Centuries of Meditations

Poets for and against. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was the cool sceptic. In a newspaper interview he allowed that Wordsworth, Vaughan and Traherne “had had some curious mystical experiences”, but insisted that mysticism is “a whole-time job”, not an episode in a writer’s life. Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), the novelist and translator of Dante, went to the opposite pole in an essay of 1958. “Dante, Blake and Traherne attained the goal, and carried their poetry with them,” she wrote, where Wordsworth had lost his along the way.

The scholars of 1964. Two books of 1964 set the terms for academic argument. Louis L. Martz (1913-2001), the Yale historian of devotional literature, read the Centuries in The Paradise Within as a structured meditation on the pattern of the Itinerarium mentis in Deum (The Mind’s Road to God) of St Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century Franciscan. The form, he argued, had a plan. He conceded that readers “may sometimes lay them aside in weariness or bewilderment”, but defended the famous repetitions as the method itself, since “Repetitions are, we might say, stepping stones”.

K. W. Salter’s Thomas Traherne: Mystic and Poet raised the doctrinal objection that has followed Traherne ever since, the charge of Pelagianism. Salter judged that “elements of the Pelagian heresy are present in his thought”, since the memory of a glorious childhood seemed to him to incline Traherne to believe that a man might live without sin, as Adam did. Defenders point to the pages on sin, the Fall and the Cross. The debate turns chiefly on III.8.

Sources and the new manuscripts. Carol L. Marks (later Sicherman) traced Traherne’s reading of the Cambridge Platonists and of the Hermetic books in two articles of 1966, and gave the Platonist claim the documentary footing Inge had lacked. From the 1960s onwards new manuscripts came to light, from the Select Meditations offered by a Birmingham bookseller in 1964 to the volume identified at Lambeth Palace Library in 1997, and the critics’ Traherne changed from a solitary mystic into a working theologian. Denise Inge’s Wanting Like a God (2009), whose title comes from I.44, made desire the key to his thought.

The essays edited by Elizabeth Dodd and Cassandra Gorman in 2016 set out to free him from the image of a “solitary thinker, ‘out of his time’”, and Kathryn Murphy has read him against Hobbes as a philosopher of realism. The Traherne of this criticism is a scholar in conversation with his age, reading the philosophers and the new science and answering them.

Richard Willmott, chairman of the Traherne Association, summed up the change in 2017, when he said that Traherne was “far from being the simple, pre-romantic poet of happiness” and was in truth a serious scholar. For the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2024 the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams gave the Association’s annual lecture, and a full critical edition from Oxford University Press is due to begin appearing in 2027.

Music and the calendar. Composers have been Traherne’s most faithful readers, and the Traherne Association counts some ninety who have set his words. The most influential, the English composer Gerald Finzi (1901-56), made the opening of the Third Century the text of the Rhapsody in his cantata Dies Natalis, first heard in 1940. He abridged Traherne freely and, in one scholar’s account, removed “almost all references to religion and the glorification of God”. The result is the Centuries as most listeners know them, a hymn to childhood with the theology taken out.

The churches have pulled the other way. The Church of England and the Episcopal Church in the United States now keep a day in his memory, so that a book first printed by a freethinking bookseller has become part of the Church’s own remembrance. The two Trahernes, the poet of rapture whom Hudson and Finzi loved and the teacher of doctrine whom the churches honour, still divide his readers, as they have since the first reviews.