Sin

Use in the book

Traherne’s praise of creation is compatible with an uncompromising account of sin because the two judgments concern different things. The world’s created beauty persists; rapacity, envy, and oppression corrupt the relations through which it should be enjoyed. Sin makes misery by opposing the true good of the person who commits it and of the persons injured.

Clear apprehension of happiness tends toward holiness, but earthly vision is dim and the possibility of sin remains. Study, prayer, and watchfulness therefore matter. The poem addressing sin voices horror at its capacity to destroy inward enjoyment, while the practical meditations prescribe pity and remedial love toward offenders. To call the world disordered is not to relinquish its inhabitants. Christ’s redemption and the imitation of his charity answer the damage that perception alone cannot simply dismiss.

Places to read

1. III.49The poem presents sin as the destroyer of enjoyment and repose.
2. II.97Earthly freedom and dim vision leave open the possibility of sin.
3. IV.24Vice, rather than the created stars or seas, disfigures the world.
4. IV.20Life among offenders requires pity and the healing practice of love.

In this edition

Original and actual sin are distinguished in the curriculum of III.43. Keep sin distinct from mere finitude; Traherne repeatedly praises finite creatures in their appointed places.

Use in the book

The decisive words appear on p. 180, when Amélie asks mercy for herself and blessings for a brother who has not shared her criminal passion. This is the strongest direct attestation and should govern retrospective reading. Earlier tenderness, embraces, shared childhood memories, and the striking hypothetical wife of her first letter become newly intelligible, but they do not erase the prayer’s denial of reciprocity. Nor does René’s intense dependence upon his sister by itself prove sexual desire.

The text gives René a different set of admissions. He confesses his intended suicide as a great crime and interprets Amélie’s intervention as both salvation and punishment (p. 182). Souël condemns neglected social obligations and vain self-sufficiency. The Preface’s Défense excerpt even calls René the true culprit and casts Amélie as his weak victim. Such claims construct a causal and moral responsibility wider than participation in her particular passion. A careful account distinguishes those kinds of culpability rather than treating all “crime” language as reference to the same act.

Souël fears that knowledge of the passion may subsequently have troubled René’s soul (p. 190). His apprehension creates an unsettling possibility, but the phrasing does not supply a later confession of reciprocal incest. Likewise, René’s pleasure in the fullness of real grief reveals a problematic investment in suffering without specifying the object of a new sexual attachment.

The variants sharpen this distinction. Appendix I, no. 3 retains Amélie’s declaration of exclusive love in the fuller 1802 letter. No. 4 makes René reflect on the purity of his tenderness and on his innocent caresses, while describing her divided response. The 1826 text removes much of this explicit retrospective explanation and leaves more to implication. Reduced explicitness is not evidence that a different sexual event has taken place. The episode’s force depends on the disruptive knowledge of a prohibited passion, the obligations it creates, and the difficulty of interpreting its aftermath, not on an unsupported claim of consummation.

Places to read

1. p. 180un frère qui n'a point partagé ma criminelle passion — The prayer names forbidden desire and denies sharing.
2. p. 182c'étoit un grand crime — René applies crime to his intended departure from life before divine permission.
3. Preface p. 15Ainsi le vrai coupable est puni — The author’s defence allocates responsibility more broadly than sexual participation.
4. Appendix I no. 4la pureté de ma tendresse — The fuller 1802 retrospective passage explicitly distinguishes his affection from hers.
5. p. 190n'ait troublé votre âme à son tour — Souël’s preceding “je crains” makes this a suspicion about the aftermath.

Translation in this edition

Inceste is an explanatory headword; the main narrative’s central phrase is criminelle passion. The apparatus compares 1802 and 1826 readings, but cannot by itself date the deletion of particular explanatory phrases to a specific intervening edition.