From the book
Centuries of Meditations
Thomas Traherne · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordA parable is a story or figurative utterance that discloses a truth through another subject.
- In TraherneThe opening promise to speak in parables announces the discovery of secrets hidden in familiar things.
- In this edition“Parables” is the attested opening word.
- A place to beginA scriptural promise of parables introduces the concealed meaning of worldly inheritance.
Meaning
A parable is a story or figurative utterance that discloses a truth through another subject. Allegory names an extended correspondence of meanings; it is a useful descriptive category here, not an abstract term Traherne develops in these passages.
Use in the book
The opening promise to speak in parables announces the discovery of secrets hidden in familiar things. What is strange is not necessarily an exotic object: it is the reader's unrecognized inheritance of the ordinary world. Later, the Cross gathers types, ceremonies, figures, and prophecies into one intelligible spectacle. Such correspondence does not make material things unreal. The tree, body, light, or journey remains effective precisely because its visible character can carry an intelligible relation. A reading that decodes every object into a detachable moral would miss this insistence on the worth of the created object itself. Traherne's figurative language enlarges a thing's significance without automatically abolishing its literal value.
Places to read
In this edition
“Parables” is the attested opening word. “Allegory” is retained as a reader's heading, not as evidence that Traherne announces a systematic allegorical method.
Source note
Primary text: I.3, I.59, I.60. I.3 quotes Scripture; I.59–602 supply Traherne’s own application of figurative correspondences.