SOURCE: Straznicky, Marta. “Performing the Self in Browne's Religio Medici.” Prose Studies, History, Theory, Criticism 13, no. 2 (September 1990): 211-29.

[In the following essay, Straznicky studies the strategy of self-presentation as used by Browne, contending that this duality is presented most clearly by Browne in the speaking voice of the text.]

… at my death I meane to take a totall 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 any where but in the universall Register of God.¹

To whom does this voice belong? Apart from the obvious irony that a statement renouncing worldly fame appears in print, there are several matters which may lead us to ask this question. We know the passage occurs nearly halfway through a revealing and rather intimate book named Religio Medici; contrary to what the passage suggests, we do know the name of the author, Sir Thomas Browne (certainly not an unfamiliar one in the history of literature); and we know that Browne revised the work in order to set straight a version pirated by Andrew Crooke. But we know, too, that in his epistle to the reader, Browne makes an extended apology for the greenness of the work, insists that “the intention was not publick,” and, moreover, that “there might be many things therein plausible unto my passed apprehension, which are not agreeable unto my present selfe.” Given, then, that Sir Thomas Browne, physician, 1643, both assumes and relinquishes authority for Religio Medici, to whom can we assign the passage quoted?

I begin in this cryptic manner to underscore that there are at least two voices sounding between the covers of Religio Medici, that of the Sir Thomas Browne whose name is inscribed on the title page, and that of a “passed apprehension” who penned the contents some seven years earlier. But this is not to point up a gap in the text which threatens to deconstruct its surroundings. On the contrary, the text projects a tonal confluence of voices which is resoundingly heard if the reader's synchronic memory is at all activated, and which renders circumscribing either voice deeply problematic, perhaps futile, and certainly questionable. Rather than disowning his prior text, Browne actually appropriates it, literally, by willing to make revisions for print. In so doing, he bonds historic and textual identity in a self now linguistically defined and confined. The demarcation between a “real” and “fictional” Browne is thus erased and we are left with an integral though pluralistic voice, a discordia concors. It is fittingly paradoxical, then, that the opening passage both belongs, and does not belong, to the titular author: the difference hinges on our definition of Sir Thomas Browne.

In this paper I would like to study the strategy of self-presentation in Religio Medici solely as it is manifested in the work's heteromorphic speaking voice. I would like, therefore, to move the locus of critical dispute about self in Religio Medici from a consideration of the mimetic relationship between the real Browne and his fictional persona,² to the strictly textual composition of that persona which is, I will argue, the only Browne we can ever retrieve. In making this shift, I advance the paradigm of recent theory of autobiography. In the wake of revolutionary critical work by such adversaries of authorial intent as Derrida, Fish,³ and Foucault, the genre of autobiography—possibly the last bastion of intentionality—has met with stimulating redefinition. In response to poststructuralist undermining of an intelligible, unitary textual truth and the power of the author in determining that truth, defenders of autobiography's capacity to make the self heard and understood have concentrated their efforts on defining the precise nature of the truth claimed by the genre. As the record of a life written by the person who lived it, autobiography clearly marks its generic distinctiveness in unrefracted self-presentation and so polarizes itself against those who exorcise authors from their texts. At the same time, autobiography is more than vulnerable to attacks on its validity as “truth,” as a dependable record of “historical reality,” and as a reliable portrait of its author.⁴ In an effort to defuse such attacks, several recent studies have broadened the definition of each of the three components of autobiography: autos, bios, and graphe. Writing is defined now as the origin and end of autobiography, as the creative force which gives shape and meaning to a previously chaotic life;⁵ the life is no longer limited to physical events but is extended to include the author's mode of consciousness;⁶ and the self, then, is not located in the person holding the pen (since that person effectively disappears in the transmission of the text), but rather in the consciousness voiced by the text: thus, autos and bios converge. The truth of autobiography, accordingly, is nothing more than the nature of the speaking voice and its construction of the mental and physical events it proposes as reasons for its unique existence.⁷

Such theories are expedient in a descriptive study of Browne's speaking voice. Although Religio Medici has been classified as an autobiography as long ago as 1958, no attempt has been made to define its non-mimetic strategy of self-presentation. I would like to propose, then, that Religio Medici is an autobiography in the more recent sense that it records a self in the act of stabilizing its consciousness and that current theory of autobiography can illuminate that act as one neither simply revealing nor concealing a historic person, but one performing independently of reference to Sir Thomas Browne, physician, 1643.

Browne's strategy of self-presentation may, indeed, be described as performative.⁸ Once perceived as cohesive, the yoking of textual and historic voices in Religio Medici will lend itself, though only for the purposes of critical exegesis, to a different order of dispersion: rather than being petrified in a single, stony substance, the “I” of Religio Medici is kinetic, moving deftly upon the stage of its self-exploration with the captivating manner of an accomplished one-man show. The reader's perspective is easily analogous to that of an audience witnessing a theatrical performance wherein the dramatis personae (literally, “masks”) act out the ideas that in their collectivity contain and express the “truth” of the play. A soliloquy of Hamlet's, for instance, is never taken to be the single key to the meaning of Hamlet, a work whose complexity (its truth) is built into the very fabric of the play, and whose discovery depends upon a multiple perspective of interrelationships between characters and the intertextuality of the ideas they voice or represent. In a similar way, Browne, while never creating dramatis personae in the strictly theatrical sense, does bifurcate his identity: the “I” of Religio Medici has two distinct voices, one which may be termed self-assertive and the other self-diminishing.

