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.

Hereford Cathedral, in the city where Traherne was born around 1637 and where he worked in later years — David Iliff (Diliff), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The documentary outline is spare and unglamorous, which suits him. He matriculated at Brasenose on 1 March 1653, took his bachelor’s degree in October 1656, and in December 1657 was presented to the living of Credenhill — a parish of a few households among the orchards west of Hereford. He returned to Oxford for his master’s in 1661 and his bachelorship of divinity in 1669, working in the Bodleian, and held Credenhill until his death even after his duties drew him away. In those Credenhill years he was drawn into the devout household circle of Susanna Hopton at nearby Kington, a gentlewoman of serious piety for whom, the evidence suggests, the meditations later gathered as his masterwork were first composed — a small private readership of one, which is nearly all the readership his greatest writing had for two hundred years. From 1669 he served Bridgeman, who had held the Great Seal from 1667 until his fall in 1672, and lived between London and Teddington on the Thames. He died there on 27 September 1674, and was buried under the reading desk of Teddington church, where he had latterly preached. He left no children, no fame, and almost nothing in print — only a small estate, some books, and a chest of papers that passed, by way of his brother Philip, into more than two centuries of silence.

Brasenose College, Oxford, where Traherne matriculated in 1653 and took his degrees, returning later to work in the Bodleian — Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

St Mary’s Church, Credenhill, the small parish near Hereford where Traherne served as rector from 1657 until his death — Philip Halling, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In his lifetime he was almost unknown as a writer. A single book, the polemical Roman Forgeries — an anti-Catholic exposure of spurious early-church documents, the kind of controversial divinity a Restoration clergyman was expected to produce — appeared under his name in 1673. A devotional volume, Christian Ethicks, came out just after his death. Neither carried the work for which he is now read, which lay unprinted in manuscript for more than two hundred years. Its recovery is not a footnote to the writing but part of its meaning: a body of prose and verse about the gift of the present world arrived in the world it addressed only when its author had been forgotten for seven generations.

The recovery began on a London bookstall in the winter of 1896–97, where two anonymous manuscripts in a seventeenth-century hand were bought for a few pence by a collector named William Brooke. They came into the hands of Alexander Grosart, an indefatigable Victorian editor of old poets, who judged the verse to be early work by Henry Vaughan and prepared to print it under that name. Grosart died in 1899 before he could; his library was bought by the bookseller-scholar Bertram Dobell, who noticed that lines in the manuscripts answered, almost word for word, to passages in the little-regarded Christian Ethicks. The match settled the authorship. Dobell brought out the Poetical Works in 1903 with a memoir, and the prose Centuries of Meditations — by general consent the summit of the corpus — in 1908. A second manuscript of the poems, copied by Philip Traherne and now British Museum Burney 392, yielded the Poems of Felicity, edited by H. I. Bell in 1910.

What no one in 1908 could have known is that the corpus was not finished surfacing. Select Meditations, an earlier and rawer sequence than the Centuries, was offered as an anonymous devotional manuscript by a Birmingham bookseller in 1964; James M. Osborn recognized the hand and the mind and carried it off to Yale, where it survives in a mutilated state and was not edited into print until 1997. The vast Commentaries of Heaven — an alphabetical encyclopedia of all created and abstract things read as occasions of happiness, its own title page promising that the mysteries of felicity are opened and all things discovered to be objects of happiness, and which breaks off, having barely begun, in the letter B — was pulled in about 1967 from a burning rubbish tip in Lancashire, its leather binding already scorched, and rescued by the man who came upon it. In 1997 Jeremy Maule, a Cambridge fellow working through some four thousand uncataloged manuscripts at Lambeth Palace Library, the archbishop of Canterbury’s London house, came on a single volume — now Lambeth MS 1360 — holding five more prose works in Traherne’s manner: Inducements to Retiredness, A Sober View of Dr Twisse, Seeds of Eternity, the fragmentary Love, and the long, ambitious Kingdom of God, by some estimates his most considerable achievement in prose, which surveys the whole creation, from the least insect to the courses of the stars, as a single legible disclosure of God. The body of writing attributed to Traherne is therefore larger now than at any point since his death, large enough to fill a multi-volume critical edition still in progress, and a poet known for two slim books in 1908 is now known for a shelf — most of it found by accident, some of it pulled from fire.

