John Evelyn, 'The Diary of John Evelyn' (1671)
‘Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but
those who do are a very good person.
Virginia Woolf
Gavin Francis's new biography of the polymath is a refreshingly
different biography. His latest account of the life and works of Sir Thomas
Browne, the 17th-century English polymath. Browne had an infectious curiosity
for the world around him. The author, Gavin Francis, who is GP, and author
shares that curiosity and has written a biography from a personal standpoint
rather than an objective one. This slim volume, which runs to only 133 pages,
is part of a series of biographies whose authors, like Francis, have a personal
attachment to their subject matter. They tell much about themselves as they do
the person they are writing about. Francis is not the only writer to be
enamoured by Browne. He influenced many writers, such as Samuel Johnson, WG
Sebald, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Conrad, and EM Forster.
Education was important to Browne. In 1623, Browne went to
Oxford University. He graduated from Pembroke College, Oxford. He studied
medicine at some of Europe’s finest institutions Padua and Montpellier
universities, completing his studies at Leiden. Second, only Shakespeare introduced
over 700 new words into English, such as electricity,’ medical’, ‘anomalous’
and ‘coma’.Browne went on to be a pivotal figure in the development of modern
science. Some put him on par with the great Francis Bacon. Browne’s problem was
that he struggled to maintain a scientific understanding of the world around
him while maintaining orthodox Christian beliefs.
Browne lived in an age when religious belief started to be
undermined by the growth of scientific knowledge of the world. David North
writes, “Religion began to encounter the type of disrespect it deserved, and
the gradual decline of its authority introduced a new optimism. All human
misery, the Bible had taught for centuries, was the inescapable product of the
Fall of Man. However, the invigorating scepticism encouraged by science in the
absolute validity of the Book of Genesis led people to wonder whether a man
couldn't change the conditions of his existence and enjoy a better world.
He continues, “Until the early seventeenth century, even
educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the
mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old
Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding,
especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in
the year of his death in 1543, which dealt a death blow to the Ptolemaic
conception of the universe and provided the essential point of departure for
the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and,
of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially,
the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the
political structures that rested upon it was well underway.”[1]
Browne was not the only genius around at the time. Amazingly,
Browne never met Sir Isaac Newton(1642-1727), Who, like Browne, by no means
sought to undermine the authority of God, but as North points out, Newton “
demonstrated that the Almighty could not have accomplished his aims without the
aid of extraordinarily complex mathematics. Moreover, the phenomena of Nature
were not inscrutable but operated according to laws accessible to the human
mind. The key to an understanding of the universe was to be found not in the
Book of Genesis but in the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
The impact of Newton’s work on intellectual life was captured in the ironic
epigram of Alexander Pope: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night, / God
said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”
Francis’s slim book is a fascinating and partisan
introduction to the life of Sir Thomas Browne. It deserves a wide readership
and hopefully re-establishes Browne’s reputation as one of the major thinkers
of the 17th century. His thinking and writing still resonate in
today’s world. If Browne were transported from his century into ours, it would
not take him long to accommodate himself. Whether he would like what he saw is
another matter.
[1]Equality,
the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html
