Centuries of Meditations

Introduction

Traherne’s book begins by describing itself. “An empty book is like an infant’s soul, in which anything may be written,” runs its first sentence (I.1), and the empty book is the notebook he was writing in, a friend’s present. She had put its blank leaves into his hands. On a flyleaf he wrote four lines of verse sending the book back to her, “That she may write my Maker’s prais therin”, so that the gift would return to its giver full of praise and she might go on filling it. It is a book about receiving, written in a book received.

Its later history reads like a parable of its teaching. For two centuries nobody knew who had written it, and when it was bought for a few pence from a London bookstall in 1896 or 1897, the lettering on its spine gave it to another poet, the Welshman Henry Vaughan. A book that teaches its reader to recognise what is truly his own had lost its maker’s name, and it came close to being printed under a stranger’s. That it was not is owed to a hymn scholar, a sceptical bookseller and a short poem that turned up in two places.

The Centuries of Meditations are a devotional book, but an unusual one. They argue as much as they pray, draw on Plato and Aristotle as readily as on St Paul, and take as their subject not sin or duty but happiness, which Traherne calls felicity, and the world as the place where it is found. Its central claim is easy to state and hard to believe. The sun, the air, the sea, the earth and other people are not scenery but gifts, made by God for each person and given to each whole. No one receives a share of them, since each receives all, as if no one else were there, and so every soul is heir of the whole world.

Most people own this inheritance without knowing it. They chase the scarce things men have invented, gold and titles and fashions, and pass over the common things that are worth far more, and Traherne sets out to reverse that valuation. Felicity, in his sense, is not a mood but the soul’s full enjoyment of what it has already been given, and it begins with learning to see. The soul was made large enough for such a gift, with a capacity no finite thing can fill, and a small child, before anyone has taught it what to value, sees the world very nearly as it is. The whole book is an education of the eye.

The Author

Thomas Traherne was born in Hereford about 1637, the son of a shoemaker, though no record of his baptism survives and the year is worked back from his entry to Oxford. His father was very probably John Traherne, a master craftsman and freeman of the city in the parish of All Saints, who kept apprentices and served as an officer in the royalist militia during the Civil War, when he was taken prisoner. Nothing is known of his mother. A younger brother, Philip (1640-1723), stayed close to him all his life. Philip went out as chaplain to the English merchants at Smyrna, later became a minister in Dorset, and after Thomas’s death kept several of his manuscripts and revised them, heavily, for the press.

Traherne may have been taught at the cathedral school in Hereford, and he was admitted to Brasenose College, Oxford, on 1 March 1653 as a commoner, a student paying his own way, and took his BA in October 1656. In December 1657, before any bishop had ordained him, he was made rector of Credenhill, a small country parish in Herefordshire, with the approval of the Triers, the commissioners Oliver Cromwell had appointed to vet preachers. The patron was Amabella, dowager Countess of Kent.

After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 he was ordained in the restored Church of England, deacon and priest on the same day, 20 October, by Robert Skinner, bishop of Oxford, since Hereford then had no bishop. He became Master of Arts the next year, and in August 1662 he subscribed to the Act of Uniformity, which drove from their livings some two thousand ministers who would not conform. He took the further degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1669. When he first went to live at Credenhill is not clear, but in 1673 his churchwardens reported that he visited the sick, taught the young, and was continually resident among them.

The best portrait of him comes from the unsigned preface to a book of his printed in 1699, whose writer, a friend, called him “a man of a cheerful and sprightly Temper”, generous to the poor almost beyond his means. He never missed the daily services of the Prayer Book. He was so full of the love of God, and of the happiness it promises, that anyone who talked with him had to hear about it, believer or not, and some, the preface admits, found him troublesome. The Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood, writing in 1692, adds that he “always led a single and a devout life” and was well read in the early councils and the Fathers of the Church.