Centuries of Meditations

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).