Centuries of Meditations

The Cross is where felicity is priced. The world is worth having because it was bought, and the prayers say so plainly, “the World is sprinkled with Thy blood” (I.78). The Second Century works out the doctrine in the language of the schools, showing why no angel could have made satisfaction for sin and only the Son could (II.31-38). It then tells the story of the loyal Persian Zopyrus, who mutilated himself to win Babylon for his king, as a figure of what redemption cost (II.95). The consequence of all this is that Traherne’s joy is never cheap, since it rests on a death.

The Cross is also placed outside time. “Had the Cross been twenty millions of ages further, it had still been equally near” (I.92), because the soul reaches it by thought and love, not by travel. That sentence explains how the book can pass so easily from the Passion to the sunrise, since both are present gifts and the same eye that sees the one aright sees the other.

The Unfinished

The book is unfinished in more ways than one. Traherne left a blank where a reference escaped him (II.21), passed from 87 to 89 in his numbering (II.88), jotted four lines of verse beside a number, struck out a whole meditation (I.80) and began the Fourth Century twice. The fair copy was a working book. The Fifth Century then announces a treatise on the attributes of God and reaches only three of them, infinity, eternity and omnipresence, before it stops.

Why it stops is not known. Bertram Dobell, the first editor, supposed that death prevented him, but the move to Bridgeman’s household or a change of plan would explain it as well, and nothing in the manuscript says which it was. It would be false to claim that Traherne meant to stop there. Yet the form of the book makes the break easy to bear, since a Century is a set of numbered meditations, and a numbered series can always take one more. The subject, too, is one no treatise could finish, for the attributes the Fifth Century sets out to survey are infinite by definition. The teaching, moreover, has already reached its conclusion, for the Fourth Century ends on an Amen (IV.100), and the Fifth reads as an overture, a view of the country the reader has now been taught to enter.

Symbolism

Traherne’s images are few and he returns to them constantly, so that by the Fourth Century each one carries the weight of all its earlier uses. Most are images of receiving, a page that takes writing, an eye that takes light, a mirror, a temple, an heir, and the book’s boldest moments come when the receiver turns out to give as well.

The empty book. The book is an object before it is an argument, a notebook of blank leaves given by one friend to another and compared at once to the soul of a newborn child. The figure then multiplies. Christ’s wounds are writing too, “These bloody characters are too dim to let me read it” (I.64), and the child of the Third Century longs for a book from heaven and finds that it has already been written and sent (III.27). The book from heaven is the Bible. In the Fourth Century the principles of happiness ought to be cut into the heart “with a pen of a diamond” (IV.50). The empty book is therefore a figure of the soul as a surface made to receive, and writing is the book’s figure for praise. Traherne fills the friend’s pages so that she may learn to fill her own soul in the same way.

The infant eye. What the child of the Third Century possessed was not better objects but a better eye, one without the film that custom lays over sight, and able for that reason to see the dust of the street as gold. The poem at III.26 calls the soul “The heavenly eye” and makes it “Much wider than the sky”, and the whole ethic of the book is in that sense a matter of seeing. Its enemies are small, “A little grit in the eye destroyeth the sight of the very heavens” (IV.17), and its cure is attention. The infant is the book’s proof that the unclouded eye is natural, and the grown man’s task is to clear his own.

The mirror. The world is a mirror of God’s beauty (I.31), the Cross the one mirror in which all things show their true colours (I.59), and the soul a looking-glass that gives back the sunbeams and is lit by them in turn (II.78). Seeing is a kind of exchange. There is also a false mirror, for the child corrupted by talk saw the world only in “The glass of imagination” (III.10). The Fourth Century then pushes the image to its limit. The soul returns God’s love as a glass returns the sun, and yet it can also love on its own account, so that it is “not called a mirror, but esteemed more, a real fountain” (IV.85). Souls on earth are “mirrors with lids” (IV.86), free to open and close. Here the image carries the book’s deepest claim, that the soul is more than a reflection, and it is where Traherne’s Christian Platonism parts from any doctrine in which the creature is merely a passive image of its source.