Traherne plaque in the church at Credenhill, Herefordshire, where he was Rector
A RESTORATION OF THE POET THOMAS TRAHERNE
“He thought it a Vain Thing to see Glorious Principles lie Buried in Books, unless he did remove them into his Understanding; and a vain thing to remov them unless he did revive them, and rais them up by continual exercise. Let this therefore be the first Principle of your soul. That to hav no Principles, or to liv beside them, is equally Miserable. And that Philosophers are not those that Speak, but Do great Things.” [Centuries of Meditations IV 2]
As I said at the outset, most of Traherne’s writings remained unknown for over two hundred years. His biographer Gladys Wade puts it in 1944, “we have the unique spectacle of an author whose first book was published less than a year before his death; and whose books have been ‘appearing’ at wide intervals over the course of two and a half centuries, with the process still incomplete!” [Wade 111] Today we know he was prolific. In 1896 someone found two manuscripts on a street book barrow in London. One of these contains all of the quotes we are reading today, a work titled by its editor ‘Centuries of Meditations’, because Traherne collected the progression of his meditations into hundreds. Other discoveries started emerging, whether by accident or educated guesswork. Some of them had lain unidentified in libraries all of that time. The most recent of these discoveries was in 1997, MS 1360 of Lambeth Palace Library, no less.
Many unanswered questions surround the vanishing of most of his writing after his death. Misplacement, misappropriation, mangling, neglect? By chance on Facebook this month I conversed with the English historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, who had reviewed a new history of the 17th-century English church. While I said I thought Traherne a “quintessential Anglican”, he replied that in the terms of the new book “one might say pioneering as much as quintessential Anglican.” “Perhaps too pioneering for his own religious friends,” I wrote, “given they seem to have succeeded in hiding his manuscripts for over 200 years.” MacCulloch then observed, “the modest inconsequentiality of Traherne’s story is rather quintessentially Anglican.”
Reader reception since 1908, when the first of his works was printed by Bertram Dobell, tells its own story and explains why a critical edition of 15 volumes called The Oxford Traherne is now underway, the first volume planned for publication in 2024. That is the very same university where they still don’t offer Felicity on the curriculum. Which is not to say that several august people inside that place, as well as outside, haven’t spoken enthusiastically of what Traherne is doing.
C.S.
Lewis called ‘Centuries of Meditations’ “almost the most beautiful book in the
English language. I could go on quoting it forever.”
Denise Inge, just about the best elucidator in this century, says “readers with imagination fall for Traherne. He takes you on unexpected interior journeys into desire and lack, infinity, time, and eternity.”
Ronald
Blythe has described his experience of giving a paper at a Traherne conference
at Credenhill, where the poet was rector, as follows. “I felt overwhelmed to be
reading Traherne’s writings in the church where his voice had sounded. Mine and
the other scholars’ papers failed to explain him. Nor could we bring him to the
real attention of those listening to us, for his is that form of happiness
which travels at the speed of light, and is well on its way in a single spoken sentence
from his works. [These gatherings at Credenhill help] re-establish the claims
of happiness and delight as being a necessary aspect of the Christian experience.
Traherne’s is the ultimate apology for such claims.”
Ronald Blythe raises the very real matter of the reader’s experience of this poet. Reading ‘Centuries of Meditations’ is to encounter someone enthusiastic to share his experience of blessedness, blessedness as both the origin and purpose of existence. His sharing of this understanding is not mainly about him, it’s about you and me the reader being made to see that this is real, that it is available to you and everyone. Everything starts with Traherne and his understanding of relationship to God, but very quickly he is true to his word in wanting us to have that understanding and experience in the same way that he does.
The
paragraphs of ‘Centuries of Meditation’ come from this place of blessedness,
such that the cumulative effect of reading them is visionary. We read some of
the paragraphs this morning and make connections; they are open invitations to
contemplation. But the work itself sets out different ways of talking about
blessedness (or Felicity) follow a ranging sequential logic, a logic that is
not made transparent, or by use of conjunctions, but must be followed by
intuition. One reason why we cannot simply read them as a thesis of the spiritual
life is that every paragraph is a spontaneous searching after meaning, valuable
in and of itself. We can spend any amount of time profitably on just one paragraph.
TRYING TO DEFINE AND EXPLAIN FELICITY
“The best of all Possible Ends is the Glory of GOD, but Happiness was that I thirsted after. And yet I did not erre – for the Glory of God is to make us Happy. Which can never be don but by giving us most Excellent Natures and Satisfying those Natures: by Creating all Treasures of infinit Valu, and giving them to us in an infinit maner, to wit both in the Best that to Omnipotence was possible. This led me to Enquire, Whither All Things were Excellent and of Perfect Valu, and whither they were mine in Propriety?” [Centuries of Meditations III 39]
To appreciate Traherne, it is necessary to try and explain what he means by this keyword, Felicity. Today we are very used to self-help books and happiness manuals that are designed to get us in a good frame of mind for daily life. Although Traherne encourages self-help, he would never have called it that, nor would he for a moment have believed that you can do any of this all by yourself. He sometimes uses Felicity interchangeably with happiness, the operations of Felicity of their very nature leading us into all happiness. However, happiness in and of itself is not the final objective of true Felicity. Nor is Felicity simply a synonym for happiness. Happiness is an outcome of being in a state of Felicity.
Often his use of the word is equivalent to blessedness, or a state of beatitude. He says we can achieve this state through various means, through prayer and living out the virtues, by loving God and our neighbour as ourselves. It also means putting aside all sinful distraction, anything that hinders this state. At the same time, he puts no time frame or rules on blessedness, so that blessedness may be experienced at any time. This means he may recall at will times of blessedness as a child, a youth, and as an adult. He freely recites examples. Felicity is available to anyone at any time. It is our willingness singlehandedly to go find it, that assists in its action.
