Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici': An AppreciationWhyte, Alexander
Religion
Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici': An Appreciation
Whyte, Alexander
Browne, Thomas, Sir, 1605-1682; Browne, Thomas, Sir, 1605-1682. Religio medici
themselves, knew how best to employ their imagination. Only Dante and
Behmen of all the foremost sons of men. Only they two turned all their
splendid and unapproached imagination to the true, and full, and final
Objects of Christian faith. Only to them two was their magnificent
imagination the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things
not seen. And though the _Religio_ does not at all rank with the
_Commedia_ and the _Aurora_, at the same time, it springs up from, and it
is strengthened and sweetened by the same intellectual and spiritual
root. Up through all 'the weeds and tares of his brain,' as Sir Thomas
himself calls them, his imagination and his faith shot, and sprang, and
spread, till they covered with their finest fruits his whole mind, and
heart, and life.
Sir Thomas Browne was a noble illustration of Bacon's noble law. For Sir
Thomas carried all his studies, experiments, and operations to such a
depth in his own mind, and heart, and imagination, that he was able to
testify to all his fellow-physicians that he who studies man and medicine
deeply enough will meet with as many intellectual, and scientific, and
religious adventures every day as any traveller will meet with in Africa
itself. As a living man of genius in the medical profession, Dr. George
Gould, has it in that wonderful Behmenite and Darwinian book of his, _The
Meaning and the Method of Life_, 'A healing and a knitting wound,' he
argues, 'is quite as good a proof of God as a sensible mind would
desire.' This was Sir Thomas Browne's wise, and deep, and devout mind in
all parts of his professional and personal life. And he was man enough,
and a man of true science and of true religion enough, to warn his
brethren against those 'academical reservations' to which their strong
intellectual and professional pride, and their too weak faith and
courage, continually tempted them. Nor has he, for his part, any
clinical reservations in religion either, as so many of his brethren
have. 'I cannot go to cure the body of my patient,' he protests, 'but I
forget my profession and call unto God for his soul.' To call Sir Thomas
Browne sceptical, as has been a caprice and a fashion among his merely
literary admirers: and to say it, till it is taken for granted, that he
is an English Montaigne: all that is an abuse of language. It is, to all
but a small and select circle of writers and readers, utterly misleading
and essentially untrue. And, besides, it is right in the teeth of Sir
Thomas's own emphatic, and repeated, and indignant denial and repudiation
of Montaigne. Montaigne, with all his fascinations for literary men, and
they are great; and with all his services to them, and they are not
small; is both an immoral and an unbelieving writer. Whereas, Sir Thomas
Browne never wrote a single line, even in his greenest studies, that on
his deathbed he desired to blot out. A purer, a humbler, a more devout
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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