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← ExitCenturies of Meditations

The Fourth Century

72

To sit in the Throne of God is to inhabit Eternity. To reign there is to be pleased with all things in Heaven and Earth from everlasting to everlasting, as if we had the sovereign disposal of them. For He is to dwell in us, and we in Him, because He liveth in our knowledge and we in His. His will is to be in our will; and our will is to be in His will, so that both being joined and becoming one, we are pleased in all His works as He is; and herein the Image of God perfectly consisteth. No artist maketh a Throne too wide for the person. God is the greatest and divinest artist. Thrones proper and fit for the persons, are always prepared by the wisest Kings. For little bodies, bodily thrones: for Spirits, invisible. God’s Throne is His omnipresence, and that is infinite, who dwelleth in Himself, or in that Light which is inaccessible. The Omnipresence therefore, and the Eternity of God are our Throne, wherein we are to reign for evermore. His infinite and eternal Love are the borders of it, which everywhere we are to meet, and everywhere to see for evermore. In this Throne our Saviour sitteth, who is the Alpha and Omega; the first and the last, the Amen; and the faithful witness who said, The Glory which Thou hast given me, I have given them, that they may be one, as we are one. In Him the fulness of the Godhead dwelleth bodily. If that be too great to be applied to men, remember what follows, His Church is the fulness of Him that filleth all in all. The fulness of the Godhead dwelleth in Him for our sakes. And if yet it seemeth too great to be enjoyed: by the surpassing excellency of His Eternal Power, it is made more than ours. For in Him we shall more enjoy it than if it were infinitely and wholly all in ourselves.

73

If anything yet remaineth that is dreadful, or terrible or doubtful, that seemeth to startle us, there is more behind that will more amaze us. For God is infinite in the expression of His Love; as we shall all find to our eternal comfort. Objects are so far from diminishing, that they magnify the faculties of the soul beholding them. A sand in your conception conformeth your soul, and reduceth it to the size and similitude of a sand, A tree apprehended is a tree in your mind; the whole hemisphere and the heavens magnify your soul to the wideness of the heavens; all the spaces above the heavens enlarge it wider to their own dimensions. And what is without limit maketh your conception illimited and endless. The infinity of God is infinitely profitable as well as great: as glorious as incomprehensible: so far from straitening that it magnifieth all things. And must be seen in you, or God will be absent: Nothing less than infinite is God, and as finite He cannot be enjoyed.

74

But what is there more that will more amaze us? Can anything be behind such glorious mysteries? Is God more Sovereign in other excellencies? Hath He showed Himself glorious in anything besides? Verily there is no end of all His greatness, His understanding is infinite, and His ways innumerable. How precious, saith the psalmist, are Thy thoughts to me, O God; when I would count them they are more than can be numbered. There is no man that reckoneth them up in order unto Thee. O my Lord I will endeavour it: and I will glorify Thee for evermore. The most perfect laws are agreeable only to the most perfect creatures. Since therefore Thy laws are the most perfect of all that are possible; so are Thy creatures. And if infinite power be wholly expressed O Lord, what creatures! what creatures shall we become! What Divine, what illustrious Beings! Souls worthy of so great a love, blessed forever. Made worthy, though not found; for Love either findeth or maketh an object worthy of itself. For which cause Picus Mirandula admirably saith, in his tract De Dignitate Hominis, I have read in the monuments of Arabia, that Abdala, the Saracen, being asked, Quid in hâc quasi mundanâ Scenâ admirandum maxime spectaretur? What in this world was most admirable? answered, MAN: Than whom he saw nothing more to be admired. Which sentence of his is seconded, by that of Mercurius Trismegistus, Magnum, O Asclepi, Miraculum, Homo; Man is a great and wonderful miracle: Ruminating upon the reason of these sayings, those things did not satisfy me, which many have spoken concerning the excellency of Human Nature. As that man was Creaturarum Internuncius; Superis familiaris, Inferiorum Rex; sensuum perspicaciâ, Rationis Indagine, Intelligentiae Lumine, Naturae Interpres, Stabilis Aevi et fluxi Temporis Interstitium, et (qd. Persae dicunt) Mundi Copula immo Hymenaeus: A messenger between the creatures, Lord of inferior things, and familiar to those above; by the keenness of his senses, the piercing of his reason, and the light of knowledge, the interpreter of nature, a seeming interval between time and eternity, and the inhabitant of both, the golden link or tie of the world, yea, the Hymenaeus marrying the Creator and His creatures together; made as David witnesseth a little lower than the angels. All those things are great, but they are not the principal: that is, they are not those which rightly challenge the name and title of most admirable: And so he goeth on; admiring and exceeding all that had been spoken before concerning the excellency of man. Why do we not rather admire the Angels and the Quires above the Heavens? At length I seemed to understand, why man was the most happy, and therefore the most worthy to be admired of all the creatures: and to know that estate; which in the order of things he doth enjoy, not only above the beasts but above the stars and that might be envied even of the supra-celestial spirits, which he styleth, ultra-mundanis mentibus invidiosam.

