SOURCE: Marks, Carol L. “Thomas Traherne and Cambridge Platonism.” PMLA 81, no. 7 (December 1966): 521-34.

[In the following essay, Marks considers the argument that Traherne can be categorized as a Cambridge Platonist and concludes that he defies all attempts at categorization.]

Although the Oxford-educated Thomas Traherne is indeed “thoroughly representative” of the “salient ideas” of the Cambridge Platonists,¹ and without a doubt should be classed with them philosophically, he is most akin emotionally to that maverick among the Cambridge men, Peter Sterry. Yet ideological differences separate him from Sterry, and even the emotional intensity which seems to link them takes radically variant forms. The case is the same with Henry More, whose work we know Traherne read,² and whose spiritual autobiography resembles Traherne's: their responses to the new ideas of space were remarkably alike in feeling, yet Traherne took issue vigorously with More's theories of space and deity, and in general lacked More's intellectual extravagance in other theological matters. We may, then, speak best of affinities with, rather than debts to, the Cambridge Platonists: the portrait of Traherne's mind shows an eclectic intellect and—more important in shaping Traherne's persistent individuality—original, highly personal feelings.

That mind, and those feelings, would have found more congenial pedagogues at Cambridge than at Oxford, for the great Platonic revival which began at Cambridge in the decade of Traherne's birth (in 1637) left official Oxford untouched, aside from the partial Platonism of the university Arminians (among them Thomas Jackson, whose works Traherne excerpted in his Commonplace Book). While Henry More's Platonissa shone at Cambridge like “a beam shot from the Deitie,”³ at Oxford Aristotle and the schoolmen, oriental philology and the Church Fathers sustained the old pattern. Oxford students read their Plato independently, if at all; at Cambridge, Benjamin Whichcote “set young students much on reading … Plato, Tully, and Plotin.⁴

The men of Cambridge who naturalized Plato an Englishman were closely associated, many of them as students and Fellows of Emmanuel College: Benjamin Whichcote, John Smith, Peter Sterry, Ralph Cudworth, Nathanael Culverwel, and John Worthington, Smith's editor. Henry More, most famous of the Platonists, belonged to Christ's. The Platonists were well entrenched in places of influence, for three of them became Heads of Colleges—Whichcote of King's, Worthington of Jesus, Cudworth of Clare Hall and later Christ's—and, in addition to his academic positions, Whichcote for some two decades occupied the Sunday afternoon pulpit at Trinity Church, Cambridge. Indifferent to publication, Whichcote exerted his great personal influence through his academic offices and even more through his Sunday afternoon sermons; to him and those he affected Gilbert Burnet attributed the salvation of the Restoration Church.⁵

Whichcote's philosophy began by postulating that the moral part of religion took precedence over the dogmatic, for from truth—conceived as a moral rather than abstract quality—the essential doctrines would naturally develop. While he adhered to the Protestant preference for faith over works, Whichcote argued that true faith by its very nature must manifest itself in works. He denied the Calvinist God of predestination and considered active goodness as God's preeminent characteristic. The image of God, man is fully human only when exercising his faculties—above all his reason—in emulation of his Creator. It follows, then, that men should abandon sterile debates on theological doctrine and turn instead to the cultivation of a tolerant, rational, and effective love of God and his neighbor. As Basil Willey puts it succinctly, Whichcote and his colleagues “affirm[ed] values where orthodoxy affirmed facts.”⁶

In these views Whichcote was not without precedent in ostensibly Puritan Cambridge; Mark Curtis traces liberal theology at Cambridge back to Peter Baro, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity from 1574 to 1596, and J. A. Stewart points to the teachings of Erasmus, Colet, and Linacre in the early sixteenth century.⁷ Nonetheless, when Whichcote began teaching (1633), such liberalism was more than suspect, as his correspondence with his former tutor, the Calvinist Anthony Tuckney, abundantly proves. Whichcote's attack on rigid Calvinism stirred much controversy and did not meet immediate success; Burnet complained that “latitude and moderation were odious to the greater part” at Cambridge in 1663.⁸

In the year before Burnet's visit, a Cambridge man signing himself “S. P.” wrote A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men Together with Some Reflections upon the New Philosophy, a pamphlet of twenty-four pages in the form of a letter to a “friend at Oxford.” The “latitudemen” were of Whichcote's stamp. By and large, said S. P., they were young, upright, learned, pious, orthodox in all essentials of the Anglican faith, practicing latitude of interpretation only in areas where “the Church her selfe leaves them to their liberty.” Indeed, S. P. maintained with Burnet, the future of the Church of England as a comprehensive national institution depended upon their talented exertions, for despite their latitude the Cambridge men demanded a broad commitment to Anglican views.⁹

The root of the opposition to the views promulgated by Whichcote lay in the reliance of the liberals upon the power of their own reason; the defence offered by S. P. summarizes their position well:

And now let no man accuse them of hearkning too much to their own reason, since their reason steers by so excellent a compass, the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church. For Reason is that faculty whereby a man must judge of every thing, nor can a man beleve any thing except he have some reason for it, whether that reason be a deduction from the light of nature, and those principles which are the candle of the Lord, set up in the soul of every man that hath not wilfully extinguished it; or a branch of Divine revelation in the oracles of holy Scripture; or the general interpretation of genuine antiquity, or the proposal of our own Church consentaneous thereto, or lastly the result of some or all of these: for he that will rightly make use of his Reason, must take all that is reasonable into consideration.

“But there is another crime which cannot be denyed,” S. P. affirmed cheerfully: “they have introduced a new Philosophy; Aristotle and the Schoolemen are out of request with them.”¹⁰ The introduction of Platonic philosophy into divinity at Cambridge was intimately connected with the rejection of the tyranny of Aristotle in natural philosophy. Both the scientific and the philosophical movements wished to clear the intellectual slate of mere verbiage, to discover by Cartesian analysis the reality of things. According to Basil Willey, the Cambridge men employed platonic terminology in an effort to get away from hair-splitting doctrinal disputes couched in an outworn language.¹¹

Although Cambridge had been for over a century a center of Greek studies, until the 1630's Plato and his followers seem to have been virtually unread, despite Geoffrey Bullough's assertion that “for a century Platonism had made more headway [at Cambridge] than at Oxford.”¹² Peter Sterry and John Sadler (later fellow of Emmanuel and Master of Magdalene) “were the first that were observ'd to make a public Profession of Platonism in the univers. of Cambridge.”¹³ More recalled that he had bought a copy of Plotinus “when I was Junior Master for 16 shillings, and I think I was the first that had either the luck or courage to buy him.”¹⁴ Acknowledging his debt to More's terminology, Joseph Glanvill in 1662 described him as “the profound Restorer and Refiner of almost-extinct Platonism.”¹⁵

Besides Plato and Plotinus, the young More read Marsilio Ficino and Hermes Trismegistus; all these authors appear frequently in the annotations to the 1647 edition of his Philosophical Poems. Ficino was an especially strong influence upon More and his friends, not only through his Latin translations and republications of all the major and minor pagan exponents of Platonic philosophy, as well as through his own Platonic treatises, but also through his belief that many of the heathens had been directly inspired by God. The Cambridge Platonists accepted Ficino's view of an unbroken tradition of early wisdom, passing from Moses to Hermes and percolating through Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Plato, Orpheus, and yet more obscure philosophers. References to these authors appear often in the works of Smith, who also read other of Ficino's protégés—Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Proclus. Culverwel quoted Plato, Hierocles, Philo, Hermes, the Chaldean Oracle, Zoroaster, and Plotinus. Among the books in Sterry's possession in 1663 were copies of Ficino, Plotinus, and Proclus.¹⁶ Nothing if not eclectic, the Cambridge thinkers discriminated not at all between Platonism and Neoplatonism.

Nor did Traherne make such distinctions, as we know from the abundant records (mainly manuscript) which he left of his Neoplatonic reading. The most salient evidence reposes in the British Museum, in the shape of a thin notebook (MS. Burney 126) bearing Traherne's signature and (but for one exception, foll. 57^v, 59^v) in his hand. The major part of the manuscript, which is nearly all in Latin, consists of notes from Ficino's commentaries on Plato. Traherne included a few excerpts from Ficino's translation of the Republic, as well as the opening part of the “Argumentum” to his translation of Hermes Trismegistus, a long life of Socrates, and some notes on a work called “Stoicismus Christianus.” For several reasons, irrelevant here, the Ficino Notebook may be dated in the late 1660's—in other words, some ten or twelve years after Traherne took his B.A. (1656) and just before he left his tiny Herefordshire parish to become (1669) chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Clarendon's successor as chief minister to Charles II.

