by Joshua Shaw

I happened to be reading a very apt passage from Thomas Traherne just a few days after Matt’s latest post. The coincidence seemed too perfect to forgo at least a short addendum to his post. He mentioned there various trends of scholarship concerning the conception of wisdom: when did it change? Is it an essentially “medieval” conception that receives a final Adieu in the Reformation? Is it to be understood in hard contrast to the “pagan mysticism of Plotinus and Proclus”? Matt’s point that, then as now, wisdom had no univocal and unequivocal sense is worth keeping in mind. Now, at least one witness – that of this post – puts in perspective a few of these claims.

I think the argument will make itself from a statement of the facts and the rendering of the views of Thomas Traherne.

Thomas Traherne was a firmly Anglican priest and a nearly unsurpassed English prose stylist (C. S. Lewis called Centuries “almost the most beautiful book in English” and, in the second preface to Screwtape, suggested that the book’s natural counterpart – advice written by an archangel to an apprentice – would naturally wear Traherne’s literary cloak). He lived a full century after the Reformation (1636 or 1637 – c. 27 September 1674).

It is well known that he drew on certain Renaissance authors (such as Pico della Mirandola), but also quite heavily on Gregory of Nyssa and, even more interestingly, Irenaeus, for various aspects of his theology and so-called “mysticism.”

It is hard to imagine a better description of his Centuries than as a guide to heavenly contemplation: the right view of God in eternity, his eternal trinitarian love, the mystery of his love on the cross, and the marvels of creation. Having the right enjoyment and appreciation of all things – that is, for Traherne, seeing things as God sees them – is the essential foundation for “Felicitie,” the thing all men are after. In my opinion, the most remarkable of these moments is his unqualified acceptance of eternal punishment – a touchy point in the history of Christian Platonism, but one which does not seem to have disturbed Traherne. He accepted God’s revelation fully and without reserve, both the good and the – humanly speaking – bad.

Is it not easy to conceive the World in your Mind? To think the Heavens fair? The Sun Glorious? The Earth Fruitful? The Air Pleasant? The Sea Profitable? And the Giver Bountiful? Yet these are the things which it is difficult to retain. For could we always be sensible of their use and value, we should be always delighted with their wealth and glory.

To think well is to serve God in the interior court: To have a mind composed of Divine Thoughts, and set in frame, to be like Him within. To conceive aright and to enjoy the world, is to conceived the Holy Ghost, and to see His Love: which is the Mind of the Father.

Centuries I 9-10, p. 7 in Dobell’s edition.

Yet all this emphasis on the right “conception” or intellectual “enjoyment” of things, which carries on for 300 or so meditations, does not keep him from saying the following,

Philosophers are not only those that contemplate happiness, but practise virtue. He is a Philosopher that subdues his vices, lives by reason, orders his desires, rules his passions, and submits not to his senses, nor is guided by the customs of this world. He despiseth those riches which men esteem, he despiseth those honors which men esteem, he forsaketh those pleasures which men esteem. And having proposed to himself a superior end than is commonly discerned, bears all discouragements, breaks through all difficulties and lives unto it: that having seen the secrets and the secret beauties of the highest reason, orders his conversation, and lives by rule: though in this age it be held never so strange that he should do so. Only he is Divine because he does this upon noble principle; because God is, because Heaven is, because Jesus Christ hath redeemed him, and because he loves him: not only because virtue is amiable, and felicity delightful, but for that also.

Centuries IV 8 p. 234-235 (Dobell).

In the next paragraph he identifies this philosophy as

The enjoyment of wisdom… the real joy and glory of the blessed, which consisteth in the enjoyment of the whole world in communion with God; not this only, but the invisible and eternal, which [true Christians] earnestly covet to enjoy immediately: for which reason they daily pray Thy kingdom come, and travail towards it by learning Wisdom as fast as they can.”

IV 9, 235 (Dobell).

Thomas Traherne only makes for one little dot on the scatter plot, by which we track the change and progress of beliefs and ideas, yet his case illustrates the difficulty of what I’ll call “historical abstractions.” (E.g., in this age, one thought or acted so and so). It is true, Traherne himself felt alone in his search for and practice of wisdom (“though in this age…”), yet so have the righteous felt in nearly every generation (see Psalms 2, 4, 11, 12, etc.). Most significantly, I think, Traherne’s example defies Rice’s spectrum of “contemplation to action and from knowledge to virtue” by making contemplation subservient to action, and knowledge to virtue, the end of all of which was man’s felicity in God.

It is true that Traherne accepts absolutely the witness of Reason alongside Revelation (the third “Century” is full of proofs from the Psalter of his program), but instead of “secularization,” he hallows all thought and action to the end of loving God and neighbor. If anything, his writings suggest a rejection of the dichotomy. “To the pure,” one is inclined to reason, “all things are pure” (Titus 1:15). Traherne might say, “To the Philosopher, all things are holy.”