[In the following essay, Ellrodt discusses Browne's conception of time in his works.]

Sir Thomas Browne's conception of time, though often clothed in biblical imagery, is largely derived from the Platonic tradition. Yet his medical profession seems to be responsible for the most distinctive and original features of his intuition of temporality.

A vivid consciousness of physiological time is often disclosed in an unpremeditated way through the choice of an image or a phrase. The author of Christian Morals warns us: “Thou hast an alarum in thy Breast, which tells thee that thou hast a Living Spirit in thee above two thousand times in an hour.”¹ Whether Browne hints at heartbeats—this heart would beat very slowly indeed—or in Keatsian phrasing at the soft fall and swell of tender-taken breath—which would be more easily reconciled with scientific accuracy—is still a matter of dispute. But one thing is certain: time is measured by the fundamental rhythm of our physiological life. That is why the longest lives, those enjoyed by the patriarchs of the Old Testament, are described as made up of so many “pulses” that their reckoning would be work for Archimedes.² The physician's most characteristic apprehension of time is perhaps best revealed in his description of human life from its earliest pre-natal stages in the mother's womb and its progress through earthly existence to its second birth or delivery:

In that obscure world and wombe of our mother, our time is short, computed by the Moone: yet longer than the dayes of many creatures that behold the Sunne, our selves being not yet without life, sense, and reason, though for the manifestation of its actions, it awaits the opportunity of objects; and seemes to live there but in its roote and soule of vegetation: entring afterwards upon the scene of the world, wee arise up and become another creature, performing the reasonable actions of man, and obscurely manifesting that part of Divinity in us, but not in complement and perfection, till we have once more cast our secondine, and are delivered into the last world, that is, that ineffable place of Paul, that proper ubi of spirits.³

For the physician who has followed the development of the embryo in all its phases and who knows how many children may be expected to die before beholding the sun,⁴ these months of an existence slowly progressing with the revolutions of the moon must be added up to the duration of human life. With this approach the traditional image of the microcosm suffers a sea-change. It was usually conceived of spatially and structurally, as a network of correspondences apprehended in stasis. The analogy becomes evolutionary and is worked out as a temporal succession. The universe may be found in man because man has passed through all the stages of existence:

… to call our selves a Microcosme, or little world, I thought it onely a pleasant trope of Rhetorick, till my neare judgement and second thoughts told me there was a reall truth therein: for first wee are a rude masse, and in the ranke of creatures, which only are, and have a dull kinde of being not yet priviledged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at last the life of spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds of existences, which comprehend the creatures not onely of this world, but of the Universe …⁵

It is therefore appropriate that the heart of a dying man should beat as feebly as the heart of the embryo, as the physician observed in A Letter to a Friend,⁶ and it is opportune that the ashes of cremated bodies should be enclosed in an urn shaped like a woman's womb, “making our last bed like our first.”⁷

In physiological time growth and decline are inseparable for “we begin to die when we live”⁸ as the author of Hydriotaphia reminds us. The stages of senescence and sickness are recorded with clinical accuracy in A Letter to a Friend. There are different ages for the different diseases and the imminence of death is revealed by various signs of an alteration which brings the dying man's face close to the animal or close to the earth, as if he were returning to earlier stages of his existence: who knows “unto what an unknown degree a man may live backward.”⁹ One may say that Browne spontaneously conceives of time in terms of the development of a living creature and the length of its life. As far as the individual is concerned time therefore is finite and assumes a circular image owing to a regression ad originem: “The whole course of Time runs out in the Nativity and Death of Things.”¹⁰

Now, historical time, as recorded in Scripture, also appears as a succession of individual lives which make up the generations,¹¹ and the youngest life, Methuselah's, curiously becomes Browne's exemplar of measure for the evaluation of historical duration.¹² In Hydriotaphia he argues that “Charles the fifth can never hope to live within two Methuselah's of Hector,”¹³ which means that the fame of Charles V cannot be expected to survive twice 969 years like Hector's since the world is drawing near its end. He insistently reminds us of the prophecy of Elias and the ancient tradition which ascribed an existence of six thousand years to the world, and notes that “seven Methusela's would exceed its whole duration.”¹⁴

Life thus appears as the measure of time, an inversion which may proceed from the focusing of attention on a life-span, the life of the body. Even the lives of the human generations will be measured by other lives in nature: “old Families last not three Oaks.”¹⁵

It cannot be claimed that Browne innovates when he deals with time in an abstract, scientific manner. He takes up the classical, Aristotelian definition when he speaks of time as the measure of movement. Yet the consequence he draws from this statement seems again to betray a peculiar attention to the body:

So do we injustly assign the power of Action even unto Time it self, nor do they speak properly who say that Time consumeth all things; for Time is not effective, nor are our bodies destroyed by it, but from the action and passion of their Elements in it; whose account it only affordeth …¹⁶

When he denies Time itself any power of alteration over bodies, Browne indeed reduces the notion of time to measurement but the processes of change within the body itself implicitly appear as the actual phenomenon of duration. In another section of Pseudodoxia Epidemica Browne apparently reverts to the traditional conception of Time as an active agent: “time that brings all things to ruin, perfects also every thing.”¹⁷ But he is probably tricked into this commonplace by the habits of language and may mean no more than this: every thing is degraded in time, every thing also reaches its perfection in time. This interpretation is confirmed by the absence in his works of those personifications of Time the Destroyer or Time the Revealer which were lavishly used by the artists, the poets, the moralists and the preachers of the Renaissance and the Baroque age. The figure of Father Time, with his scythe and his hourglass, never appears, and an allusion to his long beard in Christian Morals is purely metaphorical.¹⁸

No less telling is the absence of those images of flux which had been so profuse in evocations of time, from Ovid to Montaigne and Shakespeare. It is at first surprising since Browne shows a vivid consciousness of mutability.¹⁹ It can be explained if we remember that his perception of time is not an intuition of what Montaigne called “le passage” in opposition to “l'être,”²⁰ but the consideration of a life-span or the age of an object. He had a passion for antiques—funeral urns, monuments or mummies²¹—because time was, as it were, collected in them as waters are collected in a lake or a vase. Time was not to be hypostatized since it had no being apart from the individual temporal being.

