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| Thomas Browne – religion as passion and pastime, part 2: Religio Medici | Thomas Browne – religion as passion and pastime, part 2: Religio Medici |
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| Like most of us, Thomas Browne was several writers. The book that made him famous was one he wrote with no particular goal of publication, "for my private exercise and satisfaction". Circulated in manuscript, it became known and printed, and Browne, according to his own account, produced a corrected version. (Some, including his biographer Doctor Johnson, have expressed some scepticism about the exact ordering of events in this.) It was widely praised, and equally widely condemned – the Vatican put it on the Index of Prohibited Books rather more readily than it might have done most works of amateur theologising, and it was condemned by the puritan Alexander Ross in his Medicus Medicatus (The Doctor, Doctored). | Like most of us, Thomas Browne was several writers. The book that made him famous was one he wrote with no particular goal of publication, "for my private exercise and satisfaction". Circulated in manuscript, it became known and printed, and Browne, according to his own account, produced a corrected version. (Some, including his biographer Doctor Johnson, have expressed some scepticism about the exact ordering of events in this.) It was widely praised, and equally widely condemned – the Vatican put it on the Index of Prohibited Books rather more readily than it might have done most works of amateur theologising, and it was condemned by the puritan Alexander Ross in his Medicus Medicatus (The Doctor, Doctored). |
| Browne knew that, as a medical doctor, he stood half-convinced of infidelity in many people's eyes, and his title, A Doctor's Religion, was one some would see as a paradox. Given his glory in paradoxes, the joke implied in writing a book with such a title, and making it an intellectual's expression of simple and, for the most part, uncomplicated faith in Protestant Christianity, was not lost on him. This is not a humorous book but it is, in a far deeper sense, a good humoured one, and its lively thinking – and playing with paradoxes – is an expression both of Browne's personality and of what he believed truth to be. | Browne knew that, as a medical doctor, he stood half-convinced of infidelity in many people's eyes, and his title, A Doctor's Religion, was one some would see as a paradox. Given his glory in paradoxes, the joke implied in writing a book with such a title, and making it an intellectual's expression of simple and, for the most part, uncomplicated faith in Protestant Christianity, was not lost on him. This is not a humorous book but it is, in a far deeper sense, a good humoured one, and its lively thinking – and playing with paradoxes – is an expression both of Browne's personality and of what he believed truth to be. |
| In one of the first of those paradoxes, he says of Protestantism that he dislikes nothing about it but the name – it was his belief that the Anglican version of the Reformation had returned Christianity to a purer and more original form. One of the many things that was held against him, though, was that he insisted on maintaining Christian charity to other believers. "We have reformed from them, not against them," he said of Roman Catholics. And, while regarding most Catholic ceremonies as riddled with dangerous superstition, he said of them: "Misplaced in circumstance, there is something in it of devotion: I could never heard the Ave Marie bell without an elevation, or thinke it a sufficient warrant, because they erred in one circumstance, for me to erre in all, that is in silence and dumbe contempt." | In one of the first of those paradoxes, he says of Protestantism that he dislikes nothing about it but the name – it was his belief that the Anglican version of the Reformation had returned Christianity to a purer and more original form. One of the many things that was held against him, though, was that he insisted on maintaining Christian charity to other believers. "We have reformed from them, not against them," he said of Roman Catholics. And, while regarding most Catholic ceremonies as riddled with dangerous superstition, he said of them: "Misplaced in circumstance, there is something in it of devotion: I could never heard the Ave Marie bell without an elevation, or thinke it a sufficient warrant, because they erred in one circumstance, for me to erre in all, that is in silence and dumbe contempt." |
| That seems to me part of the relevance of Browne as a contemporary agnostic. I do not share believers' faith in a personal, transcendent, interventionist God, but it has always seemed to me that to be sure that their devotion is not to any objectively existing thing is not necessarily to regard that devotion and the charitable attitudes and actions that result from it with any sort of scorn. | That seems to me part of the relevance of Browne as a contemporary agnostic. I do not share believers' faith in a personal, transcendent, interventionist God, but it has always seemed to me that to be sure that their devotion is not to any objectively existing thing is not necessarily to regard that devotion and the charitable attitudes and actions that result from it with any sort of scorn. |
| Browne worshipped the play of intellect as much as he did the things he thought of himself as believing in. He freely confesses various heresies to which he had felt himself drawn emotionally even as he adhered to orthodoxy in a final analysis. Mystical contemplation was almost an addictive drug for him and not the opiate referred to be Marx's 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 … I love to lose my selfe in a mystery to pursue my reason to an oh altitudo. 'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved ænigma's and riddles of the Trinity, with incarnation and resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan, and my rebellious reason, with that odde resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est" (It is certain because it is impossible). | Browne worshipped the play of intellect as much as he did the things he thought of himself as believing in. He freely confesses various heresies to which he had felt himself drawn emotionally even as he adhered to orthodoxy in a final analysis. Mystical contemplation was almost an addictive drug for him and not the opiate referred to be Marx's 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 … I love to lose my selfe in a mystery to pursue my reason to an oh altitudo. 'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved ænigma's and riddles of the Trinity, with incarnation and resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan, and my rebellious reason, with that odde resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est" (It is certain because it is impossible). |
| For Browne, religion was above all true, but it was also his passion and his meditative pastime, and that sense of watching a clever man amuse himself is part of why we read him, when more earnest divines are long forgotten. | For Browne, religion was above all true, but it was also his passion and his meditative pastime, and that sense of watching a clever man amuse himself is part of why we read him, when more earnest divines are long forgotten. |
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