The sun. The sun is the book’s measure of goodness because it is common, given to all, and therefore overlooked, and the long meditation of II.7-11 imagines it away, fixed, doubled and made infinite, and each time finds the real one best. A later meditation turns the thought inward, since “The sun in your eye is as much to you” as the sun in the sky, and the sun understood illuminates the soul (II.90). Two eclipses rhyme across the book. Christ is the “Sun of Righteousness, eclipsed on the Cross” (I.88), and the child’s first light was “totally eclipsed” by the customs of men (III.7). In the Fourth Century love itself becomes a universal sun (IV.80), and in the Fifth the soul, looking ahead into eternity, darts its rays before it like the sun (V.8).

The temple. The world God made was Adam’s temple before the Fall (I.7), and the soul becomes an “interminable Temple” (I.92), a temple without end, in which all ages and kingdoms are present. The church building is where these two temples meet, and the cancelled meditation to the friend says so plainly, “The joys of the Temple are the greatest joys were they understood” (I.80). The image moves outward again at the close, when God’s omnipresence is called “a transparent temple of infinite lustre” (V.9), a building made of light and open on every side. Traherne never sets inward devotion against public worship. The same image serves both.

The sphere. Traherne takes the medieval definition of God as an infinite sphere and transfers it first to the soul, an infinite sphere held in a point (II.80), then to love, which is “hid in a centre and nowhere at all” (IV.66). Finally he applies it to every person’s share in infinite space, “Every man is alone the centre and circumference of it” (V.3). The geometry resolves one of the book’s paradoxes. If each person is the centre of an infinite sphere, then millions of persons can each be sole heir of the world without crowding one another, since an infinite sphere has room for any number of centres.

The Cross as centre. The sphere needs a fixed point, and the First Century supplies one, for the Cross stands in the soul as the centre of eternity (I.54), and “There we enter into the heart of the universe” (I.56). All nations are drawn to it as heavy things are drawn to the centre of the earth, by a pull and not by a journey on foot. Two geometries meet here. If every soul is the centre of its own infinite sphere, every soul also finds the same centre in the Cross, and it is this shared centre that keeps the many heirs of the world from becoming so many separate kingdoms.

The heir. An heir holds his estate by birth, not by labour, and that is exactly why Traherne chose the word. The friend is to be made heir of the world (I.3), every person is sole heir of all, and Christ Himself, dying naked on the Cross, is heir of the whole world (I.60). The word comes from St Paul and from the Prayer Book Catechism, as the Key Words note, and what Traherne adds to it is time. An heir must come of age before he can take possession, and the book reads as the education of an heir who has already inherited and does not yet know it. In the Fourth Century even that title passes to love, which is “the only heir and benefactor of the world” (IV.61).

The Metaphysical Layer

Traherne’s system. Behind the praise there is a metaphysics, and it can be stated plainly. God is “a pure and simple act” (V.10), the scholastic actus purus, a being with no unrealised power, whose essence is knowledge and love in full operation. He made the world to be enjoyed, and He made souls as capacities, empty rooms of infinite size that become what they are meant to be only when they are filled with their objects. An object is most truly present not in the place that holds it but in the mind that knows it, since “the in-being of an object in a faculty is the best of all” (I.100). Hence the thought of the world in a soul is worth more to God than the world itself (II.90), and hence the soul is made perfect by knowing and loving everything, until it becomes, as God is, all act. Love is the hinge of the system. God is love, begets His Son by loving, and makes the soul free so that it may choose to become love in its turn (IV.80), which is the purpose for which it was made.

Plato. Traherne names Plato twice and read him chiefly in Ficino’s Latin. The plainest trace is in the Symposium, where Diotima, the priestess whose teaching Socrates reports, calls Love a great daimon, a spirit halfway between gods and men (202d-203a). The Fourth Century calls Love “the great Daemon of the world” (IV.67). But Traherne also argues with Diotima. She had taught that Love cannot be a god because it lacks what it desires, being the child of Poverty and Resource (200a-e, 203b-c), and so for ever between having and not having. The First Century answers her by placing lack in God Himself, who wants from eternity and has from eternity (I.41-44). Her ladder of love climbs from one beautiful body to beauty itself and leaves the lower rungs behind (210a-212a), but Traherne keeps every rung (II.67), for “O what a treasure is every sand when truly understood!”

