Contrary devotion : an analysis of binary structure in the works of Sir Thomas Browne
Date
1980
Authors
Griebel, Deborah Joanne
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Abstract
Sir Thomas Browne was a seventeenth-century medical doctor who wrote on spiritual subjects. His works reflect a concern for the new methodology of Baconian empiricism and its attendant secularising impulses, as well as a deep commitment to traditional religious values. Although Browne is admired today for his amusingly complex and quaint language, and for his gracious toleration, it has not sufficiently been pointed out by critics how the achievement of such literary distinction resulted from Browne's direct and serious encounter with some of the most controversial and heated intellectual debates of his day. Browne's works, this thesis claims, are structured according to a series of binary oppositions which suggest that only by appreciating and presenting such paradoxes as faith and works,' soul and body, sacred and profane knowledge, was Browne able to arrive at a mature resolution: one, that is, which works through the issues, rather than around them.
The first chapter deals with the key Reformation question of belief and knowledge, taking the controversy surrounding the death of Michael Servetus to exemplify the actual seriousness of the question, and to establish the basic terms of a debate which remained alive for Browne, although his historical position allowed him to stand also partially out side it , and so to interpret it in his particular manner. Mainly, in this chapter, two distinct attitudes to the relationship of belief and knowledge are established. On the one hand, the paradoxes of religious faith, dogmatically stated , were held to demand intellectual submission and assent; on the other, the paradoxes were held to give rise to ambiguity which called for equivocation and exploration. Whether the mind is left with a violent separation between faith and knowledge, or whether it must explore their interpenetration formed the basis of a debate between puritans and latitudinarians in the England of Browne's time. It was Browne's distinction, however, to recognize the claims of a radical Calvinism for which in some ways he had little sympathy, as well as t he claims of the latitudinarian position. Browne's works express this peculiar joint allegiance by presenting us deliberately with the antithesis of belief and knowledge through binary structure, and then, stylistically, destructuring (though without finally destroying) that initial opposition.
Subsequent chapters deal with Browne's main works form this general perspective. Religio Medici is composed of two parts, and deals with the controversy of faith and works; Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus, two separate essays published by Brown e under one cover, reflect the debate between mortalists and Platonists over the nature of death and resurrection; Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Christian Morals can be seen together as two sides of an examination of the increasingly incompatible concerns of sacred and profane knowledge.
Browne's writing, I conclude, endures today partly because it was decisively of its own times. The sense of toleration, open-mindedness, and disinterested curiosity for which Browne is famous, is the achievement of a man who knew the mind's dangerous oversimplifications as well as its need of dogma. The purpose of this thesis has been to provide some means for understanding Sir Thomas Browne in such a manner.