October 19, 1605

Britannica says of Sir Thomas Browne, (October 19, 1605 to October 19, 1682), whose perspicuity of heart was apparent in his wide choice of topics, and the profound learning his writing displayed:

After studying at Winchester and Oxford, Browne probably was an assistant to a doctor near Oxford. After taking his M.D. at Leiden in 1633, he practiced at Shibden Hall near Halifax, in Yorkshire, from 1634, until he was admitted as an M.D. at Oxford; he settled in Norwich in 1637. At Shibden Hall Browne had begun his parallel career as a writer with Religio Medici, a journal largely about the mysteries of God, nature, and man, which he himself described as “a private exercise directed to myself.” It circulated at first only in manuscript among his friends. In 1642, however, it was printed without his permission in London and so had to be acknowledged, an authorized version being published in 1643. An immediate success in England, the book soon circulated widely in Europe in a Latin translation and was also translated into Dutch and French.

Browne began early to compile notebooks of miscellaneous jottings and, using these as a quarry, he compiled his second and larger work, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very many received Tenets, and commonly presumed truths (1646)... In it he tried to correct many popular beliefs and superstitions. In 1658 he published his third book, two treatises on antiquarian subjects, Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, or, A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in Norfolk, and The Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincunciall Lozenge, or Net-Work Plantations of the Ancients. Around the theme of the urns he wove a tissue of solemn reflections on death and the transience of human fame in his most luxuriant style; in The Garden, in which he traces the history of horticulture from the garden of Eden to the Persian gardens in the reign of Cyrus, he is especially fascinated by the quincunx. A smaller work of great beauty and subtlety, entitled A Letter to a Friend, Upon occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend, was published posthumously in 1690.

Browne had always been a Royalist, and his fame both as doctor and as writer gained him a knighthood when Charles II visited Norwich in 1671. [Browne] seldom left the city but corresponded with such men of learning as John Evelyn, Sir William Dugdale, and John Aubrey. ...

The writing of Sir Thomas Browne displays a deep erudition as well as mystical contentment. Apparently already in the 17th century this seemed odd, for the title of his most famous book is translated as the religion of a physician--a provocative paradox.

These phrases from his writings demonstrate my point:

"The visible world [is] a picture of the invisible..."

"[There is no] danger in attempting to trace the hand of God in His works..."

"Length of days [is] not to be prayed for, as age doth but increase our vices."
"Nature doeth nothing in vain."
And: "Our neighbor [is to be loved for] God's [sake.]

It was in fact his Christian charity that annoyed many:

One of the many things that was held against him, though, was that he insisted on maintaining Christian charity to other believers. "We have reformed from them, not against them," he said of Roman Catholics. And, while regarding most Catholic ceremonies as riddled with dangerous superstition, he said of them: "Misplaced in circumstance, there is something in it of devotion: I could never heard the Ave Marie bell without an elevation, or thinke it a sufficient warrant, because they erred in one circumstance, for me to erre in all, that is in silence and dumbe contempt."

However he felt about the Catholic church (which put his main book on its Index of Prohibited books) he had stringent criticisms of faiths further away: He criticized the ancient Egyptians for their ""adorement of cats, lizards, and beetles."

Regarding the Muslims, he wrote:

Hence they embrace not virtue for itself, but its reward; and the argument from pleasure or utility is far more powerful than that from virtuous honesty: which Mahomet and his contrivers well understood, when he set out the felicity of his heaven, by the contentments of flesh and the delight of sense, slightly passing over the accomplishment of the soul, and the beatitude of that part which earth and visibilities too weakly affect. But the wisdom of our Saviour, and the simplicity of his truth proceeded another way; defying the popular provisions of happiness from sensible expectations; placing his felicity in things removed from sense, and [in] the intellectual enjoyment of God. And, therefore, the doctrine of the one was never afraid of universities, or endeavoured the banishment of learning, like the other. 

But, regarding the Classical thinkers, Thomas Browne wrote: yet is there surely no reasonable pagan that will not admire the rational and well grounded precepts of Christ....

Our world today is starved for this kind of learning of the heart, and mental generosity.