This phrase took me aback. Not that I hadn’t already been happily startled by other passages in the book where I’d come across it: David Bentley Hart’s brilliantly, playfully pugnacious The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, and Bliss. But somehow the phrase I’ve used as my title stood out for me.
Here’s the whole paragraph where it occurs—and where you’ll discover the person Hart has singled out for special honors:
For Thomas Traherne, one of the sanest men who ever lived, to see the world with the eyes of innocence, and so to see it pervaded by a numinous glory, is to see things as they truly are, and to recognize creation as the mirror of God’s infinite beauty.
First off, I was startled to hear Traherne’s name mentioned at all. I hadn’t thought about him for years, and then only as a minor seventeenth century English poet and obscure cleric. But I was startled even more to discover that I’d missed something rather important about Traherne. Not only that he was neither “minor” nor “obscure.” He was actually no more nor less than “the sanest….”
Shame quickly replaced surprise. How on earth had I missed such key facts about Traherne? Where had I been? What had I been thinking? And what, after all, was sanity?
Then I did a little research and found out that Traherne’s name was almost totally forgotten until the early 1900s, when manuscripts of his poetry were stumbled upon by chance in a London bookstall and published for the first time in 1908. So my forgetting about Traherne followed a pattern of forgetting about him. I wasn’t alone. But now I was all the more eager to find out what it was I’d forgotten, or perhaps had never known, especially about sanity.
The problem was, though, what little I recalled about Traherne’s poetry didn’t involve sanity at all. What I recalled was its “Wordsworthian” quality, its deep nostalgia for the purity of childhood, though in verse forms and in an archaic diction that seemed to lack the freedom of Romantic expressiveness.
Clearly, it was time to look back at Traherne’s poetry to reassess what had clearly been a mistaken impression, and to address the failure on my part to get to the root of what kind of man Traherne was.
Here, to start, are the beginning stanzas of Traherne’s “The Salutation”:
1 These little limbs, These eyes and hands which here I find, These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins, Where have ye been? Behind What curtain were ye from me hid so long! Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?
2 When silent I So many thousand thousand years, Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie, How could I smiles or tears, Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive? Welcome ye treasures which I now receive.
“The Salutation” continues for six more stanzas. But already I could see what my problem was. Traherne was not a Romantic, at least not in the usual sense. He was not looking back longingly at a childhood defined as the earliest period of growth. He was looking back at his becoming a child in the first place, or more precisely stated: he was looking back at his transition from a pure consciousness, already born in spirit but born anew now into infant human form.
That adverb “now” I just used refers to an adult perspective that throughout Traherne’s poetry inserts itself into a contradictory position that Traherne himself was well aware of: into his “now” as the observer of the his own coming-into-being. The seeming absurdity of such a project is breathtaking. A Romantic reimagining of the past merely slides back along the same temporal axis one has spent one’s life moving forward on. Traherne imagines vaulting back over the beginning of that axis, in order to access a period prior even to his own infant “past.”
For example, right away, in Stanza One, the poet’s identity, his “I,” is already formed, already, from some unimaginable standpoint, grown age-old, and yet is startled by what appears to him “now” to be the sudden emergence of his own eyes, hands, and rosy cheeks from what he calls an “abyss.” The physical appurtenances of his own infant life astonish him as if revealed to him for the first time and as if out of nowhere.
Yet his noting these appurtenances is what defines him physically as an entity. And they do even more. Paradoxically, they differentiate him, not only from other infants, but also from himself. They allow him to rise from the “dust” where he lay “in a chaos” so that he can “perceive” himself at last, that is, stand as it were outside himself and, equipped “with a speaking tongue,” articulate his becoming human in relation not only to himself but to the created world around him—all the while from a point of view prior to that becoming.
But wait a minute—this is the man Hart claims to be “one of the sanest men who ever lived.” How can such a man be “sane” if he deliberately invites self-contradiction? What’s going on here?
What’s going on here is an extended argument on Hart’s part to show that, by devoting himself to the poetic celebration of his pre-infant state of being, Traherne is actually “seeing things as they really are.” And that by doing so Traherne is demonstrating his sanity in contrast to those who claim our being itself arises from purely physical processes. This group includes contemporary atheists, many computer scientists, neurologists, and philosophers of mind. True: by insisting on a strictly materialist explanation for reality, these savants avoid the kinds of self-contradiction that Traherne wrestled with. But by doing so they fall into a logical trap of their own, worse because they fall into it unwittingly: by claiming that the parts can explain the whole, that a higher order naturally arises out of the complexity of its own elements. The universe, these “sane” ones imply, is not innately orderly. Order is only the sum total of the consistencies we can actually see and categorize in any physical system. No God, no creator, is necessary. Human understanding of itself and of the world is radically self-sufficient.
Hart will have none of it, and neither will Traherne. Traherne’s poetry is founded on the belief that his very being is derivative of a higher order in divinity. Reason emerges in him, like his eyes, hands, and rosy cheeks, from the “abyss.” His being is not self-explanatory, not a self-contained physical event in a chain of material causes. Rather, it is a surprise to wonder about, a gift to be grateful for, and an occasion for poetic song.
An occasion made the most of by “one of the sanest men who ever lived.”
After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.
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