Centuries of Meditations

Outline

The Centuries are built from short numbered paragraphs, a hundred to each Century, four complete Centuries and ten meditations of a fifth, with the four-line Inscription standing before them all. Traherne numbered the meditations but did not group them, so the joints of the argument have to be found by reading. They come where a new question is raised, a new image takes over, or the voice changes, as it does when exposition becomes prayer at I.62 and when the author turns into a third person at IV.1. The Outline follows those joints. It divides the book into sixty-one movements and gives for each its range, what it does, where it comes to rest and what it adds to the whole.

The First Century

I.1-6. The book opens with a gift and a promise. Traherne accepts the friend’s blank book and promises to fill it with truths she loves without knowing them. He defends that promise against the scholastic maxim that nothing unknown can be loved, since unknown things draw the soul as a lodestone draws iron. He names the great gift, that she is heir of the world, and promises to lead her to it by gentle ways, not by the wars and dethroned kings of his own age. The movement ends on a paradox, that enjoying the world will teach her to despise it, and so poses the question the next movement answers.

I.7-10. The paradox of I.6 is resolved at once. There are two worlds, the beautiful one God made and the Babel of invented riches that men have made, and with Thomas à Kempis, the medieval author of The Imitation of Christ, the reader is told to give all for all. Meditation is the easy means of enjoyment, and only habit and custom make good thinking hard, since to think well is to serve God in the inner court of the mind. The movement ends by claiming that a soul which enjoys the world fulfils the very purpose for which God made it, and so sets the stakes for everything that follows.

I.11-15. Holiness becomes a matter of valuing. It is defined as right prizing, the rendering to each thing of its due value, and the soul pleases God most when it values things as He does. God made one Adam and not a crowd, to show that each person is the end of the whole world, and other souls are added not as rivals but as jewels that enrich the inheritance. The movement ends with a Latin sentence Traherne gives to the Roman Stoic Seneca, God gave me alone to all the world and all the world to me alone, and it adds the book’s central paradox of solitude and communion.

I.16-24. A formal proof comes next. It begins at I.16, which lists the evidence that the world is the reader’s own. The meditations after it take up God’s attributes (He is a delight, not a terror), His works, the soul’s powers, His laws, the senses and the soul’s insatiable appetite. King Pyrrhus of Epirus and Alexander the Great serve as warnings of that appetite gone astray. The movement ends with a short summing-up in which covetousness and ambition are satisfied rather than suppressed, and it adds the book’s method, which is to show that delight is reasonable.

I.25-31. Here the refrain begins. A chain of meditations tells the reader she never enjoys the world aright until she values each thing above a king’s treasury, sees the acorn as angels see it, wakes every morning in heaven and feels the sea in her veins. The first glimpse of the author’s childhood comes here, the dust of the street that looked like gold. The movement ends with a litany of what the world is and no one sees, a mirror, a temple, the gate of heaven, closing on Jacob waking at Bethel, and it gives the book its most memorable music.

I.32-39. The failure of men is then explained. They miss the gift because they despise what they have because they have it, and invent new treasures, scarce and useless, which bring strife, envy and a madness shared by all and therefore taken for wisdom. Against these riches of darkness stand the riches of light, free and endless, and the same world is a paradise to one soul and a prison to another. The movement ends with the refrain resumed and the true enjoyer made like God, the darling of His bosom, and it adds the book’s diagnosis of fallen society.

I.40-44. Here the book takes its greatest risk. Its most daring argument opens by correcting Socrates, who rejoiced at how much he could do without. Felicity is made of wants and supplies, as a picture is made of lights and shades, and the heathen gods who needed nothing had for that reason no being at all. God has wanted from eternity and possessed from eternity, and His wants delight Him as much as His treasures. The movement ends in the command to want like God, and adds the doctrine of divine want that the rest of the book assumes.

I.45-51. The doctrine is then turned on the reader. She must feel her wants in order to feel her treasures, for need is what gives the sun and the sea their value. To prize blessings while having them is heaven, to have them unprized is earth, and to prize them when they are gone is hell, which is itself part of God’s kingdom, His prison. The movement ends by calling wants the ligatures between God and the soul, the sinews through which His joys pass into us, and it adds the book’s sternest pages.