Afterword

The Argument Told Straight

The book begins as a gift sent back. A friend had given Traherne a notebook of blank leaves, and four rhymed lines on its first leaf return it so that she may write her Maker’s praise in it. The First Century promises truths she already loves without knowing them, chief among them that she is heir of the whole world (I.1-6). There are two worlds, the one God made and the one men have invented, and the first is enjoyed by thinking well, which custom has made hard though nature made it easy (I.7-10). Each soul is the end of all creation, as if it were alone, and proofs follow from God’s attributes, His laws, the senses and the soul’s endless appetite (I.11-24). Then comes the refrain that gives the Century its music, telling the reader she never enjoys the world aright until she sees it as her own (I.25-39).

The boldest move concerns want. Socrates boasted of how much he could do without, and Traherne answers that felicity is made of wants and supplies, and that God Himself has wanted from all eternity (I.40-44). To have and to prize is heaven, to prize and not have is hell, and wants are what bind the soul to God (I.45-51). Divine friendship and the soul’s power to visit every age lead to the Cross as the centre of eternity (I.52-61). At I.62 the exposition turns into prayer, which passes through creation and the Image of God, confesses the Fall in Adam’s voice, turns once more to the friend in a meditation Traherne later struck out (I.80), and kneels before the Passion. Praise and penitence alternate. The Century closes by distinguishing what God made human beings able to become, His sons in capacity, from what the Spirit makes them when they prize all things as He does, His sons in act (I.99). Its last meditation places all things in the soul that sees them (I.100).

The Second Century shows what the world does for its owner. The sun is imagined gone, halted, doubled and made infinite, and each time the real one proves the best of all possible works (II.7-11), and all creatures and all men serve each person, who stands alone among millions. No one is crowded out. God is unseen because any visible body would shut out the rest of being, and the world is the body He has taken on to show His beauty (II.19-24). From God as Love the argument reaches the atonement, which only the Son could make, and then a Trinity built out of love, since “God by loving begot His Son” (II.39). The soul too makes itself by loving. The soul’s own size then comes into view, an infinite sphere held in a point, which knows the infinite before it learns any bound (II.70-83), and whose idea of the world is dearer to God than the world itself (II.84-92). Thought outweighs things. The Century gathers its teaching into four terms set in capitals, God, the world, yourself and all things (II.100).

The Third Century answers its opening question with a life. As an infant the author saw the world as Adam saw Eden and owned all of it without a rival. Then “with much ado I was corrupted” (III.3), by the talk, toys and customs of those around him and by what he calls “a bad education” (III.7). He learned to prize a drum and a penny, the heavens became bare walls, and he lived like the prodigal among the husks (III.8-14). The return was slow. At about four, in a small dark room of his father’s poor house, he reasoned that a God infinite in goodness must give infinite riches, and asked why he was so poor (III.16). An empty dining room, an evening alone in a field and a thirst for news from overseas taught him that joy lies in motion and affection (III.22-26). He longed for a book from heaven and found the Bible already sent, doubting only its manner. The University taught every art except the art of happiness, and in the country he chose to live on ten pounds a year so that all his time might go to that search (III.36-46). His rule was an implicit faith in God’s goodness, which led him to the common things, until he saw that everything was well in its place except himself (III.52-60). Then he found his thoughts already written in Scripture, above all in David, and a long reading of the Psalms fills the Century’s last third, ending on the freedom David’s soul regained (III.66-100).

The Fourth Century changes its voice. The I of the Third becomes your friend and he, spoken for by a narrator who reports, out of modesty, “not his practises but his principles” (IV.30), though the disguise slips at IV.61. The principles serve an active happiness to be had now, and alone if need be (IV.1-17), in a fallen world that is a madhouse with the happy man for its physician (IV.20), who keeps open house and calls it “the house of Paradise” (IV.22). Even evil becomes material for joy. Freedom is a gift that should astonish, self-love is the ground of all love, and true glory is to love another for his own sake (IV.49-65). At IV.74-77 Traherne translates the opening of the Oration on the Dignity of Man by the Florentine philosopher Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), and then corrects it, arguing that man’s freedom is best spent in choosing to be turned into love (IV.78-81). Souls are mirrors of God’s love and yet fountains of their own (IV.82-87), and after a lesson in contentment the Century closes with ten consequences of the soul’s infinite reach and a doxology, the short hymn of glory that closes a prayer (IV.88-100).