This dual “I” has caused a not insignificant measure of critical unease; commentaries on the work are repeatedly at pains to close the gap between the two voices, to find a rationale which will explain the counteractive fractions of Browne's self as a sane, integral identity, if not as an intelligible authorial intent. Jonathan Post, for instance, mounts an argument for Browne's integrity by construing the duality as a “double comedy” in which the worldly comedy of manners (roughly analogous to my self-assertive voice) dissolves into a comedy of faith (prostrate self-diminishment before overwhelming metaphysical mysteries). Post argues that this transformation is a “vertical climb,”⁹ that it signals a supremacy of faith over reason, a gradual displacement of the city of man by the City of God. By subordinating the comedy of manners to the comedy of faith, Post effectively resolves the competitive relationship between Religio Medici's two voices. Anne Drury Hall finds a different solution by reading the two voices as marks of Browne's dual generic strategy, his intentional employment of the contrasting tones of epistolary intimacy and meditative distance, of (ironic) self-assertion before a menacing, eavesdropping audience, and a pious self-diminishment before an omnipotent deity. Browne uses this strategy, argues Hall, to give prosaic shape to his ethical argument, namely “the importance of the balance of Christian humanism between private spirituality and public manners.”¹⁰ Hall's perceptive analysis posits a stable speaking voice which dons the garments of two genres in a deliberate attempt to play up an ethical argument. But doing away with the paradox of the speaking voice, whether by subordinating one of its tones to the other or viewing both as manipulations of an independent directing intelligence, obscures the resilient difficulty of the text. The relentless fluctuations of rhythm in Religio Medici, I would argue, have something to do with the ongoing act of self-stabilization, are indelible signs of the difficulty of self-reference and linguistic self-definition. More than deploying rhetorical strategies, Browne is deliberately fracturing his voice, projecting it along several wavelengths in an attempt to render accurately the complexity and even undecidability of the speaking human subject. It is the lateral interaction of the self-assertive and self-diminishing voices, then, the dramaturgical coordination of intimacy and distance, which may characterize Religio Medici as performative autobiography, and which weaves the fabric of truth in the work, a fabric whose threads are frequently of varied texture but identical colour (strictly speaking, there is only one “I” in the work), and the detection of whose unique weave depends upon the reader's ability to view both the individual threads and the entire bolt simultaneously.

To begin with the work's more general dimensions, a source of the diversity of Browne's performance may be detected in his own protean attempt to understand the nature of truth.¹¹ The title page of the 1643 edition of Religio Medici proudly announces its contents as “A true and full coppy” of a previously unauthorized text. The epistle “To the Reader” continues and expands the concern of the title page by providing what amounts to an apology for the corrupt edition, insisting that “the intention was not publick: and being a private exercise directed to my selfe, what is delivered therein was rather a memoriall unto me then an example or rule unto any other.” Browne has here shifted his emphasis from the truth of the present text to the qualification of an absent text. It soon becomes clear, however, that the two are actually one, and with the benefit of textual scholarship we bring to mind the fact that Browne's revisions of the “true” text (insofar as his self-presentation is concerned) are very nearly insignificant.¹² The apology for the corrupt edition becomes, therefore, an apology for the edition we are about to read, and Browne's focus accordingly moves away from the “truth” of textual matters to the truth of the copy he has authorized. Anticipating misreadings of his work and averting criticism of his ideas by casting them backward in time, he makes the reasonable point that ideas expressed in the past should not be binding upon the present, that they must be considered in the context of the particular frame of mind which engendered them. In addition, Browne's final sentence “To the Reader” relegates judgment of the truth to the audience and relinquishes his authority to direct its interpretation:

Lastly all that is contained therein is in submission unto maturer discernments, and as I have declared shall no further father them then the best and learned judgements shall authorize them; under favour of which considerations I have made its secrecie publike and committed the truth thereof to every ingenuous Reader.

Browne is no doubt here exercising the self-effacing rhetoric characteristic of early autobiographers, but clearly he also voices the concern that the “truth” of his work not be interpreted as the literal truth of the historic Thomas Browne.

Browne's apprehension about a one-dimensional truth continues beyond the preface, most noticeably in the first part of Religio Medici where he is much absorbed in deliberating upon the domains of the two separate and largely independent epistemologies governing his comprehension of himself and his surroundings, faith and reason: “In briefe, where the Scripture is silent, the Church is my Text; where that speakes, 'tis but my Comment; where there is a joynt silence of both, I borrow not the rules of my Religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my owne reason” (I.5). The telltale hierarchy of Scripture, Church, and reason reveals that Browne's “faith” is the Anglican faith: the authority of the Church is advanced only as a substitute for silences in Scripture; beyond these, Browne recognizes no external authority for religious matters (and certainly not for worldly matters) but both models and insists upon man's rational self-sufficiency. This play of truths in Religio Medici, and its accompanying fluctuation of voices, may be traceable to the very amphibium of its title: “religio medici,” as Browne himself notices, is to some extent a stylistic prescription for the text it heralds. But Browne both engages and surpasses the limitations of “the generall scandall of my profession” (I.1). As a scientist, he is drawn to the study of the natural world and records his sentient evidence with lucid self-affirming prose; as a Christian firmly rooted in his faith, he recognizes that experimental philosophy is an obligation man owes to God and registers this debt in self-effacing veneration. But tactile knowledge is fulfilled only when it is marshalled as testimony of the Creator's munificence:

The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man: 'tis the debt of our reason wee owe unto God, and the homage wee pay for not being beasts; without this the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was before the sixt day when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive, or say there was a world.

(I.13)

That the world is not until it is perceived to be is a striking idea, one which expresses man's duality (another variation of the famous “amphibium” idea?) as a creature whose tremendous responsibility to exercise his reason enables him virtually to participate in the creation of the world. Browne brings the two epistemologies into even closer proximity when he uses the traditional bibliographic metaphor of the world:

… there are two bookes from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universall and publik Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all.

