A Victorian gentleman at one of London’s bookstalls is turning the pages of an ancient handwritten volume with increasing excitement. What is this? Gemlike sentences, filled with eccentric spelling and ecstatic love for creation, in an elegant seventeenth-century script: “O what a Treasure is evry Sand when truly understood! Who can lov any Thing that God made too much?” There were two manuscripts here, one of poetry and one of prose, bound together; the prose organized in a peculiar manner, as five collections of a hundred short passages each. The gentleman, W. T. Brooke, buys it for a few pence: a treasure, its author a mystery. After Brooke’s death, the manuscript eventually reached antiquarian Bertram Dobell. His detective work revealed the answer: these manuscripts were written by a shoemaker’s son from Hereford, an obscure Anglican cleric called Thomas Traherne. Dobell published the manuscript as Centuries of Meditations in 1908.

Thus began a torrent of manuscript recovery. The Commentaries of Heaven, an audacious attempt to define “all things,” was rescued from a burning trash heap in Lancashire around 1967 (Traherne only got to the letter B). A theological manuscript was unearthed from the Folger archives in America in 1997, and another, three years later from Lambeth Palace, by a scholar trying to keep out of the rain. One was found stashed absentmindedly on a forgotten shelf in the British Library, still another in a collection in Canada; most recently, in 2024, a student who had been left with the task of sorting out the papers of the late librarian of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris came across yet another manuscript in a cardboard box in the man’s office; this was the eleventh work to be discovered, and it is by no means sure that no more remain; they do tend to get themselves found.

Detail from four stained glass windows made by Thomas Denny in 2007 for Hereford Cathedral, celebrating the life of Thomas Traherne. Photograph by Malcolm Walker / Alamy. Used by permission.

There was a providential felicity, to use one of Traherne’s favorite words, in the rediscovery of his work throughout the twentieth century. Traherne writes a strange prose punctuated with heights of joy; his celebration of reality at the dawn of one of the most inhumane centuries provoked polarizing reactions in his readers. Notable fans included Thomas Merton and C. S. Lewis, who called Centuries of Meditations “almost the most beautiful book in the English language.” Other eminent readers, like T. S. Eliot, read his joyous enthusiasm with some skepticism. Could a man this happy be trusted?

Striving for happiness, we remain plagued by a bone-deep dissatisfaction. Many have diagnosed our malaise as stemming from an excess of desire, especially in consumerism. We want, and we want; we devour others, and our desires eat us up in return. Surely this is the problem. But in Centuries, Traherne encourages desire: “You must Want like a God, that you may be Satisfied like God.” Startling enough! But he elaborates: “Insatiableness is good, but not Ingratitud.”

Could it be that our delight in God and his world is as tepid as our prayer and repentance often are? Traherne argues that we have become scanty lovers of creation, against our truer nature. As we are made in the image of God, who created the world for love alone, no finite loving will be enough for us. We must learn again how to enjoy God and his creation. Stop piddling about with mean ambitions and cheap toys. Learn to want like a god, to delight like a deity.

Thomas Traherne was born in 1637 in Hereford, England. He and his brother were raised by his uncle, an innkeeper and sometime mayor of Hereford. The English Civil War raged throughout his childhood. Traherne would have been eight years old when Hereford, a Royalist stronghold, was besieged by a Scottish Covenanter army allied with Cromwell’s Parliamentarians.

But the child Traherne’s delight in the world began early. He writes of a rapturous vision he had while looking out from the city gates. “The Dust and Stones of the Street were as Precious as Gold,” he writes; the trees “Transported and Ravished” him with their “Sweetnes.” Young men were “Glittering and Sparkling Angels,” maids “strange Seraphick Pieces of Life and Beauty,” and the tumbling children in the streets “were moving Jewels.” In Centuries, the adult Traherne would connect the joy of children in God’s universe to Christ’s command to his disciples, to us, to turn and become like little children and thereby receive the kingdom (Matt. 18:3).

Yet this way of seeing did not last. Traherne describes how as he grew older, he followed his elders as he learned to value treasures initially unknown to Adam and Eve, over the moving jewels of souls and sweetness of trees: social divisions, earthly power, gold and silver. Traherne calls this period his “apostacie.” Good human insatiability, unable to be fulfilled by such “scarce and Rare, Insufficient … litle, movable, and useless Treasures” becomes burdensome. All humans learn to lug around this “Cumber of Devised Wants.”

At fifteen, Traherne entered Brasenose College in Oxford. Awakened by learning, his delight roared back. In geometry and astronomy, in metaphysics and theology, he “saw that there were Things in this World of which I never Dreamed; Glorious Secrets, and Glorious Persons past Imagination.” These treasures brought a new dawn of understanding to the astonished young man: true happiness, the art of loving God and humankind, requires careful attention to what exists. A child’s effortless appreciation for the world must be transformed into a joyous art and study. Traherne became a student of happiness: “I will first spend a great deal of time in seeking Happiness, and then a Great deal more in Enjoying it.” All Christians, he teaches, are called to become “Divine Philosophers,” actively studying and seeking the true happiness of life in God.

Detail from stained glass window by Thomas Denny celebrating the life of Thomas Traherne, Hereford Cathedral, 2007. Photograph by Malcolm Walker / Alamy. Used by permission.

