Rhetoric, religion, and politics in Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici.(Critical essay)

Publication: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Publication Date: 01-JAN-06

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Politics in Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici? Until very recently, an essay with this title could have been dangerously brief: one could simply have stated the absence of politics in Browne, or, if acknowledging a political presence, deplored its antiradical nature. (1) In historical studies of seventeenth-century political thought, Browne passes for the most part unnoticed. The last critic to take him seriously as a thinker, and then for mostly the wrong reasons, was Basil Willey in the early 1930s, who saw Browne as an important anti-Baconian "pleading for religion in an age which was beginning to be dominated by science." (2) In general, ever since the Romantics discovered him as one of their precursors, Browne was not read for what he might have had to say but rather for the way he phrased it, whatever it was. He was read for his "mere style," his artful and presumably self-conscious virtuoso use of language, admired by some as supremely baroque and literary, condemned by others as self-indulgent and politically ineffective. (3)

Many questions remain unasked in such readings: questions about the relationship of form and content in writing, especially that kind of writing designated as "literary," which, according to the OED definition, has "value on account of its qualities of form." (4) What does it mean to privilege form over content? What illocutionary force, if any, can a text claim that does so? If form, art, or style are the opposites of content, message, and meaning, a text that is "mere style" can only be an odd kind of speech act, an empty form without referential or communicative functions.

In the light, or rather gloom, diffused by these questions, is it legitimate to see Browne's writings as embodiments of personal opinions and thoughts, or do we have to assume that he constructed a fictive author-persona in his published writings, particularly in his first book, Religio Medici (1643), which would not allow us to take his utterances at face value? To what extent can his playful manner and his linguistic mannerisms be said to be intentional? (5) It has been affirmed, for instance, that Browne's uniqueness consists in "present[ing] himself" (emphasis added) instead of merely the conclusions he arrived at. (6) However, this self is not merely eloquent but ultimately elusive; there is always more than self, or, in Browne's own words, "every man is not onely himselfe." (7) If the style reveals the man, as the ancient commonplace has it, we should beware: there may be many selves and as many styles in Browne, more than the trinity of high, middle, and low that Austin Warren was willing to grant him, perhaps even an intractable "multiplicity of writing" that transcends or destroys any traditional concept of style. (8) Studies of Browne as a mystic, as a thinker, or as both are always confronted with the discrepancy between the "literariness" of his writings on the one hand and the "nonliterariness" of his subject matter on the other hand. The problem is usually solved either by more or less ignoring one or the other of these two aspects or by seeking a more or less tepid compromise between them (literary language as a "strategy of truth"). (9)

In contrast to these approaches, I suggest that readings of Browne as a mere stylist are flawed by conceptual and historical misunderstandings, based on aesthetic assumptions unavailable to Browne and his contemporaries. His texts therefore cannot be described as literary in the modern sense of the word, although to call them "protoliterary" might be a valuable step toward a media-historical reevaluation. (10) I propose a reading that explores the performative dimensions of Browne's writing and the epistemological function of his strategic use of language. These performative dimensions I have designated, in my title, as rhetoric, religion, and politics, but this is a tentative triad. The three dimensions are clearly interrelated and intersecting in the text I will concentrate on, Browne's Religio Medici. My task will be to tease out and delineate their mutual interdependence and thus to demonstrate that what has been called Browne's peculiar style does have a specific communicative function in his mid-seventeenth-century cultural context.

I

Browne's attitude toward style and form reflects an underlying epistemological conception of the function of language and rhetoric. Language, for Browne as for other seventeenth-century writers, is not a transparent medium or vehicle of knowledge but has a material and palpable object-quality. There is an aspect of resistance in language that intervenes between reality and semiotic representations. Rhetoric is a technique that uses this very predicament of imperfection in order to transform it into an asset, on the fundamental assumption that knowledge, representation, and communication are uncertain, contingent, and cannot be totalized. (11) What rhetoric, as the performative, action-oriented, or indeed political aspect of communication, establishes or hopes to establish is therefore not a stable epistemology (based on transtemporal identity, for instance on the eternal verities of scripture), but a provisional, contingent, or "collaterall" access to truth that is admittedly imperfect and subject to revision. (12)

The degree to which the rhetorical grounding of knowledge is admitted can of course vary considerably. In order to be successful and persuasive, political rhetoric, perhaps more than any other, tends to conceal and, if necessary, to disavow its Machiavellian basis in moral and epistemological imperfection. Brownean rhetoric, on the other hand, openly addresses its own ambiguity, self-consciously disclosing the manipulative aspects of strategic language use and asking the reader to rethink his or her assumptions about the nature of textuality. It shows rhetoric to be a double-edged, problem-solving strategy, geared toward both moral and intellectual self-observation and self-improvement, rather than a unidirectional instrument of discursive power geared toward the persuasion of others. It is in this sense that I would like to read Samuel Taylor Coleridge's injunction that Religio Medici "ought to [be] considered ... in a dramatic & not in a metaphysical View." (13)

The ambiguous rhetorical stance of Religio Medici shifts between the presentation of an intimate personal confession and the quasi-theatrical or even ironic upstaging of a persona, between self-description and self-distancing. This rhetorical stance "correlates directly with the familiar topic of the world as stage," but it implicates the reader time and again by forcing him or her to shift perspective and "to see 'round' the offered persona." (14) A single, essentialist focus on either the person behind the persona or the persona in front of the person is denied. The result is not an expression of self nor a mimetic mirroring of reality, but neither is it art for art's sake, "mere style" or "spiritual gymnastics." (15) Theatrical presentation in Browne is not pervasive but inconclusive, momentary, and tactical, as is his shifting between different modes of presentation and trying out multiple viewpoints. It is, quite unlike the strict and artful application of conceits in the metaphysical poets, the sometimes absurd and inconsequential result of his rhetorical problem-solving strategies.

In Browne, as in other writers of his time, such reflections and practices do have a theological and religious basis, but they are, in his case, not based on Puritan radicalism. On the contrary, he bases his practices on a liberal conservative Anglicanism that is willing to grant the legitimacy of multiple and differing viewpoints in matters of "indifferency" (RM, p. 3, i. 1) or "points indifferent" (RM, p. 5, i. 5)--at least to the educated elite of those who can tell the crucial difference between central and peripheral, rigid and flexible beliefs and actions: those who, because of their "sober judgement," are allowed what Browne calls "the libertie of an honest reason" to "play and expatiate with security" (RM, p. 9, i. 8). His rhetoric is therefore much less geared toward persuasion. Indeed, the whole Religio can be read as an antipersuasive discourse, written, as Browne...

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