ABSTRACT
Traherne’s structure of the four estates of innocence, misery, grace and glory gives particular prominence to the estate of innocence. The purpose of Commentaries of Heaven is, for each entry, to ‘see the Whole Historie of it, in its Original Nature, Object, Extent and End, in its Measures and Degrees, in its Effects and Several Estates’. 2 Within these definitions, innocence takes a foundational role. It is the measure against which misery is defined and is that which is recovered in grace and glory. Seventeen entries in Commentaries of Heaven contain a section on the several estates of the subject. The estate of innocence is often treated more extensively, and the subsequent estates are described primarily in comparison to it. In the entry for ‘Appetite’, for example, the section on ‘Innocency’ is over three times as long as that on ‘Grace’ and ten times as long as that on ‘Glory’. 3 The definition for ‘The Second Adam’ opens with the statement: ‘Tho the Estate of Man in Eden compared to that of Glory differeth as much as Infancy from perfect Manhood, yet is that Estate the Patern of our Life on Earth’. 4 The original innocence of the estate of innocence has a normative status within Traherne’s account of human existence.
