One of the areas in which modern believers, most of whom implicitly or explicitly believe in a life after death, often regard themselves as having one up on atheists and agnostics is their sense that mourning for the dead is just grief at a temporary parting. It is perhaps significant that, in an age of faith, that is one consolation that Thomas Browne – in Letter to a Friend Upon Occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend, his short but passionate meditation on mortality and mutability – did not offer. There is no sense that he and the two younger friends the letter refers to would see each other again in a meaningful way. He had said already in Religio Medici that we could not know what the judgment of God would be on any particular life; he hopes for salvation and believes it possible, but has no assurance of it.

Writing about the life and death of the friend they shared, what he consoles his living friend with is that the dead man was an example to them both, of holy living and holy dying. Now, shorn of its specifically religious aspects, this is something most of us who mourn the dead can agree with – we are consoled for death by people's life, work and achievements. Not just those things that count as the glittering prizes of a successful career, of course – but everything from a perfect salad at a dinner party 10 years ago to a political campaign fought from a self-denying position stuffing envelopes. For Browne, prayers for the dead were useless mummery and so he was left with the consolation of memory and the possibility of learning; in this, his position was not too different from ours, however much he would have thought it so.

He also found a consolation in the fact that death is one of the things of which we can be sure – though his friend had died, as far as we can tell from the case history he provides, of TB, a disease which those of us who live in the developed world no longer have to fear as mortal. He regards as particularly cruel that brief rally associated with the disease both in fact and in 19th-century opera – his friend had no such temporary recovery but drifted into sleep and into death. It's significant that for the intensely Protestant Browne, there was no particular value in last minute struggles for the soul of someone quietly confident that they had done everything needed to have hope; a peaceful death was a good one.

It was not merely a slow and painful death; it was like most human deaths in history and fewer now, the death of someone comparatively young. Some of Browne's reasoning here is bizarre from our perspective – he argues that it would have been greedy of his friend to hope for more than the 33 years lived, according to tradition, by Jesus and that he was content with that. He returns to this in less baroque terms in the section of the letter that is advice rather than consolation:

"If length of Days be thy Portion, make it not thy Expectation: reckon not upon long Life, but live always beyond thy Account. He that so often surviveth his Expectation, lives many Lives, and will hardly complain of the shortness of his Days. Time past is gone like a shadow; make Times to come, present; conceive that near which may be far off; approximate thy last Times by present Apprehensions of them: live like a Neighbour unto Death, and think there is but little to come."

That's better, because it approximates a more general version of mindfulness.

In the end, the thing that makes Browne such an attractive figure overall, in spite of his follies and occasional intellectual and other crimes, is that he is tough on himself and recommends self-critical humility as an important part of moral behaviour. The prose moves backwards and forward weaving a sonorous spell, but his style is not there purely for beauty; it is intended to persuade and to persuade himself as much as anyone else. "Let not the Sun in Capricorn go down upon thy Wrath, but write thy Wrongs in Water; draw the Curtain of Night upon Injuries; shut them up in the Tower of Oblivion, and let them be as tho they had not been. Forgive thine Enemies totally, and without any Reserve of hope, that however, God will revenge thee."

It's not an easy or comfortable version of faith – as a medical man he knows and refuses the temptation to recommend sobriety and chastity as matters of sensible policy, preferring to make them matters of spiritual virtue. In the end, though, even without faith, his resting of virtue in habits of mind and fondness for other people is not the worst thing to learn from. Think reasonably, act charitably – these are pragmatic recommendations irrespective of whether there is any such thing as spiritual benefits. And oh, that prose …