Children of Prometheus: Romanticism and Its Legacy. Gregory Maertz

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СКАЧАТЬ but in divided and distinguished worlds.” (32)

It is necessary only to cite the Dialogues of Plato or the biblical parables of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) in order to suggest the rich allusiveness, the play of irony, and the dramatic tension that belong to both strictly literary works and some philosophical tracts. Even if Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s appraisal of Browne’s metaphysics is not the last word on the subject, his famous remark on Religio Medici underscores its uncertain position in the hierarchy of literary genres. Coleridge (1772–1834), the great Romantic poet and critic, argues that Browne’s book should be considered “in a dramatic, and not in a metaphysical view, as the sweet exhibition of character and passion, and not as an expression or investigation of positive truth.”7 That is to say that one may still find pleasure in reading Religio Medici in spite of Browne’s obtruding philosophical preoccupations. It is neither to deny the importance of Browne’s ideas nor relegate them to a dark lumber room in the mansion of literature.

The case of Kierkegaard offers an especially illuminating parallel to Browne. Not only does he disclaim responsibility for his books far more vehemently than Browne; he goes so far as to disguise them as anonymous epistles and religious parables, and then published them under a pseudonym. Nevertheless, no one would dispute the seriousness or the enduring relevance of the disinherited offspring of his mind. In addition, Kierkegaard is recognized as one of the masters of Danish prose. And yet, at the first sign of ambivalence—just a sentence or two written in a tone of mild reproof against the enthusiasms of his youth—many English critics are prepared to ignore Browne’s meditations altogether, as though unaware that the style and tone of Religio Medici are derived from his religious temperament and concerns. For example, Edward Dowden argues that Browne’s work is “not modeled on the articles of a creed, but is far more the exposition of a religious temper; it concerns itself with the Christian graces.”8 Furthermore, Kierkegaard knew the contradictions of logic and willing lodged in faith as well as the difficulties encountered in sustaining the irrational premises of belief against the visible evidence of natural laws. For Kierkegaard, “faith is not an aesthetic emotion, but something far higher . . . it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence,” the yoking of the particular and the universal in the relationship of worshipping believer and adoring God.9 Kierkegaard’s faith, as well as Browne’s, rests upon “a paradox, inaccessible to thought.” For, in Browne’s phrase, “to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but perswasion.” (11) In his parable of Abraham and Isaac upon Mount Moriah, Kierkegaard identifies the man of faith as him “whose life is not merely the most paradoxical that can be thought but so paradoxical that it cannot be thought at all. He acts by virtue of the absurd,”10 as Browne does when he pursues his reason “to an O altitudo.” (11)

Kierkegaard defines the “absurd” as “not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding.” It is a mystery. And the mystery of faith is comprehended in the paradox that “with God all things are possible.”11 Browne is aware that the intoxicating anthropomorphism of Parmenides, who taught that “man is the measure of all things,” blinds us to God’s omnipotence. “We doe,” Browne scolds the reader, “too narrowly define the power of God, restraining it to our capacities.” (28) Indeed, “our understanding,” in Browne’s epistemology, “is dimmer than Moses’s Eye.” (14) Unwavering faith is impossible without first submitting reason to rigorous discipline. In Section 10 of Religio Medici Browne describes the reinforcement of faith as the process of taming the unruly flights of reason: “For by acquainting our reason how unable it is to display the visible and obvious effects of nature, it becomes more humble and submissive unto the subtleties of faith; and thus I teach my haggard and unreclaimed reason to stoope into the lure of faith.” (12) Browne does not believe in what is believable to his senses. He believes in the apparently preposterous. According to him, it is “no vulgar part of faith, to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to reason and against the arguments of our proper senses.” (12) And it is his believing itself that becomes believable in the act of worship. In a different sense from that which is cited by his critics, like John Addington Symonds, Browne’s ideas are utterly false. This sense of falsity is, however, not derogatory. There is a kind of falseness which, quite legitimately, affords the most refined aesthetic pleasure: it is enjoyed at that point where consistently sustained belief in the absurd assumes the semblance of spontaneity, and the most elaborate magical procedure, Browne’s prose style, conjures the appearance of the naively miraculous.

1 Quoted by Austin Warren, “The Style of Sir Thomas Browne,” Kenyon Review (13): 674–687 (678).

2 Norton R. Tempest, “Rhythm in the Prose of Sir Thomas Browne,” Review of English Studies (3): 308–318 (318).

3 The latter is William K. Wimsatt, the former is Marshall McLuhan.

4 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (New York: Collier, 1909), The Harvard Classics, Vol. 4, 3–4. Hereafter intra-textual references are to this edition.

5 Paul Elmer More’s description of the “esemplastic power” of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s imagination, in Shelburne Essays, Studies of Religious Dualism, Sixth Series (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company/The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1909), 167.

6 W.P. Dunn, Sir Thomas Browne: A Study in Religious Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950), 46.

7 Quoted by Robert Sencourt, Outflying Philosophy: A Literary Study of the Religious Element (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1923), 250.

8 Edward Dowden, Puritan and Anglican: Studies in Literature (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1901, 2nd ed.,), 46.

9 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton UP, rev. ed., 2013), 59.

10 Ibid., 47.

11 Ibid., 67.

2 Intertextual Dialogue: Father and Daughter Novelists

      “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”

      Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

      “The importance of struggling with another’s discourse, its influence in the history of an individual’s coming to ideological consciousness, is enormous. One’s own discourse and one’s own voice, although born of another or dynamically stimulated by another, will sooner or later begin to liberate themselves from the authority of the other’s discourse.”

      Mikhail СКАЧАТЬ