| Chapter 1: | Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity |
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Similarly, in the poem “Desire,” he thanks his maker for…giving me Desire,
Which in my Soul did Work and move,
And ever ever me Enflame,
With restlesse longing Heavenly Avarice,
That never could be satisfied,
That did incessantly a Paradice
Unknown suggest, and som thing undescried
Discern, and bear me to it.… (ll. 1–2, 6–12)
This “heavenly” desire, deeply embedded in human nature, can never be satisfied by anything less than the full awakening of Felicity, which Traherne characterizes as an inner paradise. In fact, Traherne’s goal, as he announces at the beginning of the Centuries and on the title page of Commentaries of Heaven, is to make known the secret influences or mysteries of “heaven,” which he maintains in the Commentaries“is a State and not a Place” (“Heaven! Lord is not that an Endless Sphere” 2: 414).
This nonlocalized state parallels for Traherne the vastness opened up by the new astronomy: “that Space that is illimited and present before us, and absolutly endless evry Way” (Century 5.6). During the late Renaissance, the entire model of the universe itself underwent its most radical change until the twentieth century as a result of developments in spatial science. Indeed, the seventeenth century has been called an “age of the infinite” for its “increasing obsession with the unlimitedness of space, with infinite varieties of life in an infinity of (possibly) inhabited worlds”