Another word for this is grace, grace being ultimately the state he describes. I think what he is talking about is the even closer state of peace and wellbeing experienced in close relationship to God. The way he finds this is by attention to God’s goodness and a trained avoidance, rejection, and distancing from anything else, especially that coming from perception of evil.
“And what Rule do you think I walked by? Truly a Strange one, but the Best in the Whole World. I was Guided by an Implicit Faith in Gods Goodness: and therfore led to the Study of the most Obvious and Common Things. For thus I thought within my self: GOD being, as we generally believ, infinit in Goodness, it is most Consonant and Agreeable with His Nature, that the Best Things should be most Common – for nothing is more Naturall to infinit Goodness, then to make the Best Things most frequent; and only Things Worthless, Scarce. Then I began to Enquire what Things were most Common: Air, Light, Heaven and Earth, Water, the Sun, Trees, Men and Women, Cities Temples &c. These I found Common and Obvious to all: Rubies Pearls Diamonds Gold and Silver, these I found scarce, and to the most Denied. Then began I to consider and compare the value of them, which I measured by their Serviceableness, and by the Excellencies which would be found in them, should they be taken away. And in Conclusion I saw clearly, that there was a Real Valuableness in all the Common things; in the Scarce, a feigned.” [Centuries of Meditations III 39]
Dorothy Sayers says that Traherne is one of the great spiritual writers of the via affirmativa, or affirmative way. While the via negativa is one way to have relationship with God, as for example in the ascetic practice of St John of the Cross, where meaning is achieved through a reductive process of nothing, or ‘nada’, so the via affirmativa is about understanding God through everything in creation, and by affirming and building up positive statements about God’s nature, and in turn his good creation, of which we are a part. This is certainly Traherne’s acquired mode of expression, which is why his writing can be so inspiring, but also at times overwhelming. It is a creation theology that places value on every living being and object.
Lucy Winkett, vicar of St James’ Piccadilly in London, says that “Traherne teaches us a habitual stance towards creation that is not fundamentally human-centric. Despite one of his goals seeming to be individual happiness – which could seem too self-serving – he defines that happiness as union with the divine, bound by the cords of love, as embodied by Christ on the cross. And so, in the end, it is more of a self-giving than a self-actualisation.” She argues that this de-centring of the human experience underlies all Traherne’s quests for happiness and it is this de-centring that “is needed in our attitude towards the current ecological crisis.”
CONCLUDING WITH HIS BIOGRAPHER GLADYS WADE
My paper has cited several avid readers of Thomas Traherne. I wish to conclude my paper by giving a short tribute to one of those readers, a woman who deserves much more attention and gratitude than she has received over time. Her name is Gladys Irene Wade. Gladys, though most people in her life would have addressed her as Miss Wade, and later Dr. Wade, was a Western Australian, born in 1895. She attended a convent school, which may explain what happened next.
Thomas Traherne was the subject of her thesis at The University of Western Australia and University College London, completed in 1919, when most of his newly found writings had only been available for ten years. Her study took her all over Hereford, Oxford, London and other Traherne localities. She worked closely with the “Traherne-enthusiast” Robert Allerton Parker, who lived in New York and who assisted with preparation of her final manuscript.
One of the essential turning points in mid-century study of Traherne, a gathering together and analysis and exposition of the author, was the conversion of this thesis into a book, ‘Thomas Traherne’ by Gladys I. Wade, published by Princeton University Press in 1944. Gladys Wade was an Australian scholar and educationalist. For a short while she was Deputy Headmistress of the Methodist Ladies’ College in Barkers Road, Kew, in Melbourne (1935-40), before moving to be Headmistress of MLC Burwood, Sydney, a position she held until she retired in 1959. In other words, we can surmise that much of the final editing of the (for some decades) foundational biography and introduction to Thomas Traherne was done in Melbourne, though the preface is signed Sydney 1942, after she had gone there to be Headmistress.
Dr Wade might have been a blue stocking, in the sense of someone who pursued academic literature as a career. Or she may have deliberately chosen to have two strings to the bow and go into school administration as well. However, that I am aware she never wrote another book. It is worthy of note to know that her interest in language was acute. One of the first things she did as Headmistress of MLC Burwood was to create the school’s house system, the houses being given Indigenous names: Mooramoora, Leawarra, Churunga, and Booralee. A portrait of her in the school history describes her as a person of “extreme reserve and formal manner, stemming perhaps from shyness”, thoroughly professional and “forthright” in her dealings with School Councils and administrators. I think we get closer to the insightful thinker and interpreter of Traherne however, when she is said to have had “a deeply religious nature.” It is thanks to this woman that the blossoming world of Traherne scholarship since 1944 has been able to work from her benchmark accomplishment. Denise Inge’s splendid introductory book of 2008 may be read as the successor to her book. I leave the final word in my paper to Dr Wade.
“Traherne goes joyously forward. Having followed this path, and found it good, Traherne points it out to others as a way to blessedness. The first essential, he declares, is that a man must ‘believe that Felicity is a glorious though an unknown thing.’ He must accept it as reasonable, and desire it; nothing else will set his feet on the ladder and nerve him for the climb. But to see and to long for felicity is not to possess it; the necessary spiritual discipline comes by this method of intense meditation of the common, visible things of earth, until the perception of their glory and beauty and exquisite interrelationship blends with the perception of their spiritual origin and operation. This for Traherne is the highway to felicity; this continuous, conscious perception of the essential beauty of the world is his scala perfectionis.” [Wade 235-6]
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