Sir Thomas Browne

            Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich (1605-1682), a doctor and a scholar, wrote about what his religion meant to him—“A Doctor’s Faith” he calls his best known book, Religio Medici—and about many other topics. Reading him is a leisure-time activity that requires some extended quiet time and constant access to sources for those of us less learned than he. His ornate style and diversive way of thinking, drawing analogies from wide swaths of space and time, demand that readers submerge themselves for a while in his way of thinking. He’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I found him rewarding when I went back to read a couple of his works that had been just sampled in my sophomore course on the first half of English Literature.

            When he was thirty-two he sat down to write about what exactly he believed—what constituted his faith--and the result was Religio Medici (1643). Browne did not intend it for publication and only stepped forward to correct a pirated edition that appeared in 1642. He presents a thoughtful, but mostly orthodox faith. For Browne, any church will do for a prayer. The Church of England comes closest to his beliefs, though he had several heretical ideas when young: that the soul died and would be resurrected with the body, that God would not finally condemn the wicked forever but would relent, and that there was a place for prayer for the dead. These beliefs “went out insensibly of themselves,” he says, and adds that heresies are inevitable, even within heresies.

            Browne thinks there aren’t “impossibilities enough…for an active faith,” and is willing to believe something quia impossibile est. Give me something “not only above but contrary to Reason,” he says; anyone can believe what has been demonstrated to him. God’s wisdom soothes him while the idea of eternity confounds him. There are touches of the philosophy ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus that begin to show up in this section, specifically the idealism that hermetic philosophy borrows from Platonism. About God’s wisdom, Brown writes that God is wise, but it is the business of man and a debt we owe to God to study and try to understand the world. Galen’s De Usu Partium (On the Usefulness of Parts of the Body—circa 170) has as much “Divinity,” he writes, as Francisco Suarez’s Disputationes Metaphysicae (1597). God doesn’t play tricks with nature, he suggests, and nature does nothing in vain: Natura nihil agit frustra. Nature is one of Browne’s two sacred books. God doesn’t have to put his hand on nature once he’s got it going, and nature is his work, and all beautiful. All “chance” is the hand of God, he says, in a little four-page essay on the subject of Fortune and chance, ending with the sentence Conrad used as epigraph for his novel Chance: “Those that hold that all things are governed by Fortune, had not erred, had they not persisted there.”

            Browne notes the warring factions within us of Faith, Reason, and Passion. He does not question scripture; he believes it the word of God and would read it even if he were a pagan. The Koran he thinks “an ill composed Piece, containing in it vain and ridiculous Errors in Philosophy, impossibilities, fictions, and vanities beyond laughter.” He suggests he might stop short of martyrdom for his faith. Things commonly asserted that God cannot do, such as evil acts or ceasing to be [my examples] he thinks God wills not to do: “His power is the same with His will.” He believes there have been miracles, but is skeptical of any later than antiquity. He believes that there are witches and such a thing as possession by the devil (and possession by Melancholy and Delusion as well). He thinks there is “a traditional Magick” that ultimately can be explained as nature.

            He gets involved for pages in the question of spirits. There may be a common spirit to the whole world, he says, as Plato and the hermetic philosophers thought; in any case, God is in us all. He wonders whether eternal things such as souls can have a beginning. If there are ghosts, he decides, they are devils rather than the wandering souls of men.

            Browne muses for quite a few pages on death. He says he is “bashful,” but not afraid of death. Job does not curse God and die, he points out: “where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valour to dare to live.”

            He does not think there is going to be a literal court proceeding at the last trump: “mysteries in the Scriptures are often delivered in a vulgar and illustrative way…not as they truly are, but as they may be understood.” People have always believed the world was about to end, he writes, and thinks the resurrection of the body is no more difficult to believe than the creation.

            Browne admits that he doesn’t think morality can be sustained without hope of a reward, but he thinks it’s the promise of heaven rather than the threat of hell. He speculates about heaven and hell, seeing heaven as “where the Soul hath the full measure and complement of happiness,” and not committing himself about whether the essence of hell is fire. “It is hard,” he writes, “to place those Souls in Hell, whose worthy lives do teach us Virtue on Earth.” But this notion gets nipped in the bud, he reaffirms that “salvation is through Christ,” and even starts to criticize those he just suggested might be “worthy lives.” But then he circles back at the end of this discussion: “yet those who do confine the Church of God, either to particular Nations, Churches, or Families, have made it far narrower than our Saviour ever meant it.” He is confident of his own salvation, without taking an oath on it.

