Tuesday, August 16, 2016

VOLUME NINE (2016): TEXTS & CONTEXTS


APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern
Literature & Culture
ISSN: 1946-1992

VOLUME NINE (2016):
TEXTS & CONTEXTS

ARTICLES:

James J. Balakier, University of South Dakota,

Rebecca M. Quoss-Moore, University of Arkansas,

Andie Silva, York College (CUNY),

REVIEWS:

Joshua Brazee, University of Wisconsin-Madison, review of Rocco Rubini, The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger. The University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 2014).

Philip Gavitt, Saint Louis University, review of Thomas F. Mayer, The Roman Inquisition on the Stage of Italy c. 1590-1640. University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, 2014).

Elizabeth Mazzola, The City College of New York, review of Frances Teague and Margaret J. M. Ezell, eds.; associate ed., Jessica Walker, Educating English Daughters: Late Seventeenth-Century Debates. Bathsua Makin and Mary More with a reply to More by Robert Whitehall. Volume 44 in The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series. Volume 491 in the Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies Series. Iter Academic Press (Toronto, 2016).

Amy D. Stackhouse, Iona College, review of Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, & Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain. Oxford University Press (Oxford, 2015).

Sara van den Berg, Saint Louis University, review of Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance EnglandUniversity of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, 2015).

APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern
Literature & Culture
ISSN: 1946-1992

VOLUME NINE (2016):
TEXTS & CONTEXTS

* * * ARTICLES * * *


APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern
Literature & Culture
ISSN: 1946-1992

VOLUME NINE (2016):
TEXTS & CONTEXTS

ARTICLES:

James J. Balakier, University of South Dakota,

Rebecca M. Quoss-MooreUniversity of Arkansas,

Andie Silva, York College (CUNY),

APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern
Literature & Culture
ISSN: 1946-1992

VOLUME NINE (2016):
TEXTS & CONTEXTS

James J. Balakier: "Traherne & Personality"


James J. Balakier

Thomas Traherne and the Postrepresentational Personality:
A New Theoretical Model

1> Since the discovery of his texts beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, the seventeenth century Anglican clergyman Thomas Traherne has been the subject of considerable interest. His poetry and prose--in particular his “Dobell Poems,” named after Bertram Dobell who first published them, and his Centuries of Meditations, also first published by Dobell--have been studied from a variety of critical perspectives that have brought out salient religious, philosophical, and artistic features of his writing. A book-length annotated bibliography and a collection of essays on new directions in Traherne studies have come out in recent years, and an eight volume edition of his complete works is underway.[1] The essential Traherne, however, has eluded readers. John R. Richards has described him as an "enigmatic" figure about whom there is no consensus.[2] Jonathan Sawday, moreover, has noted his " unreadability.”[3] All in all, while Carol Marks memorably found Traherne to be “radically positive"[4] (Marks and Guffey xxxviii), the grounds of that elation have tended to baffle scholars.

2> Insight into the origins of Traherne’s extraordinary optimism may be found in the picture of optimal adult growth painted by postconventional personality theory, a fairly recent area of study “coming out of positive, developmental, and humanistic psychology.”[5] Interest in advanced adult maturation was spurred by Abraham Maslow’s conception of self-actualization in the 1950s, and by the work of the leading developmental theorists Jean Piaget, Laurence Kohlberg, and Ken Wilbur. Empirical research on “personal evolution,” as it is often called by researchers, has arisen only since the 1990s as “postconventional personality development.”[6] The “postrepresentational” paradigm is an outgrowth of this field of inquiry. The expanding body of theory and research associated with it has identified an enhanced cognitive state, characterized by the experience of transcendence, as the basis for maximum inner growth. This phenomenon parallels, it will be shown, Traherne’s conception of Felicity, a fully awake state of consciousness that is profoundly nourishing to the body and mind. Traherne endeavors to communicate this state of blissful wholeness, arising from the experience of transcendence, from many angles and in a variety of genres. This essay will first give an overview of key developments in postconventional/postrepresentational psychology theory and then explore connections with Traherne’s writings on Felicity.

