| Chapter 1: | Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity |
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The poet’s goal is to awaken the reader to the existence of Felicity, a state of “Highest Bliss.” He intends, in short, to supply the master key to unlocking this essential experience.
Traherne’s signifier for this extraordinary state is an adaptation of the Latin felicitatem, which in the feminine form felix is the name of various Romans, popes and saints. Its primary meaning is happiness or intense bliss, though it carries the additional senses of good fortune, prosperity, and grace of expression.9 Francis Bacon (from whose writings Traherne took copious notes10) uses the latter sense of the word in his dedication to Advancement of Learning11 “But your Majesty’s manner of speech is indeed prince-like, flowing as from a fountain, and yet streaming and branching itself into nature’s order, full of facility and felicity, imitating none, and inimitable by any” (Francis Bacon 121). It is also used in medieval astronomy to refer to a favorable planetary aspect. Chaucer apparently introduced it into English literature (by way of Old French) in 1386, for he writes in “The Clerk’s Tale,” “We myghte lyven in moore felicitee” (109). It also occurs a number of times in the Elizabethan Homilies, mandated by Article XXXV of the Thirty-Nine Articlesof the Church of England to be read from the pulpit on Sundays and holy days. The “Homily on Common Prayer and Sacraments,” for example, calls upon “[t]he mercifull goodnesse of GOD [to] grant us his grace to call upon him as we ought to doe, to his glory and our endlesse felicity.… (2: 9.1.421–423). The “Homilie of the Resurrection of our Saviour Jesus Christ For Easter Day” warns the hearer that
And in the “Homilie on the Nativity,” felicity is used in the context of man’s creation in a passage that resembles, towards the end, Traherne’s writing: