The Major Works (English Library) Read Free Page B

Medici
on the reprehensible culinary habits of the French ( p. 133 ). Merely to observe the oddities of human behaviour is not very difficult, and to censure them easier still; but sympathetically to respond to multiform reality is the prerogative of the truly perceptive mind.
    If the irenic disposition in
Religio Medici
could be misunderstood, so might the apparently sharp dichotomy between faith and reason. The reputed ‘split’ between the two 7 is certainly warranted so long as we confine ourselves to one or the other of Browne’s explicit statements. Sometimes, however, one of the components in the expected opposition is quietly removed, e.g.: ‘though there bee but one [world] to sense, there are two to reason; the one visible, the other invisible’ (p. 104). The claim here that reason is operative equally in the physical as in the metaphysical realm, appears to contradict the role assigned to faith elsewhere. But might Browne have meant to alert us to the existence of a transcendent unity while we tend to compartmentalise human experience? For it is unlikely, we have been assured authoritatively,
    It is unlikely that grace would prompt him to do one thing and reason to do another. Browne’s definition of reason was not our modern one. The enlightenment left us with the view of reason as the principle of individual autonomy; for Browne, reason was
recta ratio
, first implanted by God in Adam, and still present, albeit less lustrous, in fallen man. Dimmed by the Fall, reason needs to be complemented by faith, and Browne considered it the mark of a wise man to walk in their combined light. 8
    Browne’s ‘reason’ is the reality espoused by the Church Fathers at the invitation of the Neoplatonists, who held, according toSt Augustine, that ‘the light of the mind giving power to conceive all… is God that created all’. 9 Its actual description by Plotinus as ‘something greater than reason, reason’s Prior, as far above reason as the very object of that thought must be’, is not unlike the ‘Divine Sagacity’ celebrated in the seventeenth century by Henry More the Cambridge Platonist, that is to say the dynamic power of mind to encompass ‘the close connexion and cohesion’ of the diverse aspects of the universe. 10 Granted, Browne does not always deploy ‘reason’ in this sense; but where he does, the term should be regarded as suggestive of the cosmic unity he constantly aspires to, a unity evident horizontally across the historical process, and vertically through the Scale of Nature.
    The vertical dimension is well attested by Browne as by his contemporaries. Browne’s formulation – ‘there is in this Universe a Staire, or manifest Scale of creatures, rising not disorderly, or in confusion, but with a comely method and proportion’ (p. 101) – appeals to the widely disseminated belief that all levels of existence are tightly knit through an elaborate hierarchical system of analogies and correspondences extending, it was said, ‘from the Mushrome to the Angels’. 11 The scheme was vastly enriched by recurrent metaphoric associations with music and the circle, the one intended to sustain the persuasion that ‘there is a musicke where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion’ (p. 149), the other to confirm belief in the omnipresence of God ‘whose center is every where, and circumference no where’. 12 Browne in resorting to these time-honouredcommonplaces, however, often transformed them into novelties by the unexpected twists in the course of their articulation. For instance:
    I have ever beleeved, and doe now know, that there are Witches; they that doubt of these, doe not onely deny them, but Spirits; and are obliquely and upon consequence a sort, not of Infidels, but Atheists. (
below
, p. 98 )
    It is an astonishing utterance; but I think intentionally so. The logic is of the singular order so favoured by Browne: might not a denial of the existence of witches lead to a denial of the