Outline

The Centuries are built from short numbered paragraphs, a hundred to each Century, four complete Centuries and ten meditations of a fifth, with the four-line Inscription standing before them all. Traherne numbered the meditations but did not group them, so the joints of the argument have to be found by reading. They come where a new question is raised, a new image takes over, or the voice changes, as it does when exposition becomes prayer at I.62 and when the author turns into a third person at IV.1. The Outline follows those joints. It divides the book into sixty-one movements and gives for each its range, what it does, where it comes to rest and what it adds to the whole.

The First Century

I.1-6. The book opens with a gift and a promise. Traherne accepts the friend’s blank book and promises to fill it with truths she loves without knowing them. He defends that promise against the scholastic maxim that nothing unknown can be loved, since unknown things draw the soul as a lodestone draws iron. He names the great gift, that she is heir of the world, and promises to lead her to it by gentle ways, not by the wars and dethroned kings of his own age. The movement ends on a paradox, that enjoying the world will teach her to despise it, and so poses the question the next movement answers.

I.7-10. The paradox of I.6 is resolved at once. There are two worlds, the beautiful one God made and the Babel of invented riches that men have made, and with Thomas à Kempis, the medieval author of The Imitation of Christ, the reader is told to give all for all. Meditation is the easy means of enjoyment, and only habit and custom make good thinking hard, since to think well is to serve God in the inner court of the mind. The movement ends by claiming that a soul which enjoys the world fulfils the very purpose for which God made it, and so sets the stakes for everything that follows.

I.11-15. Holiness becomes a matter of valuing. It is defined as right prizing, the rendering to each thing of its due value, and the soul pleases God most when it values things as He does. God made one Adam and not a crowd, to show that each person is the end of the whole world, and other souls are added not as rivals but as jewels that enrich the inheritance. The movement ends with a Latin sentence Traherne gives to the Roman Stoic Seneca, God gave me alone to all the world and all the world to me alone, and it adds the book’s central paradox of solitude and communion.

I.16-24. A formal proof comes next. It begins at I.16, which lists the evidence that the world is the reader’s own. The meditations after it take up God’s attributes (He is a delight, not a terror), His works, the soul’s powers, His laws, the senses and the soul’s insatiable appetite. King Pyrrhus of Epirus and Alexander the Great serve as warnings of that appetite gone astray. The movement ends with a short summing-up in which covetousness and ambition are satisfied rather than suppressed, and it adds the book’s method, which is to show that delight is reasonable.

I.25-31. Here the refrain begins. A chain of meditations tells the reader she never enjoys the world aright until she values each thing above a king’s treasury, sees the acorn as angels see it, wakes every morning in heaven and feels the sea in her veins. The first glimpse of the author’s childhood comes here, the dust of the street that looked like gold. The movement ends with a litany of what the world is and no one sees, a mirror, a temple, the gate of heaven, closing on Jacob waking at Bethel, and it gives the book its most memorable music.

I.32-39. The failure of men is then explained. They miss the gift because they despise what they have because they have it, and invent new treasures, scarce and useless, which bring strife, envy and a madness shared by all and therefore taken for wisdom. Against these riches of darkness stand the riches of light, free and endless, and the same world is a paradise to one soul and a prison to another. The movement ends with the refrain resumed and the true enjoyer made like God, the darling of His bosom, and it adds the book’s diagnosis of fallen society.

I.40-44. Here the book takes its greatest risk. Its most daring argument opens by correcting Socrates, who rejoiced at how much he could do without. Felicity is made of wants and supplies, as a picture is made of lights and shades, and the heathen gods who needed nothing had for that reason no being at all. God has wanted from eternity and possessed from eternity, and His wants delight Him as much as His treasures. The movement ends in the command to want like God, and adds the doctrine of divine want that the rest of the book assumes.

I.45-51. The doctrine is then turned on the reader. She must feel her wants in order to feel her treasures, for need is what gives the sun and the sea their value. To prize blessings while having them is heaven, to have them unprized is earth, and to prize them when they are gone is hell, which is itself part of God’s kingdom, His prison. The movement ends by calling wants the ligatures between God and the soul, the sinews through which His joys pass into us, and it adds the book’s sternest pages.

