Centuries of Meditations

The Fifth Century opens with a new plan. God is both the object of felicity and the way of enjoying it, and His attributes are to be taken in turn (V.1). Infinity comes first, “the room and the place of our treasures” (V.2), then eternity and omnipresence (V.6-10), and the tenth meditation ends on the words “perfecting and completing our bliss and happiness”. There the text stops.

Themes

Felicity and Wants

Felicity is the book’s word for the good it offers, the philosophers’ name for the happiness that is the end of human life, and Traherne uses it with a directness that most devotional writers of his century would have thought presumptuous. He is not embarrassed by joy. The question is never whether the soul may be happy in this life, but how, and his answer turns on a single word, want, which in his English meant both lack and longing. He sets himself against Socrates, who walked through the Athenian market marvelling at how many things he could do without (I.40), and against the philosophers who define felicity “in negatives” as contentment and self-sufficiency (II.100). Happiness, he argues, is an emptiness met by a supply, and the power to lack is the same as the power to receive.

The daring step is to place want in God Himself, in a sentence that reads like a riddle, “He wanted, yet He wanted not, for He had them” (I.41). God lacked worlds, spectators and joys, and had them all from eternity, because in eternity the need and its answer stand side by side and neither ever passes away. The want of God is therefore no poverty in Him, and the book can say that “Want in God is a treasure to us” (I.42), since our existence is the answer to it. From this follows the maxim that sums up the First Century, “You must want like a God that you may be satisfied like God” (I.44). Want, rightly understood, is a likeness to God.

The doctrine runs straight into the life. The child of the Third Century, lost among toys, would still come to himself “so far as to feel I wanted something” (III.15), and the four-year-old’s question about his poverty is want doing its proper work. Desire drives the story. Traherne never asks the reader to kill desire, only to educate it, and what he teaches the soul to want is what God already gives without price, the sun, the sea, the body and other souls. That answers the charge, easily made, that this is a licence for appetite. It is rather a discipline of attention, and of all the book’s doctrines it is the most original and the one that has worn best.

The Infinite and the Soul

Where many of his contemporaries met the infinite as a problem, Traherne meets it as a home. Hobbes had denied that the mind can form any idea of the infinite, and the Second Century answers him in kind, though never by name. A man born deaf and blind, it argues, feels infinite space about him before he ever touches a wall, so that “infinite is the first thing which is naturally known” (II.81). The wall comes later. The understanding is the truest image of God’s own boundlessness, “such an endless, invisible, and mysterious receiver” (II.24).

The Fifth Century carries the doctrine to its limit. Infinite space is the room of all treasures, which the angels see without eyes, and at the height of the argument it is called “the eternal and incomprehensible essence of the Deity” (V.3). That is a bold sentence for a priest of the Church of England, and it shows how far Traherne was prepared to follow a thought, even to the edge of saying that God and space are one. Yet his infinity is never cold. The one time it frightens him is in childhood, alone in a field at dusk, when the sheer width of the place filled him with horror until hope came to him “from every border” (III.23). Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and apologist, confessed in the same decades that the silence of infinite space terrified him. Traherne knew that fear, and he treats it as a stage the soul passes through.

The moral edge of the doctrine is easily missed, for if the soul is made to the measure of the infinite, then to feel cramped is a failure of perception rather than of circumstance. Among the Fourth Century’s closing consequences is “An exact fitness between the powers of the soul, and its objects” (IV.100). The soul is not too large for its world, nor the world too small for its soul, since each was made to the measure of the other.

The World as Treasure

The book runs on two economies, the riches of darkness, which men invent and value because they are scarce and difficult to get, and the riches of light, which God distributes freely to all (I.32-35). The Third Century names them again as the riches of invention and the riches of nature (III.9), and the method of the Century rests on the discovery of “a real valuableness in all the common things; in the scarce, a feigned” (III.53). The market’s order is reversed. Air, light, water, the sun, men and women, cities and temples are the true wealth, while gold and silver are “the very refuse of Nature” (III.62), good in their places but worthless as ends. The Second Century had already put the point bluntly (II.7), asking “what could a man do with a purse of gold in an everlasting dungeon?”