In the winter of 1896-7, as the story is usually told, William T. Brooke, a hymn scholar, bought the two manuscripts from London bookstalls for a few pence. By his own later account he bought them separately, in April 1897. Brooke took them for Vaughan’s and told Grosart, who bought them, and so, it seems, bought back the manuscripts he had owned a quarter of a century before. Grosart wavered between candidates, trying the Puritan scholar Theophilus Gale and the alchemist Thomas Vaughan, Henry’s twin brother, before settling on Henry, and he had prepared an edition of Vaughan that included them when he died in 1899.

Grosart’s library was sold, and Bertram Dobell, a bookseller of Charing Cross Road and a man of letters, was allowed to examine the two manuscripts before he bought them. He soon doubted that they were Vaughan’s. The true name was found through a chain of clues. Brooke remembered a poem he had copied long before from the book of thanksgivings printed without a name in 1699, A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation of the Mercies of God, and Dobell judged its verses the work of the manuscript’s author. The book’s preface did not name its author, but it said he had been chaplain to the Lord Keeper, Bridgeman, and Brooke then found the chaplain’s name, Thomas Traherne, in Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses, the register of Oxford writers and their books. The last link, which Dobell called “proof positive”, was the poem the Centuries share with Christian Ethicks.

Dobell printed the poems in 1903 as The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne, and in June 1908, from his shop at 77 Charing Cross Road, he published the Centuries of Meditations himself, with a second issue following in December. He was an unlikely champion. The son of a tailor, he had left school early, worked as an errand boy, built a bookshop from nothing, and become the friend and publisher of the pessimist poet James Thomson. He was a freethinker who said openly that he did not share Traherne’s beliefs, and the book owes its place in English literature to his judgement.

Its World

Traherne grew up in a cathedral city at war. Hereford changed hands more than once in the first Civil War, was besieged by a Scottish army in the summer of 1645, and in December of that year fell to Parliament’s troops, taken by surprise when soldiers disguised as labourers seized a gate. Traherne was about eight. The execution of Charles I in January 1649 fell in his twelfth year, and the Centuries keep a few traces of that world. Traherne promises his friend to advance her not “by the noise of bloody wars and the dethroning of kings” (I.4), and he calls the dead king “the Martyr” (I.61), as the Restoration Prayer Book did in its service for the day of his death.

The Oxford he entered in 1653 had been purged by Parliament and put under Puritan rule, with Cromwell as its Chancellor and John Owen, a stern divine who held that each congregation should govern itself, as its Vice-Chancellor. In the same years a club of experimenters met at Wadham College under its Warden, John Wilkins, and after the Restoration it grew into the Royal Society. A student of the 1650s could meet the sternest Calvinism and the newest science in the same streets, and Traherne’s book has something of both, the Puritan’s intensity and the natural philosopher’s delight in the frame of things. It belongs to neither.

His church was the Church of England as it was restored in 1660, ruled by bishops, bound to the Book of Common Prayer and national in its claims, after fifteen years in which the Prayer Book had been banned. Traherne had been approved as a preacher under Cromwell and ordained by a bishop before the law required it, a common path, and nothing in the Centuries looks back fondly to the Puritan years. The book’s language is that of the Prayer Book and the Authorised Version of 1611. It prays in the words of the Creeds and the Te Deum, the ancient hymn of praise sung at Morning Prayer, and it speaks of “the Holy Catholic Church” (I.79) in the Creed’s sense, not Rome’s. The one contemporary party it names is named to be refuted, the Socinians (II.33), followers of the Italian Fausto Sozzini, who denied that Christ was God.

The new science reached Traherne as it reached most educated men, as a widening of the world. The telescope had multiplied the stars, and Galileo, the Italian astronomer who turned it on the heavens, and Hevelius, the Danzig astronomer who charted the face of the moon, both appear by name in the Third Century, among the masters of human knowledge. The book takes no side on the motion of the earth. What it takes from the new picture of the heavens is scale. The Second Century can say of the universe that “whether it be infinite or no, we cannot tell” (II.21), and it draws from that open question a lesson about the soul.

The infinite divided Traherne’s contemporaries. Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan (1651) described man as a creature of appetite and fear, held that the mind can have no idea of anything infinite, since it knows only what the senses have shown it and all it can imagine is finite. Henry More, the Cambridge philosopher, argued that space would remain if all matter were taken away and must be something incorporeal and divine, and Traherne, who read More closely and quarrelled with him, stands far nearer to him than to Hobbes. “Few will believe the soul to be infinite,” he writes (II.81), and the Second Century sets out to prove it.