The Timaeus stands behind two of his central convictions. Its maker is good, and “in him that is good no envy ariseth” (29e), so he wished all things to be as like himself as possible. The same principle leads the Third Century to expect the best things to be the most common (III.53). The Timaeus also calls the cosmos a living creature and a visible god made in the image of the intelligible (30b, 92c), and the Second Century takes up the thought with care. The ancient philosophers thought God the soul of the world, and Traherne calls the world His body, “not His natural body, but which He hath assumed” (II.21), borrowing the language of the Incarnation to keep clear of pantheism. Pantheism, the belief that God and the world are one, is the step he will not take. The Phaedrus offers the nearest Platonic parallel to the Third Century, for there the soul remembers what it saw “in the pure light” before birth (250c). Traherne’s first light, however, belongs to this life. The infant did not remember heaven; he saw the earth.

Aristotle. Aristotle is named once, for his definition of felicity as the perfect exercise of perfect virtue in a perfect life (III.68, from Nicomachean Ethics 1098a16-18), but he runs silently under much of the book. Beyond the blank tablet of De Anima (430a1), already met behind the empty book of the first page, the same work holds that “the soul is in a way all existing things” (431b21). That becomes the Second Century’s soul, which “by understanding becometh all Things” (II.78). The Physics lists eight senses in which one thing may be in another and names place as the most proper (210a14-24), while Traherne counts the same eight manners of in-being and reverses the ranking in favour of knowledge (I.100). Even the Greek of II.82 is Aristotle’s, for the two phrases Traherne quotes there, kata dunamin and ekeinou heneka, which he renders as to the utmost of its power and for His sake, come from the definition of love in the Rhetoric (1380b35-1381a1).

Hermes through Pico. The Hermetic books reach the Centuries chiefly through Pico, whose oration opens with Abdala the Saracen and then quotes the Hermetic Asclepius, in the line Traherne renders “Man is a great and wonderful miracle” (IV.74). Traherne’s version is faithful but not neutral. Where Pico’s God takes man as indiscretae opus imaginis, a work of indeterminate form, Traherne’s takes him as “the Image of all His work” (IV.75), which turns Pico’s shapeless creature into the microcosm, the little world that sums up the great one. He cuts from God’s speech the sentence in which Adam may sink into the brutes, though the seeds of IV.77 still let a man who chooses sensual things become a beast. He then calls the whole creation scene a fable (IV.79), insists that the angels too are free, and ends by making love the best use of human freedom. In Everard’s Divine Pymander the Mind bids Hermes make himself immeasurably great and teaches him to be in every place and every time at once. The First Century’s conditions for enjoying the world, that the spirit should fill the whole world and know God’s ways in all ages (I.29-30), come closer to that passage than anything else in the book, and they change it. What Hermes is told to achieve by his own effort, Traherne’s reader is shown as a gift already made.

Plotinus. Plotinus (AD 205-270), the Greek philosopher from whom later Platonism descends, is never named in the Centuries, and there is no proof that Traherne read him, though Ficino’s Latin translation was widely available. The likeness is nonetheless strong. In the fifth Ennead the minds of the intelligible world see themselves in one another, each containing the whole, so that the glory there is without limit (Enneads V.8.4). That is very close to the First Century’s heaven, where every happy person is happy again in every other (I.74). In the first Ennead, in Stephen MacKenna’s translation, Plotinus writes that “Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike” (Enneads I.6.9). Sight changes the seer. Traherne prays to be changed by looking, “O let me so long eye Thee, till I be turned into Thee” (I.87). The difference matters as much as the likeness. Plotinus’s intellect is impersonal and his ascent leaves the many behind, while Traherne multiplies persons and keeps each one distinct.

The Cambridge Platonists. On infinite space Traherne was bolder than Henry More (1614-87), who had given space many divine titles but stopped short of the Fifth Century’s claim that it is the very essence of the Deity (V.3). With the other Cambridge men the likeness is one of temper. Ralph Cudworth (1617-88) preached that “Every true Saint, carrieth his Heaven about with him”, and the Fourth Century holds that heaven is established not by a change of place but by principles well practised (IV.37). John Smith (1618-52) wrote that “Such as Men themselves are, such will God himself seem to be”, and the Third Century that everything depends on “with what eyes we beheld them” (III.68). Their watchword was right reason, and Traherne uses the phrase too (IV.81). The difference is one of genre as much as of doctrine. They wrote sermons and treatises for the public and argued with Hobbes and the Calvinists in the open, whereas he wrote a notebook for a friend, and whatever system it holds is carried by praise, memory and prayer.