Not long after writing the Ficino Notebook, Traherne (with the aid of an amanuensis) began compiling a Commonplace Book, into which he copied large extracts from Theophilus Gale's Court of the Gentiles, Part II. Book III of that encyclopedic account of philosophy concerns “the Platonick Philosophie,” and Traherne included material from this section under thirty different rubrics; in addition, his amanuensis copied some of Gale's biography of Socrates into the Ficino Notebook (foll. 57^v, 59^v). Gale is tendentious and extremely dull, but compendious; and Traherne seems to have used The Court of the Gentiles to refresh his memory of the history of philosophy. This evidence of the Commonplace Book merely serves to underline the indications given by the Ficino Notebook that after he graduated B.A., Traherne devoted considerable time to the study of Platonic philosophy.

But the Commonplace Book affords richer Platonic ore than Gale. Scattered throughout the manuscript are over two hundred paragraphs from the Divine Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus, taken from the English translation by John Everard which appeared in 1657.¹⁷ The manner of his entries in the Commonplace Book proves abundantly that Traherne was fascinated anew when he remet Hermes in English. He used some of the Commonplace Book extracts in Christian Ethicks, lavishing praise on Hermes' “mighty sence of the interiour Excellency of the Soul of Man.”¹⁸ Aware that it was “a great Q[uestion].” whether Trismegistus were in fact “that ancient Heathen, the Egyptian Hermes that was contemporary with Moses,” or indeed “whether there were any such Hermes or no,” Traherne dismissed the problems of textual criticism as making no practical difference. “However it be,” he summed up, “it is a venerable & learned Author of great Esteem & Authority in the World, & by Common Consent of all learned men, many grave & venerable Mysteries are contained in it.”¹⁹

There is yet more Platonism in the Commonplace Book: the extracts already mentioned from the Divine Dialogues of Henry More. And besides reading the Cambridge Platonists, Traherne may also have met them and their pupils the Latitudinarian divines; for Bridgeman, a Cambridge man himself, had many connections among the liberal theologians of the University, and had chosen Hezekiah Burton, one of the minor Latitudinarians, as Traherne's predecessor.

Undoubtedly, then, Traherne was an Oxford Platonist, as familiar as his Cambridge contemporaries with the Platonic inheritance bequeathed to the Renaissance by Ficino. His response to Platonism, direct and exceedingly personal, was broadly similar to the response of the Cambridge Platonists, but the individual variations are striking.

Platonists postulate God as an infinitely good Being containing the Ideas of all other beings. “The Idea, in this sense,” Peter Sterry expounded,

is the first and distinct Image of each form of things in the Divine Mind. … Every Idea of each Creature is this [universal] Idea, bringing forth it self … into innumerable distinct figures of it self in the unconfined Varieties of its own Excellencies and Beauties. …

Thus in every Idea of each Creature doth this universal Idea dwell at large, and freely shine forth with all its fulnesses and sweetnesses in a distinct form, as it self in another form.²⁰

To varying degrees all the seventeenth-century Platonists accepted the theory of idealism; Plato's duality between the real world of ideas and this world of physical images had long been part of the Christian tradition. Revitalized by contact with Platonism, in Sterry's Plotinian language other worldliness received brilliant expression: “We are in a world of Images. … O Man! thou art in this world, as at a Show. A Noise of Diving Glories descending thorow the Clouds: Apparitions of heavenly Essences, or Excellencies coming forth shadowed; these fill the empty space. A Repetition of Blessed Sounds; a Reflection of Holy Images falling from above; This is the World in which thou livest.”²¹

More imaginative and (consequently?) less moralistic than the other Cambridge men, Sterry presented a Christian Platonism far less concerned than theirs with practical ethics. At first the matter seems one of proportion, with Culverwel and Smith tending more towards Sterry's theoretical approach, Traherne and Whichcote inclining in the other direction while accepting Sterry's postulated duality, and Cudworth and More at a middle position which could adopt either emphasis. Each of these men wrote, abundantly or sparsely according to his place on the scale, recommendations such as Traherne's adjuration to pass from “the phantastick World, with all its Shews and Gauderies … to the real and solid World of Bliss and Glory” (CE [Christian Ethics], Ch. xxvi, sig. 2F5). And all of them meant it in their hearts—all, that is, except Traherne, who with characteristic unorthodoxy rejected the dichotomy between the material and spiritual worlds.

For Traherne truly felt what conventional Neoplatonists stated: “This visible World is the Body of GOD” (C [Centuries] II. 21). God in his love for man, so Traherne believed, gave him the universe, establishing “an exact and pleasant Harmony between us and all the Creatures” (CE, Ch. vii, sig. G4^v). It was a music to which Traherne's ear was peculiarly attuned. He never opposed the physical to the spiritual world, but rather the frivolous, man-made world to God's world, which contains both the spiritual realm and the natural universe (C I. 7). Physical creation, especially the human body, was a source of infinite wonder to him. Whereas his contemporaries anatomized man to counter atheism (for example, More's arguments from design in his Antidote Against Atheism), Traherne praised man's “Organized Joynts, and Azure Veins” (“The Salutation,” II, 4) as manifestations of God's overflowing love. “The Person,” “The Estate,” and “The Enquirie” form a trio of poems hymning the human body, and the “Thanksgivings for the Body” celebrate man in a curious poetical-prosaic mixture of physiology and theology.

As man's body was the pinnacle of physical creation, so was his soul the acme of the spiritual world. Here again Traherne exceeded the enthusiasm of his fellow Platonists. All rejoiced in the greatness of the human soul; in the chain of being only the angels intervened between man's soul and God. But Traherne declared the human soul greater than the angels. He discerned “this mighty Difference” between men and angels: “Angels are more Simple Spirits, Men are Images of GOD carefully put into a Beautiful Case.” If their souls were not embodied, men would equal the angels; indeed they do equal the angels, even surpass them: “Bodies are Superadded, certainly for unspeakable and most Glorious Ends,” for “without such persons as men are,” the physical world “would be utterly useless” (CE, Ch. xiv, sig. 06^v).

It was the dramatic aspect of man's state which appealed to Traherne's imagination. Divine Wisdom had made “the most Sublime and Sovereign Creatures all Free” (CE, Ch. xix, sig. X2^v); the responsibility was at once awful and exhilarating. Traherne, an invincible optimist, was far more excited than awed by the magnitude of choice offered. Embracing free will more decisively than any of the other Platonists, he exclaimed: “O Adorable and Eternal GOD! hast thou made me a free Agent! … Of all Exaltations in all Worlds this is the Greatest” (C IV.43). His philosophical fellows did not tune themselves to so high a pitch, in part because the debate between Calvinist predestination and Arminian free will had by mid-century grown wearisome. “Free-will, which we so much contend for,” Whichcote observed acidly, “is no absolute perfection, and we need not be so proud of it. For free-will, as it includes a power to do wrong, as well as right, is not to be found in God himself; and therefore it is no perfection in us.”²²

While regarding the doctrine of absolute reprobation with detestation—“O belch of hell! O horrid blasphemy!” More exclaimed²³—the liberals cautiously avoided endorsement of complete liberty. Rather they limited themselves to agreement with the scholastic principle enunciated by Sterry that “the freedom of each thing is a power of acting, according to the Principles of Nature, and the Law of its own Essence.”²⁴ Reason, the law of man's essence, counsels complete obedience to God. Because of their abhorrence of Calvinism, few of the Cambridge men pointed to the conclusion of this argument, that man must ultimately be determined by God's very goodness. But Culverwel, and Sterry even more, urged the point; Sterry, indeed, wrote a long and eloquent Discourse of the Freedom of the Will, in which he proposed that since man was “a shadowy Image” of God, he must, like “the Face in the Waters, or in the Glass,” depend entirely upon his original. And this original is Divine Love; the only necessity imposed on man is to love Love itself, an activity which is purely enjoyable and in which “the most perfect freedom and the most absolute necessity are joyned together.” In practice, Sterry knew, men did not love Love; their failure, he declared, “proceeds from the nature of the Creature, from its natural tendency to that nothingness, which alone is its own, and its native Element, as it is in it self.”²⁵ Intermingled with his rich and sensuous praise of God is a profound, inexorable condemnation of man.

Traherne, so like Sterry in his praise of God, could not be more unlike him in his philosophy of man. Sterry assumed that man's very nature determined him to sin; Traherne assumed that man could be good, and further that goodness was not goodness unless it was chosen, unless, in other words, man had free will, which he claimed was necessary for the “Kingdome of Righteousnesse … So that all the Glory of the World depends on the Liberty of Men and Angels” (CE, Ch. xii, sigs. M7^v-M8).

