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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
The Religio Medici has traditionally been called “an essay” or “an autobiographical essay.” If we examine it in its literary context, however, we will see that the principles generating its style and specifying the range of its feeling derive from two prose modes associated with other, more clearly defined seventeenth-century genres, the anti-Ciceronian epistle and the religious meditation. The Religio, in fact, might better be called “a meditation in the epistolary mode.” Although the witty exaggeration of Browne’s diction often pushes his epistolary voice toward the satiric, he holds off both indignant satire and solitary, self-absorbed meditation. In avoiding these extremes, Browne’s mixture of modes makes a clear ethical argument: that human beings must understand their limitations both as individuals in relationship to society and as creatures in relationship to God. In the Religio, Browne argues the importance to Christian humanism of the balance between private spirituality and public manners.
1 For the style of the Religio Medici, see Austin Warren, “The Style of Sir Thomas Browne,” Kenyan Review, 13 (1951), 674–87; Frank Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne: A Biographical and Critical Study (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 117–34; Morris Croll, “The Baroque Style in Prose,” in Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, ed. Kemp Malone and Martin B. Ruud (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1929); rpt. in “Attic” and Baroque Prose Style: Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. Max Patrick and Robert O. Evans with John Wallace (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 207–33. On the Religio Medici as personal essay, see Norman Endicott, “Some Aspects of SelfRevelation and Self-Portraiture in Religio Medici,” in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age Presented to A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 85–102; and Joan Webber, The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1968), pp. 149–83. On the question of the Religio's genre, see Leonard Nathanson, The Strategy of Truth: A Study of Sir Thomas Browne (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 73–109, and Jean Jacques Denonain, ed., Introd., Religio Medici: A New Edition with Biographical and Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1955), p. xi.
2 The difference between an essay style and an epistolary-essay style is the difference between the impersonal judiciousness of Bacon and the ethos-laden styles of both Montaigne and Browne. Montaigne's explicit purpose—to bare himself to the reader—is, according to the rhetorical tradition since Demetrius, the province of the letter, in which a man speaks his soul to an absent friend. See Montaigne, “To the Reader,” The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1948), p. 2, and Demetrius, On Style: The Greek Text of Demetrius “De Elocutione” Edited after the Paris Manuscript, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1902), p. 175. Indeed, Montaigne says he would have preferred to write his essays in the form of letters, where a “relationship” with his audience makes him more “attentive and confident” (see “A Consideration upon Cicero,” pp. 185–86).
3 The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Norman Endicott (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1968), p. 7. All quotations from the Religio Medici are from this edition, and subsequent citations appear in the text. His audience of one is the single friend to whom he sent the manuscript and who then made it “common unto many” (“To the Reader,” p. 5). In his preface, Browne insists that the work is a “private exercise,” directed to himself with “sundry particularities and personall expressions” (pp. 5–6).
4 See E. Catherine Dunn, “Lipsius and the Art of Letter-Writing,” Studies in the Renaissance, 3 (1956), 145–56.
5 John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1935), p. 6.
6 For Lipsius, the more a letter sounds like talking out loud, the better: “Nec ad Epistolam scribendam veniatur nisi argumento concepto, & mente (ut ita dicam) tumente” ‘Nor should one set about writing a letter unless the argument is already conceived and one's mind is, as it were, boiling’ (Institutio Epistolica, in Opera Omnia [Vesaliae: 1675], II, 1073). See also Hoskins, pp. 6–7. The letter should give the sense of the urgency and immediacy of the writer's thinking. See Dunn for a useful analysis of Lipsius' treatment of conversation as the basis of the style of the familiar letter.
7 Allusions, wit, and simplified syntax, whether curt or libertine, are generally anti-Ciceronian and belong to the essay style as well as to the epistolary. Still, the anti-Ciceronian essay itself derives from Seneca's epistles, as Bacon notes in arguing that the distinction between the two genres is not firm. See his dedication to Prince Henry, intended for, though omitted from, the 1612 edition of the Essays, in The Prose of the English Renaissance, ed. J. William Hebel and Hoyt H. Hudson et al. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1952), pp. 615–16.
8 Letter to Sara Hutchinson, in Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roberta Florence Brinkley (1955; rpt. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. 448.
9 The title of one of Hall's books of meditations is Susurrium cum Deo. Soliloquies; or, Holy Self-Conferences of the Devout Soul. On Hall's meditations, see Harold Fisch, “Bishop Hall's Meditations,” Review of English Studies, 25 (1949), 210–21. The passage in which Baker calls the meditation a “sighing,” “Heare then, ? Thou which hearest where no sound is, the sound of our soules sighing,” is in his Meditations and Disquisitions upon the Lord's Prayer (London: Anne Griffin, 1636), p. 4.
10 See Helen C. White, English Devotional Literature (Prose) 1600–1640, Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No. 29 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1931), pp. 153–54.
