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A mighty sense of wonder

by
11 October 2024

David Thomson celebrates the life and work of Thomas Traherne, who died 350 years ago

Alamy

Detail of the stained-glass windows by Tom Denny (2007) in Hereford Cathedral, commemorating the diocese’s 17th-century poet and mystic Thomas Traherne

Detail of the stained-glass windows by Tom Denny (2007) in Hereford Cathedral, commemorating the diocese’s 17th-century poet and mystic Thomas Trahern...

WALKING into Hereford Cathedral the other day to lend a hand (as I do in retirement), I realised that I was following in the steps of Thomas Traherne, priest and poet of Credenhill, near by, from 1657 to 1674, who walked the same way to do the same thing, and who was buried 350 years ago yesterday. It was an enchanting feeling.

In Traherne’s day, the settlement was tiny, nestling beneath its eponymous hill, its “little church environed with trees”, where the light still shines through an old window showing two other saintly Thomases — Becket of Canterbury, and Cantilupe of Hereford — by the stall where he, another Thomas, sat.

He came 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 city’s streets paved with gold, that he recollected in his poem “Wonder” had darker shades, too.

 

WONDER of a different sort was afoot in Oxford while Traherne was there. The new Savile professors were offering lectures in astronomy; telescopes and Hevelius’s map of the moon were in circulation; and experimental science was in the air — almost, if not quite, literally, when Hooke and Wilkins tried to build 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 in 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 in which the chariot was pulled by specially trained geese. The intellectual and collaborative excitement must have been a welcome contrast to the dryness of Puritan theology and religious and civil conflict.

It certainly seems to have left its mark. Traherne, who remembered how, as a boy, “the green trees . . . ravished me,” took delight in the tranquil nature around him at Credenhill. But a naïve nature poet he was not. His wonder extended down to the atomic level and up to the cosmic — even imagining a celestial stranger coming “vast and prodigious distances from the earth” and sharing in his wonder at the variety 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 nearly always 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 17th 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 not of obscuring knowledge, but of helping us towards it, even if — 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 at the moment, but I find it an unfortunate word. A world in which we, Prospero-like, conjure a metaphysical illusion around us is not, I think, sufficient to measure up either to the deep realities of truth, love, and beauty, or to the forces that would seek to destroy them.

For me, wonder leads to faith, and faith inspires wonder. We are starting to see commentators risk acknowledging that cutting the roots of faith will wither the shoots of society and exploring a re-alignment. Time will tell whether that leads to faith itself — if so, we can only hope that it will 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 am ashamed to say that Traherne’s Centuries had languished largely unread on my bookshelves. When we moved to Hereford and I was co-opted as a trustee of the Traherne Association, I started to read the full gamut of his work, and rejoiced to see how serious he was about both faith and science, and how committed to their mutuality (a theme that matters to me), interweaving their insights in both poetry and prose. He must, I think, 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 made of Atoms, it is concluded certainly, that all Atoms were made for the sake of Souls.”

Or — to play the connection the other way, and perhaps anticipate Taylor’s thinking — “For Traherne in particular, it was the affinity between the volatile particle and the active, 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 man whose faith and writing — much of it lost for so long — is shining again for us with the same vibrancy we see in Tom Denny’s wonderful Traherne windows in Hereford Cathedral, and which has the power to leap across the years and inspire and integrate our own faith, now.
 

The Rt Revd David Thomson is an hon. assistant bishop in 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 in the countryside of Hereford, wondering at worlds both 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 within it until we come to see you its Author face to face in all blessedness and glory, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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