3> Central to contemporary development theory is Loevinger’s nine stage model of ego development, dating to the 1970s.[7] It was quantified by Loevinger’s Sentence Completion Test (SCT) which “translated qualitative observations about personality into quantitative data.”[8] Pfaffenberger and Marko divide these stages into three tiers: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional.[9] They caution that these stages have been renamed and renumbered over time by researchers since they were first formulated by Loevinger.[10] These stages, in their original form, are as follows:


Table 1.
Correspondence of Ego Development Models[11]

Tier
Stage
Hy and Loevinger
1996
Preconventional
1
Symbiotic
Preconventional
2
Impulsive
Preconventional
3
Self-protective
Conventional
4
Conformist
Conventional
5
Self-aware
Conventional
6
Conscientious
Postconventional
7
Individualist
Postconventional
8
Autonomous
Postconventional
9
Integrated


4> The first three or preconventional stages--the Symbiotic, Impulsive, and Self-protective--are normal in children, but abnormal in adulthood. They are characterized by self-centered interests and an inability to adopt another’s viewpoint. Stages four through six, the conventional stages--Conformist, Self-aware, Conscientious--are typical of the great majority of adults who adopt the norms/values of their social group, are outer- directed, and see relationships and issues in black and white terms. The postconventional stages--Individualist, Autonomous, Integrated--share a “more inner-directed and more tolerant view of themselves and others.”[12]

5> Cook-Greuter lists eight stages that repeat those in the Loevinger model but adds a ninth “Construct Aware” stage, in which the individual perceives how language conditions cultural reality, and a tenth Unitive stage in which an openness to so-called peak or transpersonal experiences is naturally sustained.[13] As Pfaffenberger and Marko clarify, individuals at this unitive level of evolution in Cook-Greuter’s model “are now able to make use of transpersonal experiences free from ego clinging.”[14] Yet measuring the stage to which a subject belongs has proved challenging. Pfaffenberger in fact notes “that currently no accurate, well-validated instrument for assessment of higher development is available, nor does it appear likely that such an instrument can be found any time soon.”[15] She still sees the SCT as the best choice for ascertaining an individual’s development for now, “despite its limitations.”[16] However, Cook-Greuter suggests that “A combination of personality tests, self-assessment [...] as well as physiological and other measures are needed to ascertain whether an individual operates from a stage of consciousness beyond the personal realm.”[17]

6> Such an integrated approach has been used by Travis and Brown to profile a “postrepresentational stage”--an advanced stage of development that differs from all the previous ones, including Cook-Greuter’s unitive stage. These previously identified stages all share a sense of selfhood that begins when a child first speaks, giving rise to “the representational, discursive, personal, or mental self [which] is born out of the sense-dominated body-self.”[18] The postrepresentational stage subsequently engenders experiences that are the ground for a transformed identity that is independent of socio-psychological representation as well as the “body-self.” In “My Brian Made Me Do It: Brain Maturation and Levels of Self-Development,” Travis and Brown report on two studies that combine analysis of brain patterns along with psychological tests, the SCT, and interviews to identify a postrepresentational state. These studies add to the extensive body of research on practitioners of an easily learned, widely researched meditation technique that naturally opens the mind to the continuum of self awareness that underlies the waking, dreaming and sleep states.[19] This fourth “pure” state of “self-referral” or “transcendental” awareness is, Travis and Brown argue, the silent basis of “postrepresentational” experiences.[20] Their work adds to research by Travis, Trecce, Arenander and Wallace published in 2002[21] on individuals reporting stabilized nighttime experiences of this fourth state. Travis and Brown compared electroencephalographic (EEG), muscle tone, and eye movement readings for nine subjects experiencing pure awareness while in sleep with nine other short term meditating and 13 non-meditating control subjects.[22] Notably these subjects, though sleeping soundly, exhibited brainwave patterns indicative of a state of restful alertness. The following account of such an experience of inner wakefulness while asleep is typical:

“When I fall asleep, there are first layers of the body settling down and then I notice when the body is asleep and then I would just watch lots of dreams come and go or just fatigue leaving the body, and then afterward, 5-6 hours, the body wakes up again in gradual layers and being aware of the other side. I feel the covers. I hear the birds […].”[23]

7> The subject describes silently witnessing[24] the process of falling to sleep and waking up in “layers,” along with watching the rise and fall of dreams. This unique type of experience has been designated as a fifth state of consciousness in which experiences of a higher Self (in contrast to a lower self which is outer oriented) have become a permanent backdrop upon which waking, dreaming and deep sleep occur.

8> Travis and Brown’s findings confirm a model proposed by Alexander, Heaton and Chandler in 1994 which assigned developmental stages to preverbal/pre-representational, representational (“including ego stages up to Loevinger’s Integrated, Stage 9”[25]) and post-representational tiers. As Dennis Heaton notes, the final stage of this model “comprises higher states of consciousness in which self identity is not mediated by symbolic thought but grounded in awareness of transcendental Being.”[26] Heaton elaborates on “the role of transcendence in cultivating development”[27] of advanced states, as brought out by Travis and Brown and others:

“These higher states of consciousness have been identified as a postrepresentational range of development, in which the Self knows itself as pure consciousness, rather than a conceptually created identity. Systematic cultivation of experiences that transcend thought promote development to the postrepresentational range.”[28]

