Centuries of Meditations

More belonged to the group now called the Cambridge Platonists, divines who answered both Puritan dogmatism and Hobbes with a religion of reason, love and the inner life. Benjamin Whichcote taught that heaven is a temper of the spirit before it is a place. Ralph Cudworth told the House of Commons in 1647 that ink and paper can never make us Christians, and John Smith held that divinity is a divine life before it is a divine science. Any of those sentences could stand in the Centuries.

Traherne was an Oxford man and never one of their circle, but he shared their temper, and he copied extracts from Gale, the Puritan Platonist, into his commonplace book. The American scholar Carol Marks, who set out the connection in 1966, found him closest in feeling to Peter Sterry, Cromwell’s chaplain and the maverick of that company. What joins them is less a doctrine than a confidence. They share the conviction that God is love, that reason is His gift and not His rival, and that the soul was made for joy.

Behind the Cambridge men, and behind Traherne, stands the Platonism of Renaissance Florence. Among his notebooks is a Latin one, headed as a digest of Plato’s practical teaching made by Marsilio Ficino, the fifteenth-century scholar who translated the whole of Plato into Latin. Traherne read Plato through Ficino. From that tradition he took two convictions that run through the whole book, that the visible world is an image of an invisible good, and that love is the power by which the soul rises towards it. Aristotle, whom the schools of the universities called simply the Philosopher, is named only once, but his account of the mind before it thinks, as a tablet on which nothing is yet written, stands behind the empty book of the opening sentence.

The same Florentine circle had revived the writings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-great Hermes, a legendary Egyptian sage whose Greek treatises of the early centuries AD were then believed to be of immense age. Traherne knew them in John Everard’s English version, The Divine Pymander (1650), and copied from it. In the Fourth Century he translates part of the Oration on the Dignity of Man, the Latin speech Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote in 1486 to open a public debate in Rome (IV.74-77). In it God tells the first man that he has been given no fixed place in the world, and may make of himself what he chooses.

None of this makes Traherne an occultist. He took Hermes and Plato as many divines of his century took them, as pagan witnesses to truths that Scripture states plainly, a view Gale had argued at length, and he kept them inside a faith shaped by the Prayer Book. The mixture is his own. Much of the book’s strangeness comes from it, a country rector’s devotion written in the vocabulary of the Florentine academy, with neither diminished by the other.

What to Look For

The Centuries have no plot, though the Third Century tells a story, but they have an argument that grows by returning to its themes, images that recur and deepen, and a voice that changes as it goes. A first reading goes better for knowing what to watch.

The empty book and the friend. The book never forgets that it is a book, written in a notebook for one reader, and the “you” of the First and Second Centuries is first of all a particular woman to whom a promise has been made. Watch the manner of address, the warmth and the occasional sternness, and ask what kind of book is being written, a letter, a treatise, a prayer book or a notebook of discoveries. The answer is probably all four, in turn and at once.

Felicity and wants. Felicity, the book’s master-word, means happiness in its fullest sense, not a passing pleasure but the settled joy of a soul that has what it was made for. Traherne insists that it can be had in this life, and from things already given. Set beside it from the start is a stranger word, want, which in his English means lack and need before it means desire. Men are first shown burdened with wants they have invented for themselves, and then Socrates, the Athenian philosopher, walks through the market at Athens marvelling at how many things there are “which I do not want” (I.40), and most moralists would side with him. Traherne takes issue with him. A first reader should ask what could be wrong with needing little, and what kind of wanting a Christian teacher could possibly defend.

The infinite and the soul’s capacity. The book’s boldest claims are about size. “Alas the WORLD is but a little centre in comparison of you,” Traherne tells his friend (I.19), and later he writes that “my Soul is an infinite sphere in a centre” (II.80). The second of these borrows a formula that medieval writers, quoting a book ascribed to Hermes, applied to God, whom they called a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, and Traherne applies it to the soul. By infinite he does not mean merely very large. He means that the soul’s power to know and to love has no edge, that there is nothing it could not take in, and that nothing less than everything will satisfy it. Watch how such claims are argued. Traherne proceeds less by proof than by experiment, asking the reader to do something with the mind, to imagine the sun away or to think past the stars, and then to notice what the mind has done.