[In the following essay, Wong explores the reasons why Browne's work became such an integral part of the public and literary discourse concerning authorial intention and critical interpretation.]

This essay reexamines the relationship among three works: the Religio Medici of Sir Thomas Browne which first appeared in 1642; Browne's preface to the 1643 Religio; and Observations upon “Religio Medici,” the commentary written by Sir Kenelm Digby near the end of 1642. Read in concert, these works reveal how Browne's masterpiece became a public text defined by the complex intercourse of authorial and critical intention. While much of the criticism of Browne's work has been concerned with parsing his prose, calibrating his religious beliefs, or assessing his place in scientific history, critics have paid less attention to the ways in which Religio, together with Observations, illuminates in striking fashion the dynamics of early modern critical reception and authorial defense—how the construction of author and book as subjects of critical reading by Digby, and by Browne in response to Digby, complicates the idealized performance of subjectivity in Religio itself.¹ In what follows, I hope to show that Digby is a subtler reader of Religio than has been generally granted and to consider Religio not as an effusion of “winning naïveté” (as Douglas Bush described it years ago), but as a complex representation of the trials of authorship in this period.²

I

In 1641, as tensions mounted between parliament and King Charles I, Sir Kenelm Digby, a well-known royalist and Catholic, was brought before Parliament to be questioned. Soon after Digby fled to France, but difficulties resulting from a duel—he killed a French nobleman who, he said, had insulted the bravery of the English monarch—brought him back to England where he was imprisoned at Winchester House in November of 1642. John Aubrey, who tells us that Digby “was held to be the most accomplished Cavalier of his time,” paints a charming picture of his activities during this incarceration: “here Sir Kenelm Digby wrote his Book of Bodies, and diverted himself in Chymistry, and used to make artificial precious Stones, as Rubies, Emeralds, &c. out of Flint, as Sir Francis Dodington, Prisoner with him at the same Time, told me.”³ In addition to his reputation as a gentleman, Digby was a philosopher well regarded by many, if not all, of his contemporaries. One of these, Edward Sackville, earl of Dorset, invited him to comment upon Religio Medici which, in two printings by Andrew Crooke in 1642, had become remarkably popular. Digby agreed and, in December of that year, wrote Observations upon “Religio Medici,” more than a hundred pages of commentary addressed to Sackville in the form of a letter.

Early in 1643, having heard of the impending publication of Observations, Browne wrote to Digby asking him to withhold it, arguing that Religio was a private piece never intended for the press or public debate and scarcely worth Digby's attention:

[T]here is contain'd therein nothing that can deserve the Reason of your contradictions, much lesse the candor of your Animadversions: and to certifie the truth thereof; that Booke (whereof I doe acknowledge my self the Author) was pen'd many yeers past, and (what cannot escape your apprehension) with no intention for the Presse, or the least desire to obliege the Faith of any man to its assertions. But what hath more especially emboldened my Pen unto you at present is, that the same piece contrived in my private Study and as an exercise unto my self, rather than exercitation for any other, having past from my hand under a broken and imperfect Copy … the liberty of these times committed it unto the Presse, from whence it issued so disguised, the Author without distinction could not acknowledge it.⁴

Browne goes on to say that he will soon publish the “intended Originall” more fit for Digby's consideration than the “imperfect Copy” brought out by an unscrupulous printer: “If after that you shall esteem it worthy your vacant houres to discourse thereon, you shall but take that liberty which I assume my selfe, that is freely to abound in your sense, as I have done in my own” (Works, 4:235-6). In a nicely evasive reply, Digby disavows any plan to publish his notes on Religio and then dismisses them as too slight to cause Browne concern in any case: “For such reflections as I made upon yr learned and ingenious discourse, are so farre from meriting the presse, as they can tempt nobody to a serious reading of them. They were notes hastily sett downe, as I soddainly ranne over yr excellent peece; wch is of so weighty subjects, and so strongly penned, as requireth much time and sharpe attention but to comprehend it” (Works, 4:236). Having made clear the trivial nature of his work, Digby rises to a pitch of self-effacement: “If I had the vanity to give myselfe reputation by entring the listes in publike wth so eminent and learned a man as you are, yet I know right well I am no wayes able to do it: It would be a very unæquall congresse. I pretend not to learning” (Works, 4:237). Despite these pleas and denials, a flurry of publications ensued. Crooke immediately brought out a corrected version of Religio that included Browne's apologetic preface, “To the Reader,” as well as his exchange of letters with Digby (Works, 1:4). Observations quickly followed, still based on the “imperfect” Religio of 1642 and printed by Daniel Frere—the same printer Digby had used for his comments on Edmund Spenser suggesting his original intention to publish despite his denials to Browne. Crooke then issued a second printing of Religio in 1643 accompanied by a letter, presumably written by Crooke, addressed “To such as have, or shall peruse the Observations upon a former Corrupt copy of this Book” (Works, 1:4). Further editions of Observations were printed by Frere later that year and by Lawrence Chapman in 1644. Finally, in 1659, Crooke was able to print Observations along with the fifth edition of Religio, in what became the standard pairing in future editions of Browne's book.⁵