9> Heaton in fact notes that in “a longitudinal study of TM pracitioners, an unprecedented 38% of the 34 experiment subjects scored at or beyond Loevinger’s Autonomous level, Stage 8.[29] Maslow’s description of self-actualization can thus be seen now in relation to “a stable stage in which the transcendental Self is awake to its own nature, which is distinct from the contents and activities of the mind.”[30] Heaton also identifies as a spontaneous condition of this transcendental Self a universally applicable empathy. A feeling of intimacy with everyone and everything is identifiable as “an end point” of this development.[31]

10> A number of important points emerge from this research. The process of transcending, firstly, is linked to the development of the advanced states of consciousness that define the postrepresentational personality. Secondly, as Travis and Brown conclude,

“Higher states may not be in a hierarchical sequence that requires the last stage of ego development before higher states can emerge. Rather, experiences of and transformation to higher states could begin even when one is at conventional stages.”[32]

11> In short, “ego development and growth of higher states may be parallel processes rather than part of single hierarchical sequence” as assumed by Cook- Greuter. Thirdly, research confirms that the postrepresentational Self is not bounded by roles, values, or ideas. This advanced stage of personality development, which is characterized by a deep sense of wellbeing, further exhibits a great openness to and appreciation of life as a whole resulting in sense of unity with all things.[33]

12> These postrepresentational psychological traits are relevant to the Traherne “enigma.” Relating to the first point, in his poetry, prose meditations, ethical handbook (Christian Ethicks), commentaries (Commentaries of Heaven), and other works, Traherne consistently and brilliantly maintains that the mind has the natural ability, if not blocked, to transcend and experience Felicity, a blissful state of inner wholeness. Moreover he contends that the highest states of human existence may be glimpsed by children, contrary to the view that they only emerge with ego development. Rather they can occur independently of any developmental hierarchy. Lastly, love is portrayed throughout his canon as a nourishing, transcendent force that engenders the ultimate sense of connectedness.

13> To highlight the vital role of the first of the above points that define the postrepresentational model, Traherne’s conception of personal development is grounded in the experience of transcendence. It is crucial, in his view, to the whole process of self-unfoldment. He describes, for example, a recurrent experience of transcendence in Select Meditations, a manuscript discovered in 1964 but not published until 1997,[34] where he writes "When I retire first I seem to Com in my selfe to a Centre, in that Centre I find Eternitie and all its Riches" (Select Meditations 1. 81).[35] Naturally withdrawing into himself, free from the binding power of the senses, he experiences the deepest level of consciousness, which transcends time and is the source of all true non-material wealth. He declares, moreover, in the Centuries, that "[...] Infinity we know and feel by our Souls: and feel it so Naturaly, as if it were the very Essence and Being of the Soul" (Centuries 2.81). Once again he refers to transcending limits and directly feeling infinity, stressing that it is a natural phenomenon. Similarly in another passage from Select Meditations he states that the mind, reduced to its most essential or “naked” condition, would see

“Infinite space […] within it. And being all sight it would Feel it selfe as it were running Parrallel with it. And that truly in an Endless Manner, becaus it could not be conscious of any Limits: nor feel it Selfe Present in one Centre more then another.” (3.27)

14> The self in its pure nature, he relates, is as vast as infinite space and not restricted to any one finite point. In another passage in Select Meditations he uses a mathematical image to convey his sense of the fully opened mind’s greatness: “Infinity being present in the Soul of man Causeth the Extreame[s] of an Infinit Line to be there togeather. both to Lye hid in the Same centre. And at once to be Seen in the Inward mind” (4.5). Reading like a Zen paradox, Traherne’s assertion that the mind holds the potential to encompass the full extent of a line stretching infinitely in both directions is engaging. Elsewhere in Select Meditations he likens the mind to a "Rasa Tabula" or blank tablet that is actually "a concealed Centre of [God's] Eternal Being" (4.2).

15> His favorite image for transcendence, however, is the unbounded sphere whose center is everywhere. In the penultimate stanza of “My Spirit,” his most comprehensive poem, he describes at length such an "Extended Orb of Joy" which he discovered within himself:

                  “A Strange Extended Orb of Joy,    
                          Proceeding from within,    
                  Which did on evry side convey
                  It self, and being nigh of Kin
                          To God did ever Way
            Dilate it self even in an Instant, and   
            Like an Indivisible Center Stand
            At once Surrounding all Eternitie.
                                 Twas not a Sphere 
                                 Yet did appear
            One infinit.  Twas somwhat evry where.
                   And tho it had a Power to see
                          Far more, yet still it shind
                                 And was a Mind
            Exerted, for it saw Infinitie
                   Twas not a Sphere, but twas a Power
                   Invisible, and yet a Bower.” (91‑108)

16> This expansive orb with an “Indivisible Center” represents the full power of "a Mind/ Exerted." It is transcendent dynamism, invisibly dilating everywhere and surrounding everything, and yet a “Bower” or place of retirement. The unifying power of this “spirit” or deep consciousness is delineated in the following stanza:

