Thomas Traherne

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Thomas Traherne was an English clergyman, poet, and devotional writer of the seventeenth century whose work treats felicity — a settled, wondering happiness in the goodness of existence — as something close to a discipline of the soul. Born in Hereford around 1637, the son of a shoemaker, he took his degrees at Brasenose College, Oxford, was ordained in the Church of England, and served as rector of the small parish of Credenhill, near Hereford, before becoming chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. He died in 1674, not yet forty.

In his lifetime he was almost unknown as a writer. A single book, the polemical Roman Forgeries, appeared under his name in 1673, with a devotional volume, Christian Ethicks, published just after his death. The work for which he is now read lay unprinted for more than two centuries. Its recovery is itself part of the story: in the winter of 1896–97 a set of anonymous manuscripts was found on a London bookstall, at first taken for the work of Henry Vaughan, and identified by the scholar Bertram Dobell as Traherne’s. Dobell brought out the Poems in 1903 and the prose Centuries of Meditations in 1908. The twentieth century kept adding to the corpus — further manuscripts surfaced as late as the 1960s and 1990s — so that the body of writing attributed to Traherne is larger now than at any point since his death, and parts of it are still being edited.

The Centuries and the poems return again and again to a few convictions. The world, Traherne held, is given — not earned, not neutral, but a gift to be received as a child receives it, and the failure to see it so was, in his diagnosis, the deep human poverty. He wrote that he had to be taught into greed and suspicion, having first known the fields and the sky as treasures; the recovery of that early wonder is, in his account, the recovery of felicity, and felicity is how the soul comes to know God present in what it sees. The register is contemplative rather than ecstatic: less the dark night of other mystics than a bright noon, immanence rather than ascent.

Where to place him is partly a matter of how the term mystic is read. He was an orthodox Anglican priest who wrote no visions and claimed no special raptures; what marks the work as mystical is its insistence that the divine is encountered directly through the ordinary world, fully present in it. Readers since his rediscovery have set him beside the other seventeenth-century English religious poets — Vaughan, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw — and, for his sense of the world charged with God, in a longer line of nature-facing contemplatives. The near-total eclipse of his reputation for two hundred years means his place in that line is a modern judgement, assembled after the fact. The writing was finished long before anyone read it.

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