Man stood, then, in the essential, significant position in God's creation; he was, said Traherne, “the Golden clasp whereby Things Material and Spiritual are United” (CE, Ch. xiv, sig. 07), “the Head of all Things visible & Invisible, since in His Body all visible, in his Soul all Invisible Things are Contained” (CYB [Church's Year-Book] fol. 94). He was, in Pico's famous statement of this great commonplace of Renaissance humanism (translated by Traherne): “A Messenger between the Creatures, Lord of Inferior things, and familiar to those abov; by the Keeness of his sences, the Peircing of his Reason, and the light of Knowledg, the Interpreter of Nature, A seeming Intervall between Time and Eternity and the Inhabitant of both, the Golden link or Tie of the World, yea the Hymenaeus Marrying the Creator and his Creatures together” (C IV.74). Traherne's sensibility responded to, reaffirmed, and—in all his philosophical works and poems—re-expressed Pico's grand metaphors. The excitement of his assertion of man's unique status stands in engaging contrast to doctrinally similar statements by other seventeenth-century Platonists, such as More's Philotheus, who declared woodenly that man is “of such a mixt nature, and of so invincible a Freeness, that he may either associate himself with Angels, or sort himself with Apes and Baboons or Satyrs of the Wood.”²⁶

Whatever their degree of fervor, all Renaissance Platonists made two assumptions when they asserted man as the bond of the universe: they attributed great strength to human reason, and—as we have just seen—they maintained free will; the second assumption is a corollary of the first, and both depend on the Neoplatonists' picture of a good God abounding in love.

Uncorrupted, man's reason is capable of grasping the natural law as it is spelled out by innate ideas, “some cleare and undelible Principles, some first and Alphabetical Notions,” which “are stampt and printed upon the being of man.”²⁷ As Theophilus Gale explained laboriously (in an exposition of Plato transcribed in Traherne's Commonplace Book):

And indeed these common seeds of natural light are a private Law, which God has deeply engraven on mens Consciences, and is universally extensive unto all, though with a latitude of degrees; it being in some more, in some lesse, but in all in great measure obliterated, and defaced since the fall. It is also by Divines generally termed the Light, or Law of Nature, because it flows in, and with, and from Human Nature, either immediately, or mediately.²⁸

All things except Christian redemption “are evident in themselves by the Light of Nature,” according to Traherne, “because they may either be clearly deduced from the principles of Reason, or certainly discerned by plain Experience”; God republishes all truths either because they lie buried “under the Rubbish of our Fall,” or because he wishes to “confirm all by the Seal of his Authority” (CE, Ch. xvi, sigs. Q7^v-Q8). Traherne placed rather more stress upon “experience” (as opposed, partly, to reason) than the other Platonists, no doubt because he was so rich in it himself: “I speak as I am inspired by Felicity,” he said in one place (CE, Ch. xxviii, sig. 2H5), and in another described his many years' “Search of Happiness” and “Study of Felicity” (C III. 46).

In theoretical pronouncements the Cambridge men abounded. Culverwel explained: “Now these first and Radical Principles are wound up in some such short bottomes as these: Bonum est appetendum, malum est fugiendum; Beatitudo est quaerenda; Quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri nè feceris. And Reason thus … by warming and brooding upon these first and oval [i.e., ab ovo] Principles of her own laying, it being it self quicken'd with an heavenly vigour, does thus hatch the Law of Nature.”²⁹ But in postlapsarian man, reason, this heavenly hen, requires extraneous aid in incubating natural law. Divine revelation was the auxiliary, making “clear what had become obscured … Christianity was therefore a republication of the law of nature, with a new law-giver, and with impressive inducements to well-doing and penalties for the reverse.”³⁰ Because, as Smith explained, “the inward virtue and vigour of Reason is much abated” since the Fall, God has supplemented the “Truth of Natural inscription” with “the Truth of Divine Revelation.”³¹

Such was the argument reconciling reason with Christian revelation, but it did not satisfy nervous dogmatists. “I find that some men take offence,” Whichcote remarked in a sermon, “to hear reason spoken of out of a pulpit, or to hear those great words of natural light, of principles of reason, and conscience. They are doubtless in a mighty mistake … there is no inconsistency between the Grace of God, and the calling upon men carefully to use, improve and employ the principles of God's creation.”³² Reason and faith do not conflict, asserted the liberals: “Faith is by Reason confirmed, and Reason is by Faith Perfected” (CE, Ch. xv, sig. Q1).

This reason of the Platonists was by no means simply logical thinking, or (as More put it) “dry Reason.”³³ True reason was, in its most important aspect, “an internal sensating Faculty” which “can tast and discern how near any thing comes to” God,³⁴ effective only when allied with “a good and holy man throughly sanctified in Spirit, Soul and body.”³⁵ It was the duty of this good man, Whichcote reiterated (with conscious reference to the Protestant tradition), “to set up a throne of judgment in his own soul” in order “to understand what is true of God” and “to express it in our lives and to copy it out in our works.”³⁶

Reason had a “twofold meaning” in the thought of the Cambridge Platonists: “On the one hand it meant the discipline of thinking exactly and philosophically about the things which were Real. On the other hand it involved the unification of the whole personality in the pursuit of truth.”³⁷ With Descartes and the earlier Platonists they observed “that there is a world of diligence, care, and thoughtfulness necessary for a man to understand the truth.” One must therefore acknowledge the vanity of dogmatizing, realize man is “finite and fallible,” and “be resolved to follow truth whenever it may appear.” For the essential “truth lies in a narrow room, and little compass.”³⁸ As far as religious truth went, it was “something rather to be understood by a Spiritual sensation, then by any Verbal description.”³⁹

Certain criticisms of Christianity developed from this Plotinian concept of religion as essentially intuitional, not dogmatic. By cultivating the vestiges of natural light, “the better sort of heathen” (in the popular phrase of the time) perceived many truths; and Christians, for whom the natural light was rekindled by Christ, could profit from reading heathen works, above all from reading the Platonic wisdom which flowed ultimately from the Mosaic fountain. But surely, the argument ran, Christians should be better men than heathens; for they alone know the totality of God's goodness, they alone know the end for which man lives. And yet, exclaimed Traherne, “there is no Salvage Nation under the Cope of Heaven, that is more absurdly Barbarous than the Christian World. … I am sure those Barbarous People that go naked, com nearer to Adam God, and Angels in the Simplicity of their Wealth, tho not in Knowledg” (C III. 12). Culverwel reported that “the famous Salmasius in his late Tractate De Coma … tells us that he had rather search for Natures Law in a naked Indian, then in a spruce Athenian, in a rude American, rather then in a gallent Roman; in a meer Pagan, rather then in a Jew or Christian.”⁴⁰ Stimulated by reports of travels in distant lands, Christianity faced the challenge of natural religion.

The debate ended in a draw. “And the Truth is,” Traherne confessed,

I wonder much, (the World being so Beautiful and Glorious in every Eye, so really deep and valuable in Worth, so peculiarly applied to the use and service of every person;) that the Heathens did miss the fruition of it, and fail to measure themselves and their Felicity, by the Greatness of its Beauty, and the Joy which all the Creatures ought to produce in the mind of Man by their real Services. For the Earth is really better than if all its Globe were of beaten Gold, the Seas are better than if all their Abysses were full of Diamonds, the Air is better, than if all the space between us and the Skys were full of Scepters, and the Sun alone a greater Treasure then all the wealthy Mines in the Indies: every man is surrounded with all the Light of their Advantages, and so much served by them, as if no man but himself were alive in the World.

(CE, Ch. viii, sigs. H3-H3^v)

This is one of Traherne's great themes, as we have already noted. As a manifestation of divinity, the physical world merited both praise (such as Traherne offered in his Thanksgivings) and study (such as the Royal Society supported and Traherne may have dabbled in⁴¹). Here was the juncture of the new philosophy and Cambridge Platonism, a juncture which S. P. observed with pride in his Brief Account, remarking pointedly that “True Philosophy can never hurt sound Divinity.”⁴² Apprehending God “in and through nature, not in spite of or beyond it,” as had the Puritans, the Platonic philosophers contributed to the constructive attempt being made in these years “to bring together the new knowledge and the old faith.”⁴³

For, as Glanvill stressed, the Cambridge men studied not only the history of philosophy and the development of Christianity, but in addition “They read, and consider'd all sorts of late Improvements in Anatomy, Mathematicks, Natural History, and Mechanicks, and acquainted themselves with the Experimental Philosophy of Solomon's House, and the other Promoters of it. So that there was not any valuable Discovery made, or Notion started in any part of Real Learning, but they got considerable knowledge of it.”⁴⁴ Glanvill and a number of his heroes were, not surprisingly, members of the Royal Society, which held as part of its program “that The Natural Philosopher is to begin, where the Moral ends.”⁴⁵ Traherne broadened the dictum: “Natural Philosophy … leads us into a Diligent inquisition into all Natures, their Qualities, Affections, Relations, Causes and Ends, so far forth as by Nature and Reason they may be Known. And this Noble Science, as such is most Sublime and Perfect, it includes all Humanity and Divinity together GOD, Angels, Men, Affections, Habits, Virtues” (C III.44). The world (as More's Cuphophron observed) is the “picture, shadow, or footstep of the Divinity,” God's temple, his mirror, the rays of his sun-like being.⁴⁶ Even “in the most contemptible creature, as a creature, there is aliquid Dei”;⁴⁷ “a Sand Exhibiteth the Wisdom and Power of God” (C I.27).