More than a century later, Samuel Johnson would describe the correspondence between Browne and Digby in his “Life of Sir Thomas Browne”:

Of these animadversions, when they were yet not all printed, either officiousness or malice informed Dr. Browne; who wrote to Sir Kenelm with much softness and ceremony, declaring the unworthiness of his work to engage such notice, the intended privacy of the composition, and the corruptions of the impression; and received an answer equally gentle and respectful, containing high commendations of the piece, pompous professions of reverence, meek acknowledgements of inability, and anxious apologies for the hastiness of his remarks.

The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life. Who would not have thought, that these two luminaries of their age had ceased to endeavour to grow bright by the obscuration of each other: yet the animadversions thus weak, thus precipitate, upon a book thus injured in the transcription, quickly passed the press.⁶

For Johnson, their exchange of letters can only be read as typical authorial gamesmanship, and he dismisses out of hand any claims of victimage or ignorance. His assumption that Browne and Digby are doing what all writers do to establish precedence, moreover, speaks to the power of Religio not as a “private exercise”—the description Browne urges in his letter and repeats in his preface—but as a public work shaped by critical conflict, authorial ambition, and literary reputation.⁷ I want to embrace what I take to be Johnson's liberating cynicism: his view of a Browne who is less poet in prose than author in heat; and of a literary work that, for all its preciosity, operates in familiar realms of authorial rivalry.⁸ In this arena, if Browne possessed a greater literary skill, it was Digby who enjoyed superior social and intellectual standing. His notice of Religio would not only raise its profile (as Crooke, who took every opportunity to link both writers, certainly realized) but also, as Browne understood, effectively redefine the boundaries of its meaning and terms of its reception.

If Digby neatly transforms the putatively private discourse of Religio into a matter of public contention, his Observations has usually been characterized as, at best, an interesting misreading—a dryly rationalist critique of an exquisitely wrought meditation: “While Browne wondered at the divine hand in human affairs, Digby rationalized its existence and moralized on its effect. Digby's system was too rigid and too mechanical to allow for the Janus-like Browne, who enjoyed paradox and contradiction. Digby searched for tangibility and reliability in his universe, so he expected the same qualities in Religio.”⁹ Yet I shall argue that Digby's failure to appreciate Religio is no mere misconception. Indeed, Digby is as sensitive as any modern critic to Browne's wit and reads Religio, in its intended spirit, as a self-consciously idiosyncratic amalgam of philosophical speculation and rhetorical play: “I doe not see how seasonably he falleth, of a suddaine, from naturall speculations to a morall contemplation of Gods Spirit working in us. In which also I would inquire (especially upon his suddaine poeticall rapture) whether the solidity of the Iudgement be not out weighed by the ayrienesse of the fancy. Assuredly one cannot erre in taking this Author for a very fine ingenious Gentleman: for how deep a Scholler, I leave unto them to judge, that are abler then I am.”¹⁰ Again and again, Digby reads Religio with a sharp, if condescending, appreciation of its author's modus. So he playfully disparages Browne for insufficient rapture when circumstances seem to demand: “In his concluding Prayer wherein hee summeth up all hee wisheth; mee thinketh his arrow is not winged with that fire which I should have expected from him upon this occasion” (p. 115). It is, then, with the liveliest sense of Browne's wit that Digby finally dismisses it as a subversion of substance: “This language were handsome for a Poet or Rhetorician to speake, but in a Philosopher, that should ratiocinate strictly and rigorously, I cannot admit it” (p. 87). For Digby, philosophy is incompatible with rhetorical excess, and in this regard his critique is distinctly modern: informed by current belief that language must be disciplined for the purposes of philosophical study. Yet his attack on Browne's rhetoric—a keynote of Observations—is not only a matter of philosophical belief, as we shall see, but bound up in the way both authors strive to define their authority and establish the claims of their work—to illuminate themselves, in Johnson's words, by obscuring one another. If the process of personal aggrandizement actually begins in the self-commemoration of Religio, it is complicated by the radical transformation of Browne's work into an object of reading in Observations. For in every sense that matters, Digby is the arch(e)-reader of Religio, assuming the role of interpreter, extending authority over the text, creating the public sphere of a work that clings to an enabling fiction of privacy. In Observations, Religio is subjected: mastered by a reader who constructs a vision of the author—“a very fine ingenious Gentleman” in Digby's nicely dismissive words—who will be tested and found wanting. When Sackville invites Digby to engage Religio, Digby's assent imposes a regime of authority, meaning, and intentionality that, henceforth, Browne cannot evade but only hope to enlist in his defense.