            The second part of Browne’s essay is about charity, as the first has been about faith and to some extent and less explicitly, about hope. Browne believes he inherits a disposition for charity, which is a manifold virtue. Scholarship and teaching are charity, since it is “no greater Charity to cloath” the body, “than apparel the nakedness” of the soul. He begins a discussion of offenses to charity: acrid disputes in scholarship, prejudicial naming of other countries’ qualities, satire, lack of self-love. He writes about friendship, whose truest feature is to look beyond ourselves toward the welfare of others, to wish them virtuous, and to pray for it.

            Browne claims to be free of the main enemy of charity, namely pride, though he understands six languages, has lived in several countries and understood them, knows constellations and plants, but “heads of capacity…think they know nothing till they know all; which being impossible, they fall upon the opinion of Socrates, and only know that they know not any thing.”

            At this point Browne seems to go off his subject somewhat, getting personal, though returning to the idea of charity at the end. He tells us that he is unmarried, which is just as well, considering his ideas about women (“the Rib and crooked piece of man” and marriage (foolishness at best, and at some times and places, polygamy might be necessary). A short disquisition on music leads to ideas of harmony in the body and in the body politic. Browne says his life is “a miracle of thirty years. “I am as happy as any: Ruat coelum, fiat voluntas Tua, salveth all; so that whatsoever happens, it is but what our daily prayers desire.” He sleeps well and has happy dreams, he says. Though he was not “born unto riches,” he thinks anyone rich “who hath enough to be charitable,” and thus we come back to the subject. “Another part of charity…is the love of God….I conclude, therefore, and say, there is no happiness under…the sun,” but he will “be happy enough to pity Caesar” with a good conscience, self-control, and love of God and his dearest friends.

            When in 1658 some prehistoric urns containing human ashes and bones were discovered near Norwich, Browne wrote about them and used the occasion for wide-ranging speculations about mortality and the hope of immortality. The result was Hydriotaphia: Urne Buriall; Or, A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk (1658).

            “Who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?” asks Browne in the dedication. He spends the first chapter culling known history for burial versus burning practices, and only in the second gets to what was found and where: in a field of “old Walsingham,” between forty and fifty urns were dug up, differing in size and shape, of capacities from more than a gallon to less than half that, in various shapes, some with “handles, ears, and long necks,” and containing, besides ashes and parts of skulls, teeth, long bones, and ribs, “peeces of small boxes or combes handsomely wrought,…small brass instruments, brazen nippers, and in one some kind of Opale.”

            He imagines the urns to date from thirteen hundred years earlier, in the fourth century, in the waning of the Roman empire, but the time is uncertain of “these sepulchral Bonefires.” Could they have been Saxon or Danish? We don’t have any evidence, but we can guess the Romans might have influenced the Brits to follow their customs. The Germans certainly did it, and urns, not Roman in origin, have been found in Norway and Denmark.

            The urns are of earthenware, red and black clay, commonly with necks (Browne compares “our last bed like our first,” the round urns like round wombs with necks. Browne’s style can be deliberately elaborate and multisyllabic, but is often very clear and modern on the ear. He is very fond of litotes or at least double negatives: did they mix bones among the urns? “sometimes they declined not that practice.” Browne gets into details of which sorts of bodies and bones make how much and what kind of ashes. In Chapter IV he talks about burial rites and rationalizes particular practices as frequently pointing to a hoped-for next step for the departed soul.

            The fifth and final chapter is an extended contemplation about death, and can only be sampled with quotation.

“If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death, our life is a sad composition; we live with death, and die not in a moment.”

“the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying”

“What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution.”

“the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy....”

“Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names”

“And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt, whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementoes, and time that grows old in itself, bids us hope no long duration;—diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.”

“To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is a merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days”

“But all was vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim, cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.”

“To subsist in lasting monuments, to live in their productions, to exist in their names and predicament of chimeras, was large satisfaction unto old expectations, and made one part of their Elysiums. But all this is nothing in the metaphysicks of true belief. To live indeed, is to be again ourselves, which being not only an hope, but an evidence in noble believers, 'tis all one to lie in St Innocent's church-yard as in the sands of Egypt.”