| Chapter 1: | Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
Traherne’s “Felicity”:
An Alternative to Hobbesian Materialism
Since the exciting rediscovery of Traherne texts at the turn of the twentieth century, scholars have considered this obscure but challenging clergyman’s place in the intellectual tradition, have examined the formal qualities of his poetry and prose, and have compared his writings to those of other figures associated especially with the School of Donne.6 The central phenomenon recorded in Traherne’s canon, Felicity, has not in itself, however, been the subject of a book-length treatment, even though its special significance has long been noted. Percy Osmond, for example, in The Mystical Poets of the English Church identified Felicity as the mainspring of Traherne’s mysticism, though he thought the word beatitude more apt (236). T. O. Beachcroft in “Traherne, and the Doctrine of Felicity” also recognized the unique role Felicity plays in Traherne’s poems and prose (291) and how “he wrote with the sole expressed purpose of imparting his experience to others” (292). Beachcroft moreover saw Felicity as evidence of a modern ethos:
He also sensed that Traherne’s poems comprise “an organic whole” (304) growing out of this core experience.
Other useful perspectives on Felicity have been offered by a small but enthusiastic body of critics. J. B. Leishman in The Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, highlights Traherne’s heterodoxy insofar as his vision of the felicitous self “contains God and the whole world” (207). Renée Grandvoinet in “Thomas Traherne and the Doctrine of Felicity” tellingly sees Felicity as rooted in “the apprehension of Self as the subject and object of wisdom” (167), in what may be called a unified