Centuries of Meditations

This is not the contempt of the world that a monk might teach, as Traherne insists at the outset (I.7), but a revaluation, and it has a social edge. The child who “knew no churlish proprieties, nor bounds, nor divisions” (III.3) grew up in the age of enclosure, when common land was being hedged into private fields. The world he describes is owned wholly by each person and wholly by all, because spiritual possession does not divide. What is enjoyed is multiplied, not shared out.

Some readers find in all this an innocence about poverty, and the charge has some force, since Traherne chose his own ten pounds a year and could have chosen otherwise. But the goods he names are precisely those that poverty cannot take away, and the Fourth Century draws the conclusion without flinching, “A naked man is the richest creature in all worlds” (IV.36). Adam in Eden owned nothing and possessed everything.

Childhood, Custom and Apostasy

The opening of the Third Century is the most famous prose Traherne wrote, and read in its place it is an argument, not a memoir, in which every detail is chosen to prove a point. It proves by example what the First Century asserted by reason, that the right sight of the world is native to the soul, is lost by culture and can be regained. The word he chooses for the loss is a theologian’s, for apostasy, a standing away, was the term for the fall of the rebel angels and of Adam, and he applies it to a small boy’s forgetting (III.2).

What caused the loss was custom, since the adults around him spoke only of other things, and “All things were absent which they talked not of” (III.10). The weight Traherne puts on this is bold. Misery comes far more from opinion and custom than from inward corruption, “not our parents’ loins, so much as our parents’ lives” (III.8). The Ninth of the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Church of England’s statement of doctrine, had denied that original sin lies only in following Adam’s bad example. That had been the teaching of the Pelagians, followers of the fifth-century monk Pelagius, who held that Adam harmed his descendants by his example rather than by passing on a corrupted nature. Traherne comes close to that line. But he adds in the next breath that all our corruption still comes from Adam, through the examples and inclinations his sin let loose, and the rest of the book is anything but light on sin (III.47-51).

The recovery is not a return to the cradle. What the child knew by intuition, the man gathered again “by the highest reason” (III.2). The task is to unlearn “the dirty devices of this world” (III.3) and so to turn and become a little child again, as Christ told his disciples they must (Matthew 18:3). Unlearning is the method. The infant’s vision is the evidence, and Scripture, reason and prayer are the road back, which is why the autobiography ceases to be autobiography and turns into a long meditation on David. The recovered child is a grown man who has learned to see deliberately what he once saw without trying.

Love and Communion

If the world belongs wholly to each person, the question is how it can belong to all without theft, and the book’s answer is love. “Love is the true means by which the world is enjoyed” (II.62), because love lives in the persons it loves and enjoys the world again through them. The Second Century builds a doctrine of the Trinity out of this, the Father begetting His Son by loving, and makes the soul a small copy of it, a lover who “does propagate and beget itself” by loving (II.48). Love makes the lover. Nothing, it adds, is ever loved too much, but other things are loved too little (II.66).

The Fourth Century faces the objection of the moralists who said that all love is self-love, and turns it round. Self-love is the ground of love and must be satisfied first, since “That pool must first be filled that shall be made to overflow” (IV.55). God Himself seeks His own glory, but true glory is to love another for his own sake (IV.64), so His self-love and His love of His creatures are one thing. The riddle dissolves. The soul’s love, in turn, is both a mirror of God’s and a fountain of its own (IV.84-85).

Communion is the social form of this love, and the book keeps it concrete. Friends who “exchange Souls” (I.83) divide their estates and comforts, the author’s house is open to every stranger (IV.22), and the fallen world is a madhouse in which the happy man is physician (IV.20). None of it is abstract. The saints of all ages are present to the soul that thinks of them (I.85), and since much of the book was written for a single reader living at a distance, it is itself an act of the communion it describes.

The Cross

Readers who know Traherne only for the orient wheat of the Third Century are surprised to find that the longest single stretch of the First is spent at Golgotha. From I.54 to I.98 the Cross stands at the centre, “the only mirror, wherein all things appear in their proper colours” (I.59), and the object of prayers that are among the most intense passages he wrote. They are not decoration. The Cross is “a tree set on fire with invisible flame” (I.60), the flame being the love of the one who died on it.