II

If, in the modern view, Observations is filled with misprision, it succeeded brilliantly in flushing Browne out. As we have seen, Religio reappeared in 1643 accompanied by a preface defending the book against potential criticism and recounting its unwarranted seizure by the press. And as Browne admits paternity, he locates his Religio in an interpretative space largely created by Digby:

This I confesse about seven yeares past, with some others of affinitie thereto, for my private exercise and satisfaction, I had at leisurable houres composed; which being communicated unto one, it became common unto many, and was by transcription successively corrupted untill it arrived in a most depraved copy at the presse. He that shall peruse that worke, and shall take notice of sundry particularities and personall expressions therein, will easily discern 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 … It was penned in such a place and with such disadvantage, that (I protest) from the first setting of pen unto paper, I had not the assistance of any good booke … It was set downe many yeares past, and was the sense of my conceptions at that time, not an immutable law unto my advancing judgement at all times … There are many things delivered Rhetorically, many expressions therein meerely Tropicall and as they best illustrate my intention; and therefore also there are many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason.

(SW [Sir Thomas Browne: Selected Writings], 5-6)

The apology for his rhetoric, complaints about a lack of books and “rigid test[s] of reason,” are all responses to objections raised in Observations—responses more personally affirmed in the letter to Digby reprinted in this new edition. In his aggressive effort to regain authority over his book—in preface, letter, and textual emendation—Browne's chief weapon lies in privileging his work as “a memoriall unto me,” an ideally reflexive Religio that existed as writing but hovered above the corruption of print. In this version of events, it is the printer, Crooke, who despoils the author's state of innocence: “But because things evidently false are not onely printed, but many things of truth most falsly set forth; in this latter I could not but thinke my selfe engaged: for though we have no power to redresse the former, yet in the other the reparation being within our selves, I have at present represented unto the world a full and intended copy of that Peece which was most imperfectly and surreptitiously published before” (SW, p. 5). Yet, in spite of his upset, the material differences between the texts of 1642 and 1643 were relatively minor. Browne added a few passages, corrected errors in transcription, and actually retained Crooke's services for the new edition. To Johnson, ever wary of the special pleading of authors, the facts suggested that it was Browne, or a surrogate, who had supplied Crooke with the text of Religio in the first place: “It is easy to convey an imperfect book, by a distant hand, to the press, and plead the circulation of a false copy as an excuse for publishing the true, or to correct what is found faulty or offensive, and charge the errors on the transcriber's deprivations. This is a stratagem, by which an author panting for fame, and yet afraid of seeming to challenge it, may at once gratify his vanity, and preserve the appearance of modesty; may enter the lists, and secure a retreat” (Life, pp. 485-6).

Whatever the truth of Browne's dealings with Crooke, Johnson reminds us that his preface is a calculated intervention in the ongoing public history of Religio.¹¹ There Browne assumes the conventional role of the unwillingly exposed writer, forced out of a world of “private exercise” to reclaim Religio because “I could not but thinke my selfe engaged.” Yet he also admits that his “selfe” is as subject to internal change as the predations of press and public; that his book has “many things therein plausible unto my passed apprehension, which are not agreeable to my present selfe.” It is this sense of a “present selfe,” now much transformed as well as abused, that compels him to authorize his book at last: “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” (SW, p. 6). While Browne presents himself as a victim of the press, lamenting the surreptitious seizure of his work, it is the violation of its “secrecie” that affords him the chance to redefine the access to his work by imagining a private space from which it can reemerge into public view. The violation, directly blamed on the press and obliquely assigned to Digby in the 1643 text, now becomes an ironic source of power—closely akin to the potent presentation of self in Religio, where Browne delights in describing a private discourse that easily resists public incursion: “I have therefore one common and authentick Philosophy I learned in the Schooles, whereby I discourse and satisfie the reason of other men; another more reserved and drawne from experience whereby I content mine owne” (SW, p. 79). If Browne reaffirms in his preface the vision of a writer who has always cultivated psychic distance, he must do so now in reaction to an aggressive, and very public, act of critical appropriation. If Religio, taken with its preface, now presents an extended meditation on self, past and present, public and private, it is Digby who impels that meditation; who forces the precipitate appearance of the authorized text and creates the uneasy contretemps between “present selfe” and “passed apprehension” that informs the authorized Religio.

As the encounter between Digby and Browne turns on notions of private writing and public reading, moreover, these issues converge in the rhetorical excesses that Digby so often condemns and that Browne both defends and demeans in his preface: “There are many things delivered Rhetorically, many expressions therein meerely Tropicall and as they best illustrate my intention; and therefore also there are many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason.” The tropes that mark Browne's earlier self-imagination—figurative traces of an author once free to create himself as he chose—now mark the present dilemma of a work set between secrecy and exposure, old and new selves, soft rhetoric and hard reason. In the rhetoric of Religio, in the “flexible sense” of its tropes, Browne and Digby engage as author and critic in a mutual interrogation of the ancient claims of rhetoric and philosophy, adversaries in the Johnsonian mode contending over shared discursive territory.¹² In the next section, I examine how Digby and Browne's authorial contention is mediated through questions of rhetoric and philosophy in ways that crystallize the problems of critical reading and critical subjection for them both.