(I.16)¹³

Browne's use of the commonplace topos finds a strong precedent in Bacon;¹⁴ but they part ways in their understanding of the intertextuality of the two books: while Bacon circumscribes divinity and philosophy in two largely independent and even mutually repelling spheres, Browne links them and, in a remarkably un-Baconian motion, easily discredits scientific method where it presumes to unseat Scriptural contrariety:

It is impossible that, either in the discourse of man, or in the infallible voyce of God, to the weakenesse of our apprehensions, there should not appeare irregularities, contradictions, and antinomies. … Wee doe too narrowly define the power of God, restraining it to our capacities. I hold that God can doe all things, how he should work contradictions I do not understand, yet dare not therefore deny.

(I.21, 27)

Such an awareness sent many other “heads” into harrowing self-doubt. But because Browne's identity is so inexorably rooted in his faith, the quirks of nature and the shortcomings of reason are not so much a cause for concern as an occasion for play. Speaking scientifically about the dangers of heresy, for instance, he is extraordinarily confident that reason can be employed to no harmful end when it is based in a genuine faith:

… a sober judgement may [acquire a theological opinion] without offence or heresie; for there are yet after all the decrees of counsells and the niceties of the Schooles, many things untouch'd, unimagin'd, wherein the libertie of an honest reason may play and expatiate with security and farre without the circle of an heresie.

(I.8)

Given his solid belief in the existence of an afterlife and in the essential, though not always perceived, order of the world, Browne is free to “pursue my reason to an o altitudo” (I.9). These flights of reason constitute the familiar, innocently self-assertive voice of Religio Medici and are often cited as evidence of Browne's “modern” autonomous individuality.¹⁵

One of the more memorable of these passages is Browne's attempt to define the stuff—whether material or ethereal—of human souls. Having sounded out each of the two views, he concludes that “either opinion will consist well enough with religion” (I.36). One might expect that such a conclusion would tempt him to move on to a new pursuit. On the contrary: Browne's intellectual horizons are actually enlarged by his faith and encourage him to “play” with the essentially inexplicable puzzle before him:

… either opinion will consist well enough with religion; yet I should rather incline to this, did not one objection haunt mee; not wrung from speculations and subtilties, but from common sense, and observation; not pickt from the leaves of any author, but bred among the weeds and tares of mine owne braine.

(I.36)

Browne goes on to state the objection (or is it the opinion he began to expound?) in interrogative form and then swiftly crosses the everfading line between assertion and objection to give the other view. His “inclination” to side with one as opposed to the other turns out to be nothing more than the requisite thesis of the coming dialectical debate. A few lines later he advances his professional experiential evidence as proof of the non-substantiality of souls, prefacing the remark with a highly dubious “yet” (the entire passage resembles a coordinated slide show in which the projectors alternately flash “but” and “yet” onto the screen):

… yet amongst all those rare discoveries, and curious pieces I finde in the fabricke of man, I doe not so much content my selfe as in that I finde not, that is, no Organ or instrument for the rationall soule; for in the braine, which we tearme the seate of reason, there is not anything of moment more than I can discover in the cranie of a beast.

(I.36)

The synthetic o altitudo is imminent and shows that Browne's cerebral play, though seeming to have arrived at a rational impasse, has in fact been the highly pleasurable vehicle of a willing abandonment to mystery and ineluctably an affirmation of faith:

Thus are we men, and we know not how; there is something in us, that can be without us, and will be after us, though it is strange that it hath no history, what it was before us, nor can tell how it entred in us.

(I.36)

Coleridge thought this passage “truly sublime and in Sir T. Browne's best manner.”¹⁶ The sublimity stems, I think, from Browne's relentless desire and sure-footed ability to maintain a paradox without slipping into absurdity. Truth for Browne is not a well-trod path by which all queries are to be guided. It is rather more like a network of roads whose various intersections all have multi-directional signposts pointing to a single destination: faith. The responsibility and privilege of human beings is simply to initiate a search and zealously to continue travelling the system until they bump up against a dead end, until they arrive at a necessarily self-diminishing encounter with faith. But Browne warns against coming to rest even at such a point; he urges a change in direction and the commencement of yet another journey. It is the dramatic energy and enthusiasm with which Browne pursues one issue after another that helps to characterize his self-revelation as performative, that shapes the interplay of voices in Religio Medici, and that renders our reading experience dynamic.

As may be expected, this changefulness is also a characteristic feature of the style of Religio Medici.¹⁷ The passage about the organic basis of souls provides a good example of Browne's unwillingness to pin down his opinion, his great delight and admirable skill in viewing the problem from all possible angles without ever conveying a sense of confusion. Related features include the completely unpredictable direction of Browne's thoughts, such as the sudden shift from a reflection upon the supernatural element of nature to “I am naturally bashfull” (I.39-40), and the typically paradoxical but not disturbing way in which he is able to assert two opposing opinions even within the same sentence: “I doe desire with God, that all, but yet affirme with men, that few shall know salvation” (I.55).¹⁸ This “rhetoric of uncertainty,” as Joan Webber calls it, is evident on every page of the work. My interest here is not so much in the general linguistic elements of Religio Medici as in the more specific stylistic strategies Browne employs in revealing his “I” in the text. Not surprisingly, this self-revelation is achieved by exactly the same kind of “soft and flexible sense” (“To the Reader”) as characterizes his style and as informs his world view. And indeed, one would be hard pressed to point to the place where style, self, and outlook disperse.

Religio Medici is not simply the “religion of a physician” but is significantly narrowed within the text to the religion of a specific physician at a specific point in time. The difference between the two, I think, is more than a random substitution of a definite article for the ambiguous, indefinite “a” (though Browne's “rhetoric of uncertainty” could be seen at work even here in his endorsement of the noncommittal Latin title which requires one to place a necessarily meaningful article where the original is ambivalent): the direction of the work towards the delineation of the speaking, particular individual is the direction towards autobiography, towards establishing the centre of interest in the self.