11 Those who discuss Browne's use of the cursus usually concentrate on Urn Burial, infrequently on the Religio Medici; but see Michael F. Maloney, “Metre and Cursus in Sir Thomas Browne's Prose,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 58 (1959), 60–67. For the influence of the Old Testament, see William Whallon's important article “Hebraic Synonymy in Sir Thomas Browne,” ELH, 28 (1961), 335–52.
12 See, e.g., Joseph Hall, The Art of Divine Meditation, in The Works of Joseph Hall, D.D., Successively Bishop of Exeter and Norwich, vi (Oxford: D. A. Talboys, 1837–39), 70–71. See also Baker, p. 29.
13 For the formal stages of the meditation, see Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 25–70.
14 Bacon, p. 615. Bacon's meditations are themselves short pieces; see Meditationes Sacrae, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, vu (London: Longman, Green, & Co., 1859). See also Joseph Hall's Occasional Meditations, in Works, xi. For Hall's use of the meditation and his expansion of it, see Fisch. Baker's meditations are examples of those that ramble on with only the biblical text itself as some control on the direction of the thought.
15 In rambling meditations, the logical change in direction is signaled by a connective: “Wherefore, ? my soule, when thou goest to pray …” and “Consider then, ? my soule the great cause St. Paul had to bee so resolute” (Baker, pp. 19, 39). In Hall's Occasional Meditations, the logical break is frequently signaled simply by the white space between the two short paragraphs.
16 See Fisch; also Benjamin Boyce, The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1947), p. 128, and The Polemic Character: 1640–1661 (1955; rpt. New York: Octagon, 1969), passim.
17 Jonson, Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, viii (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947), 586.
18 Nashe, Strange ? ewes, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (1904–10; rpt. ed. by F. P. Wilson [Oxford: Blackwell, 1958]), i, 270.
19 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. ?. E. Butler (London: Heinemann, 1921), vi.iii.17.
20 The value of this figure is its subtlety: “It exceedeth speech in silence, and makes our meaning more palpable by a touch than by a direct handling” (Hoskins, p. 25).
21 See John Earle on “A Young Gentleman of the University”: “The two marks of his seniority is the bare velvet of his gown and his proficiency at tennis, where, when he can once play a set, he is a freshman no more,” in Prose of the English Renaissance, p. 667. There are some interesting connections between the Religio and the character in general. Some character writers were interested in exploring the mind of the observer as well as that of the observed, and late in the career of this genre, a work appeared that used this form as the vehicle for the author's opinions: Brathwaite's “The Authors Opinion of Marriage: Delivered in a Satisfying Character to His Friend,” in Essaies upon the Five Senses (1620). With the phrase “to a Friend” at the end, the title suggests an epistle as well as a character and an essay. Moreover, the typical “he believes,” “he holds,” “he says” of the character becomes, merely by a change in pronoun, Browne's “I believe,” “I hold,” “I say.” Further, the pressure of the genre required character writers to sound quite worldly-wise, no matter how young they were, and Browne's voice has this quality in the Religio, as has frequently been observed (see Boyce, The Theophrastan Character, pp. 141, 236).
22 In pairing Horace and Juvenal, Dryden admires Juvenal's wit but finally prefers the poised disengagement of the laughing moralist in Horace (“The Original and Progress of Satire,” in The Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker [Oxford: Clarendon, 1900], n, 84–105). Before Browne there was the theory of a satire that could reprove with Horatian mildness. Sidney defines satire as a genre that can make the reader feel “how many head-aches a passionate life bringeth us to” and supports his definition with a quotation from Horace (“An Apologie for Poetrie,” in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith [1904; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971], i, 176). Nashe criticizes Harvey for a railing that is “contrary to all humanitie and good manners” (i, 324). Burton too advises a mannerly satire (The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith [New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1927], pp. 292–93). In practice, however, most Renaissance satire (of Lodge, Donne, Hall, Marston, Wither, Rowlands) is either rather bland or shrill, cranky, and nervous. The rhetorical characteristics of an English “Horatian” satire seem to have matured in other genres before being used in formal verse satire.
23 The phrase “the happy man” is borrowed, of course, from Maren-Sofie Rostvig's study The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, Vol. 1 (1600–1700), 2nd. ed. (Oslo: Norwegian Universities Press, 1962). Evelyn's letter to Browne is quoted on p. 121.
24 See Stanley Fish's criticisms of the Religio Medici in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), pp. 353–74. A typical comparison of Donne and Browne appears in Gilbert Phelps, 'The Prose of Donne and Browne,“ in The Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol. nr. ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1956), 116–30.
25 Despite those who see Browne as happily oblivious to the historical facts of the 1630s and 1640s, the four sections added to the edition of 1643 show that he intended to speak to an angry piety characteristic of his age. Sec. 1.8 argues that it is futile to try to rid the world of heresies. Sec. 1.28 mocks the superstitious belief in the power of relics and offers a piece of antiquity that all sects may acknowledge—God's eternity. Sec. I.43 argues that, since human life is fragile and we are ignorant of God's intentions for us, certain men cannot presume that they alone know the truth. And Sec. i.56 ridicules the condemnations and countercondemnations among the various sects of Christianity.
26 Walter Pater, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1924), p. 127.