III

Throughout Observations, Digby balances occasional praise of Browne's wit against frequent disapproval of his “wilde fancie” (p. 37), and his sharpest readings focus on those parts of Religio where Browne brings his wit to bear on the practice of philosophy—what Digby saw, not unreasonably, as his particular preserve. Several pages into Religio, having set down the tenets of his faith and made clear his distaste for theological dispute, Browne offers his now famous views on divine mystery: “As for those wingy mysteries in Divinity and ayery subtilties in Religion, which have unhindg'd the braines of better heads, they never stretched the Pia Mater of mine; me thinkes there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith; the deepest mysteries ours containes, have not only been illustrated, but maintained by syllogisme, and the rule of reason: I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an o altitudo” (SW, p. 14). For Browne, the chief delight in speculating on the divine nature lies in the limits it imposes on reason and in the opportunity it affords for displays of unquestioning faith. And in such matters of faith, Digby is at one with Browne: “I am extreamely pleased with him, when he saith there are not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith” (p. 14). Yet the case is altered when Browne subdues his reason by giving free rein to his fancy:

Since I was of understanding to know we know nothing my reason hath beene more pliable to the will of faith; I am now content to understand a mystery without a rigid definition in an easie and Platonick description. The allegorical description of Hermes, pleaseath me beyond all the Metaphysicall definitions of Divines; where I cannot satisfie my reason, I love to humour my fancy; I had as leive you tell me that anima est angelus hominis, est Corpus Dei, as Entelechia; Lux est umbra Dei, as actus perspicui: where there is an obscurity too deepe for our reason, 'tis good to sit downe with a description, periphrasis, or adumbration.

(SW, p. 15)

As he multiplies the tropes he will one day be forced to defend, Browne uses stock terms of scholasticism—entelechia, actus perspicui—to suggest the kind of arid philosophizing he gladly abandons for the seductive adumbrations of a Plato or Hermes.¹³

Though Digby himself has no sympathy for school philosophy, he has little enthusiasm for this typical performance by Browne:¹⁴

I confesse when I enquire what light (to use our Authors example) is I should be as well contented with his Silence, as with his telling mee it is Actus perspicui; unlesse hee explicate clearly to me what those words mean, which I finde very few goe about to do. Such meate they swallow whole, and eject it as entire. But were such things, scientifically, and methodically declared, they would bee of extreame satisfaction, and delight. And that worke taketh up the greatest part of my formerly mentioned treatise. For I endeavour to shew by a continued progresse, and not by Leapes, all the motions of nature; & unto them to fit intelligibly the termes used by her best Secretaries: whereby all wilde fantasticke qualities and moods (introduced for refuges of ignorance) are banished from my commerce.

(pp. 14-6)

As Digby argues for a methodical study of light and the model of his own sober philosophy in response to Browne's delightfully conceited play, it is tempting to view this as a simple failure to grasp the spirit of Religio where, as Browne says (in words clearly directed at Digby), “[t]here are many things delivered Rhetorically … and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason.” Yet I would argue that Digby's reading is less a misapprehension of Browne's rhetoric, which he often disparages but rarely mistakes, than a careful cultivation of his own role as Natural Philosopher: a role he has been invited to play by Sackville—a request both flattering and limiting—and grounded in displays of reason of the kind so wittily abused in Religio. As Digby replays the battle of philosophy and rhetoric (as Browne will replay it in his preface), he dismisses Religio as poor philosophy not purely in the spirit of intellectual engagement—indeed, he hardly wishes to elevate Browne by doing so—but in fulfillment of his role, chosen and imposed, as philosopher and as part of the self-conscious performance of his public authority. If Observations takes the casual form of a letter to Sackville, it is in passages like these, where Browne is in some ways only the putative subject, that the force of its epistolary form is made clear; for here Sackville is the true correspondent of Digby's work: the esteemed friend for whom Digby displays his intellectual expertise. As Browne rejects Digby's reading, he answers him in kind: reasserting the rhetoric of Religio in order to represent himself in his role, chosen and imposed, as private writer made against his will into public author, indulging in soft rhetoric rather than hard reason. What is striking here is not the old topos of sober philosophy versus specious rhetoric, but how that contention mediates a present struggle over precedence acted out in correspondence, commentary, and apology; how Browne and Digby displace their vital interests in authorship—interests they disclaim in transparent gestures of disdain—onto the stormy marriage of rhetoric and philosophy.