I.52-55. Friendship with God comes next. If God’s will is the soul’s own, all His treasures are hers, and the soul that wills as He does becomes the universal heir. Such a soul is never desolate, for all ages, saints, councils and temples are present to it, and it can visit Noah in the ark or Solomon in his glory by journeys of thought. The movement ends by placing the Cross above all these sights, as the throne of delights and the tree of life, and it adds the soul’s presence in all times, which the Cross will make concrete.

I.56-61. The Cross now takes the centre. It draws all men as the earth’s centre draws heavy things, and a litany gives it title after title, abyss of wonders, school of virtues, gate of heaven. It is the one mirror in which things show their true colours, Jacob’s ladder, and a tree burning with invisible flame. The movement ends on the crucified as tutor to King Charles the Martyr and master of St Paul, the school where the soul learns to love all men as Christ did, and it adds a theology of the Cross as a place of vision.

I.62-69. Exposition turns to prayer. The speaker addresses Christ crucified as his friend and joy, applies the five senses to Golgotha, and then looks back through the wounds to the creation made for him before he was redeemed. Heaven and earth, the body with eyes like diamonds, the Image of God and all other souls are received as gifts. The movement ends in praise of a God infinitely infinite in all His doings, and it adds the first-person voice of devotion, which governs most of the rest of the Century.

I.70-74. Love is given its laws. God commands all men to love each one, and each to love all whom He loves, so that no soul can be loved in isolation. Love lives in its objects and is multiplied by them. The movement ends in a small hymn to a kingdom where every one is happy in every other and all are like gods, since the same good is increased by being enjoyed. It adds the arithmetic of felicity, which answers any charge that the book’s happiness is selfish.

I.75-79. The Fall and redemption are told in prayer. The speaker prays in the person of Adam, who offended in an apple against the giver of the whole world, and confesses that he would never have known the dignity of his nature if Christ had not taken it on. The world is sprinkled with the Saviour’s blood and so restored to him. The movement ends with a prayer to spend blood, estate, life and time for the good of all, knit together in godly love, and it adds penitence to praise.

I.80-85. I.80, which Traherne later struck through, speaks to the friend directly, asks whether two souls united by Christ’s blood cannot love each other at a distance of a hundred miles, and counsels her to make the place she lives in fragrant with virtue. It is a letter within the book. The meditations that follow commend the poor as Christ’s members, the hidden saints like jewels in ruins, and friends who exchange souls. The movement ends by rebuking those who busy themselves only with things at home, when by seeing the saints of all ages they might live in their company, and it adds the communion of saints across all ages.

I.86-90. The prayers return to the Cross. Kneeling before the crucified, the speaker learns that Christ loves each soul wholly, as if it were alone, and asks to gaze on Him until he is changed into Him. The prayers follow the signs of the Passion, the darkened sun, the rent veil and the opened graves, and find God most divine when He appeared as a man. The movement ends with Christ as the true Samson, who by dying killed all his enemies and carried away the gates of death, and it adds the most intense devotional writing in the book.

I.91-94. The prayers grow more urgent. They seek a will made one with God’s, a love as strong as death and a fire that never goes out on the altar of the heart. The speaker would rather suffer hell with St Anselm, the medieval archbishop of Canterbury, than sin, and he learns that the Cross is equally near across all the ages, and the soul is an endless temple. The movement ends with St Paul’s prayer from Ephesians, to know the breadth and length and depth and height of Christ’s love, and it adds the union of wills that the whole Century has been seeking.

I.95-100. The Spirit is the last theme. The prayers turn to Pentecost, the new commandment and the communion of saints, and ask for a love that leaves the soul never alone. The Century then closes in exposition. God made us His sons in capacity, and the Spirit makes us sons in act when we prize all things as He does, and things are truly present only in a soul that sees them. The movement ends with the song of Moses and the Lamb, and it adds the distinction of capacity and act that governs the rest of the book.

The Second Century

II.1-6. The Second Century begins with the world’s services. The world is the first gift God gives every infant and the gate of eternity. Only one who sees it as his own can weigh sin, the Fall and the Redeemer, since a man who does not know to what he is redeemed cannot prize redemption. The movement ends by arguing that a God who gave heaven and earth can easily be believed to have given His Son as well, and it adds the claim that a right view of creation is the ground of faith.