                   “It Acts not from a Centre to
                          Its Object as remote,
                   But present is, when it doth view,
                   Being with the Being it doth note.
                          Whatever it doth do,
            It doth not by another Engine work,
            But by it self; which in the Act doth lurk.
            Its Essence is Transformed into a true
                                 And perfect Act.
                                 And so Exact
            Hath God appeared in this Mysterious Fact,
                   That tis all Ey, all Act, all Sight,
                          And what it pleas can be,
                                 Not only see,
             Or do; for tis more Voluble then Light:
                   Which can put on ten thousand Forms,
                   Being clothd with what it self adorns.” (20‑36)

17> The state of transcendence as depicted here is totally self-referral, independent of anything external to itself; it is as “Voluble” or rapidly moving and fluent as light, and present everywhere in an instant; and it is, in its essential nature, pure “act” or potentiality and not at all flat and static.

18> His Inducements to Retiredness,[36] discovered in 1997 by Jeremy Maul at the Lambeth Palace Library in a manuscript containing in all four new Traherne texts,[37] indeed makes the case for a retired life on the basis of transcending space and time: "Retirement is [...] Necessary to him, that Studieth Happiness [because] Infinity and Eternity are only to bee seen by the Inward Ey" (1: 5). It is "the field of Mens true Enlargement," and the way in which a man achieves the state "[wherin he may] never be bounded" (1: 19). This view is summed up in the sublime paradox that "We then are Doing the Greatest things when we seem Doing Nothing" (1: 12).

19> One of the most telling transcendental references in Traherne’s poetry and prose[38] appears in an autobiographical passage in Century III in which he describes a transformative vision of the source of goodness and beauty:

“This Spectacle once seen, will never be forgotten. It is a Great Part of the Beatifick Vision. A Sight of Happiness is Happiness. It transforms the Soul and makes it Heavenly, it powerfully calls us to Communion with God, and weans us from the Customs of this World. It puts a Lustre upon GOD and all his Creatures and makes us to see them in a Divine and Eternal Light. I no sooner discerned this but I was (as Plato saith, In summâ Rationis Arce Quies habitat) seated in a Throne of Repose and Perfect Rest. All Things were well in their Proper Places, I alone was out of frame and had need to be Mended.” (3.60)

20> This transcendent vision, which is grounded in “Perfect Rest” and psycho-physiological orderliness, produces super-abundant happiness. Traherne thus identifies the process of transcending as the means to "A Temple more Heavenly then Heaven is [...]" (Select Meditations 4.6). As he makes clear here and in the Commentaries,[39] “Heaven surely is a State and not a Place" ("[All Things]" 2: 414). His works abound with references to this heavenly happiness. In the prefatory poem “The Author to the Critical Peruser” he announces:

            “At that we aim; to th' end thy Soul might see
            With open Eys thy Great Felicity,
            Its Objects view, and trace the glorious Way
            Wherby thou may'st thy Highest Bliss enjoy.” (7‑10)

21> This poem introduces Felicity, his preferred word for this unfathomable experience. Speaking again as one who has discovered this deeply hidden happiness, he begins the Centuries by telling his reader, the person who presented him with the blank book as pure and clean as an “Infant[’]s Soul,” that he will fill it with "Things that have been Kept Secret from the foundation of the World," echoing Matthew 13.35. In a series of poems he then inventories the amazing power of thoughts as “Engines of Felicitie” (“Thoughts I” 7).

                   “O ye Conceptions of Delight!
            Ye that inform my Soul with Life and Sight!
                          Ye Representatives, and Springs
                                 Of inward Pleasure!
                   Ye Joys!  Ye Ends of Outward Treasure!
                   Ye Inward, and ye Living things!
                   The Thought, or Joy Conceived is
            The inward Fabrick of my Standing Bliss.
                    It is the Substance of my Mind
                   Transformd, and with its Objects lind.
            The Quintessence, Elixar, Spirit, Cream.
            Tis Strange that Things unseen should be Supreme.” (54-65)

22> The cognitive experience poetically documented in this irregular stanza poem is Traherne’s discovery of the essentially blissful nature of his mind at its deepest level. It is, as he brings out elsewhere in “My Spirit,” a "Strange Mysterious Sphere"; a "Deep Abyss" of silence; and “The only Proper Place of Heavenly Bliss" (81, 82, 84). This poem superbly shows Traherne attempting to express the ultimately inexpressible reality of Felicity. It knows no limits, paradoxically like a sphere without a circumference. It is the source of unfathomable silence; but at the same time, within that seeming emptiness, it is bubbling with happiness.

