The Works of Thomas Traherne: Volume I (review)

'Why is this soe long detained in a dark Manuscript, that if printed would be a Light to the World, and a Universal Blessing?' Over three hundred years after an unknown person penned these words on its flyleaf, this 'dark Manuscript' has at last been printed in its entirety as the first of eight projected volumes collating the work of Thomas Traherne (1637-1674). The publication of this edition is the latest chapter in the saga of the recovery of the poetry and prose of an Anglican priest who spent most of his life in a small parish outside Hereford during the years immediately preceding and following the Restoration. Only two of his works were published (and quickly forgotten) in the seventeenth century, but since 1896 a considerable body of work has come gradually to light as manuscripts have been serendipitously picked up in London street-barrows, rescued from the flames of rubbish tips, and dusted off in Canadian attics. While many of the poems and meditations, and the richly digressive prose of Christian Ethicks, have been published and anthologized over the course of the twentieth century, much remains unpublished or is out of print – at a time when Traherne is not only the subject of burgeoning scholarly interest, but is being drawn upon more popularly as a source of joyful and profound spiritual insight.

Jeremy Maule unearthed Lambeth Palace MS 1360 and identified it as Traherne's in 1997 but, sadly, died shortly after his major discovery. It comprises five separate works: Inducements to Retiredness, A Sober View of Dr Twisse (a polemical piece opposing the notion of predestination), Seeds of Eternity or the Nature of the Soul, a fragment on Love, and, the major work of the volume, The Kingdom of God – a treatise of over 110,000 words concerning the attributes of divinity as imminently manifested in the material world and the human soul. The text is not as monolithic as the first impression of long and dense paragraphs would suggest; it is eclectic and varied in tone and subject – alternating between theological, scientific and cosmological reflections, by turns discursive, speculative, scholastic, argumentative, caustic, contemplative, and ecstatic. A good introductory selection from this and other works can be found in Denise Inge's anthology Thomas Traherne: Poetry and Prose (SPCK, 2002).

Traherne is noted for the vitality of his literary catalogues, and there are some especially memorable examples in this manuscript: a catalogue of the workings of Infinite Love which whispers 'in evry Gale of Wind' and 'fanneth our Lungs with Air' and is 'hid in the Labyrinth of our Ears'; a meditation upon a 'Curious and High Stomached' fly, crowned with an 'Imperial Tuff', 'Enthroned upon a Leaf... contemplating all the World'; and an extended reverie upon the imagined observations of a 'Celestial Stranger' who is 'let down of a suddain' from the aether and encounters a 'World of Mysteries' in the earth which had previously seemed to him to be but a pin-prick of light – 'This litle Star so Wide and so full of mysteries! So capacious, and so full of Territories, containing innumerable Repositories of Delight, when we draw neer!'

Such passages provide but a glimpse of the 'Repositories of Delight' contained in the first volume of The Works of Thomas Traherne. The completed collection will not include Traherne's Commonplace Book or an early notebook. This omission squares with the fact that, apart from biblical references, a glossary, and the noting of marginalia and textual revisions, Ross has not aimed to provide a comprehensive set of scholarly annotations. Aside from some general observations on Traherne's sources in the introduction, there is no attempt to trace through the text his broad-ranging interest in contemporary science and cosmology, his engagement with theological and political controversy, and his interaction with sources ancient and modern, ranging from the Hermetic writings and the Church Fathers to Theophilus...