Underlying these views was a Neoplatonic theory of immanence, the belief, as Smith put it, that God “runs through all created Essence, containing the Archetypal Ideas of all things in himself, and from thence deriving and imparting several prints of Beauty and Excellency all the world over.”⁴⁸ The world is the actualization of the ideas of God; to be fully understood and appreciated, it must be seen with both the physical and the spiritual eye, to use a distinction of which both Traherne and Sterry were fond. Although the beauties of the world are daily before us—“we need nothing but open Eys, to be Ravished like the Cherubims” (C I.37)—such is human blindness that we do not perceive this most obvious of all truisms. All the difficulty is to “apprehend” God's “infinite love,” wrote Traherne's Thomas Jackson.⁴⁹ “Pigs eat Acorns,” Traherne illustrated, “but neither consider the Sun that gav them Life, nor the Influences of the Heavens by which they were Nourished, nor the very Root of the Tree from whence they came.” For “the Services of Things, and their Excellencies are Spiritual” (C I.26); we must eat our acorns in the flesh and understand their idea. Actuality and idea must be perceived simultaneously:

The Heavens and Earth serv you, not only in shewing unto you your fathers Glory, as all Things without you are your Riches and Enjoyments. But as within you also, they Magnify, and Beautify and Illuminat your Soul. For … [they are like] the Sun Beams … [which] carry Light in them as they Pass through the Air, but go on in vain till they meet an Object: and there they are Expresst. … Even so your Soul in its Rays and Powers is unknown … Like light from the Sun, its first Effigies is simple Life, the Pure resemblance of its Primitive fountain but on the Object which it meeteth it is quickly changed, and by Understanding becometh All Things.

(C II.78)

Traherne's thoroughgoing Neoplatonism was matched by Sterry, who supplied the psychological theory underlying Traherne's spiritual physics, as he described the progress of “the particular Forms of the outward senses” from their first meeting place in the “common sense” to their ultimate home in “the Intellectual Region.”⁵⁰

This “Intellectual Region” was a country of infinite capacity, to borrow two of Traherne's favorite words. “The Spiritual Room of the Mind,” he declared, “is the Greatest Miracle perhaps in Nature. For it is an infinite Sphere in a Point, an Immensity in a Centre, an Eternity in a Moment. We feel it, tho we cannot understand it” (CE, Ch. X, sig. K3). Less modest than Traherne, Sterry explained that the soul can contain not only its own body, but also “the world with all Varietie of things in it,” and indeed “in the supreame, & inward part of itselfe it conteineth all fformes of things in their Originall, Eternall, Glorious Truths, & substances.”⁵¹

Traherne wrote constantly, brilliantly, and somewhat unsystematically on the themes of infinity and eternity. Like More, he found inspiration in Platonism conjoined with the new perceptions offered by the microscope and telescope; but, as Marjorie Nicolson remarks, “training in science and philosophy served only to heighten youthful intuition.”⁵² His idea of infinity was innate: when he was a mere child, Traherne related, instinct “told me there was endless Space / Within my Soul” (“Felicity,” II, 90); his “Infant-Ey” discerned “endless Space” (“Sight” II, 132). “Infinit is the first Thing which is naturally Known” (C II.81; cf. C V.2-3), according to Traherne; More, too, claimed that it was impossible for a man to “shuffle off” the notion “of an Infinite Space; which Notion will stick as closely to his Soul as her power of Imagination.”⁵³

To the imagination of both More and Traherne the concept of infinity appealed with over-whelming power, affording “not only logical satisfaction but emotional gratification.”⁵⁴ Since their emotions were expressed in terms of their religion, their gratification took on a theological cast. For them, as for Peter Sterry, perception of infinity of space and time was a principal criterion of the regenerate man. A person anxious to discover whether he is truly regenerate should ask his heart, said Sterry, “Canst thou tell a way to possess all Things in one point, in a Unity of Life? … Didst thou ever yet descry a glorious Eternity in each winged Moment of Time; a Bright Infiniteness in the narrow points of every dark Object? Then thou knowest what the Spirit means …”⁵⁵

Traherne passed Sterry's test. Believing it to be “the Nobility of Mans Soul that He is Insatiable” (C I.22), Traherne found satisfaction only in infinity. “Can nothing hold my Mind?” he cried, explaining: “This busy, vast, enquiring Soul / Brooks no Controul … It will all see, / Not Time alone, But ev'n Eternity.”

                    'Tis mean Ambition to desire
                              A single World:
                    To many I aspire …
          Each one of all those Worlds must be
Enricht with infinit Variety
          And Worth; or 'twill not do.

(“Insatiableness,” II, 145-146)

The extraordinary power of the human soul to desire and—more glorious still—to comprehend this infinity of space, worlds, and time filled Traherne with amazement; “even more than to the aesthetics he responded to the new psychology of infinity.”⁵⁶

Man's “capacity” for infinity was the subject of frequent comment as well by the Cambridge Platonists. The soul, said More, was “thirsty still in all estates,” for nothing can “satisfie / Her hungry self, nor fill her vast capacity.”⁵⁷ Culverwel, no friend to exaggerated claims for fallen man, observed ungracefully that “the soul can quickly open its mouth so wide, as that the whole world can't fill it.”⁵⁸ But Traherne was indebted to no contemporary, not even to More, for his glorification of man's soul. As the extracts from the Divine Pymander in the Commonplace Book and in Christian Ethicks suggest, it was Hermes who fired his imagination, reinforcing his infant intuition. Man was for Hermes “a Divine living thing … to be compared to … them that are above in Heaven.”⁵⁹ Traherne had often drawn the same conclusion. Endowed by God with the whole world, “evry Man,” Traherne held, “is like a God Incarnat on the Throne” (“Ease,” II, 66). Both Traherne and Hermes celebrated the far-reaching extent of man's “Intellectuall Operation”: “Command thy Soul to go into India, and sooner then thou canst bid it, it will be there. … Command it to flie into Heaven, and it will need no Wings. … Behold how great power, how great swiftnesse thou hast!”⁶⁰ Man's soul, Traherne rhapsodized in the Church's Year-Book (fol. 90), may “by a Thought appear in the very Indies, & mov in an Instant from East to West,” and he glorified intellectual capacity at length in a series of poems entitled “Thoughts.”

Obscured by many centuries, Hermes did not compel Traherne to argue with him; Traherne took what appealed to him, ignored the rest. Henry More, however, was but an older contemporary, not a misty Egyptian sage, and Traherne read him critically. Although More and Traherne shared many opinions on space and time, their views were not identical, as a fascinating passage in Traherne's Commonplace Book shows.

Under the rubric “Deitie,” Traherne copied extensive selections from the discussion in the first of the Divine Dialogues on space. He ended by giving a summary of the argument presented by More's disputants:

They finally conclude it [space] must be the Essence of God, whose Omnipresence they affirm this infinit Space to be, which cannot but be a Spirit, bec. it pervades the Matter of the Univers. And this they insist on so much the more, bec. it is increated infinit & Eternal. for a Measurable Extension distinct from that of matter, shews that there is also a Substance distinct from that of Matter, which therefore must be immaterial: & this immaterial Substance being increated & Eternal is the Deitie.⁶¹

“Thus much,” wrote Traherne briskly, “for the Politeness & Ingenuity of their Endeavor, the Vanity of it followeth.” In his demonstration of the “Vanity,” Traherne demonstrated as well that quality of intellect and feeling which sets him apart from his Platonist contemporaries: the infusion of theory with emotion which is part and parcel of his style, the warm humanization of God accompanied by an insistence on the essential difference between God and man, the subtlety of intellect which refused the neat theory and demanded instead the impossible simultaneous awareness of all kinds of knowledge about God.

Traherne was impatient with theories. The dull style of the early chapters of Christian Ethicks is the corollary of gritted teeth; once he got through the mandatory explanations of traditional terms, he wrote in his usual rhythms. Suppressed in the Ethicks, irritation appears more clearly in his private reaction to More. He began the attack:

That there is an immovable Extension distinct from that of Matter I readily acknowledg. I acknowledg it Immutable, Eternal, infinit, Spiritual, Substantial. … But I do not acknowledg it to be a Living Substance, endued with Knowledg & Wisdom, Love & Goodness Power & Dominion, as God is. … I acknowledg that that Immensity we behold within us is the Omnipresence of God in our Minds, which is wholy there & wholy evry where. But that the Eternal Capacity or Space is God, or that all Spirits are parts of that Capacity, or Capacities distinct from it, & extended like it, I shall not be hasty to believ.

God's omnipresence, said Traherne, is “a more lively & Sublimer thing, then that desolat vacuity, or dark Imaginary Space” described by More. Reverting to a passage (p. 106) he had previously quoted (fol. 33.2), he continued (fol. 33^v.1):

Infinit Space I grant is [“]a more obscure Shadow or Adumbration[”] of his Essence, but not his Essence; [“]a more confused Apprehension of his Divine Amplitude[”] but not his Amplitude. It is a Pledg of the Existence of an infinit Spirit, but not his Substance.

Traherne's vehement distinctions may be read as a private palinode. Not long before, in the Centuries, he had declared explicitly that infinity of space “is the Eternal and Incomprehensible Essence of the Deitie” (C V.3). It seems clear from the context that he did not actually believe anything so extreme as the phrase implies, for he went on to state that “Almighty Power includes Infinitie in its own Existence” (C V.4). His debate with More thus clarifies an obscurity in the Centuries.

Continuing his argument in the Commonplace Book, Traherne disposed of a technicality and went on to state the gravamen of his charge: More's theory deprived God (and our own souls as well) of “Life & Knowledg … Chois & freedom, Will & Power Joy & Glory”—which, he noted, “are things of another order, infinitly distant in Kind & Nature.” More's hypothesis would deprive human souls of the ability “to conceiv infinit Space, to feel Eternity, & to be present by Light & Sight with all Ages.”

Employing a standard tactic of debaters, Traherne slew his opponent with his own words. Early in the discussion quoted under “Deitie,” More's Bathynous complained that it “is too mean a conception of the Majesty of God” to imagine him as “a subtile Body,” or in other words “a Congeries of very little Atomes toying and playing one by another.”⁶² Traherne retorted:

Suppose the Substance of God to be this infinit Extended Space, is it not too mean a Conception of God? … This Power is a Being far more Noble & Divine then Extended Space. … That Power how Mysterious soever it seem, may exist alone, & existing by it self may be a Substance: a Being far abov all Time & place, including all, containd in none, reigning over all Subject to none, ubholding [sic] all, depending on None, as far abov infinit Space, as Space above Nothing. … Bare Extended Space cannot Think, illuminat or desire.

He then submitted more technical arguments against More, posing a series of theoretical problems which he said were “Questions to [sic] difficult to be solved by those that count infinit Space a Deitie.” He attempted no answers: he declined to match theory with theory. The temper of his mind appears admirably in his concluding paragraph, modulating as it does from an analysis of all the considerations which must be taken into account in discussing the nature of deity to a lyrical meditation on God:

Is Power therfore it self a Deitie? For that is infinit & Eternal! It is neerer to the Deitie then Space is, & is the Deitie. Yet not alone. All Power is not the Godhead. Nor will infinit & Eternal Power satisfy the Soul, unless exerted. Bare Power is neither Wise nor Good, nor Holy, nor Blessed & Glorious, nay tho it be infinit & Eternal. But it is Transformable into any Act, & may becom a Voluntary Simple Act, infinit & Eternal. For it has Power to be what it will. But simple Power without a Will is dead & idle. Almighty Power therfore endued with Choise, & acting from all Eternity in the most wise & Glorious Manner is the Deitie, a more pure Incomprehensible Eternal Act, that is never Desolate nor idle, but the fountain & the End of all Things, ordering all, & enjoying all, that is God. Who is a voluntary Being unbegotten from all Eternity, yet Begotten of himself, & proceeding by that Generation to all his Creatures, the father & the first Born, the virtu & the Beauty of evry Creature.

Traherne's works all manifest an abiding interest in divine power, a continuing attempt to define that power in terms of goodness and love. To the development of his thoughts the critique of More certainly contributed. The final fruit of his meditations on God's power appears in Christian Ethicks:

We must take heed of conceiving GOD to be one Thing, and his Act another, for all his Wisdom and Goodness, all his Blessedness, and Life, and Glory are in the Act, by which he became the Fountain and the End of all Things. He became so freely, and yet was so by his Essence from everlasting … Act is the Top and Perfection of Nature, it is the fulness of Power … it is the Cause, and Means and End of it self, as well as of other Things, which for its own sake, are produced by it. For idle Power can do nothing.

(Ch. ix, sigs. I4-I5)

This eternally active God, being infinitely good, created all possible beings: Traherne, like all good Platonists, believed in that plenitude of creation first described in the Timaeus and so powerfully re-emphasized by Plotinus. In its unelaborated form it was an assumption held by all men of the Renaissance, whatever their philosophical school. Only when More and his followers speculated upon such corollated subjects as the infinity of worlds or the pre-existence of souls did antagonists question the proposition that “the divine benignity … produced things into being, according to the vast plenitude of Forms that were in his all-knowing mind.”⁶³ It was generally agreed that plenitude was like a “long chain of life and Being propagated from the highest to the lowest of all, from the most incorporeal Deity to Matter it self.”⁶⁴ Because all were interconnected, each link in the chain possessed inherent value; and our aim, as Smith put it, should be to learn “how to ascend and descend upon those golden links that unite as it were the World to God.”⁶⁵

Not all was golden, however; one logical consequence of Plato's plenitude was the inclusion of Hell in the grand scheme of things. “Hell it self,” Traherne explained, “is a Part of GODs Kingdom, to wit His Prison. It is fitly mentioned in the Enjoyment of the World: And is it self by the Happy Enjoyed, as a Part of the world” (C I.48). He insisted, “Mens Woes shall be but foyls unto thy Bliss” (“The Vision,” II, 26). Such statements did not negate the postulate of an infinitely good God. Sterry explained the principle: to one, he said, should be surprised,

Because he meeteth with an Hell, as well as an Heaven in this work of God. Divine Love … knoweth how to joynt an Hell into its work, with such Divine Artifice, incomprehensible to Men or Angels, that this also shall be beautiful, with delights in its place, and shall give a sweetness, a lustre to the whole piece. … All things … are shining links in this golden Chain.

If God is truly a God of plenitude, Sterry argued, he will create not only harmony but its possible opposite, so that “Contrariety it self … is a part of the Variety of things in the Unity of the whole,” and man's Fall was “in the Universal Design; was comprehended in it, and part of it.”⁶⁶ Since Sterry's God of love ultimately invites all things into his bosom, the story ends happily; besides—importantly—Sterry denied the eternity of damnation.

As D. P. Walker has shown,⁶⁷ the idea of hell was so complicated with beliefs about morality and about God that it was extremely difficult for seventeenth-century theologians to make an out-right denial of the existence of hell. It was daring simply to reassert Origen's theory, as Rust and Sterry did in refusing to admit the eternity of damnation. Other Platonists expressed theological sophistication by proposing (as Smith wrote) that “Hell is rather a Nature then a Place: and Heaven cannot be so truly defined by anything without us, as by something that is within us.”⁶⁸ Traherne concurred, observing that even this world “is both a Paradice and a Prison to different Persons” (C I.36). Discussing justice in Christian Ethicks, he declared: “'Tis but to see how much we are hated of GOD, and how base the Action is, no other fire is needful to Hell: The Devils chiefest Hell is in the Conscience” (CE, Ch. xiii, sig. N7^v). These rejections of “hell local” in favor of “hell moral”⁶⁹ presumably stemmed from the belief held by all the Platonists that, “as S. Austin and others of the Fathers often inculcate,” sin is “an adventitious and extraneous thing,”⁷⁰ a mere “Privation of Good.”⁷¹

Another, more cheerful, consequence of the theory of plenitude among seventeenth-century Platonists was their stress on activity, in both God and man. Mere potentiality would not do, in Traherne's view, for “Perfect life is the full exertion of perfect power” (CE, Ch. ii, sig. Cl^v). Indeed, “it is an Indelible Principle of Eternal Truth. That Practice and Exercise is the Life of all” (C IV.95). God's “Essence is his Act, and his Act his Pleasure” (CE, Ch. ix, sig. I4^v). Continuously creating, God “is never Desolate nor idle,” as Traherne wrote in his reply to More (quoted above).