23> That Traherne was familiar with the experience of witnessing sleep, an advanced stage of the growth of consciousness, is hinted at by the Dobell poem “Innocence.” Traherne tells the reader that all he can remember of his blessed childhood is the "Joyfull Sence and Puritie" (10) that filled his soul with the light of Felicity which "No Darkness then did overshade" (6). This benign spiritual light was present even during sleep, for the poet reports that "the very Night to me was Bright" (12). That his mind was thrilled with blissful awareness even in dreaming or deep sleep is given plausibility by a similar experience common among the members of Travis and Brown’s test group.[40] The experience of silent wakefulness within sleep was also apparently known to literary figures as diverse as Homer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Vaughan[41] Robert Louis Stevenson and Jame Joyce.[42]

24> Traherne’s celebrated vision of childhood perception parallels Travis and Brown’s view that higher states may not be hierarchical. In a poem interpolated in Century 3.4 he lauds childhood as “My Tutor Teacher Guid" (51), empowering him to see "with New and Open Eys / […] as if I were abov the Skies" (33-34). That his exalted conception of childhood is not sentimental but profoundly experiential is suggested by his emphasizing in 3.5 that this childlike “Purity of all our Soul […] is a Deeper Thing then is commonly apprehended” (3.5). To experience it fully, "all our Thoughts must be Infant-like and Clear: the Powers of our Soul free from the Leven of this World, and disentangled from mens conceits and customs" (3.5). The opening poems in the Dobell sequence also connect childhood with the primal state of blissful awareness. In "Wonder," for example, he writes

                   “A Native Health and Innocence
                          Within my Bones did grow,
            And while my GOD did all his Glories shew,
                    I felt a Vigour in my Sence
            That was all SPIRIT.  I within did flow
                          With Seas of Life, like Wine;
                    I nothing in the World did know,
                                  But 'twas Divine.” (20-27)

25> As idealized as they sound, these lines depict childhood first and foremost as a state of holistic consciousness that enlivened both his mind, which "did flow / With Seas of Life," and his senses, which perceived the outer world with joyful clarity.

26> His position that childhood is an edenic state corresponds to contemporary Anglican theology,[43] which contrasted with “the Puritan emphasis on original sin and the transformation of individual children into agents of moral and social reform.”[44] As Leah Sinangolou Marcus points out, conservative Anglicanism affirmed the “original innocence and idealization of childhood as a symbolic link with a past untroubled by Puritan agitation,”[45] referring here to the religio-political tensions between these two groups that broke out in to civil war while Traherne himself was a child. But while ideologically Traherne is an Anglican, his emphasis on the possibility of infinite happiness is radical and rooted in his belief, as expressed definitively in “Innocence,” that the basis of childhood Felicity is a cognitive state:

                     “Tis not the Object, but the Light
            That maketh Heaven; Tis a purer Sight.                                 
                                 Felicitie
            Appears to none but them that purely see.”
                      (“The Preparative” 63-66)

27> It is the light of consciousness that is the ground of heaven and not objects themselves, whatever their inherent qualities or attractions. Traherne subordinates an object referral state in favor of a self intrinsically in touch with itself through transcending. Marcus notes in particular Traherne’s “remarkable insight into the undifferentiated wholeness of the infant’s perception--an insight which had to wait until the twentieth century to be validated by the research of Piaget.”[46]

28> Such an “undifferentiated wholeness” characterizes the postrepresentational personality in general. As noted above, a central outcome of this wholeness and a defining quality of this personality type is spontaneous empathy for the world at large. Traherne’s many inspiring passages on love point to the holistic development and a “greatly enriched appreciation and intimacy,” highlighted by Heaton.[47] As Traherne states in “Fragment on ‘Lov’,”[48] “It [Love] delights in magnifying the felicity of its object, and endeavors after an infinit Nearness and Communcion with it” (1: 561). He unquestionably places the highest value on love, but one that arises as the result of growth in transcendental consciousness. Among his many compelling descriptions of love is this passage from Century I:

“Lov is Deeper then at first it can be thought. It never ceaseth but in Endless Things. It ever Multiplies. Its Benefits and its Designes are always Infinit. Were you not Holy Divine and Blessed in Enjoying the World, I should not care so much to Bestow it. But now in this you accomplish the End of your Creation, and serv God best, and Pleas Him most: I rejoyce in Giving it. For to Enable you to Pleas GOD, is the Highest Service a Man can do you. It is to make you Pleasing to the King of Heaven, that you may be the Darling of His Bosom.” (1.11)

29> Love is deep and endless because it originates and takes its force from the fully awake and enlivened consciousness. It is “the End of your Creation” as such, representing the totality of what it means to be human. In religious terms, it transforms the soul or self into a mirror of the wholeness that is greater than all the separate aspects of life. An episode in his spiritual history that stands out in this regard is reported in the following passage from Select Meditations:

