This is not the contempt of the world that a monk might teach, as Traherne insists at the outset (I.7), but a revaluation, and it has a social edge. The child who “knew no churlish proprieties, nor bounds, nor divisions” (III.3) grew up in the age of enclosure, when common land was being hedged into private fields. The world he describes is owned wholly by each person and wholly by all, because spiritual possession does not divide. What is enjoyed is multiplied, not shared out.

Some readers find in all this an innocence about poverty, and the charge has some force, since Traherne chose his own ten pounds a year and could have chosen otherwise. But the goods he names are precisely those that poverty cannot take away, and the Fourth Century draws the conclusion without flinching, “A naked man is the richest creature in all worlds” (IV.36). Adam in Eden owned nothing and possessed everything.

Childhood, Custom and Apostasy

The opening of the Third Century is the most famous prose Traherne wrote, and read in its place it is an argument, not a memoir, in which every detail is chosen to prove a point. It proves by example what the First Century asserted by reason, that the right sight of the world is native to the soul, is lost by culture and can be regained. The word he chooses for the loss is a theologian’s, for apostasy, a standing away, was the term for the fall of the rebel angels and of Adam, and he applies it to a small boy’s forgetting (III.2).

What caused the loss was custom, since the adults around him spoke only of other things, and “All things were absent which they talked not of” (III.10). The weight Traherne puts on this is bold. Misery comes far more from opinion and custom than from inward corruption, “not our parents’ loins, so much as our parents’ lives” (III.8). The Ninth of the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Church of England’s statement of doctrine, had denied that original sin lies only in following Adam’s bad example. That had been the teaching of the Pelagians, followers of the fifth-century monk Pelagius, who held that Adam harmed his descendants by his example rather than by passing on a corrupted nature. Traherne comes close to that line. But he adds in the next breath that all our corruption still comes from Adam, through the examples and inclinations his sin let loose, and the rest of the book is anything but light on sin (III.47-51).

The recovery is not a return to the cradle. What the child knew by intuition, the man gathered again “by the highest reason” (III.2). The task is to unlearn “the dirty devices of this world” (III.3) and so to turn and become a little child again, as Christ told his disciples they must (Matthew 18:3). Unlearning is the method. The infant’s vision is the evidence, and Scripture, reason and prayer are the road back, which is why the autobiography ceases to be autobiography and turns into a long meditation on David. The recovered child is a grown man who has learned to see deliberately what he once saw without trying.

Love and Communion

If the world belongs wholly to each person, the question is how it can belong to all without theft, and the book’s answer is love. “Love is the true means by which the world is enjoyed” (II.62), because love lives in the persons it loves and enjoys the world again through them. The Second Century builds a doctrine of the Trinity out of this, the Father begetting His Son by loving, and makes the soul a small copy of it, a lover who “does propagate and beget itself” by loving (II.48). Love makes the lover. Nothing, it adds, is ever loved too much, but other things are loved too little (II.66).

The Fourth Century faces the objection of the moralists who said that all love is self-love, and turns it round. Self-love is the ground of love and must be satisfied first, since “That pool must first be filled that shall be made to overflow” (IV.55). God Himself seeks His own glory, but true glory is to love another for his own sake (IV.64), so His self-love and His love of His creatures are one thing. The riddle dissolves. The soul’s love, in turn, is both a mirror of God’s and a fountain of its own (IV.84-85).

Communion is the social form of this love, and the book keeps it concrete. Friends who “exchange Souls” (I.83) divide their estates and comforts, the author’s house is open to every stranger (IV.22), and the fallen world is a madhouse in which the happy man is physician (IV.20). None of it is abstract. The saints of all ages are present to the soul that thinks of them (I.85), and since much of the book was written for a single reader living at a distance, it is itself an act of the communion it describes.

The Cross

Readers who know Traherne only for the orient wheat of the Third Century are surprised to find that the longest single stretch of the First is spent at Golgotha. From I.54 to I.98 the Cross stands at the centre, “the only mirror, wherein all things appear in their proper colours” (I.59), and the object of prayers that are among the most intense passages he wrote. They are not decoration. The Cross is “a tree set on fire with invisible flame” (I.60), the flame being the love of the one who died on it.