Before considering more specifically the actual performance of Browne's self-revelation, it is necessary to appreciate that it is the syncretism of his sense of self, the composite nature of his “I,” which drives the contrapuntal voices in the text. The predominant form of Browne's discussion of self is the serviceable metaphor of the circle, its tenor radiating concentrically with the exploration and expansion of self.¹⁹ In an attempt to lead his thoughts away from more general ruminations to the central concern, Browne tries “to difference my self neerer, & draw into a lesser circle” (I.5). In so doing, he directs our attention to the characteristics of a unique individual. Throughout Religio Medici we are made to feel that a person of specific definition is speaking directly to us in his own voice, that the opinions being expressed are, however audacious they may appear on the surface, somehow fundamentally related to the “I” we believe and have faith in. Browne's self-conscious sense of uniqueness is already implicit in his composition and publishing of the work at hand, in the transmission of a personal vision which he considers worthy of sharing with others.²⁰ And within the text, Browne carves out a niche for himself by effectively barring others from his work. Many autobiographies surrender valuable textual space to considerations of relationships with other specific individuals and they thus, perhaps inadvertently but unavoidably, admit personalities which may detract attention from their own. Browne's territory, however, is much more carefully guarded: he is unusually “selfish” in diligently avoiding the introduction of other selves into his autobiography; and any “others” that are allowed expression are vaguely defined and never given individual status. Joan Webber has noted Browne's consistent and distinctive use of the forcefully impersonal noun “heads” when he feels he must refer to other persons.²¹ And when he refers to the only significant “other” in the work, God, he as often uses synecdoche as not: the “voyce of God” and the “finger of God” become as familiar to us as God himself.

Perhaps the best, and certainly the most enjoyable, evidence of Browne's strong sense of individualism, reflected in the intimate, autonomous voice, is the sheer delight he takes in his fanciful reason, the faculty which is largely responsible for his o altitudos. One such instance is memorable for its self-indulgent exorbitance. Deciding that salvation cannot be affirmed or denied by ordinary human faculties, Browne backhandedly registers the utter mystery of predestination by wresting those imperfect faculties and generating an insight that sets our rationality spinning:

… the world was before the Creation, and at an end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive; though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise, and Eve miscarried of mee before she conceiv'd of Cain.

(I.59)

Browne is everywhere unable to resist logically sorting through the various mysteries of his faith, though he usually prefaces these ruminations by insisting on the very fruitlessness of the endeavour. For instance, he states bluntly that “to determine the day and yeare of this inevitable time [the Apocalypse], is not onely convincible and statute madnesse, but also manifest impiety” (I.46). He then happily goes on to explore in detail exactly how fruitless such a pursuit is by thinking over various predictions of the end. Even though his tone continues to chastise, his pensive speculation betrays a delight in mental ingenuity.

Elsewhere, this freewheeling ingenuity arrives at a conclusion which logically subverts the preceding enquiry but which somehow fixes rather than unsettles the enquiry in the mind of the reader. In a passage on the fate of pre-Christian souls on the Judgment Day, Browne analyses the various arguments supporting or denying their damnation. He also expands the review to put forward some of his own opinions, but then concludes that:

It is an insolent part of reason to controvert the works of God, or question the justice of his proceedings; Could humility teach others, as it hath instructed me, to contemplate the infinite and incomprehensible distance betwixt the Creator and the creature, … it would prevent these arrogant disputes of reason.

(I.54)

“These arrogant disputes of reason” must include the dispute Browne has just finished writing, and our smile at the last line acknowledges the warmly ironic light in which this distinctly personal voice is projected. To anticipate, Browne here exercises a dual role—a doubling, in theatrical terms—and is therefore “playing” not only within his fancy but also outside it by casting his own ruminations into the heap of condemned speculations.

The passages in which Browne delights in himself invite us to share an intimacy with the author. They are interspaced however, by extensive passages in which he labours at qualifying his individuality by extending it into social and religious contexts (as in I.32, I.37, I.60). Broadly, these qualifications constitute the distancing voice of his work and they include the places where Browne seems to remove himself even from himself. But any resolute separation between intimate contact and alienation, I would caution, is entirely artificial and is a product of the critical rather than artistic intelligence. Indeed, Browne was not the only Renaissance author to perceive his individuality as circumscribed and to locate a measurable portion of his existential significance in the Christian community. If we recall Montaigne's statement that “Chaque homme porte la forme entière de l'humaine condition” and Donne's “No man is an island, intire of itself,”²² we are reminded that Browne was writing in a culture in which the consciousness of singularity was less fully formed than in our own.²³ What I am suggesting, then, is that the energy of the self presented in Religio Medici derives from the symbiosis of “modern” individuality and “medieval” Christian community, a sense of identity in which self and other do not battle for possession of the soul, but in which they are mutually supportive: in their broadest meanings, religio and medici are complementary rather than conflicting terms.