In this search, none of God’s creation is irrelevant, each part an invitation into holy mystery. In The Kingdom of God, written in the 1670s, we glimpse how young Traherne encountered these sciences and arts in a thought experiment. If a “Celestial Stranger” who had only ever lived in the heavens came to Earth, Traherne writes, he would find it full of “Such Mysteries and Varieties,” from “So many Brisk, and Beautifull, and melodious Birds; Such Fluent Springs, and silver Streams,” to “Such Bookes, and Universities; Such Colleges and Libraries; Such Trades and Studies” to “Such Sufferings and persecutions; Such Deaths and Martyrdoms; Such Lov and fidelity; Such faith, and Hopes, and Desire.…” Unjaded by familiarity, his Celestial Stranger reels at the magnitude of the marvels of the world.

Traherne himself would never cease to marvel. He received his bachelor of arts and was ordained as a priest in the Church of England. In 1661, he began as rector at the parish of Credenhill outside Hereford. It was when, after eight years serving there, he left to become private chaplain for Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, that he began his Centuries, as a love letter and spiritual guide to those he left behind.

Traherne wrote poems and prayers, published his university studies, wrote a Christian Ethicks, and undertook other projects. But it is the Centuries that speaks most to us. To enjoy a fallen world for itself is an act of intention and attention. Traherne argues in “The Fourth Century” that knowledge of what would make one happy in a condition of perfect health and stable government is useless. All must learn to appreciate what is present here, now. The only durable principles are those “that will make a Man Happy, not only in Peace, but Blood.” Necessary words, for a people still recovering from civil war – and for us. How can we delight like children in the midst of suffering and loss?

The first step, Traherne writes, is to realize that the whole world is a gift to you alone. The child Traherne was right as he watched all the people and the city streets and knew they belonged to him: “The Skies were mine, and so were the Sun and Moon and Stars, and all the World was mine, and I the only Spectator and Enjoyer of it. I knew no Churlish Proprieties.” You, reader, are “Sole Heir” of the world, among other Sole Heirs, a paradoxical phrasing. The tree and the man belong to you, and you to them. “How good it is that you are here!” says the one who delights to the child, city, tree, star. Implicit within this delight is Him whom we love in our imitation: And God saw that all the things he had made were very good.

Indeed, loving delight is actually a practice of justice:

Can you be Holy without Accomplishing the End for which you are Created?… Can you then be Righteous, unless you be Just in rendering to Things their Due Esteem? All Things were made to be yours. And you were made to Prize them according to their value: which is your Office and Duty, the End for which you were Created, and the Means wherby you Enjoy. The End for which you were Created is that by Prizing all that God hath don, you may Enjoy your self and Him in Blessedness.

Righteousness and happiness flower together in the just love of what God has done. Our most ordinary needs – food, breath, sleep – reorient us to divine love. Were the land “all Beaten Gold” it could not bring forth the plants and animals that sustain us. Were the air we breathe “Cramd and fild with Crowns and Scepters” it would not be our elixir of life. With these real needs, God binds us graciously to himself and to one another: “Wants are the Bands and Cements between God and us.”

This love even applies to our own selves. Traherne writes of the body as a gate into eternity: now, not only in our deaths. Through our bodies, we receive the gifts of the created world. When we smell a beeswax candle, taste freshly baked bread, feel the ground beneath our feet as we walk, we tangibly meet an infinite love, which awakens the freedom and capacity for love in us. Because we love ourselves, we love that we need these things. We then learn to love the objects, and their giver. How can we ever love the candle, bread, ground, eyeballs enough, let alone our fellow men? “God by satisfying my self Lov, hath enabled, and engaged me to love others.”

As we are made in the image of God, who created the world for love alone, no finite loving will be enough for us. We must learn again how to enjoy God and his creation.

As one learns to love God through his creatures, one becomes safe from loving those creatures falsely. For truly, Traherne writes, nothing that God has made can be loved to excess. This seems to fly against common sense: we’ve all known people who love one particular person or project to their undoing. But this love is deficient rather than excessive: “When we dote upon the Perfections and Beauties of som one Creature: we do not lov that too much, but other things too little. Never was anything in this World loved too much, but many Things have been loved in a fals Way: and all in too short a measure.” We should “be all Life and Mettle and Vigor and Lov to evry Thing” because when we love God infinitely more, he “will be infinitly more our Joy, and our Heart will be more with Him.”

God never loves in the abstract, Traherne reminds us. He loves particulars. He rejoices in the infuriated Canada goose I came upon this morning; he loves you.

In this grace, I act for the good of my actual neighbor, Sole Heir, who voted differently than I did and parks his car so as to take up two spaces. I will glory in the magnificence of stars and the feeling of taking off socks after a long day, for there is nothing too small for joyful gratitude, and that gratitude overflows in service to others. “With a Lov conformable to God’s, Guided to the same Ends, and founded upon the same causes. Which however Lofty and Divine it is, is ready to humble it self into the Dust to serv the Person Beloved … Now you may see what it is to be a Son of God more clearly.”

Thomas Traherne died in 1674, at the age of thirty-seven. He is buried at Teddington, Sir Orlando’s seat in the English countryside. He had lived the resolution he’d written in “The Third Century”: “I will Prize all I hav: And nothing shall with me be less esteemed, becaus it is Excellent. A Daily Joy shall be more my Joy, becaus it is continual. A Common Joy is more my Delight because it is Common. For all Mankind are my Friends. And evry Thing is Enrichd in serving them.”