That displaced tension is best revealed in Digby's consideration of Browne's views on the resurrection of the flesh. There Digby reaffirms his philosophical authority, but does so in the carefully defined context of his reluctant authorship and friendly obligation to Sackville. In reading Browne on resurrection, as we shall see, Digby's social and intellectual authority are casually conjoined at Browne's expense in a public demonstration of status that claims of privacy can hardly resist. While Religio is replete with carefully choreographed encounters between natural philosophy and divine mystery, the idea of physical resurrection inspires Browne's most elaborate entrelacement of faith, reason, and philosophy: “How shall the dead arise, is no question of my faith; to beleeve onely possibilities, is not faith, but meere Philosophy; many things are true in Divinity, which are neither inducible by reason, nor confirmable by sense; and many things in Philosophy confirmable by sense, yet not inducible by reason” (SW, p. 54). Where Browne set reason plainly at odds with faith in discoursing on divine mystery, here the matter is more complex. For as Browne tells us, resurrection of the flesh raises “no question of my faith” nor has anything to do with speculations of “meere Philosophy.” The promise of resurrection inspires no witty tropes or hermetic periphrases, only a simple declaration of belief: “I beleeve that our estranged and divided ashes shall unite again; that our separated dust after so many pilgrimages and transformations into the parts of mineralls, Plants, Animals, Elements, shall at the voyce of God returne into their primitive shapes, and joyne againe to make up their primary and predestinated formes” (SW, p. 54). And in this affirmation of belief, the practice of natural philosophy still plays a vital role:

Let us speake naturally, and like Philosophers: the formes of alterable bodies in these sensible corruptions perish not; nor, as wee imagine, wholly quit their mansions, but retire and contract themselves into their secret and inaccessible parts, where they may best protect themselves from the action of their Antagonist. A plant or vegetable consumed to ashes, to a contemplative and schoole Philosopher seemes utterly destroyed, and the forme to have taken his leave for ever: But to a sensible Artist the formes are not perished, but withdrawne into their incombustible part, where they lie secure from the action of that devouring element. This is made good by experience, which can from the ashes of a plant revive the plant … This is that mysticall Philosophy, from whence no true Scholler becomes an Atheist, but from the visible effects of nature, growes up a reall Divine.

(SW, p. 55)

Instead of school philosophy that sees destruction where there is hidden life, Browne urges a “mysticall Philosophy” in sympathy with divine edict: “God by a powerfull voyce shall command them backe into their proper shapes” (SW, p. 55). Philosophy is conceived, in a nice pun, as “reall” divinity that elides natural and supernatural and becomes like a trope “soft and flexible,” enclosing paradoxical phenomena: life in death, form in dissolution.

Browne's discourse on resurrection and philosophy inspires the longest sustained reading in Observations. It opens, typically, with Digby praising Browne's wit while making clear his limitations:

But when he meeteth with such difficulties as his next concerning the Resurrection of the body … I doe not at all wonder hee should tread a little awry, and goe astray in the darke; for I conceive his course of life hath not permitted him to allow much time into the unwinding of such entangled and abstracted subtilties. But if it had, I beleeve his naturall parts are such as he might have kept the chaire from most men I know … Most assuredly his wit and smartnesse in this Discourse, is of the finest Standard; and his insight into severer Learning, will appeare as piercing unto such as use not strictly the touchstone and the Test to examine every peece of the glittering coine he payeth his Reader with.

(pp. 76-7)

Where some—even Sackville—may be dazzled by the “glittering coine” of Religio, Digby intends to dismantle its ideas and begins by dismissing the belief that our ashes will be reconstituted at last: “It is but a grosse conception, to thinke that every Atome of the present individuall matter of a body; every graine of Ashes of a burned Cadaver, scattered by the wind throughout the world, and after numerous variations changed peradventure into the body of another man, should at the sounding of the last Trumpet bee raked together again from all the corners of the earth” (p. 78). Yet as Digby concedes, “if we will be Christians, and rely upon Gods promises, wee must beleeve that we shall rise again with the same body, that walked about, did eate, drinke, and live here on earth” (pp. 78-9). Having framed physical resurrection as a clash between doctrine and philosophy—in the same terms Browne pursues to notions of mystical philosophy—Digby asks, “How shall these seeming contrarieties bee reconciled?” (p. 79). Where Browne trusts divinity to resolve this question, Digby recasts it as a problem of philosophy that entails, not mysticism or ecstasy, but a complex physics of soul and matter—issues that form the very core of Digby's philosophical concerns.

