The Apophatic Garden of Cyrus: Thomas Browne's Fleeting God

Abstract

This essay explores Sir Thomas Browne's most skittish and intractable text, The Garden of Cyrus (1658). It makes the case that despite being a work of some scientific precision, premised on the profuse regularity and geometric order of the world, in its pathological discovery of pattern, Cyrus has its crescendo in the scientific unthinkable, an understanding of the world that consisted in the unsustainable glimpse, and always only ineffable experience. The essay pursues this idea to suggest that seventeenth-century natural philosophy routinely expected to come upon exploratory thresholds, beyond which reason and logic failed to function adequately. The response to this endemic inscrutability of the world in scientific writing was to borrow from the apophatic, the theological traditions by which the unspeakable and the unthinkable, the outermost borderlands of experience, were reckoned. The case is developed that Cyrus , in its rhetoric and poetics, as well as its theological character, is a response to this supposition of the symphonic unknowability of the world.