Browne's sense of community is expressed in two fundamentally related ways: in his relationship with other persons and in his participation in the divinity of God. To take the societal aspect first: Browne's frequent move from the singular to the plural first person pronoun signals a radial emanation, a perspective in the act of broadening, and thereby of including a community of human beings within its scope. In addition, the whole of Part II emphasizes personal relationships under the rubric of a distinctly Augustinian caritas which condemns, above all else, self-love. These features of Religio Medici can fruitfully be set alongside Browne's tendency to exclude others from his work. Rather than pointing to a troubling paradox, viewing the two together actually illustrates Browne's deployment of a basic constituent of autobiography. One cannot compose a self without a sense of other: the very notion of drawing oneself into a circle of self-definition acknowledges the existence of others. In other words, a sense of self is only possible in an intellectual environment which recognizes individuals as unique and fundamentally separate. The resolute trials and adversities of self-fashioning in the Renaissance (I refer, among others, to Donne, Herbert, Montaigne, Rembrandt) may be testimony of a culture in the process of reaching such a view of individuality.²⁴

To digress for a moment: while Religio Medici does reveal an expansion of the speaking voice to include an element of community, Browne's concern with a social “other” has more to do with his sense of audience, his “dread of the publicke eye” as Samuel Johnson would have it,²⁵ than with defining that aggregate voice. Writing in a new and largely unrespectable genre, Browne shows concern that his work not be read as self-serving. To avert such criticism, he repeatedly alludes to his existence not as an individual but rather as a member of a community: “I am not onely ashamed, but heartily sorry, that besides death, there are diseases incurable; yet not for my own sake, or that they be beyond my art, but for the general cause & sake of humanity whose common cause I apprehend as my own” (II.9). Joan Webber identifies this and similar features as the typical seventeenth-century cosmic personality. But while Browne displays the tendency of the “prudent Englishman who usually placed his essential self in a social and subordinate relation to God, state, and community,”²⁶ he was not able to suppress the power of his psyche. In response, several of his contemporaries severely attacked Browne's presumption to write and publish a tract about himself. They were evidently, and quite rightly I think, struck more by the dominant personal tone of the work than by his “cosmic personality.” It is interesting, in this regard, that Sir Kenelm Digby, who chastised Browne for his self-reflective interests, himself penned an autobiography titled Loose Fantasies in which he used fictional names but whose protection he clearly did not trust: he left instructions to have the work burned in the event of his death.

In any event, Browne's social being is less significant in the present context than his sense of himself as a member of the Christian community. Again, I would stress that this divine component can in no way be separated from the more “earthly” delight outlined earlier.²⁷ George Poulet has taught us that the metaphor of the circle (which Browne uses to define both his individuality and the nature of God) metamorphosed from Dante's medieval vision at the end of The Divine Comedy of a God at the centre of the single sphere of existence to the Renaissance vision of a God inhabiting the centre of infinite spheres.²⁸ The later version of the metaphor is also enlarged to refer to the individual's analogous position at the centre of infinite spheres by virtue of one's own (stable) centre in God (xxvii). Humans thus acquire a tremendous freedom of mental and spiritual movement; even in a Copernican cosmology (which Browne easily acknowledges at II.15), they enjoy the privileged position of looking outward from an immutable core, and so remain fundamentally at the centre of existence. By the same token, Browne's individual circle of existence and the rational enquiry cultivated within it has its final cause not in the establishment of self as centre but in the recognition and praise of God:

The wisedome of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads, that rudely state about, and with a grosse rusticity admire his workes; those highly magnifie him whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research of his creatures, returne the duty of a devout and learned admiration.

(I.13)

In addition, Browne's belief in a benevolent Providence illustrates that the lines we may draw around ourselves in attempts at self-definition and self-determination are very tenuous indeed:

For the lives not onely of men, but of Commonweales, and the whole world, run not upon a Helix that still enlargeth; but on a Circle, where, arriving to their Meridian, they decline in obscurity, and fall under the Horizon againe.

(I.17)

So while Browne refers to “the Cosmography of my selfe” (I.15) and various kindred notions of individuality, he insists, like Herbert,²⁹ that humans are also governed by a being largely beyond their comprehension. In such a condition, human individuality is more of a hindrance than a privilege:

… there is no such thing as solitude, nor any thing that can be said to be alone, and by it selfe, but God, who is his owne circle, and can subsist by himselfe. … In briefe, there can be nothing truely alone, and by its self, which is not truely one, and such is onely God: All others doe transcend an unity, and so by consequence are many.

(II.10)

In the final analysis (in so far as such a thing is possible), self and other are submissive to God: “this I thinke charity, to love God for himselfe, and our neighbour for God. All that is truely amiable is God, or as it were a divided piece of him, that retaines a reflex or shadow of himselfe” (II.14). (In connection with reading Religio Medici as autobiography, it is highly significant that Browne here echoes St. Augustine's definition of Christian charity as the subversion of self to God: while Augustine's Confessions, arguably the first autobiography of Western civilization, did not influence the English tradition directly, it is the first and best example of a work about the self in which the self is continually subordinated both to its readers and its addressee, God.)

The foregoing and admittedly tenuous separation of individual, social, and religious selves does, however, enhance an understanding of Browne's strategy of self-revelation and provides the necessary basis for a full appreciation of its complexity. As I have been suggesting, Browne's mental and linguistic mastery shows that he is able to separate his various selves (in practice, though not in theory), by exaggerating the main tendencies of his personality and playing them off against each other: he defines himself at the same time that he is himself. It is here, in analysing the interplay of the various selves, that the paradigm of autobiographical writing is especially useful. “The autobiographer,” claims Roy Pascal, “exists for himself as something uncompleted, something full of potentiality, always overflowing the actuality, and it is this indeterminateness and unlimitedness that he communicates to us as an essential quality of being.”³⁰ In a more recent study, Jonathan Loesberg amplifies Pascal's point in his definition of autobiography as the active and (within the text) ongoing representation of the self: “the self to be represented exists, to the extent that it does exist, in the act of representation. The act, therefore, cannot fail to represent.”³¹ The proper locus of autobiography, therefore, is the creation of the self, is self in process.

The approach works well for Browne. While he does not engage in trying out alien selves, he does “perform” by splitting himself into the two “I's” described above: the self-assertive voice of confident rationality, and the self-diminishing voice of devout faith. But I emphasize that these two, like the separate but inseparable components of Browne's sense of self, must be seen as complementary; that in the act of writing Browne explores various manifestations of what is essentially a single personality, expressed in the two tonalities of an essentially harmonious voice. Many readers have been unable to reconcile the paradoxes which strain the text through and through with the overall sense of integrity it projects. By viewing Religio Medici as a performative autobiography, we can understand the paradoxes as elements of play which reveal the author in the act of self (in its multiple sense) exploration.

