Book Review

New light on a forgotten visionary

The Works of Thomas Traherne (Vol.1)

There seems always to have been something elusive and strange about the life and writings of Thomas Traherne. A mid-seventeenth-century Anglican clergyman who spent most of his adult life in a small country parish near Hereford, Traherne is at once known and unknown. Dying suddenly in October 1674 at Teddington, he left behind him one recently published book and another book in the hands of the printers. Neither of these works made any great impression on his contemporaries; by the eighteenth century Traherne’s name had passed into oblivion.

Then there was silence for another two centuries, until suddenly at the beginning of the last century, two manuscripts turned up. One was a collection of poems on religious themes, the other a book of prose meditations. These created a stir: Traherne was perceived as a late example of a metaphysical poet (though more likely to be compared with Henry Vaughan than John Donne). But what is clear is that he was a greater writer of prose than of poetry. Indeed the Centuries of Meditations was felt by many to be his outstanding work. In it, Traherne describes a childhood vision of an unfallen world; eternity shining out through the things of time.

There followed another century mostly of silence, though from about 1950 onwards sounds began to be heard from learned journals, and other manuscripts of Traherne were discovered. It was only in 1997 that the first of these, an earlier set of meditations, was published. Then suddenly on 1 March this year, this handsome book of almost 600 closely printed pages appeared. This is announced as Volume 1 of The Works of Thomas Traherne, a project which it is hoped to bring to completion in 2017 by the publication of the final volume of Commentary and Index, Volume 8. Anyone who is interested in the spiritual and intellectual world of seventeenth-century England must feel grateful to the publishers for the vision and courage in undertaking this work, and to the American scholar Jan Ross for her skilful and considerable editorial labours.

How does the new Traherne, who emerges in these pages, relate to the writer with whom we are already familiar? In one sense he is clearly at one with the author of the Centuries of Meditations. There is the same sense of the glory of God shining out in all creation, the same almost ecstatic note of praise and thanksgiving. But this is a much larger, more powerful, more complex writer, a man who is a considerable scholar, a theologian contributing to the ongoing debates of his own day and delighting in the witness of the Fathers of the Church of the Greek East no less than of the Latin West. But at the same time here is a man who is fascinated by the beginnings of natural scientific investigation taking place in the years after 1660. He looks through a telescope at the moon and the planets and begins at once to grasp the immensity of the physical universe. He looks through a microscope at insects and flies and is struck in a new way by the multiplicity of the living world. He reads Harvey on the circulation of the blood and reflects on the importance of the principle of circulation and exchange, not only in the human body but in creation at large.

The major work which this volume contains, about 300 pages, is called simply The Kingdom of God. It is a long, at times repetitive, at times highly eloquent, development of the author’s perceptions of God’s presence in and through the whole creation: God’s Glory, God’s Goodness, God’s Generosity, God’s Wisdom, God’s Power, God’s Beauty, God’s Magnificence, above all God’s Love. For Traherne, it is only in relation to God as creator that we are able to recognise the true meaning and beauty of creation.

“Till we see the relation that all things bear unto God, they are like branches divided from their roots; they partake not of the juice and fatness of the vine to which they belong; bring forth no fruit, are like dry sticks, fit to be burned for their barrenness … They are bereaved of the soul which animates them with their chiefest excellency, and are robbed of the perfection they should enjoy by the union of all the members, for want of which their end is not vanity, but corruption and deformity … The relation between the Creator and all other things, being a divine and heavenly thing is in eternity itself to be seen and enjoyed. It is our comfort that eternity may be discerned here, and they and we and God in eternity.”

In the same chapter, Traherne speaks in more human terms of how God pours out himself in the work of creation. “His wisdom easily and sweetly passeth through all from end to end … The streams by which it overflows are as sweet unto it as a nurse’s milk is to her in its effusions, which is if withheld of no delight. It wrankles within the bosom if by too long detention it curdle there, whereas the child that easeth his mother of the burden is dear and precious, the milk in the act of communication most sweetly felt; while it feeds and supports the young one.”

Towards the end of this chapter, Traherne speaks of God as going out of himself into his creation. “He that is out of himself and in himself together is greater than he that is shut up and confined, abiding in himself alone. God is infinite in himself and in his kingdom too. He is wholly out of himself, as well as wholly in himself. I may say he poured out himself when he proceeded to his work, and that God himself is the life and beauty of the same, who is as great in the Holy Spirit as in the first person of his eternal essence; as great in his kingdom, as in himself; since his Holy Spirit entirely proceedeth from him and really dwelleth in all the creatures …”

Beginning to find my way through Traherne’s exploration of his great theme, I found myself returning to certain theologians of our own time; to Rowan Williams in his study of Sergei Bulgakov and to Bulgakov’s own affirmation, “God is love and therefore is creator; and the world is bathed in the light of God’s eternity.” I looked again at John Polkinghorne’s affirmation in Science and the Trinity that: “I certainly believe that the distant God of classical theism, existing in isolated transcendence, is a concept in need of correction by a recovered recognition of the imminent presence of the Creator to the creation.” But the one recent theologian who has had a preview of this newly-discovered Traherne is David Ford, as is evident in his book Self and Salvation. It was through his friendship with the Cambridge scholar Jeremy Maule, who first found the manuscript from which Kingdom of God comes, that Ford saw so clearly the relevance of many of Traherne’s theological positions to contemporary debate.

Maule was a man of great ability, determined that the manuscript should see the light of day. A sudden, unforeseen cancer put an end to his plans. Once again Traherne’s voice seemed to be silenced. A seventeenth-century reader wrote on the title page of the manuscript, “Why is this so long detained in a dark manuscript, that if printed would be a light to the world and a universal blessing?” But the silence at last is over; Traherne’s voice can be heard as never before.

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