The Cross is where felicity is priced. The world is worth having because it was bought, and the prayers say so plainly, “the World is sprinkled with Thy blood” (I.78). The Second Century works out the doctrine in the language of the schools, showing why no angel could have made satisfaction for sin and only the Son could (II.31-38). It then tells the story of the loyal Persian Zopyrus, who mutilated himself to win Babylon for his king, as a figure of what redemption cost (II.95). The consequence of all this is that Traherne’s joy is never cheap, since it rests on a death.

The Cross is also placed outside time. “Had the Cross been twenty millions of ages further, it had still been equally near” (I.92), because the soul reaches it by thought and love, not by travel. That sentence explains how the book can pass so easily from the Passion to the sunrise, since both are present gifts and the same eye that sees the one aright sees the other.

The Unfinished

The book is unfinished in more ways than one. Traherne left a blank where a reference escaped him (II.21), passed from 87 to 89 in his numbering (II.88), jotted four lines of verse beside a number, struck out a whole meditation (I.80) and began the Fourth Century twice. The fair copy was a working book. The Fifth Century then announces a treatise on the attributes of God and reaches only three of them, infinity, eternity and omnipresence, before it stops.

Why it stops is not known. Bertram Dobell, the first editor, supposed that death prevented him, but the move to Bridgeman’s household or a change of plan would explain it as well, and nothing in the manuscript says which it was. It would be false to claim that Traherne meant to stop there. Yet the form of the book makes the break easy to bear, since a Century is a set of numbered meditations, and a numbered series can always take one more. The subject, too, is one no treatise could finish, for the attributes the Fifth Century sets out to survey are infinite by definition. The teaching, moreover, has already reached its conclusion, for the Fourth Century ends on an Amen (IV.100), and the Fifth reads as an overture, a view of the country the reader has now been taught to enter.

Symbolism

Traherne’s images are few and he returns to them constantly, so that by the Fourth Century each one carries the weight of all its earlier uses. Most are images of receiving, a page that takes writing, an eye that takes light, a mirror, a temple, an heir, and the book’s boldest moments come when the receiver turns out to give as well.

The empty book. The book is an object before it is an argument, a notebook of blank leaves given by one friend to another and compared at once to the soul of a newborn child. The figure then multiplies. Christ’s wounds are writing too, “These bloody characters are too dim to let me read it” (I.64), and the child of the Third Century longs for a book from heaven and finds that it has already been written and sent (III.27). The book from heaven is the Bible. In the Fourth Century the principles of happiness ought to be cut into the heart “with a pen of a diamond” (IV.50). The empty book is therefore a figure of the soul as a surface made to receive, and writing is the book’s figure for praise. Traherne fills the friend’s pages so that she may learn to fill her own soul in the same way.

The infant eye. What the child of the Third Century possessed was not better objects but a better eye, one without the film that custom lays over sight, and able for that reason to see the dust of the street as gold. The poem at III.26 calls the soul “The heavenly eye” and makes it “Much wider than the sky”, and the whole ethic of the book is in that sense a matter of seeing. Its enemies are small, “A little grit in the eye destroyeth the sight of the very heavens” (IV.17), and its cure is attention. The infant is the book’s proof that the unclouded eye is natural, and the grown man’s task is to clear his own.

The mirror. The world is a mirror of God’s beauty (I.31), the Cross the one mirror in which all things show their true colours (I.59), and the soul a looking-glass that gives back the sunbeams and is lit by them in turn (II.78). Seeing is a kind of exchange. There is also a false mirror, for the child corrupted by talk saw the world only in “The glass of imagination” (III.10). The Fourth Century then pushes the image to its limit. The soul returns God’s love as a glass returns the sun, and yet it can also love on its own account, so that it is “not called a mirror, but esteemed more, a real fountain” (IV.85). Souls on earth are “mirrors with lids” (IV.86), free to open and close. Here the image carries the book’s deepest claim, that the soul is more than a reflection, and it is where Traherne’s Christian Platonism parts from any doctrine in which the creature is merely a passive image of its source.