Three examples will suffice. Following a striking passage in which Browne baldly confesses that “I am nothing” and which concludes with a sweeping condemnation of self-love, he continues by switching into his vain, self-assured voice and takes the point, in a playful way, to ridiculous extremes:

There is, I thinke, no man that apprehends his owne miseries lesse than my selfe, and no man that so neerely apprehends anothers. I could lose an arme without a teare, and with few groans, mee thinkes, be quartered into pieces; yet can I weepe most seriously at a Play, and receive with a true passion, the counterfeit griefes of those knowne and professed Impostors.

(II.5)

The author's play here is not only in his light-hearted testing of some sincere ideas against their exaggeration, but also in doubling back on his ironic speaker by having him (self) profess sympathy for admitted fictions rather than real people. His posing, however, does not destroy the validity of the “serious” point he makes about charity: in fact, it actually enforces it in much the same way dramatic irony asserts, by inversion, that which it presumes to undercut.

Further on, Browne so ingeniously doubles the two voices that they effectively dissolve into each other. Browne's most poignant expression of the futility of human insularity occurs as he considers the nature of true friendship. He finds in legendary friendships a quality which “I could not performe within the narrow compasse of my selfe” (II.5), and values friendship as the relation most resembling a “mysticall union”:

I have loved my friend as I do vertue, and as I do my soule, my God. From hence me thinkes I doe conceive how God loves man, what happinesse there is in the love of God. … For though indeed [friends] bee really divided, yet are they so united, as they seeme but one, and make rather a duality then two distinct soules.

(II.5)

In the following section, however, Browne's radiating sensibility is abruptly contracted as he comes to focus with equal conviction and sincerity upon his own discriminate position: “This noble affection fals not on vulgar and common constitutions, but on such as are mark'd for vertue” (II.6). The volleying between the two voices continues, though increasingly with less distinction between them, as he points up his instinctive self-diminishing “prayers and best wishes” for departing spirits brought to mind by the toll of a passing bell, the “call[s] unto God” for the souls of his patients, and the “fall[ing] into a supplication” for those he may view at prayer. But in labouring to underscore the near-heroic proportions of his self-denial, this catalogue of charitable intentions deliberately reinforces his own “vertue” and eventually brings him to an unabashedly self-congratulatory twist:

… if God hath vouchsafed an eare to my supplications, there are surely many happy that never saw me, and enjoy the blessings of mine unknowne devotions.

(II.6)

A far cry from the “I am nothing” of two sections before.

A similar “performance” occurs in the notorious passage in which Browne speaks rather extensively and in a tone of self-congratulating relief of the amazing fact that, given his worldly experience and accomplishments, he does not suffer from the despicable sin of Pride:

For my owne part … I understand no less then six Languages; yet I protest I have no higher conceit of my selfe than had our Fathers before the confusion of Babel, … I know the names, and somewhat more, of all the constellations in my Horizon, … I know most of the Plants of my Country, and of those about mee, … yet cannot all this perswade the dulnesse of my spirit unto such an opinion of my self, as I behold in nimbler & conceited heads, that never looked a degree beyond their nests.

(II.8)

Browne achieves something of a double-take here: his exaggeration in one voice of a point well taken in another gives us the impression of an actor changing in and out of two costumes, trying to juggle the responsibilities of doing justice to two roles. Reading the passage in this way, as part of a performative autobiography, may solve the critical dilemma surrounding it: rather than disclosing a vanity hidden to the author's consciousness, and so rendering the integrity of the work problematic, the passage enacts a sophisticated sense of composite selfhood, counterpointing two seemingly contradictory roles to achieve an elaborate harmony. This grafting of self-assertion upon self-diminishment is intriguing in its ability to hold off an impending textual schizophrenia. Again, the solution to the enigma of Browne's ability to maintain a current of stability while his two voices alternately toss on the surface may be found in reading the work as performative autobiography. Because Browne both is and is not fully invested in either of the two voices, because he both directs and enacts the drama of his selfhood, his performance is not a process of disqualifying particular roles from the repertoire of self but rather of giving them equal hearing in the ongoing process of self-creation.

But there are limits to this kind of performance, and especially so when the script concerns sacred truths. In an earlier section, Browne has been discussing the benefits of Death and his own heroic fearlessness of the most daunting fact of human life. His only objection to Death is the way in which it alters the human being from a person to a heap of frightful flesh. The force of the first part of the passage is indelible, and reveals a genuine fear which even Browne's performance cannot offset:

I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof; tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, wives and Children stand afraid and start at us. The Birds and Beasts of the field that before in a naturall feare obeyed us, forgetting all allegiance begin to prey on us. This very conceite hath in a tempest disposed and left me willing to be swallowed in the abysse of waters; wherein I had perished unseene, unpityed, without wondring eyes, teares of pity, Lectures of mortality, and none had said quantum mutatus ab illo! Not that I am ashamed of the Anatomy of my parts, or can accuse nature for playing the bungler in any part of me, or my owne vitious life for contracting any shamefull disease upon me, whereby I might not call my selfe as wholesome a morsell for the wormes as any.

