B, vol. 3, p. 325.

15. Quoted in Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 15. Prayer considered as a literary form often overlaps with meditation. The distinction as I make it is that prayer is a set composition, designed to be recited by an utterer other than the writer; meditation is, as de Sales says, “an attentive thought iterated … in the mynd, to excitate the will to holy affections and resolutions.” Most contemporary theory on prayer as literature differs from the ensuing discussion in focusing on its thematic content rather than its use of language. This is true of the standard study, William T. Noon, S. J., Poetry and Prayer (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967), and of its most influential predecessor, Henry Bremond's Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory (London: Burns & Oates, 1927).

16. Luis de Granada, Of Prayer, and Meditation, wherein are conteined fowertien devoute Meditations, etc. (Paris, 1582), p. 20.

17. Francois de Sales, An Introduction to a Devoute Life, tr. I. J. (Rouen, 1614), p. 114.

18. Jeremy Taylor, The Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgy, in The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor, D.D., ed. Richard Heber (London, 1822), vol. 7, p. 323.

19. Ibid., vol. 7, p. 331.

20. Robert South, Sermons Preached on Several Occasions (Oxford, 1842), vol. 1, p. 329.

21. Luis de Granada, A Paradise of Prayers, Containing the Purity of Devotion and Meditation (London, 1633), pp. 12-14.

22. B, vol. 1, p. 87

23. “Civility,” after all, had two meanings in the seventeenth century, of which “politeness” was only the second. Primarily it meant a community of citizens considered collectively (OED), implying that the kneeling is not just an individual, but somehow a communal gesture.

24. B, vol. 1, p. 55.