“when I First saw it, [it] so wholy Ravished and Transported my spirit, that for a Fortnight after I could Scarsly Think or speak or write of any other Thing. But Like a man Doteing with Delight and Extasie, Talk of it Night and Day as if all the Joy of Heaven and Earth were Shut up in it. For in very Deed there I saw the Divine Image Relucent and shining, There I saw the foundation of mans Excellency, and that which made Him a Son of God. Nor ever shall I be able to forget its Glory.” (4.3)

30> This record of a personal experience of the soul’s powers verifies for Traherne that excellency is within everyone’s reach and resides in discovering the “Relucent and shining” self hidden within. In line with Heaton’s account of this advanced stage of development, Traherne’s crystal clear experiences of the “transpersonal self” are the mainspring of his comprehension of love. Of interest is the supposition that the Centuries of Meditations were written for someone dear to the poet, as apparently revealed by the presentation quatrain:

            “This book unto the friend of my best friend
            As of the Wisest Love a Mark I send
            That she may write my Makers prais therin
            And make her self therby a Cherubin.”

31> He cleverly, tenderly offers the book, which ends seemingly incomplete with the heading for an unwritten Century 5.11,[49] back to the woman who gave it to him to express and glorify herself. Though the identity of Traherne’s muse is not certain,[50] the work from its inception is dedicated to a love shared by means of a creative endeavor. That this love was a compelling one is perhaps suggested by the fact that he crossed out the meditation containing the passionate rhetorical question "Cannot we see and Lov and Enjoy each other at 100 Miles Distance"? (1.80)--about the distance from London to Traherne’s home in Hereford.[51] Century II in particular, at any rate, focuses for some meditations on the subject of love as a unifying force in relationships, as expressed in the following passage:

“By Lov our souls are married and Sodderd to the Creatures: and it is our Duty like GOD to be united to them all. We must lov them infinitly but in God, and for God: and God in them: namely all His Excellencies Manifested in them.” (2.66)

32> As the poet drives home here and elsewhere, it is an open-hearted or “Naked Lov” like the Creator’s that “is more Delightfull to us then all Worlds”[52] and that connects us to others (2.60). This theme is picked up in several meditations, such as the following one:

“Lov is the true Means by which the World is Enjoyed. Our Love to others, and Others Lov to us. We ought therfore abov all Things to get acquainted with the Nature of Lov. for Lov is the Root and Foundation of Nature: Lov is the Soul of Life, and Crown of Rewards.” (2.62)

33> Love is the agency by which the world and all it entails is enjoyed. Thomas Hobbes famously dismissed the heart in Leviathan as "but a Spring"[53] or a metal mechanism. For Traherne, who actively rejects Hobbism,[54] the heart is the seat of a love that is a most advanced expression of Felicity.

34> Moreover, his Christian Ethicks, published posthumously in 1675, forcefully argues, atypically for ethical handbooks of the time, that one must feel as much as know the virtues, for “without Loving it is impossible to Delight in its Goodness" (30).[55] He eulogizes the vastness of love in the following passage:

“The Capacity of Love Being so exceeding vast, multiplies and heightens in the Soul of man, that is apt to overflow of its own Accord. For nothing is so prone to communicate it self as that Active Principle of Love; that Soul which is Generous and Divine, being disposed to the exercise of Love, because therin it findeth its Proper Element. The very sun is not more inclined to communicate its Beams, then the Soul to love. For the Soul being made in the Image of GOD, who is Love by his Essence, must needs be like him in Power and Inclination, and is made for nothing else but the Attainment of its perfection, so that it can never rest, till it actually love after his similitude.”[56]

35> The soul’s infinity is the foundation for the vastness of love which is inclined like the sun to spread its light. This infinite capacity is described further below:

“The Spiritual Room of the Mind is Transcendent to Time and Place, because all Time and Place are contained therein: There is a Room in the Knowledge for all Intelligible Objects: A Room in our Esteem for all that is worthy of our Care and Desire. I confess this Room is strange and Mysterious. It is the Greatest Miracle perhaps in Nature. For it is an infinite Sphere in a Point, an Immensity in a Centre, and Eternity in a Moment. We feel it, tho we cannot understand it.”[57] (73)

36> The essence of Traherne’s psychology of love is that experiencing the mind’s natural ability to transcend empowers it to rightly esteem and care for all worthy things. In short, experiencing the joys of the mind must come first, then love and the other virtues will automatically follow.