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 been taught into greed and suspicion, having first known the fields and the stars and the streets as treasures, the very dust and stones as gold; that the corn was orient and immortal wheat to him as a child, and the city itself seemed built in Eden. The fall, in this reckoning, is less a single ancient catastrophe than a daily unlearning of wonder — the child’s clear sight clouded over by custom, opinion, and the habit of price. The recovery of that early seeing is the recovery of felicity, and felicity, for Traherne, is no mere mood: it is how the soul comes to know God present in what it sees, an act of attention that is at once gratitude, possession, and worship. To enjoy the world rightly — to esteem the sun and the sky and the persons in it as one’s own, given for one’s joy — is in his account the work for which the soul was made, and the way it answers its Maker.

The form in which he set this down is itself part of the argument. The Centuries are not a treatise but a sequence of short numbered meditations gathered in hundreds — a manuscript book apparently written for the gentlewoman Susanna Hopton and her devotional circle near Hereford — moving without system from praise to instruction to recollected autobiography and back, so that the reader is led not through a proof but through a re-education of attention. Felicity, on his account, is not attained by withdrawal from the world but by a right estimate of it: the same fields and faces that custom has made cheap are restored to their true price when seen as freely given and infinitely valuable, and the measure of a soul is the breadth of what it can love and so possess. He returns repeatedly to the figure of the infinite within the finite — the heavens enclosed in the eye that beholds them, all ages and all kingdoms made present at once to a mind that knows them, the single human soul made wide enough to contain the creation and, in containing it, to make it its own. Possession, for Traherne, is a mode of knowing and loving, not of holding; the man who truly enjoys the sea and the stars owns more of them than the man who merely inherits a field.

The shape of this is worth marking, because it sets him apart within the contemplative tradition. One dominant grammar of Christian mysticism is ascent and negation: the soul climbs, strips away images, enters a darkness beyond knowing — the apophatic way taught in The Cloud of Unknowing and traced to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, for whom God is reached only past the failure of every name. Traherne moves the other way. His path is descent into the given, the sanctification of the ordinary rather than the transcending of it; his climate is immanence rather than transcendence, bright noon rather than the dark night. Where Richard Rolle reported the felt heat and sweetness and song of contemplation as bodily sensation, Traherne reports no raptures and no special states at all; what he offers is a way of looking, available in a wheat field or a London street, that finds the infinite already lodged in the finite. He is closer in this to the joy-saturated affirmation of Julian of Norwich, who found all creation held like a hazelnut in the hand of God, than to the purgative night — though Traherne wrote a century and a half later, an educated Restoration clergyman rather than an anchoress, and out of a temperament wholly his own.

His intellectual furniture is Christian-Platonist. The conviction that the soul is infinite in its capacity, that it can contain and so in a manner possess the whole world it knows, that the visible order is a transparency through which the invisible shows — these belong to the long inheritance of Platonism and Neoplatonism as it ran through Christian thought, and they put him in the company of his English contemporaries the Cambridge Platonists, Henry More and the circle that included Anne Conway, who likewise read the new century’s mechanical world back into a cosmos full of spirit and intelligible form. With them he holds that knowing is a kind of union: the mind that contemplates the heavens becomes, in some real sense, a heaven. But Traherne takes the doctrine in a direction the philosophers did not, toward an almost ecstatic theology of enjoyment, where the proper end of an infinite soul is to be filled with an infinite world received as love.