(I.40)

The incongruities here between (professed) modesty and self-assertion are marked and not as easily assimilated as in other of Browne's performances. Significantly, the two voices take shape in a fashion exactly opposite to Browne's overt intention: as he details the ultimate annihilation of human existence—of which he loudly professes no fear—Browne etches, first in broad strokes and then in vivid detail, the most striking self-image of the entire work, the vision of self as a corpse; then, as he moves to erase the effect of that image, reverting to his vigorous and self-assured voice but failing to recover his composure, Browne actually discloses evidence of a universal resistance to the relentless undertow of humanity's eventual bodily fate. There is a distinct fissure in the performance here: the cooperation of Browne's two voices disintegrates into a confrontation in which two players compete to upstage each other. The disturbing sense of incongruity in this passage stems, I would suggest, from the inappropriateness of “playing” with feelings that can rarely be undercut successfully, and the additional inappropriateness of the self-assured, mocking voice as the sincere portrayal of the otherwise intelligent, thoughtful and sympathetic Thomas Browne. These are the places in the text where Browne's performance is visibly and understandably strained under the very aesthetic form he has taken up. Like Rembrandt who painted more than one hundred self-portraits, Browne continuously searches for an expression of self which will fully contain his complexity. Not surprisingly, his attempts sometimes reveal what he is not more than what he is.

Religio Medici represents the autobiographical characteristic of a man exploring, not explaining, the boundaries of his self-perception. In so doing, Browne is faced with having to define those boundaries. This task he ultimately finds impossible: the multi-faceted and often perplexingly complex voice of the work reveals his wrestling with the problems of self-reference, specifically the frustrating fact that self-reference is, in the final analysis, incomplete: as Rosalie Colie has written, “in self-portraits of artists painting, the left hand (the right hand in fact) is usually somehow concealed, huddled out of the way, since except in a paradoxical drawing, with no body, or nobody, attached to it, no man can draw his hand while he is drawing it.”³² The analogy of autobiography with self-portraiture is not forced. Significantly, both began shortly after the invention of good mirrors and both, moreover, attempt self-expression directly through the self.³³ As such, they necessarily include the act of self-limitation: any direct expression of self is condemned to be deficient because art, by definition, is the act of delimiting form and content. When the form and content are, respectively, one's language and one's self, choosing what to portray is paradoxically both creative and destructive. Browne's “rhetoric of uncertainty” and his performative self-revelation are noble attempts to overcome the limitations of direct self-expression. They are, together, the most pleasurable aspects of Religio Medici and the necessary and frequently troubling limitations of autobiography.³⁴

Notes

1. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Vol. 1 of The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber, 1964), I.41. Citations to this edition are noted in my text according to Browne's part and section numbers.

2. See, for example, N. J. Endicott who points to the places in Browne's text where his revelation can be affirmed by historical evidence; Mark Caldwell who argues, on the contrary, that the “I” of Religio Medici is not the voice of personal revelation but a universal voice which transcends a localized personality; and Joan Webber's definition of the persona as one “not identical with Browne.” Endicott, “Some Aspects of Self-Revelation and Self-Portraiture in Religio Medici,” in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age, ed. Miller Maclure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 85-102; Caldwell, “The Transfigured ‘I’: Browne's Religio Medici,” Thought 57 (1982): 332-44; Webber, The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 156.

3. Not surprisingly, Stanley Fish has written a striking condemnation of Religio Medici, a work which resists, in its unabashed self-centredness, the pressures of reception theory. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 353-73.

4. The point must be made, however, that poststructuralism has forced upon us not only a questioning but also a thorough and much needed reevaluation of concepts such as “truth” and “historical reality.” We notice, as a result, a conspicuous increase in the number of inverted commas in our writing, a sure sign that we are sensitive to the inescapable effects of our meaning-making capacities.

5. Michael Sprinker, “Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography,” in James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 312.

6. James Olney, “Some Versions of Memory / Some Versions of Bios: The Ontology of Autobiography,” in Olney, Autobiography, 242. For an expansion of these ideas, see Jonathan Loesberg, “Autobiography as Genre, Act of Consciousness, Text,” Prose Studies 4 (1981): 178.

7. Loesberg, “Autobiography as Genre, Act of Consciousness, Text,” notes that this redefinition of autobiographical truth runs throughout Olney's collection: “the telling of the life, its tone, its style, the kind of events it chooses to recount and its attitude toward them, its narrative texture, is for all these writers the locus of an autobiographer's veracity” (175).

8. J. L. Mulryne, too, has proposed a theatrical metaphor for the study of self-presentation in Religio Medici, but he argues that the “I” in the text is a role which Browne dons and so continues the critical debate concerning the mimetic quality of the speaking voice. See Mulryne, “The Play of Mind in Religio Medici,” in C. A. Patrides, ed., Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), 60-68. William L. Howarth speaks similarly of dramatic autobiography (using Boswell, Cellini, and Montaigne as examples) as one in which the artist distances himself from his work and manipulates a histrionic persona in order to conceal his identity. See Howarth, “Some Principles of Autobiography,” in Olney, Autobiography, 84-114. For an analogous view, see Renée Hannaford's treatment of Carew's self-presentation as performance intended to protect the author from the hazards of Charles's court. Hannaford, “Self-Presentation in Carew's ‘To A. L. Perswasions to Love,’” Studies in English Literature 26 (1986): 97-106.

9. Post, Sir Thomas Browne (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 83.

10. Hall, “Epistle, Meditation, and Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici,” PMLA 94 (1979): 234-46.

11. This concept of metamorphic identity is of course very familiar to students of the Renaissance and its connections with theatricality, especially in the Baroque period, have long been recognized. In fact, Paul Delaney identifies role-playing as the feature which distinguishes Renaissance self-study from the routine medieval examination of conscience. Delaney, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1969), 11. On this topic, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Thomas M. Greene, “The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature,” in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory and Interpretation, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas M. Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 241-64; Joan Lord Hall, “‘To Play the Man Well and Duely’: Role-Playing in Montaigne and Shakespeare,” Comparative Literature Studies 22 (1985): 173-86; Barbara Leah Harmon, Costly Monuments: Representations of the Self in George Herbert's Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Thomas F. Van Laan, Role-Playing in Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978).