Digby first asks Sackville—his silent companion throughout Observations—to consider if his own body is the same as that once borne by his mother—“the same body, which your vertuous and excellent Mother bore nine moneths in her chaste and honoured Wombe?”—and Digby promptly answers his question: “Most certainly it is the same” (p. 80). “And yet,” he argues, “if you consider it well, it cannot bee doubted, but that sublunary matter, being in a perpetuall flux … in long processe of time, all is so changed” (p. 81). If all physical objects exist in a state of constant change, he asks, then what can justify calling our bodies the same “unlesse some higher consideration keepe up the Identity of it?” (p. 82). This “higher consideration”—what Digby calls “substantiall forme” or, more simply, the soul—allows for the flux of matter while guaranteeing our physical integrity across time: “Let us consider then how that which giveth the numerical individuation to a Body, is the substantiall forme. As long as that remaineth the same, though the matter bee in a continuall flux and motion, yet the thing is still the same” (p. 82). Here is the true philosophical solution to the quandary of resurrection: “substantiall forme” joins matter to “maketh againe the same man” (p. 83). Each resurrection is, in effect, a re-creation where the soul, taking up the homogeneous matter Digby compares to “the undigested Chaos” (p. 84), transforms it into our body of old: “whensoever the same Soule doth, it must be understood alwaies to be the same matter and body” (pp. 86-7). So he corrects the notion of matter peculiar to ourselves, to be “raked together” from the ends of the earth; for “there are no subsistent forms of Corporeall things … whensoever that compound is destroyed, the forme perisheth with the whole” (pp. 87-8). What survives such destruction is only the soul, the “informing forme” (p. 88) that at the resurrection will recreate our bodies out of a common store of matter.¹⁵

Throughout this reading Digby writes with the assurance of an author who has dealt with such issues before, and so he reminds his readers: “the mystery of all which I have at large unfolded in my … Treatise of the immortality of the Soule” (p. 89). It is in his proprietary role as philosopher—a role Browne blithely usurps—that Digby refutes Browne, and he ends his alternative analysis of resurrection by drawing a sharp line between true philosophy and mere rhetoric: “I may piece to it what our Author saith of a Magazine of subsistent formes residing first in the Chaos, and hereafter (when the world shall have been destroyed by fire) in the generall heape of Ashes? out of which Gods voyce did, & shall, draw them out & cloath them with matter. This language were handsome for a Poet or a Rhetorician to speake, but in a Philosopher, that should ratiocinate strictly and rigorously, I cannot admit it” (p. 87). For Digby, the discourse of Religio falls within the shadow of rhetoric, where clever error may prevail over truth: “For even where he roveth widest, it is with so much wit and sharpnesse, as putteth mee in minde of a great mans censure upon Joseph Scaligers Cyclometrica … that hee had rather erre so ingeniously as he did, then hit upon Truth in that heavy manner as did the Jesuite his Antagonist” (pp. 76-7). Digby's gibe at Browne—these words preface his analysis of resurrection—shows how well he perceives the wit at the core of Religio as well as Browne's unabashed affection for his own ingenuity. Yet it also reveals the subtle contention that informs his reading here and throughout Observations; it suggests how fully his analysis of Religio entails the aggressive displacement of Browne's authority—an authority grounded in the ingenious displays of wit Digby unfailingly admires and inevitably disparages. If Digby and Browne cannot properly be called rivals or disputants, their engagement suggests a kind of strained emulation: a mutual cultivation of public prestige that both would be seen to despise but that neither can resist.

The larger nature of that relation is clarified when, at the end of Observations, Digby sums up his work for Sackville:

Thus (my Lord) having run through the book (God knowes how sleightly, upon so great a suddaine) which your Lordship commanded mee to give you an account of, there remaineth yet a weightyer taske upon mee to performe; which is to excuse my selfe of presumption for daring to consider any moles in that face which you had marked for a beauty. But who shall well consider my manner of proceeding in these remarkes, will free me from that censure. I offer not at Judging the prudence and wisdome of this Discourse: Those are fit inquiries for your Lordships Court of highest appeale; in my inferiour one, I meddle onely with little knotty peeces of particular Sciences … In which it were peradventure a fault for your Lordship to bee too well versed; your imployments are of a higher and nobler Straine.

(pp. 117-8)

In apologizing for his critique, Digby suggests that his concerns—“peeces of particular Sciences”—are beneath the attention of Sackville who alone is fit to judge the wisdom of Religio (which Sackville may well overvalue as Digby softly suggests). Yet even as he dismisses his work, a gesture of deference that returns the compliment of Sackville's request, Digby founds his authority on the expertise he has employed in service to him and defines the bounds of an authorship commissioned by his estimable friend. Digby writes not for personal gain or prestige, or for any delight in censuring, but out of the duty he owes the earl and science itself. It is, of course, a self-serving notion of authorship, reluctantly but faithfully acceded to, and in its final focus on the relation between Digby and Sackville, it neatly elides the actual subject of Observations: Browne himself. Ironically, Digby's vision of a courteous exchange of wisdom and knowledge with the earl of Dorset resembles nothing so much as the ideal discourse envisioned by Browne in his letter to Digby: “If after that you shall esteem it worthy your vacant houres to discourse thereon, you shall but take that liberty which I assume my selfe, that is freely to abound in your sense, as I have done in my own” (Works, 4:236). Browne's hope for a free exchange of “sense” with Digby would be disappointed. In Digby's reply to Browne, he describes his reluctance to enter the “public lists” with the learned author of Religio: a show of modesty that carries with it an air of superior standing and neatly parries Browne's presumption. His modesty was, of course, false in every respect and Digby quickly proceeded to publish Observations where Religio is, as it were, put in its place. Yet if Digby is jealous of Browne's status, he also finds in Browne a writer remarkably like himself. So they share a tactical wariness of authorship balanced by a mutual aggression in establishing the claims of their work; and both of their books, elaborately composed despite similar claims of carelessness and immaturity, betray every sign of a profound interest in the publication and reception of their writing. If Browne and Digby seem to disdain publication, they guard their work, as Johnson observed, like common authors.