37> To conclude, the transformative psychology or “Transforming Vision” (Kingdom of God,[58] 479) embedded in Traherne’s writings resonates with the possibilities of the postrepresentational self. The phenomenon of transcending, which we have seen is an essential feature of advanced personal development, is abundantly present in his texts. Traherne believed, based upon his own experience, that through transcending it was "Easy, safe, or cheap [for any] Intelligent Soul" (1: 9) to enrich him or her self internally. Traherne also insists that this experience, the foundation of a fully evolved life, may sprout in childhood, thus preceding adult ego-development--another parallel between Traherne’s writing and the research on the postrepresentational Self reported in this essay. When the Felicity of the mind is thusly cultivated, he assures his ostensible reader in the Centuries, then

“we are so full, that we know not what to do with it, we are in danger of bursting, till we communicate all to some fit and amiable Recipient, and more delight in the Communication than we did the Reception.”[59]

38> This exuberant testament to the power of Felicity aligns with the third feature of the postrepresentational Self highlighted above: openness of heart extending, ultimately, to all living beings. The strength of Traherne’s conviction that Felicity is open to all, and the radiance with which he manifests it in his poetry and prose, are perhaps the best testimony to the existence and efficacy of such a simple and amazing state, and sufficient grounds for his radical optimism.

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Notes



[1] Jacob Blevins, An Annotated Bibliography of Thomas Traherne Criticism, 1900-2003 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005); The Works of Thomas Traherne. Vols. 1-6, ed. Jan Ross (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2005).

[2] An Annotated Bibliography of Thomas Traherne Criticism, 1900-2003, ii.

[3] The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1995), 265.

[4] Carol Marks and George Robert Guffey,eds., Christian Ethicks: or Divine Morality, Opening the Way to Blessedness, by the Rules of Vertue and Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), xxxviii.

[5] Angela H. Pfaffenberger and Paul W. Marko, “Exceptional Maturity of Personality,” The Postconventional Personality: Assessing, Researching, and Theorizing Higher Development (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 1.

[6] Pfaffenberger and Marko 2.

[7] See Loevinger and Wessler, Measuring Ego Development: Vol. 1. Construction and Use of a Sentence Completion Test. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1970; Measuring Ego Development: Vol. 2. Scoring Manual for Women and Girls. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1976.

[8] Pfaffenberger and Marko 3.

[9] Pfaffenberger and Marko 3-4.

[10] Pfaffenberger and Marko 3.

[11] Adapted from Pfaffenberger and Marko 3.

[12] Pfaffenberger and Marko 4.

[13] Cook-Greuter, S. “Postautonomous Ego Development: A Study of Its Nature and Measurement.” Dissertation Abstracts International, 60(6), 300B. Retrieved from Proquest Dissertations and Theses database. (AAT 9933122).

[14] Pfaffenberger and Marko 5.

[15] Pfaffenberger, “Assessing Postconventional Personality: How Valid and Reliable is the Sentence Completion Test,” The Postconventional Personality: Assessing, Researching, and Theorizing Higher Development (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 22.

[16] Pfaffenberger 22.

[17] Quoted in Fred Travis and Sue Brown’s “My Brian Made Me Do It: Brian Maturation and Levels of Self-Development,” The Postconventional Personality: Assessing, Researching, and Theorizing Higher Development (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 38.

[18] Cook-Greuter, “Mature ego Development: A Gateway to Ego Transcendence?” Journal of Adult Development, 7(4), 227-240.

[19] This technique, which is of the Vedic tradition of India, is known as Transcendental Meditation or TM. Its inner and outer benefits have been the subject of several hundred peer-reviewed studies. See Scientific Research on the [Maharishi’s]Transcendental Meditation [and TM Siddhi Programme]: Collected Papers. Volumes 1-7. Various editors (Fairfield, Iowa: Maharishi University of Management, 1976-2015).

[20] See also the following two sources: Fred Travis, “States of Consciousness Beyond Waking, Dreaming and Sleeping: Perspectives from Research on Meditation Experiences,” States of Consciousness: Experimental Insights into Meditation, Waking, Sleep, and Dreams, edited by Cvetkovic, Dean and Irena Cosic, 223-234. New York: Springer, 2011; and Norman E. Rosenthal, Transcendence: Healing and Transformation Through Transcendental Meditation. NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2011.

[21] “Patterns of EEG coherence, power, and contingent negative variation characterize the integration of transcendental and waking states,” Biological Psychology, 61, 293-319.

[22] Travis and Brown 25.

[23] Travis and Brown 35.

[24] Witnessing is a term used by Maslow for “peak experiences.” See Dennis Heaton, “The Postconventional Personality: Assessing, Researching, and Theorizing Higher Development (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 185.

[25] Dennis Heaton 179.

[26] Heaton178-79.

[27] Heaton 178.

[28] Dennis Heaton 175-76.

[29] Heaton 175.

[30] Heaton 178. Heaton correlates Maslow’s conception of peak experiences with transcending as the basis of Self-Actualization in “The Postconventional Personality: Assessing, Researching, and Theorizing Higher Development, 177, 185-86.

[31] Heaton 180.

[32] Travis and Brown 37.

