Thomas Traherne and the Felicities of the Mind By James Balakier

Chapter 1:

Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity

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“the impossibility of finding any basis of reconciliation for systems and dogmas so contradictory, that turned the most enlightened minds of the age to questioning the assumptions from which the unhappy state of affairs had arisen” (Wade, Thomas Traherne 222). Traherne wages an all-out attack on the declinations from religion of Hobbes and his fellow “atheists” as this passage from Commentaries of Heaven, a Traherne manuscript identified in the 1980s, demonstrates:

An Atheist is so corrupted generally both in his Intellectuals and Morals, that he is a Burden to the Earth, Abominable to Society an Enemie to himself, a Curse to his Acquaintance, and a Danger to all his Companions. To unloos the Girdle of Religion, is the Way to deflower her: And the Breaking of the Sacred Tie, is the Destruction of all the Beauty and Glory of the Univers. An Atheist at best is one that hath trampled under foot the Principles of Reason, that constantly believeth there is no such thing as Vice and Virtue, Holiness or Profaness, Justice or Injustice. That all Magistrates and Ministers are meer Cheats, that there is no Law, no Conscience no Good or Evil in Human Actions. His Appetite is his only Oracle, and himself his GOD.… (3: 325)⁴

The cutting statement concerning “Appetite” is a pointed allusion to Hobbes’ definition of good as “whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire” (Leviathan 39). Traherne’s works, as a whole, are a concerted response to the speculative crisis of the seventeenth century, offering an alternative to the sensory-based, object-oriented philosophy with which Hobbes was identified⁵ As Traherne counters in The Kingdom of God,

Life is so Mysterious, and Miraculous a Being, and So Sublime in order of Nature; that as it is superior to all Material things, So is it more difficult to be Conceived. Its Efficient and Final Causes are assignable: But its Material Cause is almost Impossible to be understood.… The Final Cause, or End of Life is, that the Glory of the univers might be usefull, and Enjoyed. It is founded in perception, for whatsoever is able to Apprehend, liveth. Were we to define it therfore, we should say. That Life is an Abilitie to Apprehend, and Move.… They that would by meer Mechanical