IV

In effect, Observations offered Browne an opportunity to reimagine his Religio as private work, taken against his will, and now reluctantly presented to the public as the representation of an earlier self: authorized, but not fully owned, by Browne.¹⁶ So the 1643 Religio exists in a limbo between past and present intention, where every reading is a potential misreading and each reader cast, preemptively, as an eavesdropper. Mediating private discourse is the primary goal of the preface and a hedge against the impending publication of Digby's book, but it is also a recurring theme in Religio itself: “No man can justly censure or condemne another, because indeed no man truly knowes another. This I perceive in my selfe, for I am in the darke to all the world, and my nearest friends behold mee but in a cloud; those that know mee but superficially, thinke lesse of me than I doe of my selfe; those of neere acquaintance thinke more; God, who knowes me truly, knowes that I am nothing” (SW, pp. 72-3). As Browne questions the validity of a public perception of private self (while he affirms the validity of the divine perception of that self nicely compounding private and divine insight) it leads him to argue against the possibility of any objective interpretation: “for we censure others but as they disagree from that humour which wee fancy laudable in our selves, and commend others but for that wherein they seeme to quadrate and consent with us” (SW, p. 73). These words form part of the meditation on charity in the second part of Religio, but they might well describe the relationship between Browne and Digby. For their encounter turns not on any objective judgment, but on the calculations of personal interest that inform their censure and praise. If, as several recent readings suggest, Religio offers vital insight into current political and religious controversy, an insight characterized by its author's careful negotiation of the social and political pressures that inform religious speculation in this period, then the circumstances that transform Religio into a public text—manipulations of printers, distinctions of class and reputation, negotiations of authorship and audience, even the old war of rhetoric and philosophy—reveal an equally careful negotiation of the pressures of publication.¹⁷ In turn, these pressures complicate the imaginative self-sufficiency, the spectacle of serene subjectivity, that marks Religio. They transform it from an act of self-commemoration, a discrete “memoriall unto me,” as Browne says, to a collective enterprise, produced by the activity, real and supposed, of printers and readers as well as the author.¹⁸ In this view, Religio, as remarkable as it is, is in many ways a typical text: born of a collaboration larger than the author can control and defined by a public reading that overrides the desires of the author. The encounter between Browne and Digby suggests that Religio can be read not only as an exquisite meditation fashioned as Browne says out of his “solitary and retired imaginations,” but also as part of a more worldly history of authorial struggle over precedence and reception: part of the spectacle of authorial striving that informs so much English writing in this period. If Browne's book has not often been read in this turbulent context—if Religio has enjoyed, in this respect, a kind of privilege—returning to the critical encounter between Browne and one of his most cogent readers helps to restore some of its force as a work shaped by the public trials of writing.

Notes

1. For a representative collection of criticism, see Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays, ed. C. A. Patrides (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1982). More recently, there has been a good deal of interesting work on Sir Thomas Browne's religious views and, in particular, on his carefully mediated religious politics. See, for example, Jonathan F. S. Post, Sir Thomas Browne (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), pp. 40-55; Michael Wilding, Dragon's Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 89-113; Victoria Silver, “Liberal Theology and Sir Thomas Browne's ‘Soft and Flexible’ Discourse,” ELR 20, 1 (Winter 1990): 69-105; and Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 119-46. And for an arresting view of Browne that casts new light on his scientific work, see Howard Marchitello, Narration and Meaning in Early Modern England: Browne's Skull and Other Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997).

2. Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century: 1600-1660, 2d edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 349. The most thorough reading to date of Sir Kenelm Digby's Observations upon “Religio Medici” may be found in James Wise, Sir Thomas Browne's “Religio Medici” and Two Seventeenth Century Critics (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1973). Wise pays particular attention to the philosophical differences between Digby and Browne and reaffirms the critical consensus that Digby is a poor reader of Religio because his philosophy is inadequate to cope with Browne's art. For this common view of Digby, see F. L. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne: A Biographical and Critical Study (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1968).

3. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker and Warburg, 1950), pp. 97-8. The best modern biography of Digby is Robert T. Petersson's Sir Kenelm Digby, The Ornament of England: 1603-1661 (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956). The circumstances that led to his composing Observations are summarized in Wise, pp. 57-63, and Huntley, pp. 135-46.

4. Browne, The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 4 vols. (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 4:235. Keynes reproduces both letter and reply. All subsequent references to this work will be to this edition, hereafter abbreviated Works, and will appear parenthetically in the text by volume and page number.

