The Influence of Thomas Traherne on the Philosophy of Herbert Read

Abstract

The article examines the influence of the 17th-century religious thinker and poet Thomas Traherne on the philosophy of Herbert Read. The focus is on one of Tra­herne’s works, Centuries of Meditations (1674, published 1908), since it had the greatest impact on Read. The author of the article identifies two main vectors of this influence: the sense of glory, which became Read’s intellectual and moral guide, and childhood experience, referring to genuine reality. Traherne’s two most important intuitions – infantile innocence, endowed with special knowl­edge-vision (embodied in the image of the “Infant-Ey”), and the sense of glory as the main principle of his rational mysticism – become the connecting thread between Traherne’s work and Read’s philosophy. Already in Read's first autobi­ography of 1933, one of his central concepts appears – “innocent eye” – which is comparable to Traherne’s concept of “Infant-Ey”. Read calls the experience of childhood the only real experience, and all subsequent, adult life – an echo of that life with innocent sensitivity. This is consonant with Traherne’s ideas that it is the infant state that is related to the transcendent and universal. It is impor­tant to note that Traherne emphasizes not only the innocence and purity inherent in a small child, but also the special knowledge that is revealed to him. This un­derstanding is also characteristic of Read’s philosophy. Along with the concept of “innocent eye”, the concept of the sense of glory (Read interprets it as the de­light of involvement in the beauty and mystery of the universe) becomes funda­mental in the philosophy of Herbert Read.