Religious tolerance according to Thomas Browne

Abstract

In England of 17th century there were periods of tensions, conflicts, and at last Civil War. The public life was dominated by religious and political intolerance. At that time a religious tolerance and connected with it a political one was a rare phenomenon, and many confessional communities and radical sects tolerated only their own opinions and convictions. Quite different attitude towards religious issues took Thomas Browne (1605-1682), English physician, thinker and the author of Religio Medici. He stood in opposition to the contemporary intolerant public opinion in England. Support of that intolerance can one see in the works of Samuel Parker and Roger L’Estrange. They described and judged permanent disputes between Erastian protagonists and confessors of conscience freedom. Browne goes beyond those disputes. He strongly sympathize with a tolerance, going beyond narrow dogmatic convictions of religious communities and sects by his philosophical and scientific reflections. As an Anglican believer he underpins supranatural theology by natural theology, elements of metaphysics and some biological and medical observations in his work. Browne presents tolerant attitude and even benevolent one towards other people, does not aspire to own any full and definite truth of reality. As an open-minded man he discloses rationality of the structure and functioning of the natural world. For him biological researches and philosophical reflektion does not contradict his faith in God and does not make him any atheist. On the contrary, Browne acknowledges that faith opens more wide cognitive horizons than reason, but simultaneously he is convinced that certainty and solidity of rational cognition reinforces his faith in God. In this article we want to demonstrate that above mentioned cognitive elements are the main source of the tolerant attitude of Thomas Browne.