More belonged to the group now called the Cambridge Platonists, divines who answered both Puritan dogmatism and Hobbes with a religion of reason, love and the inner life. Benjamin Whichcote taught that heaven is a temper of the spirit before it is a place. Ralph Cudworth told the House of Commons in 1647 that ink and paper can never make us Christians, and John Smith held that divinity is a divine life before it is a divine science. Any of those sentences could stand in the Centuries.

Traherne was an Oxford man and never one of their circle, but he shared their temper, and he copied extracts from Gale, the Puritan Platonist, into his commonplace book. The American scholar Carol Marks, who set out the connection in 1966, found him closest in feeling to Peter Sterry, Cromwell’s chaplain and the maverick of that company. What joins them is less a doctrine than a confidence. They share the conviction that God is love, that reason is His gift and not His rival, and that the soul was made for joy.

Behind the Cambridge men, and behind Traherne, stands the Platonism of Renaissance Florence. Among his notebooks is a Latin one, headed as a digest of Plato’s practical teaching made by Marsilio Ficino, the fifteenth-century scholar who translated the whole of Plato into Latin. Traherne read Plato through Ficino. From that tradition he took two convictions that run through the whole book, that the visible world is an image of an invisible good, and that love is the power by which the soul rises towards it. Aristotle, whom the schools of the universities called simply the Philosopher, is named only once, but his account of the mind before it thinks, as a tablet on which nothing is yet written, stands behind the empty book of the opening sentence.

The same Florentine circle had revived the writings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-great Hermes, a legendary Egyptian sage whose Greek treatises of the early centuries AD were then believed to be of immense age. Traherne knew them in John Everard’s English version, The Divine Pymander (1650), and copied from it. In the Fourth Century he translates part of the Oration on the Dignity of Man, the Latin speech Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote in 1486 to open a public debate in Rome (IV.74-77). In it God tells the first man that he has been given no fixed place in the world, and may make of himself what he chooses.

None of this makes Traherne an occultist. He took Hermes and Plato as many divines of his century took them, as pagan witnesses to truths that Scripture states plainly, a view Gale had argued at length, and he kept them inside a faith shaped by the Prayer Book. The mixture is his own. Much of the book’s strangeness comes from it, a country rector’s devotion written in the vocabulary of the Florentine academy, with neither diminished by the other.

What to Look For

The Centuries have no plot, though the Third Century tells a story, but they have an argument that grows by returning to its themes, images that recur and deepen, and a voice that changes as it goes. A first reading goes better for knowing what to watch.

The empty book and the friend. The book never forgets that it is a book, written in a notebook for one reader, and the “you” of the First and Second Centuries is first of all a particular woman to whom a promise has been made. Watch the manner of address, the warmth and the occasional sternness, and ask what kind of book is being written, a letter, a treatise, a prayer book or a notebook of discoveries. The answer is probably all four, in turn and at once.

Felicity and wants. Felicity, the book’s master-word, means happiness in its fullest sense, not a passing pleasure but the settled joy of a soul that has what it was made for. Traherne insists that it can be had in this life, and from things already given. Set beside it from the start is a stranger word, want, which in his English means lack and need before it means desire. Men are first shown burdened with wants they have invented for themselves, and then Socrates, the Athenian philosopher, walks through the market at Athens marvelling at how many things there are “which I do not want” (I.40), and most moralists would side with him. Traherne takes issue with him. A first reader should ask what could be wrong with needing little, and what kind of wanting a Christian teacher could possibly defend.

The infinite and the soul’s capacity. The book’s boldest claims are about size. “Alas the WORLD is but a little centre in comparison of you,” Traherne tells his friend (I.19), and later he writes that “my Soul is an infinite sphere in a centre” (II.80). The second of these borrows a formula that medieval writers, quoting a book ascribed to Hermes, applied to God, whom they called a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, and Traherne applies it to the soul. By infinite he does not mean merely very large. He means that the soul’s power to know and to love has no edge, that there is nothing it could not take in, and that nothing less than everything will satisfy it. Watch how such claims are argued. Traherne proceeds less by proof than by experiment, asking the reader to do something with the mind, to imagine the sun away or to think past the stars, and then to notice what the mind has done.