[33] Heaton 180-81.

[34] See Thomas Traherne: Select Meditations, ed. Julia Smith (Manchester:  Carcanet Press 1997), vii-viii. I have used the new edition published in 2013 as volume 5 of The Works of Thomas Traherne, edited by Jan Ross.

[35] I have retained Traherne’s original spelling and punctuation throughout this essay.

[36] The Works of Thomas Traherne: Inducements to Retiredness, A Sober View of Dr Twisses his Considerations, Seeds of Eternity or the Nature of the Soul, The Kingdom of God. Vol. 1. Ed. Jan Ross. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2005.

[37] Known as the Lambeth Manuscript.

[38] Upon mentioning to the distinguished Shakespearean Harry Berger that I was writing a book on Thomas Traherne, he brightly said: “Transcendence!”

[39] The abecedarian Commentaries of Heaven is yet another rediscovered Traherne text, rescued from a burning garbage heap in 1967, but not identified until 1981. See Jan Ross’s introduction to her two volume edition (1: x-xl).

[40] Additionally Thomas Wehr in “Effect of Seasonal Changes in Day Length on Human Neuroendocrine Function” analyzes the sleep patterns in subjects experiencing a silent wakefulness during an intermediate phase of sleep known as the “Watch” and occurring between midnight and 2 a.m. See Norman Rosenthal’s overview in Transcendence: Healing and Transformation Through Transcendental Meditation (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2011), 32-37. See also A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.)

[41] See Silvine Marbury Farnell’s "Henry Vaughan's 'The Morning-Watch': An Experience of a Higher State of Consciousness.”  Studia Mystica, 15, 4 (Winter 1992): 44-64.

[42] See James J. Balakier’s “An Unnoted Textual Gap in the Bird-Woman Epiphany of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 25. 2 (1999): 483-496.

[43] See Leah Sinangolou Marcus’s Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 1978.

[44] Marcus 243.

[45] Marcus 243.

[46] Marcus 181.

[47] Heaton 180.

[48] Included as an appendix in The Works of Thomas Traherne: Inducements to Retiredness, A Sober View of Dr Twisses his Considerations, Seeds of Eternity or the Nature of the Soul, The Kingdom of God. Vol. 1. Ed. Jan Ross. (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2005), 561-64.
[49] H.M. Margoliouth in his edition of the Centuries notes that a “numerical heading for another section” follows 5.10 (I. 297).

[50] Possibly Susanna Hopton of Gattertop, which is outside Hereford. See Richard D. Jordan, "Thomas Traherne: Notes on His Biography," Notes and Queries 225 (1980):  341-345 and Julia Smith, "Susanna Hopton: A Biographical Account." Notes and Queries 236 (1991): 165-172.

[51] See Ross’s note for 80.1 (V. 207).

[52] From a deleted section included by Margoliouth in his edition of the Centuries. See Ross’s note (V. 219).

[53] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. Ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9.

[54] See James J. Balakier, "The Competing Early Modern Epistemologies of Thomas Traherne and Thomas Hobbes: The Grounds of Felicity," The McNeese Review 47 (2009):  17-42. In this essay, I reference Nabil I. Matar’s “Thomas Traherne and St Bernard of Clairvaux,” Notes and Queries 230 (June 1985): 182-184, which explains how Traherne discredits Hobbes’s ego-bound conception of the self by means of St. Bernard’s theology of self-love as inspired by the Creator’s love. See also Balakier, Thomas Traherne and the Felicities of the Mind, 1-4.

[55] Christian Ethicks: or Divine Morality, Opening the Way to Blessedness, by the Rules of Vertue and Reason (1675). Eds. Carol L.Marks and George Robert Guffey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 30.

[56] Christian Ethicks 48.

[57] Christian Ethicks 73.

[58] Another rediscovered Traherne text, published as Volume 1 in Jan Ross’s The Works of Thomas Traherne.

[59] Christian Ethicks 258.
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Farnell, Silvine Marbury. Henry Vaughan's 'The Morning-Watch': An Experience of a Higher State of Consciousness.” Studia Mystica, 15, 4 (Winter 1992): 44-64.

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 Loevinger, Jane and Richard L. Wessler.  Measuring Ego Development: Vol. 1. Construction and Use of a Sentence Completion Test. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1970.

-------. Measuring Ego Development: Vol. 2. Scoring Manual for Women and Girls.  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass, 1976.

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James J. Balakier is Professor Emeritus of English from the University of South Dakota. He is an English Renaissance specialist and has published widely on Thomas Traherne, including “Traherne, Husserl, and a Unitary Act of Consciousness,” published in Re-Reading Thomas Traherne: A Collection of New Critical Essays; and the book, Thomas Traherne and the Felicities of the Mind.

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APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture,
Volume Nine (2016): Texts & Contexts

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