Centuries of Meditations

The Fathers. Behind all these stands the older Christian Platonism of the Fathers of the Church. Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329-390), the Greek bishop and theologian, is quoted by name, from his thirty-eighth oration, on goodness that could not rest in contemplating itself and so poured itself out in creation (III.65). The same oration calls man a second world, great in littleness, and the Fourth Century’s soul, in which the dimensions of innumerable worlds are shut up in a centre (IV.81), is the same idea. Here the likeness is exact. From St Augustine (354-430), never named, comes the near-quotation of I.59, “If Love be the weight of the Soul”, for Augustine had written pondus meum amor meus, my weight is my love (Confessions XIII.9.10). The boldest patristic theme is deification, the teaching that men become by grace what God is by nature, which rests on the promise that believers might be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Traherne states it without fear. To be sons of God “is to be like Him, and to share with Him in all His glory” (III.97).

What emerges is a Platonism of the particular. The classical ascent leaves bodies, persons and places behind on its way to the One, but Traherne’s ascent keeps all of them and finds the infinite in each. The grain of sand, the stranger at the door, the dying man on the Cross and the child in the street are not rungs to be kicked away, as the steps of a ladder are once the climber has reached the top. They are the places where infinity is met.

Relation to Other Works

Traherne’s other writings. The Centuries belong to a body of work that has been recovered only piece by piece, and they read differently beside it. Christian Ethicks (1675), his treatise on the virtues, printed just after his death, contains a longer version of the little poem on bounded power at III.21, and it argues out at length the doctrine of felicity that the Centuries state in flashes. The two books share a vocabulary. Select Meditations, an earlier set of centuries surviving in a copy made under his eye, covers much of the same ground in a plainer and more public voice. The Thanksgivings, printed without his name in 1699, turn the praise of the body and the world into long free-verse litanies. The manuscripts found since the 1960s, among them The Kingdom of God and the unfinished encyclopedia Commentaries of Heaven, show a mind that also worked on a vast systematic scale. Beside them the Centuries are the most personal and least systematic statement of that mind, the one place where the doctrine is tested against a life.

Vaughan. Henry Vaughan (1621-95), the Welsh physician and poet, was Traherne’s nearest neighbour in spirit as well as in country. His poem The Retreate, in Silex Scintillans (1650), looks back to the days when he “Shin’d in my angel-infancy”, and its wish to move backward to the child’s first sight runs close to the Third Century. The difference is doctrinal. Vaughan’s child, like the soul of the Phaedrus, remembers a life before this one, and Vaughan mourns a light that can be recovered only after death. Traherne teaches that it can be recovered now, by reason and by grace, in the ordinary life of a parish and a household.

Herbert and Browne. George Herbert (1593-1633), whose The Temple (1633) made the devotional lyric part of the Church of England’s inheritance, stands behind the poems set into the Third Century. The stanzas on sin at III.49 each begin with a single exclaimed word and then swell and narrow on the page, a patterned lyric of Herbert’s kind. The prose shares Herbert’s trust in the ordered worship of the parish church and his habit of turning theology into a conversation with God, so that argument slides into prayer without any change of key. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82), the Norwich physician, confessed in Religio Medici (1643) that he loved to lose himself in a mystery, and wrote that “We carry with us the wonders, we seek without us”. The First Century’s happy loss of oneself in wonder, and the Second’s world within the soul, are Browne’s temper turned from curiosity to praise.

Later kin. The kinship with later writers is striking, and none of it can be influence, since the Centuries were not printed until 1908. Dobell himself found II.67 “singularly Blake-like” and set it beside Auguries of Innocence by the visionary poet William Blake, which opens with the wish to see a world in a grain of sand. William Wordsworth’s great ode Intimations of Immortality (1807) tells the same story as the Third Century, the child’s glory and the growing dark, in which “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy”. But Wordsworth, like Vaughan, gives the child a life before birth, and his ode ends in consolation for a loss that is never undone, a thoughtful calm taking the place of the vision. Traherne’s loss is undone.