Paradox Regained: Reconsidering Thomas Browne’s Double Hermeneutics

The Compage of all Physical Truths is not so closely jointed, but opposition may find intrusion, nor always so closely maintained as not to suffer attrition. Many Positions seem quodlibetically constituted, and like a Delphian Blade will cut on both sides. Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods, and some Falsehoods almost Truths; wherein Falsehood and Truth seem almost aequilibriously stated, and but a few grains of distinction to bear down the balance.

—Sir Thomas Browne¹

In the opening book of Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenets and Commonly Presumed Truths (1646–72), Thomas Browne relates the tale of “Caius the blind,” who

in the reign of Antoninus, was commanded to passe from the right side of the Altar unto the left, to lay five fingers of one hand thereon, and five of the other upon his eyes, although the cure succeeded and all the people wondered there was not any thing in the action which did produce it, nor any thing in his power that could enable it thereto.²

Appearing in the second of two chapters on Satan’s promotion of “Error” and “false Opinion,” Caius’s story serves as a cautionary tale on the dangers of attributing supernatural efficacy to natural signs, a category mistake identified in Pseudodoxia as one of the prime causes of interpretive error. In the instance of Caius’s healing, Satan encourages onlookers to perceive a causal relation between the blind man’s ritualistic action and the restoration of his eyesight, when he himself has repaired the man’s vision through the “secret and undiscerned wayes of Nature” (69).

Given the force with which Browne denounces the interpretive confusion displayed in the Caius anecdote, it comes as some surprise when The Garden of Cyrus (1658) offers the tale as evidence of the divine and mystical power of the five-pointed quincunx. In a list of the numerous “mysteries and secrets, accommodable unto this number,” among which ranks “the mysticall name of God” composed of five letters, Browne demands “[i]f any shall question the rationality of that Magick, in the cure of the blind man by Serapis, commanded to place five fingers on his Altar, and then his hand on his Eyes.”³ Stunningly, an event that in Pseudodoxia is attributed to the natural machinations of Satan is in The Garden of Cyrus ascribed to the magical power of God. Whereas the earlier text chastises those wonderers who perceive a supernatural efficacy in Caius’s actions, the later urges readers to join the crowd.

This essay takes up the well-worn topic of paradox in the philosophy of Thomas Browne. Though critics long have recognized Browne as a paradoxical thinker, they have tended to characterize his paradox as dispositional and easily resolvable.⁴ Those who have approached paradox as an important figure of thought in Browne’s works generally have invoked his belief in the coincidentia oppositorum as a means of resolving contradictions between them.⁵ While this approach illuminates the inclusive vision of texts such as Religio Medici (1635–43) and the companion pieces Hydriotaphia (1658) and The Garden of Cyrus, it only captures one side of Browne’s paradoxical equation. On the other side lies a work such as Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which, as the tale of Caius illustrates, disavows the mystical, quincuncial logic on which Browne’s faith in the coincidence of opposites rests. To such a degree does it do so that in light of its claims, studies of Pseudodoxia have at times viewed the mysticism of the Religio and Cyrus as the product of poetic fancy, unreflective of Browne’s genuine philosophical beliefs.

It is a testament to the success of Browne’s paradox that critics reading from the perspective of different texts can draw opposing conclusions about his philosophy. To argue that one of Browne’s interpretive dispositions is more authentic than the other, however, is to characterize him as a monolith when instead he is an iron: one who holds two differing positions simultaneously. This essay draws on W. V. O. Quine’s discussion of paradoxical kinds in order to reassess the...