The Fifth Century opens with a new plan. God is both the object of felicity and the way of enjoying it, and His attributes are to be taken in turn (V.1). Infinity comes first, “the room and the place of our treasures” (V.2), then eternity and omnipresence (V.6-10), and the tenth meditation ends on the words “perfecting and completing our bliss and happiness”. There the text stops.

Themes

Felicity and Wants

Felicity is the book’s word for the good it offers, the philosophers’ name for the happiness that is the end of human life, and Traherne uses it with a directness that most devotional writers of his century would have thought presumptuous. He is not embarrassed by joy. The question is never whether the soul may be happy in this life, but how, and his answer turns on a single word, want, which in his English meant both lack and longing. He sets himself against Socrates, who walked through the Athenian market marvelling at how many things he could do without (I.40), and against the philosophers who define felicity “in negatives” as contentment and self-sufficiency (II.100). Happiness, he argues, is an emptiness met by a supply, and the power to lack is the same as the power to receive.

The daring step is to place want in God Himself, in a sentence that reads like a riddle, “He wanted, yet He wanted not, for He had them” (I.41). God lacked worlds, spectators and joys, and had them all from eternity, because in eternity the need and its answer stand side by side and neither ever passes away. The want of God is therefore no poverty in Him, and the book can say that “Want in God is a treasure to us” (I.42), since our existence is the answer to it. From this follows the maxim that sums up the First Century, “You must want like a God that you may be satisfied like God” (I.44). Want, rightly understood, is a likeness to God.

The doctrine runs straight into the life. The child of the Third Century, lost among toys, would still come to himself “so far as to feel I wanted something” (III.15), and the four-year-old’s question about his poverty is want doing its proper work. Desire drives the story. Traherne never asks the reader to kill desire, only to educate it, and what he teaches the soul to want is what God already gives without price, the sun, the sea, the body and other souls. That answers the charge, easily made, that this is a licence for appetite. It is rather a discipline of attention, and of all the book’s doctrines it is the most original and the one that has worn best.

The Infinite and the Soul

Where many of his contemporaries met the infinite as a problem, Traherne meets it as a home. Hobbes had denied that the mind can form any idea of the infinite, and the Second Century answers him in kind, though never by name. A man born deaf and blind, it argues, feels infinite space about him before he ever touches a wall, so that “infinite is the first thing which is naturally known” (II.81). The wall comes later. The understanding is the truest image of God’s own boundlessness, “such an endless, invisible, and mysterious receiver” (II.24).

The Fifth Century carries the doctrine to its limit. Infinite space is the room of all treasures, which the angels see without eyes, and at the height of the argument it is called “the eternal and incomprehensible essence of the Deity” (V.3). That is a bold sentence for a priest of the Church of England, and it shows how far Traherne was prepared to follow a thought, even to the edge of saying that God and space are one. Yet his infinity is never cold. The one time it frightens him is in childhood, alone in a field at dusk, when the sheer width of the place filled him with horror until hope came to him “from every border” (III.23). Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and apologist, confessed in the same decades that the silence of infinite space terrified him. Traherne knew that fear, and he treats it as a stage the soul passes through.

The moral edge of the doctrine is easily missed, for if the soul is made to the measure of the infinite, then to feel cramped is a failure of perception rather than of circumstance. Among the Fourth Century’s closing consequences is “An exact fitness between the powers of the soul, and its objects” (IV.100). The soul is not too large for its world, nor the world too small for its soul, since each was made to the measure of the other.

The World as Treasure

The book runs on two economies, the riches of darkness, which men invent and value because they are scarce and difficult to get, and the riches of light, which God distributes freely to all (I.32-35). The Third Century names them again as the riches of invention and the riches of nature (III.9), and the method of the Century rests on the discovery of “a real valuableness in all the common things; in the scarce, a feigned” (III.53). The market’s order is reversed. Air, light, water, the sun, men and women, cities and temples are the true wealth, while gold and silver are “the very refuse of Nature” (III.62), good in their places but worthless as ends. The Second Century had already put the point bluntly (II.7), asking “what could a man do with a purse of gold in an everlasting dungeon?”