From the book
Centuries of Meditations
Thomas Traherne · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordApostasy is a falling away or abandonment.
- In TraherneThe loss of childhood vision is called the speaker’s apostasy even though the narrative does not describe a formal change of religion.
- In this editionThe two spellings refer to the same word.
- A place to beginChildhood’s intuitive knowledge is recovered after the speaker’s apostasy.
Meaning
Apostasy is a falling away or abandonment. Traherne gives the religious term an unusually intimate scope: departure from the soul’s proper apprehension and enjoyment of God’s gifts.
Use in the book
The loss of childhood vision is called the speaker’s apostasy even though the narrative does not describe a formal change of religion. What falls away is the immediate sense of the world’s purity, divinity, and personal belonging. Recovery requires reason to gather again what intuition once supplied. Elsewhere even a momentary interruption of attention would count as apostasy in glory; perfect union makes such a lapse impossible there. The word consequently marks the seriousness of attention without making ordinary earthly distraction equivalent to a deliberate public renunciation of faith.
Places to read
In this edition
The two spellings refer to the same word. The 2026 notes explain falling away; neither passage alone establishes a biographical conversion or denominational departure.
Source note
Primary text: III.2, II.89; historical gloss: 2026 edition notes to III.2 and II.89.