Centuries of Meditations

The Timaeus stands behind two of his central convictions. Its maker is good, and “in him that is good no envy ariseth” (29e), so he wished all things to be as like himself as possible. The same principle leads the Third Century to expect the best things to be the most common (III.53). The Timaeus also calls the cosmos a living creature and a visible god made in the image of the intelligible (30b, 92c), and the Second Century takes up the thought with care. The ancient philosophers thought God the soul of the world, and Traherne calls the world His body, “not His natural body, but which He hath assumed” (II.21), borrowing the language of the Incarnation to keep clear of pantheism. Pantheism, the belief that God and the world are one, is the step he will not take. The Phaedrus offers the nearest Platonic parallel to the Third Century, for there the soul remembers what it saw “in the pure light” before birth (250c). Traherne’s first light, however, belongs to this life. The infant did not remember heaven; he saw the earth.

Aristotle. Aristotle is named once, for his definition of felicity as the perfect exercise of perfect virtue in a perfect life (III.68, from Nicomachean Ethics 1098a16-18), but he runs silently under much of the book. Beyond the blank tablet of De Anima (430a1), already met behind the empty book of the first page, the same work holds that “the soul is in a way all existing things” (431b21). That becomes the Second Century’s soul, which “by understanding becometh all Things” (II.78). The Physics lists eight senses in which one thing may be in another and names place as the most proper (210a14-24), while Traherne counts the same eight manners of in-being and reverses the ranking in favour of knowledge (I.100). Even the Greek of II.82 is Aristotle’s, for the two phrases Traherne quotes there, kata dunamin and ekeinou heneka, which he renders as to the utmost of its power and for His sake, come from the definition of love in the Rhetoric (1380b35-1381a1).

Hermes through Pico. The Hermetic books reach the Centuries chiefly through Pico, whose oration opens with Abdala the Saracen and then quotes the Hermetic Asclepius, in the line Traherne renders “Man is a great and wonderful miracle” (IV.74). Traherne’s version is faithful but not neutral. Where Pico’s God takes man as indiscretae opus imaginis, a work of indeterminate form, Traherne’s takes him as “the Image of all His work” (IV.75), which turns Pico’s shapeless creature into the microcosm, the little world that sums up the great one. He cuts from God’s speech the sentence in which Adam may sink into the brutes, though the seeds of IV.77 still let a man who chooses sensual things become a beast. He then calls the whole creation scene a fable (IV.79), insists that the angels too are free, and ends by making love the best use of human freedom. In Everard’s Divine Pymander the Mind bids Hermes make himself immeasurably great and teaches him to be in every place and every time at once. The First Century’s conditions for enjoying the world, that the spirit should fill the whole world and know God’s ways in all ages (I.29-30), come closer to that passage than anything else in the book, and they change it. What Hermes is told to achieve by his own effort, Traherne’s reader is shown as a gift already made.

Plotinus. Plotinus (AD 205-270), the Greek philosopher from whom later Platonism descends, is never named in the Centuries, and there is no proof that Traherne read him, though Ficino’s Latin translation was widely available. The likeness is nonetheless strong. In the fifth Ennead the minds of the intelligible world see themselves in one another, each containing the whole, so that the glory there is without limit (Enneads V.8.4). That is very close to the First Century’s heaven, where every happy person is happy again in every other (I.74). In the first Ennead, in Stephen MacKenna’s translation, Plotinus writes that “Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike” (Enneads I.6.9). Sight changes the seer. Traherne prays to be changed by looking, “O let me so long eye Thee, till I be turned into Thee” (I.87). The difference matters as much as the likeness. Plotinus’s intellect is impersonal and his ascent leaves the many behind, while Traherne multiplies persons and keeps each one distinct.

The Cambridge Platonists. On infinite space Traherne was bolder than Henry More (1614-87), who had given space many divine titles but stopped short of the Fifth Century’s claim that it is the very essence of the Deity (V.3). With the other Cambridge men the likeness is one of temper. Ralph Cudworth (1617-88) preached that “Every true Saint, carrieth his Heaven about with him”, and the Fourth Century holds that heaven is established not by a change of place but by principles well practised (IV.37). John Smith (1618-52) wrote that “Such as Men themselves are, such will God himself seem to be”, and the Third Century that everything depends on “with what eyes we beheld them” (III.68). Their watchword was right reason, and Traherne uses the phrase too (IV.81). The difference is one of genre as much as of doctrine. They wrote sermons and treatises for the public and argued with Hobbes and the Calvinists in the open, whereas he wrote a notebook for a friend, and whatever system it holds is carried by praise, memory and prayer.