Where to place him is partly a matter of how the term mystic is read. He was an orthodox Anglican priest who subscribed to the settlement of 1662, 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 — that, as he put it, one never enjoys the world aright until the sea itself flows in one’s veins and one is clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars. That conviction — the world charged with God and received as one’s own inheritance — ties him to a recurring strain of nature-facing contemplation in English religious writing: the sacramental wonder of the Welsh-born poet to whom his own manuscripts were first wrongly assigned, the quieter devotion of the poets of the generation just before him. It also reaches forward. The child who sees creation unfallen, the dust shining like gold, the ordinary blazing with the eternal — that vision returns, transfigured, in William Blake, who likewise held the doors of perception to have been narrowed by custom and the world to be infinite to the cleansed eye, and it has been read alongside the divine-immanence verse of Angelus Silesius and the visionary spirituality of Jane Lead. It is the kind of inward, affirmative Christianity that the Quaker historian Rufus M. Jones would later trace and prize, and the kind of direct, world-affirming gnosis — knowledge as transformed seeing rather than secret information — that gives him a place in any account of how the sacred is known within the world rather than beyond it.

That place, it is worth being exact about, is one his own age would not have recognized. To his contemporaries Traherne was, so far as he was anything in print, the author of a competent piece of anti-Roman controversy and a posthumous manual of moral divinity — a respectable minor clergyman of the Restoration church, not a visionary. The figure now read as one of the great voices of English Christian mysticism is in this sense a modern composition: the very category of an English mystical school into which he was fitted was assembled in the early twentieth century, by Bertram Dobell and then by the curators of the mystical revival who set the Centuries beside Rolle, Julian, and the Cloud, and who needed a tradition for the manuscripts they were recovering. The judgment that he belongs among them is sound on the evidence of the work; but it is a judgment reached by readers he never had, applying a description he never used, to a body of writing he never published.

The textual scholarship is, for an author of his stature, unusually unfinished, because the corpus itself is unfinished surfacing. Bertram Dobell’s editions — the Poetical Works of 1903, with the memoir that first laid out the case for Traherne’s authorship, and the Centuries of Meditations of 1908 — remain the foundational documents of the recovery and are freely available in the public domain through Project Gutenberg. H. I. Bell’s Poems of Felicity (1910) added the Burney-manuscript versions copied by Philip Traherne. The mid-twentieth century brought Gladys Wade’s collected Poetical Works (1932) and her 1944 biography, the first sustained life. The real transformation, though, has come since the rediscoveries of the 1960s and 1990s: the Commentaries of Heaven, Select Meditations, The Kingdom of God, and the other Lambeth treatises are texts no earlier scholar could have read at all. They are being gathered now into the multi-volume scholarly edition issued by D. S. Brewer and documented in the Works of Thomas Traherne series, and into the long-running editorial project of The Oxford Traherne, which aims at the first complete critical edition of everything he wrote. The effect is that Traherne is, paradoxically, among the least settled of the major seventeenth-century devotional writers: the editions are catching up with a body of work that kept growing for a hundred years after it was first printed, and the critical estimate has shifted with each enlargement — from the lyric poet Dobell presented, to the prose contemplative of the Centuries, to the encyclopedic and theological writer the Lambeth and Commentaries manuscripts reveal.

His standing rests almost entirely on the modern verdict. For two centuries he had no readers and no reputation to defend; his entry into the canon of English devotional writing is a judgment assembled after the fact, by editors and critics working from manuscripts their subject never saw printed — and one still in motion, since each fresh discovery has enlarged and partly redrawn the picture. William Inge gave him a chapter among the English mystics; the twentieth century made the Centuries a classic of the contemplative life; the poems found their place beside the metaphysicals. None of it was inevitable, and none of it was his doing. The writing was finished long before anyone read it.

→ Related: Gnosis · Mysticism · Immanence · Platonism · Neoplatonism · Henry More · Anne Conway · Angelus Silesius · Jane Lead · William Blake · Richard Rolle De Hampole · Rufus M Jones · Julian Of Norwich · The Cloud Of Unknowing · Christian Mysticism · Apophatic Theology · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite