WALKING into Hereford Cathedral the opposite day to help (as I do in retirement), I realised that I used to be following within the steps of Thomas Traherne, priest and poet of Credenhill, near by, from 1657 to 1674, who walked the identical strategy to do the identical thing, and who was buried 350 years ago yesterday. It was a fascinating feeling.
In Traherne’s day, the settlement was tiny, nestling beneath its eponymous hill, its “little church environed with trees”, where the sunshine still shines through an old window showing two other saintly Thomases — Becket of Canterbury, and Cantilupe of Hereford — by the stall where he, one other Thomas, sat.
He got here there after graduating from Brasenose College, Oxford — then fiercely Puritan. Hereford was Royalist (Traherne’s father was a militia officer), and its occupation by the Parliamentarians when Traherne was a boy reminds us that the state of innocence, with the town’s streets paved with gold, that he recollected in his poem “Wonder” had darker shades, too.
WONDER of a special sort was afoot in Oxford while Traherne was there. The recent Savile professors were offering lectures in astronomy; telescopes and Hevelius’s map of the moon were in circulation; and experimental science was within the air — almost, if not quite, literally, when Hooke and Wilkins tried to construct a machine to go to the moon in Wadham College garden.
Wilkins, later Bishop of Chester, had recently published a treatise, The Discovery of the World within the Moone, with details of the flying chariot, inspired by a remarkable early sci-fi novel by Bishop Godwin of Hereford, which chronicled just such a journey by which the chariot was pulled by specially trained geese. The mental and collaborative excitement should have been a welcome contrast to the dryness of Puritan theology and non secular and civil conflict.
It actually seems to have left its mark. Traherne, who remembered how, as a boy, “the green trees . . . ravished me,” took enjoyment of the tranquil nature around him at Credenhill. But a naïve nature poet he was not. His wonder prolonged right down to the atomic level and as much as the cosmic — even imagining a celestial stranger coming “vast and prodigious distances from the earth” and sharing in his wonder at the range of God’s creation, before following that up in The Kingdom of God with two chapters of solid scientific description.
So, wonder, for Traherne, was not a fluffy feeling. The word appears nearly 700 times in his works, and it is sort of at all times focused not on feelings about nature per se, but on the wonder of God and his works, whose intelligible and real forms are intuited by us beyond our perceptions. (Our Herefordshire lad had read the Cambridge Platonists.)
The seventeenth century was an age when wonder had not yet been pathologised as a dangerous suspension of reason. Thinkers could still value it as a way of focusinf attention, and never of obscuring knowledge, but of helping us towards it, even when — as Francis Bacon realised — this was an interrupted journey.
IT IS good for us to wonder, too. I said earlier that my walk was enchanting. “Re-enchantment” is in vogue in the mean time, but I find it an unlucky word. A world by which we, Prospero-like, conjure a metaphysical illusion around us just isn’t, I believe, sufficient to measure up either to the deep realities of truth, love, and wonder, or to the forces that may seek to destroy them.
For me, wonder results in faith, and faith inspires wonder. We are beginning to see commentators risk acknowledging that cutting the roots of religion will wither the shoots of society and exploring a re-alignment. Time will tell whether that results in faith itself — if that’s the case, we are able to only hope that it should be a more fruitful and thoughtful faith than sometimes results from the polarised positions that plague us.
But, despite degrees in English and theology, I’m ashamed to say that Traherne’s Centuries had languished largely unread on my bookshelves. When we moved to Hereford and I used to be co-opted as a trustee of the Traherne Association, I began to read the complete gamut of his work, and rejoiced to see how serious he was about each faith and science, and the way committed to their mutuality (a theme that matters to me), interweaving their insights in each poetry and prose. He must, I believe, have smiled to himself when the entry on “Atom” in his encyclopaedic Commentaries of Heaven was immediately followed by that on “Atonement” with its stark opening statement: “If the World were fabricated from Atoms, it’s concluded actually, that every one Atoms were made for the sake of Souls.”
Or — to play the connection the opposite way, and maybe anticipate Taylor’s pondering — “For Traherne specifically, it was the affinity between the volatile particle and the energetic, insightful movements of his lyric poetry that inspired his development of the atom as a reliable model for the similarly indivisible soul,” as Cassie Gorman suggested in her recent book The Atom in Seventeenth-Century Literature.
Here, then, 350 years after his death, is a person whose faith and writing — much of it lost for therefore long — is shining again for us with the identical vibrancy we see in Tom Denny’s wonderful Traherne windows in Hereford Cathedral, and which has the ability to leap across the years and encourage and integrate our own faith, now.
The Rt Revd David Thomson is an hon. assistant bishop within the diocese of Hereford and chairs the Traherne Association. thomastraherneassociation.org
Collect
GOD of all infinities, in whom your servant Thomas Traherne found all his happiness within the countryside of Hereford, wondering at worlds each great and small, and at our salvation in Jesus Christ your Son; open our eyes like his to the majesty of creation and our deep connectedness inside it until we come to see you its Author nose to nose in all blessedness and glory, through the identical Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
