Centuries of Meditations

IV.38-41. The principles are summed up. A run of summary maxims presents the world as a stage on which virtue is exercised, and teaches that the objects of our joy are also the objects of our care. The friend found that he was miserable exactly as far as he had swerved from justice and right. The movement ends with the heart kept with all diligence, since out of it are the issues of life and death, and it adds a brief ethics of the inner life.

IV.42-48. Freedom comes next. God made man a free agent, able even to offend Him infinitely, and the speaker breaks into astonished prayer that he might therefore be the friend of God. The desire to please is first called the greatest snare and then pure gold, and to give is God’s happiness, to receive man’s. The movement ends with the lesson that what you are matters more to your happiness than what you enjoy, since everything depends on your love, and it adds freedom to the list of gifts.

IV.49-57. Self-love is defended. God made the soul capable of love by planting self-love in it, and upright nature climbs by steps from self-love to the love of God and all things. The pool must be filled before it can overflow, and the author spent ten years satisfying his self-love before he found it easy to love others better than himself. The movement ends with the lover living in others in order to receive their joys, and it adds a psychology of love that makes generosity the fruit of a satisfied self rather than its denial.

IV.58-65. Love’s sacrifice raises a riddle. Love will die for a brother and lose nothing by it, and it reaches across the veil between this life and the next, and here the first person breaks through the narrator’s disguise. Some men say that all love is self-love, and the riddle is answered by distinguishing true glory from vain, since true glory is to love another for his own sake. The movement ends by commanding love after God’s likeness, and it adds the book’s answer to the moralists of self-interest.

IV.66-73. Love is praised as infinite. It is an endless sphere hidden in a centre, the Bride of God, able to love all persons in all ages, all angels and all worlds, and to love every person as though he were the only one. It is in its infancy here and will reach its full stature in heaven, and to sit in God’s throne is to inhabit eternity and omnipresence. The movement ends with the claim that God is nothing less than infinite and cannot be enjoyed as finite, and it adds the enlarging of the soul by its objects.

IV.74-81. Pico enters the book. His Oration is quoted in Latin and translated, from Abdala the Saracen and Hermes to God’s speech to Adam and the seeds of every kind of life planted in him. Traherne then judges it, finding poetic fancy and deep things hidden together, calls the creation story a fable, grants the angels freedom too, and makes man’s best choice the choice to become love. The movement ends by declaring a single soul enough to convince every atheist in the world, and it adds the book’s fullest statement of human dignity.

IV.82-87. Is the soul a mirror or a fountain? Its beams of love are God’s reflected and yet its own, like a looking-glass that seems to be a real fountain of the sun’s light, while souls on earth are mirrors with lids, free to love or to refuse. The movement ends with the diviner love of the estate of grace, which can love sinners as God loved Adam out of nothing, and it adds the book’s final word on the soul’s freedom.

IV.88-93. Gratitude and contentment follow. God is to be thanked for His intention even where the gift seems small, and every estate, afflictions included, is the best for the one who has it, since God’s purpose in it is love. Praise is owed day and night, and in public. The movement ends with this life as the most precious season in all eternity, since only here can faith and hope be exercised, and it adds a theology of the present moment.

IV.94-100. The Century ends in practice. The principles must be practised, since the soul is made for action and idleness is its rust, and then the soul’s secret sufficiency and its freedom from every limit are shown. The movement ends with ten consequences of the soul’s infinite understanding and affection, from the manifestation of God’s love to the perfect indwelling of God in the soul, and a doxology, and it closes the teaching of the book.

The Fifth Century

V.1-5. The Fifth Century starts afresh. A new plan is announced, in which God is both the object of felicity and the way of enjoying it, and His attributes are to be treated in turn, beginning with infinity. Infinite space is the room of all treasures and the seat of souls, seen without eyes, required by almighty power, and like a painter’s panel prepared for a picture as large as itself. The movement ends with the spectator who owns every view, and it adds a fresh start, which treats the doctrine of the Centuries as a treatise.

V.6-10. Eternity and omnipresence follow. Eternity is the duration of infinite space, an absence of times in which all ages stand together, and we pass through it like men in a ship who see the shore move. Omnipresence is a field of joys and a transparent temple, and the Bridegroom governs all worlds. The movement ends in the middle of the plan, on God busied in every place in perfecting our happiness, three attributes into a treatise that meant to treat them all. After it the manuscript has only the number 11.