12. But for an interesting study of the ideological implications of Browne's revisions, see Jonathan Post, “Browne's Revision of Religio Medici,” Studies in English Literature 25 (1985): 145-63.

13. For a comprehensive look at the origin and development of the topos, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Harper, 1953), 321-24.

14. In The Advancement of Learning, Bacon writes: “let no man upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation think or maintain, that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God's works, divinity or philosophy: but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both; only let men beware that they apply both to charity, and not to swelling; to use, and not to ostentation; and again, that they do not unwisely mingle or confound these learnings together.” Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin (London: Dent, 1965), 8.

15. Conversely, these are the very passages attacked by Fish as false leads in a work whose stylistic pattern ends repeatedly in a “happy loss of individuality” (Self-Consuming Artifacts, 359). I admit to some confusion here: elsewhere, Fish is severe with Browne for his thorough self-centredness. But if, in the final analysis, Browne is only “displaying Browne to advantage” (367), then his o altitudos are not masks, and it is the “happy loss of individuality” that is rendered hypocritical. An answer to this apparent contradiction may lie in the personal and overtly moral stakes with which Fish is playing. He resents being misled by (or merely reading) a work which labours to maintain a distinctly separate existence from the act of reading. The nature of Fish's involvement in his critical task surfaces in the diction he chooses to express Browne's betrayal of the tradition he (nominally) adopts: his words are “objects, frozen into rhetorical patterns which reflect on the virtuosity of their author” (372). The contradictory comments may, therefore, be read as largely separate attacks on, on the one hand, (morally) meaningless rhetoric, and, on the other, a solipsistic aesthetic.

16. Quoted in C. A. Patrides, ed., Sir Thomas Browne: Major Works (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 107n.

17. For a counter-interpretation, see Murray Roston, who argues that Religio Medici is a “celebration of an achieved equilibrium of spirit” and not the depiction of a “soul in Progress.” Roston, “The Doubting Thomas,” in Patrides, Approaches, 74.

18. Loesberg, “Autobiography as Genre, Act of Consciousness, Text,” makes the useful suggestion that paradox is only problematic for the reader of autobiography, that the integrity of the autos is necessarily a given of the genre (182).

19. Although one could not trace a single, graphic radiation of the metaphor over the course of the text, the pattern of gradual movement from an autonomous, circumscribed individual self to a communal, inclusive self is repeated and modulated in individual sections of Religio Medici. In its general dimensions, the development of this pattern finds support in Ann Drury Hall's identification of a similar intrasectional shift from epistolary to meditative prose styles. However, Hall's further proposal that “[t]he movement of individual sections … is the pattern for the Religio as a whole” (238) suggests a teleological progression which disables the work as performative autobiography.

20. St Augustine also intended that his Confessions be completed only in the book's relationship with others, i.e., in the act of communication between writer and audience: “This is the fruit of my confessions of what I am [my emphasis], not of what I have been, to confess this, not before Thee only, in a secret exultation with trembling, and a secret sorrow with hope; but in the ears also of the believing sons of men, sharers of my joy, and partners in my mortality, my fellow citizens and fellow pilgrims, who are gone before, or are to follow on, companions of my way.” Confessions, trans. E. B. Pusey (London: Dent, 1939), 207. Petrarch's and St Theresa's well-known conversional reading experiences of the Confessions attest to the power of Augustine's desire. For Petrarch, see T. C. Price Zimmerman, “Confession and Autobiography in the Early Renaissance,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Anthony Molhol and John A. Tedeschi (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), 119-40; for St Theresa, see Barrett J. Mandel, “Full of Life Now,” in Olney, Autobiography, 49-72.

21. This tendency throws interesting light on one of Browne's most spiteful remarks: “If there be any among those common objects of hatred [which I can safely say] I doe contemne and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, vertue and religion, the multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity, which taken asunder seeme men, and the reasonable creatures of God; but confused together, make but one great beast, & a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra” (II.1).

22. Quoted in Margaret Bottrall, Every Man a Phoenix: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography (London: Murray, 1958), 14.

23. Georges Gusdorf adopts the metaphor of the circle to describe such a society: “lives are so thoroughly entangled that each of them has its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere.” Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in Olney, Autobiography, 29-30. Browne adopts the familiar metaphor when describing God's realm of existence: [Deus est] Sphaera cuius centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibi” (I.10, margin).

24. For an historicist discussion of the repeated failures at true self-definition in the English Renaissance, see Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning.

25. Johnson, “Life of Browne,” rpt. in Patrides, Major Works, 490.

26. Webber, Eloquent ‘I’, 4.

27. I don't follow Post, Sir Thomas Browne, then, in seeing a hierarchical arrangement of faith and reason, with the latter always assuming a subordinate position. Though he often negates the power of his reason outright, Browne's performance, the process of self-composition, betrays a distinct parity between the two strains of his personality. Browne himself admits as much: “a moderate and peaceable discretion may so state and order the matter [of faith versus reason], that they may bee all Kings, and yet make but one Monarchy, every one exercising his Soveraignty and Prerogative in a due time and place, according to the restraint and limit of circumstance” (I.19).

28. Poulet, The Metamorphoses of the Circle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), xxvii.

29. See Harmon, Costly Monuments, for a discussion of Herbert's “collapsing poems.”

30. Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 18.

31. Loesberg, “Autobiography as Genre, Act of Consciousness, Text,” 182.

32. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 393.

33. On this matter, see Delaney, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century, 21. See also the suggestive comments of Howarth, “Some Principles of Autobiography,” on the (visual) poetic autobiographies of Rembrandt and Van Gogh as continuous self-studies in which the process of becoming is essential (113). In many ways, Browne fits better into this category than into that of dramatic autobiography as Howarth defines it.

34. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. An earlier version of this essay was read to the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English at Laval University in May, 1989.