The same “Indelible Principle” governed the human soul, which “is made for Action, and cannot rest, till it be employd. Idlenes is its Rust” (C IV.95). The soul, Traherne continued, must constantly be “up and Think and Taste and see.” Not surprisingly, “desire” is another of his key words:⁷² endlessly restless, man's soul searches the universe for felicity; “his Avarice is insatiable, and his Ambition infinite” (CE, Ch. vii, sig. G7). Nothing but full knowledge of God can quench the innate thirst for happiness:

The Soul of Man cannot … have stronger Desires after any Thing then Knowledg. …

Since therfore the Soveraign Good is ever desired by our Reasonable Appetite, the Supreme Truth is certainly capable of being Known to our Understanding. Not that one may have in this World an Absolut & Perfect Knowledg of GOD, as of a Thing finit: but that among so many Great Lights as He hath given us, we may arrive at such a Measure, as to Dread his Majesty & Rejoyce in his Mercy, feel his Omnipotence & see his Omnipresence, Know his Omniscience & find his Infinity. Admire his Wisdom, Depend upon his Bounty. Rejoyce in his Goodness, Revere his Justice, Adore his Greatness; & be wholy Ravisht with the Eternity of his Essence; & the Depth of His Subsistence in the Trinity of Persons & Unity of Substance.

Since therfore evry Wise Soul is stird up with a Natural Desire & Inclination to the Search of this Soveraign Good, & hath a General Bent to its first Cause, the Soul is always Working and Moving towards God. And in all that it Desires is seeking Him. For in its own Nature it is Scorcht with such an Honest flame, that it always is in Motion towards Him, & is Dissatisfied with all things else …

(CYB, foll. 56^v-57)

Even the attainment of felicity results in activity. Rejecting the Stoic concept of happiness as “a meer Apathy, or freedom from Passion” (CE, Ch. i, sig. B5^v), Traherne felt true felicity to be the fullest possible exertion of all man's spiritual powers.

The application of this attitude in the moral realm led to a practical ethic of activity. “Be as Activ as is Possible,” Traherne counseled (CYB, fol. 99); and he prayed: “O giv us a Practical faith! And make us to remember … That Faith without Works is Dead, being alone” (CYB, fol. 21). Again: “Philosophers are not those that speak, but Do great Things” (C IV.2), for “the reality of Religion consists in the solid practice of it among the Sons of men that are daily with us” (CE, Ch. xxx, sig. 2L3^v). With this concept of man's duties all the Cambridge Platonists agreed, though they did not always conceive of so dramatically active a God. Like Traherne Smith repeatedly attacked Stoic “autarchy,” pointing instead to man's ceaseless search for happiness. “A Good man … hath a Spring of perpetual motion within,”⁷³ and he realizes himself in God's similitude by doing good to his neighbors.

Activity and goodness are two sides of the same coin, according to seventeenth-century Platonists, their interdependence being as true of God as of man. “Goodness is the chief moral Perfection,” declared Glanvill in his summary of the Platonists' tenets.⁷⁴ “Goodness,” said Henry More, “is the measure of all moral perfection in man, as it is certainly the most sovereign Attribute in God, and the measure of all … moral Attributes in him.”⁷⁵ Traherne, going further, believed that “the very End for which GOD made the World was that He might Manifest His Lov” (C II.62). Assertions such as these, commonplace among More's colleagues, provoked Samuel Parker, an antagonist of orthodox bent, to complain that “these mens minds are so excessively possessed with thoughts of Gods goodness, as to neglect all his other Attributes, advancing it to such an exorbitant Preheminence, as to … engross the Deity wholly to it self.”⁷⁶

If Parker was irritated by attitudes like More's, he would have been enflamed by the views Traherne published in the next decade. Agreeing with More that goodness was God's principal attribute, Traherne defined divine goodness in terms of love, for God is “LOVE by Nature” (CE, “To the Reader,” sig, A8^v); “Infinite Goodness can be seated no where but in Love alone, for that onely is capable of infinite Benevolence and Complacency” (CE, Ch. xi, sig. L8).

As we have just seen, Traherne held that God manifests his benevolence brilliantly in his physical creation. This concept of the physical actualization of divine love distinguishes Traherne from the other Platonists. Even when they seem to be saying the same thing, their feelings about the subject differ from Traherne's. Sterry, for example, like Traherne believed God to be “LOVE by Nature,” and he praised the excellence of love in general: all forms whatsoever, he wrote, “vanish, as imperfect Things, like Shadows or Stars, at the Presence of the Day, when Love shineth forth. … Love itself takes in every Light, every Life with all their distinct Forms, Perfections, and Pleasantnesses, making them all New, Perfect, Eternal, infinitely above themselves.”⁷⁷ But this love is different from Traherne's; rather than taking a concrete form, it is an abstraction, an ideal center unifying lesser ideas, according to the purest idealism.

Abstractions of this sort were difficult, if not impossible, for Traherne, who, with his exuberant homocentricity, could not be a consistent idealist. Whereas Sterry (and the other Platonists, More excepted) regarded man as a passive recipient of the ideas of things, in Traherne's view man's incessantly active soul sends out as well as receives: “For nothing is so prone to communicate it self as that Active Principle of Love” (CE, Ch. xi, sig. F8). The difference can be expressed in terms of the mirror imagery favored by both Sterry and Traherne: Sterry's mirror reflected; Traherne's—somehow—projected as well.

A reflector-projector: a passive-active: the image a paradox, and as such eminently suited to an exposition of Traherne's ideas. For he delighted in contradictions, enjoying the spectacle of “a strange Paradox” which nonetheless “is infinitely true” (CE, Ch. xxiii, sig. 2B2^v). One of the keys to his philosophy—and a key which fits no other Platonist door—was the paradoxical contention that every person is “the Sole Heir of the whole World”; and yet it belongs to all, all are “evry one Sole Heirs, as well as you” (C I.29). Riddles entranced him; he liked to describe modesty as “the most friendly strife, and kind Contention” (CE, Ch. xxix, sig. 2K2), to liken repentance to “a Child so Black and so Beautiful” (CE, Ch. xvii, sig. R7), to dwell upon the learned and … Happy Ignorance” of his infancy (“Eden,” II, 12), to meditate upon “Things Strange yet Common; Incredible, yet Known; Most High, yet Plain; infinitly Profitable, but not Esteemed” (C I.3). From the paradox that by looking down into a reflector man sees above, there came forth a whole cluster of images involving mirrors, wells, reflections in water, abysses, the antipodes.⁷⁸

These images and paradoxes carry much of the weight of Traherne's thought; in his devotion to such modes of expression, rather than to the discursive reasoning of the Restoration, he recalls the earlier part of the century. He recalls as well Peter Sterry (who was a man of the earlier age: he entered Emmanuel before Traherne was born), and for a very good reason: the imagery of both derives from Platonic fountainheads. More than the other seventeenth-century Platonists, Traherne and Sterry relied on imagery to convey their ideas, and more broadly than the rest their imagery is Platonist. At first glance, in fact, the apparent similarity of their imagery may lead one to assume an equal similarity in their thought.

Both make much use of the reflective metaphors just mentioned. Closely allied with this group are the metaphors of circulation familiar to readers of Traherne's poetry: God as the ocean of love or the fountain of grace; the creatures as streams or conduits or pipes. These images of water may be related to the most important kind of Platonist image, those relating to visual perception, for according to Sterry, “The same Word in Hebrew signifies the Eye, and a Fountain.”⁷⁹ The eye led to light, and light to the sun, and the sun to circles; one image brought forth another, all variant symbols of the Divine.

