Subsistence

Use in the book

Ocellus contrasts the change of a subject in generation with the subject’s identity and persistence on the causal side. In the account of forms, sensible things have a subsistence patterned by an incorporeal exemplar. These uses concern how things stand or exist; they do not automatically name a fixed hierarchy of metaphysical persons.

Places to read

1. I.20.3.3Stable subsistence characterizes the cause in contrast with what changes.
2. I.12.1a.1The form patterns the subsistence of sensible things.

Translation in this edition

“Persistence” is especially clear in Ocellus’s contrast. Retain “subsistence” where the mode of existence is the central issue.

Use in the book

Traherne employs the term first to explain a threefold relation within love and then to describe the loving soul. II.40 distinguishes love in the lover, love communicated, and love dwelling in the beloved object. These are one love considered in different manners of subsisting. The distinction matters because communication neither detaches a portion from the lover nor produces an inferior copy: the love received is the love that remains in its source. II.41 accordingly insists that fountain and stream are the same love and equally glorious.

This analysis forms part of Traherne’s attempt to apprehend the Trinity through love. The preceding meditation identifies God as pure, uncompounded love and speaks of the Son as begotten through loving. The vocabulary of begetting and proceeding consequently carries more than an ornamental three-part pattern. Yet the reader should preserve the author’s argument as he develops it rather than substitute a complete doctrinal system for these few meditations. The supplied notes observe that his initial naming of the Son as Love has a distinctive emphasis within the Christian tradition.

II.56 transfers the pattern to the soul. Before loving, its powers lie confused and unexercised; in loving, it abides within itself, flows outward, and lives in its object. Traherne calls these three subsistences. The sun and its spreading beams illustrate how outgoing activity makes an inward life manifest. The soul’s extension into another is therefore a fulfilment of its own life, not its abolition. It can now contemplate what it is both in itself and for its beloved, enjoying communion with itself through this enlarged activity.

The analogy should not be literalized into three human persons or a human acquisition of divine personhood. Its immediate explanatory work is to hold unity and communication together. Subsistence names distinguishable relations within a life that remains one; it helps Traherne explain how love genuinely reaches another without ceasing to belong to its source.

Places to read

1. II.39Presents divine love as uncompounded and the Son as begotten through loving.
2. II.40Distinguishes three manners of subsisting within the same love.
3. II.41Insists on the equality of love in its fountain and stream.
4. II.56The loving soul gains a threefold inward, outgoing, and object-directed life.

In this edition

The supplied 2026 notes explain the technical theological sense and compare Augustine’s accounts of love and the mind. Those comparisons are background supplied by the edition; neither passage claims that an ordinary human soul becomes the Trinity.