75

The Supreme Architect and our Everlasting Father, having made the world, this most glorious house and magnificent Temple of His divinity, by the secret laws of His hidden Wisdom; He adorned the regions above the heavens with most glorious spirits, the spheres he enlivened with Eternal Souls, the dreggy parts of the inferior world he filled with all kind of herds of living creatures. Sed Opere Consummato; but His work being completed, He desired some one that might weigh and reason, and love the beauty, and admire the vastness of so great a work. All things therefore being (as Moses and Timaeus witness) already finished, at last He thought of creating man. But there was not in all the platforms before conceived any being after whom He might form this new offspring. Nor in all His treasures what He might give this new son by way of inheritance, nor yet a place in all the regions of the world, wherein this contemplator of the universe might be seated. All things were already full; all things were already distributed into their various orders of supreme, middle and inferior. But it was not the part of infinite power to fail as defective in the last production; it was not the part of infinite wisdom, for want of council to fluctuate in so necessary an affair; it was not the part of infinite goodness or sovereign love, that he, who should be raised up to praise the Divine Bounty in other things, should condemn it in himself. Statuit tandem opt. Opifex, ut cui dari nihil proprium poterat commune esset, quod privatum singulis fuit: The wisest, and best of workmen appointed therefore, that he to whom nothing proper to himself could be added, should have something of all that was peculiar to everything, and therefore he took man, the Image of all His work, and placing him in the middle of the world, spake thus unto him,?

312.A chain of texts. Earlier in the meditation, to inhabit eternity is said of God in Isaiah 57:15, and the light inaccessible is 1 Timothy 6:16. Here Christ is Alpha and Omega, the first and the last (Revelation 1:11), the Amen (3:14) and the faithful witness (1:5); his prayer that his disciples may be one is John 17:22. “In Him the fulness of the Godhead dwelleth bodily” is Colossians 2:9, and the Church as “the fulness of him that filleth all in all” is Ephesians 1:23.

313.The soul becomes in a way what it knows, as Aristotle taught (see the note at II.78). The closing claim that God cannot be enjoyed as finite answers Hobbes (see the note at II.24); compare II.81, “infinite is the first thing which is naturally known”.

314.Psalm 139:17-18, where God’s thoughts are precious and more than the psalmist could count, run together from memory with Psalm 40:5, where they “cannot be reckoned up in order unto thee” and are more than can be numbered. “His understanding is infinite”, just before, is Psalm 147:5.

315.Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), Italian philosopher. His Latin oration of 1486 was written to open a public debate in Rome on his nine hundred theses; it was first printed in 1496, and the title De Dignitate Hominis (On the Dignity of Man) was given it in later collected editions. From here to the end of IV.77 Traherne translates the opening of the Oration, apparently in his own version, since no English translation was printed until the nineteenth century.

316.Pico begins “I have read, most reverend Fathers, in the records of the Arabs”; Traherne drops the address to the Fathers. Monuments are written records (Latin monumenta). Abdala has not been securely identified; the historian George Makdisi proposed the ninth-century Arabic man of letters Ibn Qutayba. The Latin question means “what on the world’s stage, as it were, was most to be wondered at?”, and Traherne’s English drops the stage.

317.Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice-greatest Hermes), the Egyptian sage to whom the Renaissance ascribed the Hermetic writings and a great antiquity. The saying is from the Latin dialogue Asclepius (6), magnum, o Asclepi, miraculum est homo, which Pico quotes; Asclepi is the vocative, O Asclepius, the name of Hermes’s pupil. Dobell misread the manuscript here and printed Asclepiades. Traherne also knew the Hermetica in John Everard’s English Divine Pymander (1650).

318.Pico’s list of man’s praises, which Traherne translates in the words that follow, leaving qd. Persae dicunt, as the Persians say, in Latin. A copula is a bond or link and Hymenaeus the god or song of marriage, so that man is the wedding-bond of the world’s parts. Two phrases of the English are Traherne’s own, “the golden link or tie” and the marriage of “the Creator and His creatures”. The words from David are Pico’s, citing Psalm 8:5.

319.Close to Pico’s summus Pater architectus Deus, God the supreme Father and architect, whose world is divinitatis templum augustissimum, the most august temple of his divinity. The spheres enlivened with eternal souls are the heavens turned by spirits in the old astronomy, and the dreggy parts render Pico’s excrementarias ac feculentas, the dregs and refuse of the lower world.

320.Pico’s ut Moses Timaeusque testantur. Genesis and Plato’s Timaeus, the two great accounts of the world’s making, were paired as witnesses to one ancient truth, for Greek wisdom was widely held to derive from Moses; so argued Theophilus Gale’s Court of the Gentiles (1669-77), which Traherne read. Platforms, just after, are Pico’s archetypa, patterns or models.

321.Traherne’s largest change to Pico. Pico wrote that God took man as indiscretae opus imaginis, a work of indeterminate form; Traherne makes him the image of the whole creation, the little world or microcosm in which every kind of being is gathered.