Religio Medici

Overview

About a hundred pages, written by Thomas Browne, a physician in Norwich, around 1635, for himself alone, a private confession of faith he apparently never intended for publication. A manuscript copy circulated among friends, and in 1642 an unauthorized, corrupted edition appeared in print without Browne’s knowledge or consent; he responded the following year by publishing his own authorized text, correcting what had been garbled in the pirated version, which is the text now generally read.

Browne trained in medicine at Oxford, Montpellier, Padua and Leiden, some of the leading centers of the new experimental science in Europe, and practiced as a physician in Norwich for the rest of his life, later knighted for his learning. This combination, a working doctor steeped in the empirical, observational habits of the new science, writing a book of devotional self-examination, is central to what makes Religio Medici distinctive: Browne does not experience his scientific training and his Christian faith as opposed forces requiring him to choose between them, at a moment when many of his contemporaries increasingly did, but holds both together with a relaxed, curious, unhurried temperament that gives the whole book its particular charm.

The book falls into two parts. The first addresses faith directly, Browne’s own religious convictions, his attitude toward mystery, doubt, other religions and denominations, and toward the relationship between reason and revelation. The second turns to charity and to Browne’s own temperament, character and habits, an unusually candid and often self-deprecating self-portrait for devotional writing of the period.

What happens

A religion at ease with mystery. Browne opens by describing his own faith, professing himself a Christian and a member of the Church of England, but immediately distinguishing his own temperament from what he takes to be the more common religious posture of demanding logical resolution for every article of belief. He states his preference plainly: he loves to lose himself in a mystery, to pursue his reason to what he calls an O altitudo, an exclamation of wondering surrender before a depth reason cannot fathom, rather than forcing every doctrine into a neat, fully rationalized system. He goes further, suggesting there are not impossibilities enough in religion for what he calls an active faith, implying that faith worth having should be tested by genuine difficulty rather than confirmed by easy agreement with what reason already finds plausible.

Reconciling science and faith. Running throughout the first part is Browne’s account of how his medical and scientific training relates to his religious belief. Rather than treating the new experimental philosophy as corrosive to faith, the position increasingly common among more skeptical contemporaries, Browne presents scientific inquiry into nature as itself a form of religious contemplation, since the natural world, studied closely, reveals the wisdom and order of its creator. He is unusually generous, for his period, toward other religious traditions and toward doctrinal disagreement generally, describing his own reluctance to condemn another man’s differing opinion, partly on the ground that he might himself hold a different view within a few days, a tolerance grounded more in temperament and intellectual humility than in any developed argument for religious liberty.

Charity, and self-portraiture. The second part turns from doctrine to conduct and character. Browne discusses charity at length, treating it as the practical expression of the faith described in the first part, and then turns candidly inward, cataloguing his own temperament: his habitual solitariness, his dislike of crowds and public spectacle, his private vanities and weaknesses, admitted with a wry, unguarded honesty that gives the second part a different, more intimate texture than the more purely theological first. This self-examination is offered without excessive self-flagellation or, equally, without much self-congratulation; Browne simply describes himself as he takes himself to be, curious about his own nature in much the same unhurried, observational spirit he brings to everything else.

Style. Nearly every reader of Browne, from his own century to the present, comments on the prose itself as much as the content, a slow, elaborate, heavily Latinate style, full of long, carefully balanced periods and an unusual vocabulary drawing extensively on Latin roots, that has struck later readers as by turns magnificent and, particularly for a modern audience accustomed to plainer prose, genuinely demanding. Samuel Johnson, generally a severe judge of style, praised Browne highly, and the prose has remained, for many readers, the primary reason to read the book independent of its specific theological content.

How to read it

Read Part I for the book’s central and most distinctive argument, the reconciliation of scientific curiosity and religious faith through a temperament that embraces rather than resolves mystery, and read Part II for the more intimate, self-deprecating self-portrait that follows.

Read slowly, and do not expect Browne’s long, elaborately balanced sentences to yield their meaning at the pace of modern prose. The style rewards patience, and reading a section aloud, or reading it twice, often clarifies a period that resists understanding on first pass.

Notice how unusual Browne’s tolerance is for his period, and consider what it is grounded in. He does not offer a developed philosophical argument for religious liberty in the manner later thinkers like Locke would; his tolerance is presented as a matter of personal temperament and intellectual humility, an interesting contrast worth holding alongside more systematic later arguments for the same conclusion.

Read the passage on losing himself in an O altitudo as the key to the whole book’s religious sensibility. Browne’s preference for embracing mystery over resolving it, and his suggestion that faith needs real difficulty to be worth having, distinguishes his religious temperament from both a purely rationalist faith seeking full logical justification and a purely credulous faith uninterested in reason at all.

Read Montaigne’s Essays alongside this book if you want to see a related but distinct model of candid, unhurried self-examination from the preceding generation, and Pascal’s Pensées for a roughly contemporary but considerably more anguished engagement with the relationship between faith and reason.

Questions it raises

• Is Browne’s ease with religious mystery a genuine intellectual virtue, a form of honest humility before questions reason cannot settle, or a way of avoiding harder argumentative work that a more systematic theologian would have to do?
• Does his reconciliation of scientific curiosity and religious faith actually hold up as a coherent position, or does it work only because Browne’s temperament lets him not press the tension between the two too hard?
• What grounds Browne’s unusual religious tolerance, given that he offers no developed philosophical argument for it? Is temperament alone a sufficient foundation for tolerance, or does it need argument to be durable?
• How does the elaborate, heavily Latinate style relate to the book’s content? Does the prose’s own unhurried, digressive quality embody the same tolerant, curious temperament the book describes, or is the connection merely coincidental?
• Browne says there are not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith. What would it mean for a belief system to be improved, rather than weakened, by containing genuine difficulties?
• Is the candid self-portrait in Part II, with its admitted vanities and private habits, in tension with the more formal theological argument of Part I, or does the personal honesty of the second part actually reinforce the intellectual honesty claimed in the first?