Another Platonist cluster was musical, depicting the universe as a harmony, each part a note, all consenting in beauty. “All Harmony consisteth of Notes & Stops,” reads a passage probably by Traherne in his Commonplace Book, “Pauses being if not a Part, yet the Grace & Ornament of all.”⁸⁰ “Privations,” Sterry said, have “their measure and bounds, as Rests and Stops have time in Musick,” and making the metaphor more inclusive he wrote: “The Flats and Sharpes, the Bases and Trebles, the Concords and Discords of Music, are all comprehended by the spirit of the Musician in one Act of Harmony … In like manner, … the Will of God … containeth originally eminently within it self complacency and aversion, love and hatred … most properly and harmoniously suited to each other.”⁸¹ Both Sterry and Traherne played metaphoric variations on sympathetic strings; Traherne compared the “sympathy that runs through the Universe” to “the strings of several Lutes skrewed up to Unisones, [when] the one is made to quaver by the others motions.”⁸²

Their common dependence upon the Platonic tradition sometimes elicited images of striking similarity in Traherne and Sterry (there is no question, usually, of possible indebtedness of one to the other because of the chronology of their publications). Speaking of man's perception of the world, Traherne predicted: “These Things shall never be seen with your Bodily Eys. but in a more perfect maner. … You shall be In them to the very centre and they in you. As Light is in a Piece of Chrystal, so shall you be with every Part and Excellency of them” (C II.76). Sterry wrote, in a work published nine years after Traherne's death: “Thus Man is as a living Crystal, in which the entire Form of all the World visible, and invisible is seen transparently in the whole Glass, and in every point of the Glass, by a ravishing concurrence of all parts in each, the minutest part, with a most beautiful, and divine Harmony arising from the accurate mixture of that Precious Dust.”⁸³

Though their style shares a brilliance inspired by their Platonist sources, the doctrinal deductions of Traherne and Sterry varied nonetheless. One example of actual divergence despite an apparent agreement is their treatment of what Sterry called the “Two-fold Eye,” which he explained as the “Outward Eye,” which takes in sensuous impressions, and the “Inward Eye,” or the “Eye of the understanding.” Sterry ignored the outward eye and went on to explain that the inward eye “also is Two-fold,” consisting of “1^st.A Naturall. 2. A Divine Eye.” He continued:

The Naturall Eye is that of Reason, which is alwayes open in all Men. … The Divine Eye is for many yeares, many ages, quite shut up in the Soul ever since the Creation, untill the Regeneration.

This Eye is a Divine Principle or Faculty of seeing Things; the Supreame Power of Knowing, as God Knows and is Known.⁸⁴

Traherne, as his most cursory reader knows, celebrated the beauties perceived by the outward eye, insisting that the inward and outward eyes see simultaneously. “Mine Infant-Ey,” he wrote, “Did make me see / Two Sights in me”: his physical eyes and another which “did lurk within … of greater Worth than both the other” (“Sight,” II, 132-133). So far he seems to agree with Sterry: there are two eyes, the inward eye being superior. But it is not two-fold, like Sterry's; Traherne's inward eye was evidently not affected by the Fall but could perform those very feats which Sterry said were impossible until the Second Coming: it could “all the Depths descry / That God and Nature do include. … The very Ground and Caus / Of sacred Laws, / All Ages too, Thoughts, Counsels, and Designs” (“Sight,” II, 132-134).

Traherne defies categories. Just when he seems like a typical Christian Platonist, he overleaps the boundary with a fit of idiosyncratic daring, heretically claiming that man can understand sacred mysteries; yet there are abundant instances of his exemplary adherence to received doctrine, both Christian and Platonist. The explanation for these contradictions lies in his intellectual autobiography, in his self-education, finally in his very strong individuality. Arriving at his personal philosophy through youthful reflection rather than through acceptance of customary opinion, in his mature years Traherne reinforced his early intuition through study, principally through the study of Neoplatonism. But the impress of his personality, of his informed intuition, is such that the portrait of his intellect evades labels. He remains what he was: an original.

Notes

1. T. O. Beachcroft, “Traherne and the Cambridge Platonists,” Dublin Review, CLXXXVI (1930), 290.

2. In his Commonplace Book (Bodl. MS. Eng. poet. c. 42, s.v. “Cohaesion,” “Deitie,” and “Omnipresence,” foll. 26^v.2, 33.2-33^v.2, and 71^v.2-72.1) Traherne copied from More's Divine Dialogues (London, 1668), Dialogue 1, pp. 32, 66-67, 88-90, 93, 104-108, 112, 119, 132-133, and 157-160. On the basis of a quotation by Gladys Wade in her Thomas Traherne, Frances L. Colby divined that “Cohaesion” (fol. 26^v.2) was from the Dialogues, but she did not have access to Traherne's MS and did not know the extent of the borrowing (“Thomas Traherne and Henry More,” MLN, LXII, 1947, 490-492). On the Commonplace Book, cited hereafter as CB, see Carol L. Marks, “Thomas Traherne's Commonplace Book,” PBSA LVIII (1964), 458-465.

3. More, “Psychathanasia,” I.i.18, in Complete Poems, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (Edinburgh, 1878), p. 45.

4. Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Time, ed. Osmund Airy, I (Oxford, 1897), 331. “Mathematicks and the new philosophy were in great esteem” at Oxford, Burnet remarks (I, 342); but it is clear from his other comments that the old forms of thought still prevailed.

5. History, I, 330-331.

6. The Seventeenth Century Background (London, 1934), p. 138.

7. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558-1640 (Oxford, 1959), p. 222; Stewart, “Cambridge Platonists,” Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, III (Edinburgh and New York, 1910), 168. Frederick J. Powicke notes that Valentine Cary “taught Arminianism” as Master of Christ's from 1609 to 1620 (The Cambridge Platonists, Cambridge, Mass., 1926, p. 5).

8. A Supplement to Burnet's History of My Own Time, ed. H. C. Foxcroft (Oxford, 1902), p. 464. On the Whichcote-Tuckney correspondence, see John Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh and London, 1874), II, 59-80.

9. London, 1662, pp. 11-13. “S. P.” is usually identified as Simon Patrick.

10. Ibid., pp. 10, 14. Prov. xx.27 (“The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord”) was quoted frequently by Whichcote and used by Culverwel as the text for his only scholarly treatise, his Discourse of the Light of Nature. In the Church's Year-Book (hereafter cited as CYB), Traherne prays: “O H. Spirit … be Thou the Candle of the Lord shining in me that must never go out” (Bodl. MS. Eng. th. e. 51, fol. 50). See Carol L. Marks, “Traherne's Church's Year-Book,” PBSA, LX (1966), 31-72.

11. Seventeenth Century Background, p. 134.

12. Introd. to Henry More, Philosophical Poems (Manchester, 1931), p. xvii. See R. M. Ogilvie, Latin and Greek: A History of the Influence of the Classics on English Life from 1600 to 1918 (London, 1964), p. 16.

13. Thomas Baker's MS notes on Emmanuel College, quoted in Vivian de Sola Pinto, Peter Sterry (Cambridge, Eng., 1934), p. 10.

14. Letters on Several Subjects, ed. Edmund Elys (London, 1694), p. 27.

15. Two Choice and Useful Treatises: The One Lux Orientalis … (London, 1682), sig. B8.

16. Pinto, Sterry, p. 56. On the Ficinan view of heathen illuminati see P. O. Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, tr. Virginia Conant (New York, 1943), p. 15; Raymond Marcel, Marsile Ficin (Paris, 1958), pp. 603, 605; and Gunnar Aspelin, “Ralph Cudworth's Interpretation of Greek Philosophy,” tr. Martin S. Allwood, Göteborgs Högskolas Årsskrift, XLIX (1943), 32-45.

17. Traherne did not use the first ed. (1650) of Everard's translation; see Marks, PBSA, LVIII, 464, n. 12. He had read Hermes before he used Everard's version in CB, as the Ficino Notebook indicates. In his Centuries (C IV. 74-81) Traherne quoted sections from Pico della Mirandola's De dignitate hominis which in turn quoted Hermes (Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols., Oxford, 1958). All quotations from Traherne's Centuries and poems are from this edition, Margoliouth's Introduction and the Centuries from Vol. I, and the poetical works from Vol. II. References to the Centuries (C) use Roman numerals for the century, Arabic for the meditation. References to the poems consist of title, volume, and page (e.g., “Silence,” II, 44).

18. Christian Ethicks (London, 1675), Ch. xxviii, sig. 2H5^v (hereafter abbreviated CE). Traherne quotes Hermes on sigs. 2H5-2H7, 2H8.

19. CB, s.v. “Generation,” foll. 48b^v.2, 49. It is possible that these remarks by Traherne are copied from another (unknown) source. On these and related matters, see Carol L. Marks, “Thomas Traherne and Hermes Trismegistus,” RN, XIX (1966), 118-131.

20. A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will (London, 1675), p. 49. This is more graceful than Gale's account of the theory of ideas which Traherne copied in CB (fol. 55, s.v. “Idea”; Gale, The Court of the Gentiles, Part II, Oxford, 1670, p. 181).

21. The Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the Soul of Man (London, 1683), p. 5.

22. Works (Aberdeen, 1751), I, Discourse XV, 251. This view was shared by the other Platonists; see D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (London, 1964), p. 150. Note that in CB, s.v. “Freedom” and “Libertie” (foll. 46^v.2, 62^v.1-2), Traherne copied a number of passages from Jackson's Arminian assertion of free will, all congruous with his own views.

23. “Psychathanasia,” III.iv.22, in Poems, ed. Grosart, p. 85.

