All and everything

Use in the book

The book's expansive language depends on a distinction between possessing all things and controlling them exclusively. A sun in its proper place can serve every eye. Another person's enjoyment need not subtract from mine; when that person's happiness is itself my treasure, it adds a further good. “All” consequently belongs with “each,” not only with “whole.” The astonishing claim is that every person can receive the whole gift while other persons remain entire recipients.

Traherne also uses universality to test the quality of love. A love bounded by one private interest has not assumed the divine likeness. To love people in every age is to treat remote happiness as something that concerns the present soul. The universality is intensely particular: persons are to be loved with an intimate familiarity, as though each were the sole object. The same word thus joins cosmic scope to individual dignity.

“All things” must nevertheless be read through the book's discrimination of value. It does not command approval of sin, cruelty, or false valuation. The two worlds of I.7 make that clear: relinquishing humanly devised vanities is how one receives the created world's true riches. Universal enjoyment is the action of an educated judgment, not indiscriminate consumption. Its practical form is to prize each thing's service, delight in other recipients, and return thanks to the giver.

Places to read

1. I.14Everything serves the enjoyer in its proper place, as Adam’s undivided inheritance makes evident.
2. I.15Every person is an end of the world and an enrichment of others’ inheritance.
3. II.79Exclusive-seeming possession and the desire for companions become mutually perfective.
4. IV.69All persons in all ages are to be loved intimately, as though each were alone.

In this edition

The scope of “all” is controlled by its sentence. “All nations,” “all treasures,” and “all things” should not be silently flattened into the same list. Repeated capitals intensify emphasis but do not supply a separate technical definition.

The rhetoric of accumulation

Traherne's repeated lists of angels, kingdoms, persons, ages, and treasures perform an exercise in enlargement. They keep the reader from taking one already familiar possession as the measure of all possible good. Their repetition is cumulative rather than merely redundant: physical things, spiritual faculties, historical events, and other enjoyers enter the same growing field. Yet the field is not a warehouse. Each new object must be received according to what it is and the services it renders. A universal pronoun becomes meaningful only through that patient attention to particulars.

Use in the book

Plato at A29 calls the All alternately one and friendly or many and at war with itself. Aristotle at A37 describes the All as separated into the elements and brought together under Love. These uses concern the comprehensive changing arrangement, not only one familiar celestial region.

A47 makes the distinction between All and cosmos explicit: the one cosmos is only a small part of the All, with the remainder described as inert matter. That striking claim is a lone doxographic report here and lacks support in a printed fragment. It should not govern every other occurrence of “All” as if the spatial distinction had already been established. At A332 the All undergoes partial changes without the whole dissolving, an assertion compatible with enduring constituents but still transmitted in later explanatory vocabulary.

The entry therefore guards against two shortcuts: treating the All as identical with every particular world-order, and treating A47’s larger material totality as a securely reconstructible container surrounding that world. The evidence preserves both conceptual distinctions and uncertainties.

Places to read

1. A 29 (testimony)Plato, Sophist 242c-d. Makes the All the subject of alternating unity and plurality.
2. A 33 (testimony)2Aëtius I 3,20. Describes partial changes without dissolution of the whole.
3. A 47 (testimony)Aëtius I 5,2 (D. 291). Distinguishes the single cosmos from a larger All containing an inert remainder.

Translation in this edition

Translations “All,” “whole” and “universe” can make the same Greek expression sound like different entities. Conversely, translating both κόσμος and τὸ πᾶν as “universe” would erase A47’s explicit distinction.