A physiological emphasis may also explain why Browne's retrospection is not attended by a yearning for edenic innocence or the first age of humanity as in the poetry of Henry Vaughan. Since he believed that the existence of the world was probably limited to six thousand years (though he seems to have wavered in this conviction²²), his imagination would dwell more willingly in the more spacious past than in the narrow bounds of the future. But the famous phrase, “Time antiquates Antiquities,”²³ is not merely the rhetorical heightening of a self-evident truth through the sonorous seduction of polysyllables. To say that time makes what was ancient more ancient is a means of suggesting a perpetual invasion of the present by the past, a constant over-freighting of the ancient object with a new load of antiquity. Attention is focused on this increment of ancientness and the meditation never seeks to move up the stream of time in the hope that recollection might recapture an undamaged splendour, a pristine glory. Browne always contemplates the work of time at its present point of progressive decay or ultimate destruction. “Time antiquates Antiquities” expresses a physical and physiological law, which is also the law of universal history. History, however, is time-bound and every moment brings us nearer the end of time.

Looking upon time as the finite duration of physical existence, Browne was attracted at once to Antiquity, as the remotest extension, and to Eternity as a state beyond time. His peculiar mode of thought is disclosed in another celebrated aphorism:

And in this sense, I say, 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.²⁴

The paradox is based on the traditional Platonic assumption that essence in the mind of God precedes existence in the world.²⁵ But Browne's phrasing makes nonsense of the philosophical assumption for he turns the anteriority of essence into existential anteriority. Using the imagery of conception and miscarriage the author of Religio Medici shows that he could not think of his own existence in the mind of God otherwise than in terms that would apply to a physiological phenomenon.

Notes

1. Christian Morals, I. 33, Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. L. C. Martin, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964, p. 216. All references are given to this edition with one exception: the six volume edition of The Works of Sir Thomas Browne by Geoffrey Keynes, London, Faber & Faber, 1928-31, is used for page references to Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

2. Hydriotaphia, V, Martin, pp. 118-119.

3. Religio Medici, I. 39, Martin, p. 38.

4. A Letter to a Friend, Martin, p. 182.

5. Religio Medici, I. 34, Martin, p. 33.

6. A Letter to a Friend, Martin, p. 180 (the “salient point” is the heart as first seen in embryo).

7. Hydriotaphia, III, Martin, p. 102.

8. Hydriotaphia V; Martin, p. 118.

9. A Letter to a Friend, Martin, pp. 187, 179-80, 183.

10. A Letter to a Friend, Martin, p. 182.

11. Pseudodoxia Epidemica, VI. i, Works, ed. Keynes, III. pp. 165-6.

12. Religio Medici, I. p. 22, I. 42; Hydriotaphia, V; Christian Morals, III. i; Martin pp. 23, 40, 118-9, 228. Cf. Pseudodoxia, “Of Methuselah,” VII. iii, Keynes, III. p. 267.

13. Hydriotaphia, V, Martin, p. 120.

14. Christian Morals, III. 29, Martin, p. 246.

15. Hydriotaphia, V, Martin, p. 120.

16. Pseudodoxia, IV. xii, Keynes, III. p. 61.

17. Pseudodoxia, V. 18, Keynes, III. pp. 131-2.

18. Christian Morals, III. 13, Martin, p. 236.

19. Typical is Ovid's passage in Metamorphoses (XV. 181-5) which inspired Shakespeare's Sonnet 60. Time always appears to Montaigne “comme en ombre, avec la matière coulante et fluante toujours” (Essais, II. xii). A. Favre has studied “Le thème de la mortalité chez Sir Thomas Browne,” Etudes Anglaises 33 (1980), 32-40.

20. “Je ne peints pas l'estre. Je peinct le passage”: Essais, III. ii.

21. Hydriotaphia, passim; on mummies see Hydriotaphia, V, Martin, p. 120, l. 10; p. 121, l. 2; p. 122, l. 32 and Letter, Martin, p. 184.

22. Despite his many allusions to the prophecy of Elias (Religio I. 46; Hydriotaphia, V, Christian Morals, III. 29; Martin, pp. 44, 120, 246), he writes rather cautiously: “The World, which took but six days to make, is like to take six thousand years to make out” (Christian Morals II. 5; Martin, p. 221, my italics). He definitely rejects all speculations about the imminence of the Second Coming: Religio Medici, I. 25, (Martin, p. 25, ll. 33-35).

23. Hydriotaphia, V, Martin, p. 118.

24. Religio Medici, I. 59, Martin, p. 54.

25. A notion correctly expressed in Religio Medici I. 45 and I. 50, Martin, p. 43, ll. 23-28, and p. 48, ll. 26-37.