24. Discourse, p. 136.

25. Ibid., p. 61, sig. c2^v, p. 114.

26. More, Divine Dialogues … The Three First Dialogues (London, 1668), Dialogue 2, p. 298.

27. Culverwel, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, With Several Other Treatises, ed. William Dillingham (London, 1652), p. 54

28. Court of the Gentiles, II, 293; quoted CR, s.v. “Reason,” fol. 82^v.1, and perhaps the passage Traherne referred to in a note s.v. “Light,” fol. 64.1: “The Light of Nature. vid. Reason.”

29. Light of Nature, p. 55.

30. Norman Sykes, From Sheldon to Secker (Cambridge, Eng., 1959), p. 162.

31. John Smith, “The Excellency and Nobleness of True Religion,” Select Discourses, ed. John Worthington (London, 1660), p. 383.

32. Works, I, Discourse XXIII, 370. To understand the orthodox distress, one must realize how new was the Platonists' assertion of reason; see Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, tr. James P. Pettegrove (Austin, Tex., 1953), pp. 38-41.

33. Divine Dialogues … The Two Last Dialogues (London, 1668), Dialogue 5, p. 403.

34. Smith, “The Existence and Nature of God,” Discourses, p. 138.

35. More, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (London, 1662), p. viii.

36. Works, I, Discourse IX, 151, 149.

37. G. R. Cragg, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Eng., 1950), pp. 42-43.

38. Whichcote, Works, I, Discourse XVII, 280; I, Discourse XXII, 355; II, Discourse XXX, 82.

39. Smith, “The True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge,” Discourses, p. 2.

40. Light of Nature, p. 85. See Sykes's acute analysis of the problem of natural religion (From Sheldon to Secker, pp. 158-161).

41. On the admittedly slender evidence of imagery, scattered references in the Centuries, and the scientific jottings in CB, 3.v. “Cold,” fol. 27.1.

42. P. 24.

43. Cragg, From Puritanism, p. 53.

44. “Anti-fanatical Religion and Free Philosophy,” Essay 7 in Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (London, 1676), p. 9. This essay provides an apologia for the Cambridge men by way of a continuation of Bacon's New Atlantis.

45. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. and introd. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (St. Louis, Mo., and London, 1959), p. 33.

46. More, Divine Dialogues, Dialogue 2, p. 279.

47. Culverwel, “Spiritual Opticks,” printed with Light of Nature (separate pagination), p. 188.

48. “Excellency of Religion,” Discourses, p. 434.

49. Jackson, Divine Essence … The First Part, p. 191; quoted CB, s.v. “Libertie,” fol. 62^v.1.

50. Sterry, Discourse, p. 102 (mispaginated “100”).

51. MS essay “Of the Nature of a Spirit,” quoted in Pinto, Sterry, pp. 161-162.

52. The Breaking of the Circle, rev. ed. (New York, 1960), p. 197.

53. Antidote against Atheism, in Collection, p. 16.

54. Nicolson, Circle, p. 163 (speaking of More); on Traherne, see p. 201.

55. Rise, Race, and Royalty, p. 24.

56. Nicolson, Circle, p. 201. On infinity and capacity in Traherne's thought, see Ellrodt, Les Poètes métaphysiques anglais, II, 334-343, 371-372.

57. “Psychathanasia,” II.iii.28, in Poems, ed. Grosart, p. 65.

58. “The Worth of Souls,” printed with Light of Nature (separate pagination), p. 201.

59. Hermes Trismegistus, His Divine Pymander, in Seventeen Books. Together with his Second Book Called Asclepius …, tr. John Everard (London, 1657), IV.89; quoted by Traherne, CE, Ch. xxviii, sig. 2H5; CB, s.v. “Man,” fol. 65.1.

60. Pymander, VII.47, X.120, 122, 124; quoted CE, Ch. xxviii, sigs. 2H6-2H6^v; CB, s.v. “Capacity,” fol. 23^v.1. Cf. passages quoted in Marks, “Traherne's Church's Year-Book,” pp. 68-69.

61. CB, fol. 33.2. Traherne is here quoting and paraphrasing from More's Divine Dialogues, pp. 108, 112. More's description of space in his Enchiridion Metaphysicum (1671) coincides with Traherne's in CB (see Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance, pp. 149-150). The remaining quotations from CB given below are from foll. 33.2 and 33^v.1-2. Cf. CYB, fol. 37^v, where Traherne speaks of human souls, “whose Materials are not Dead & Empty Space, but Life & Understanding Honor & Affection.”

62. Divine Dialogues, p. 88; Traherne quoted this on fol. 33.2; now it reappears on fol. 33^v.1.

63. Glanvill, Two … Treatises … Lux Orientalis, pp. 116-117. Cf. Sterry's Preface to his Discourse, sig. c4: divine love contains “all Variety Originally in it self, sending forth from it self, and diffusing it self through all!” Pinto, Sterry, pp. 90-91, says that this “Unity in Diversity [is] the great principle that pervades the whole of Sterry's theology.”

64. [George Rust], A Letter of Resolution Concerning Origen and the Chief of his Opinions, ed. Marjorie Hope Nicolson (New York, 1933), p. 46. On the attribution of the Letter to Rust, see Walker, Decline of Hell, pp. 125-126.

65. “Excellency of Religion,” Discourses, p. 431.

66. Discourse, sig. c4^v, pp. 118, 119. On Sterry, see Walker, Decline of Hell, pp. 104-121; and on this “abominable fancy,” Walker, pp. 29-32. Pinto traces Sterry's idea of “Contrariety” back to the Jewish Cabbala (Sterry, p. 107).

67. Decline of Hell, pp. 3-8, 69. The heretical “denial of eternal torment” which appeared during the Commonwealth was a product of Cromwell's religious tolerations (Walker, p. 104).

68. “Excellency of Religion,” Discourses, pp. 446-447.

69. Whichcote, Works, II, Discourse XXXVI, 157. Cf. Walker, pp. 68-69.

70. Ralph Cudworth, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable Society of Lincolnes-Inne (London, 1664), p. 34.

71. Sterry, Rise, Race, and Royalty, p. 320.

72. In CB, s.v. “Desire,” fol. 34^v.1, Traherne copied some passages from Jackson's Treatise Containing the Originall of Unbeliefe (London, 1625), pp. 456-458, 462, 464, which express sentiments similar to his own.

73. “A Christians Conflicts,” Discourses, p. 470; cf. pp. 136-137, 420, 445.

74. “Anti-fanatical Religion,” Essays, p. 21.

75. The Apology …, suffixed to A Modest Enquiry into the Mystery of Iniquity (London, 1664), p. 533.

76. An Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion & Goodnesse (Oxford, 1666), pp. 27-28.

77. The Appearance of God to Man in the Gospel, and the Gospel Change (London, 1710), pp. 207-208. The belief that love is God's main attribute was “a most unusual view” in this period, Walker notes in his discussion of Sterry (Decline of Hell, p. 110).

78. See, for example, CE, Ch. xxvi, sigs. 2F3^v-2F4, and the poems “Shadows in the Water” and “On Leaping over the Moon,” II, 127-132. Cf. Rosalie L. Colie: “Traherne was among the last serious thinkers to value paradox and to rely on it, in fact to force the fulcrum of his thought to rest upon its delicate balance” (“Thomas Traherne and the Infinite,” HLQ, XXI, 1957, 77).

79. Rise, Race, and Royalty, p. 141; Sterry repeats this point, p. 240. Pinto discusses Sterry's imagery on pp. 70-78, mentioning Plato and Plotinus as sources on p. 77. Angela Russell compares Traherne's and Sterry's imagery in her Oxford B.Litt. thesis, “A Study of Thomas Traherne's Christian Ethicks” (1952), pp. 146-147.

80. Traherne, CB, s.v. “Silence,” fol. 88.1: the remark was apparently provoked by a quotation from Gale just copied by Traherne.

81. Discourse, pp. 151, 22-23.

82. CE, Ch. xxx, sigs. 2K5, 2K5^v. Cf. Sterry, Discourse, sig. d2, p. 95; and his The Comings Forth of Christ (London, 1650), p. 18: “When Two Lutes are rightly tuned one to another; touch a String upon One Lute, and the same String upon the other Lute will answer it with a like Sound. Jesus Christ, and a Saint are thus tuned by mutuall Love, each to other.”

83. Rise, Race, and Royalty, pp. 268-269.

84. The Clouds in Which Christ Comes (London, 1648), p. 25. It would distort Sterry's philosophy to deny him appreciation of the natural world. In fact he comes close to Traherne in describing how the spiritual eye should perceive nature (see Pinto, Sterry, p. 195), and “for him as for Traherne the visible universe was invested with a perennial splendour” (Pinto, p. 115).