ABSTRACT
The Herefordshire Anglican divine, Thomas Traherne ( c .1637-1674), is a considerably lesser-known contemporary of John Milton. His poetic and theological works are part of the same burgeoning of literature on Genesis 1-3, the state of innocence and humanity’s Fall, of which it has been argued that Paradise Lost was both the zenith and the final word. 1 The Genesis literature of this period has often been situated within literary-critical grand narratives of secularisation. In these accounts, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a transition from an Augustinian theology of original sin to a Pelagian or humanist celebration of humanity’s potential for goodness (Hulme, 1936, pp. 111-140). Traherne has been located at the tipping point of this transformation; both looking back to the patristic and scholastic roots of seventeenthcentury theology and forward to the development of the modern individual.