5. Raymond Waddington summarizes the publication history in his introductory note to Sir Kenelm Digby's Observations on “Religio Medici” (Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1973), n. p. All subsequent references to this work will be to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text. A brief discussion of this publication history may be found in Huntley, pp. 143-4. On the roots of the traditional disdain for the press, see J. W. Saunders's seminal essay, “The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry,” EIC 1, 2 (April 1951): 139-64. Recent work on this issue has deepened the historical perspective and stressed the shifting attitudes toward print in this period: Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), esp. pp. 184-208; and Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 1-22.

6. Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Sir Thomas Browne,” in Sir Thomas Browne, The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Penguin, 1977), pp. 481-511, p. 486. All subsequent references to this work will be to this edition, hereafter abbreviated Life, and will appear parenthetically in the text by page number. Johnson's Life, the best reading of Browne that we have, was written for an edition of Christian Morals published in 1756.

7. Sir Thomas Browne: Selected Writings, ed. Keynes (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 6. All subsequent references to this work will be to this edition, hereafter abbreviated SW, and will appear parenthetically in the text by page number.

8. This view of an agonistic Browne contrasts with recent readings that have stressed the urbanitas of Religio. See Anne Drury Hall, Ceremony and Civility in English Renaissance Prose (State College: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1991).

9. Wise, p. 121. In his acute analysis of Religio, Leonard Nathanson expresses a similar view of Digby's reading, which he describes as intelligent but “misjudged” (The Strategy of Truth: A Study of Sir Thomas Browne [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967], p. 75). For a slightly more sympathetic view of Observations, see Joan Bennett, “A Note on Religio Medici and Some of Its Critics,” Studies in the Renaissance 3 (1956): 175-84.

10. Digby, p. 38.

11. The two most important modern editors of Religio express different views on the matter. Keynes takes Browne at his word, assuming that Religio was originally printed without permission and that Browne “forgave the publisher his act of piracy” (see Keynes's introduction, in Selected Writings, n. p.). Jean-Jacques Denonain is more dubious; citting Browne's decisions to retain Crooke and correct the printer's text rather than his own copy (allowing many egregious errors to stand), he describes his handling of the 1643 edition as “astonishing.” See his introduction, in Sir Thomas Browne, “Religio Medici,” ed. Denonain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1955), pp. x-xi. Johnson, long experienced in such matters, offers what is in my view the most persuasive reading of Browne's relation to Crooke.

12. I am less interested in the details of this ancient antagonism than in the ways it informs the conflict between Browne and Digby. For a lively rendition of the war between philosophy and rhetoric from Plato to Benedetto Croce, see Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 148-213.

13. For an excellent analysis of the Christian rhetorics that may have inspired Browne's interest in rhetorical adumbration, see Deborah Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988).

14. Digby shared with Browne the antischolastic sentiment common in this period (and exemplified in Digby's chief work of philosophy, Two Treatises); elsewhere in Observations he praises Browne because “hee will not be satisfied with such naked termes as in Schools use to be obtruded upon easie mindes” (p. 14).

15. Digby's speculations on time, identity, and corporeality place him within the metaphysical branch of early-modern philosophical tradition—a tradition that extends to more recent British philosophy. Making allowances for his theological terms, much of what Digby says here might easily be found in the work of A. J. Ayer or P. F. Strawson. See the discussion on individuality and corporeality in Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (New York: Methuen, 1964), pp. 87-116; and Ayer's critique of Strawson in Ayer, The Concept of a Person (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 82-128.

16. In Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Charlottesville and London: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1999), Cecile Jagodzinski describes the various ways of authoring the private self in this period and, in particular, the complex transformation of private histories, such as conversion narratives and letters, into “spectacular” public texts (p. 58). Though she does not consider Browne, Religio typifies a kind of writing that is characterized, as Jagodzinski argues, by its simultaneous creation and invasion of privacy (p. 73).

17. Two recent books offer brief but interesting analyses of the sociopolitical background of Browne's scientific and religious speculation: in Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), Philip C. Almond sets Browne's flirtation with mortalist heresy—related in part 1, section 6 of Religio Medici—in the context of the social and political agenda pursued by the more radical mortalists among his contemporaries (pp. 41-7); and in The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), Peter Harrison discusses how the religious science of Browne grew out of Protestant beliefs and interpretive practices that entailed a renewal of the social order (pp. 129-38, 249-65).

18. Browne's enforced engagement with Digby exposes the authorial fiction that sustains Religio: its potent imagination of the author negotiating, freely and at his ease, the most difficult questions of science and religion. In this sense, the reflection on authorship and the perils of publication in Browne's preface speaks directly to the nature of his primary meditation on faith and natural philosophy in Religio proper. If the chief distinction of Religio lies in the ability of its author to mediate contemporary controversy through a remarkable personal style, it is important to consider how Digby's reading—and, more generally, the difficulties of public reception it represents—undermines the carefully wrought pretences of Religio.