“Easy and Sweet”: Thomas Traherne’s Method of Meditation

This article links Thomas Traherne’s method of meditation to the precarious art of “thinking Well.” Traherne rejects or reforms historical and contemporary meditative practices of humiliation, scriptural engagement, and solitude, in favor of self-love, personal creativity, and community. Meditation is proven to be “Easy and Sweet” because good thoughts are “Prepard” and “inlaid” in the soul by God. Meditation becomes not an agonizing search for God, but a joyful communication with him. The article concludes with a revealing exposition of Traherne’s manuscript of the Centuries of Meditation (housed in the Bodleian Library), which displays the author’s meditative theories in practice and offers insight into seventeenth-century manuscript culture.