Innocence

Use in the book

The first comparison calls perfect innocence perfect ignorance, lovable but unreliable. In the paraphrase attributed to Pope, innocence receives secret truths denied proud philosophers; Joubert praises the saying while acknowledging its laughter. The Bible/Gospel contrast then calls the Gospel a book of innocence and relates different reading habits to different religious dispositions. These are distinct valuations, not evidence for a single ascent from ignorant innocence to knowledge.

Places to read

1. I, p. 32, entry 3, ¶1Innocence is loved but cannot substitute for prudent virtue.
2. II, p. 693, entry 6, ¶1An attributed saying gives innocence privileged receptivity.
3. II, p. 876, entry 5, ¶1The Gospel is characterized as a book of innocence.

Translation in this edition

The English translation preserves the greater-love/equal-reverence comparison with virtue. It newly translates Joubert’s French report of Pope and does not substitute an English quotation from Pope. The Bible/Gospel distinction remains his wording, without imposing a modern definition of Bible.

Use in the book

Traherne’s childhood account makes innocence a mode of apprehension as well as a moral condition. The young observer sees things as new, glorious, precious, and his own. His ignorance of sickness, death, demands, and quarrels removes the impediments through which adults habitually view the world. What is absent from his awareness allows what is present to appear with astonishing fullness. Innocence is consequently not described as blankness. It possesses a positive knowledge and an expansive enjoyment.

The wording of III.2 is carefully comparative: he seemed as one brought into the estate of innocence. The adult narrator does not simply equate his personal childhood with a second historical Eden. He draws an analogy between an original felicity and an experience that disclosed what the world could mean before corrupted valuation intervened. III.3 carries that analogy into streets, trees, wheat, and ordinary people. The theological vision is inseparable from familiar visible things.

The later recovery is also more than nostalgia. What was known by intuition has been collected again by the highest reason. The child’s apprehension supplies evidence and direction; mature meditation tests, understands, and learns to sustain its value. Social teaching can corrupt, but the remedy is not permanent resistance to thought or learning. It is an education able to explain and enact what was initially seen without explanation.

II.5 places innocence within redemption. Unless the lost happiness is understood and valued, the reader cannot appreciate the work that restores it. Incarnation, death, resurrection, and reconciliation receive their proper esteem through recognition of their end. The remembered goodness of creation thus heightens the value of Christ’s work rather than making it superfluous.

The relation between ignorance and knowledge should therefore remain open in reading. Ignorance of harms helps the child see unshadowed beauty; knowledge later discovers how that beauty may be loved despite the harms. Innocence supplies a standard of undivided apprehension, but mature felicity must include responsibilities and truths not yet visible to the infant.

Places to read

1. II.5Remembering the estate of innocence makes the end and value of redemption intelligible.
2. III.1The first apprehensions remain a gifted light for seeing the universe.
3. III.2The narrator compares childhood to innocence and contrasts intuition with recovered rational knowledge.
4. III.3Edenic perception encounters ordinary streets and people, then is corrupted by acquired valuations.
5. III.7The primitive clarity of infancy is eclipsed by acquired valuations.

In this edition

The phrase seemed as one in III.2 matters. It introduces a retrospective likeness, not an explicit claim that infancy abolishes the fall or makes redemption unnecessary. Primitive in III.7 means belonging to the first or original condition; it does not mean intellectually inferior or crudely formed.