From the book
Centuries of Meditations
Thomas Traherne · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordHell names the state of punishment and separation from blessed enjoyment.
- In TraherneThe reversal is severe: those who refused to recognise their needs and treasures now see the goods they lack with painful clarity.
- In this editionDo not make every use purely metaphorical: Traherne explicitly speaks of future punishment.
- A place to beginPossession without appreciation is compared with hell, then distinguished and reconsidered.
Meaning
Hell names the state of punishment and separation from blessed enjoyment. Traherne also uses its language to expose analogous failures of valuation within earthly life.
Use in the book
The reversal is severe: those who refused to recognise their needs and treasures now see the goods they lack with painful clarity. Hell makes delayed appreciation an image of irreversible loss. The deliberately unstable comparison in I.47 also distinguishes having without prizing from prizing without having, asking which deprivation is worse. These earthly analogies do not make the future prison disappear. Elsewhere hating and being hated supply its most intimate form of bondage. The purpose of contemplating hell is admonitory: present judgement may change before neglect becomes fixed deprivation.
Places to read
- I.47Possession without appreciation is compared with hell, then distinguished and reconsidered.
- I.48Punishment involves seeing and desiring treasures without possessing them.
- I.49The morally asleep are imagined awakening into awareness of their misery.
- II.63The necessity of hating God and persons is called the greatest bondage hell can impose.
In this edition
Do not make every use purely metaphorical: Traherne explicitly speaks of future punishment. Nor should the meditations’ pedagogic contemplation of hell be confused with a complete account of its geography or chronology.