A Thesis Submitted to the Facility of Divinity of the University of Edinburgh in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree
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THE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT OF THOMAS CARLYLE EVOR ROBERTS A thesis submitted to the Facility of Divinity of the University of Edinburgh in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree. May 14, 1948 "Do make religion your great study, Tom; if you repent it, I will bear the "blame forever." (From a letter written "by his mother, April 10, 1819.) CONTENTS INTRODUCTION **».*«*»»«**. page iv 1. ORIGINS ...»....».»«**., 1 2. THE DRIFT INTO SCEPTICISM * . * . Jit $» BATTLE WITH THE MUD-GODS 60 4* SELF-DENIAL 99 5. DUTY . 130 i, CARLYLE'S WELTANSCHAUUNG ***.... 150 7* CARLYLE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY . » 192 8. CHRISTIANITY AND THE CHURCH . 252 f. FOUR STRAINS OF CARLYLE'S RELIGIOUS THOUGHT: A SUMMARY 270 Stoicism ........ 270 Idealism ........ 279 Mysticism ...... * 288 Calvinism ....... 302 Conclusion . ****** 320 APPENDIX ONE: Carlyle and Pascal * * 325 APPENDIX TWO: Faust, TeufelsdrSckh, and Carlyle ..... 326 APPENDIX THREE: Igdrasil ...... 331 BIBLIOGRAPHY f 41 333 iv INTRODUCTION In the application of titles to the great literary figures of the 19th century, there is tut one which fitly describes the character of Thomas Carlyle that of seer. There is a strik ing resemblance between the writings of the temperamental Scot tish moralist and the rhapsodies of the stern prophets of Isra el. Imos and Carlyle are at one in condemning the indolent rich for "selling the needy for a pair of shoes." They share a common attitude in their bitter denunciation of an institution alized religion which has hid the light of spiritual power to the point of extinction under the bushel of ecclesiastical formalism. Carlyle, though he turned away from the gates of a clerical career, became the outstanding religionist of his century, touching liberal thinkers in all fields of social en deavor those of the church, ^together with those of the political arena. He became the seer fcot only of Britain but also of the rapidly growing civilization of the lew World. There are many specialized studies which have been made of Carlyle. He was most prolific in his writings and not at all confined to the narrow limits of a particular field. Literary criticism, essay writing, history, philosophy, bio graphy, the interpretation of society, ethics, and religious thought Well qualified in each of these, he is unsurpassed when considered in the light of his versatility. A review of his work, however, reveals that there is one fundamental aspect of Carlyle 1 s mind which provides the canto firmo for them all. Only such terms as spiritual power, religious conviction, the search for the eternal, can "be used, though inadequately, to describe that aspect. Because it is always a valuable as well as fascinating study to seek out the driving forces of men (although it is blasphemous to do so without reverence for those forces), and because it is essent ially in them that the permanence of any man T s influence lies, the writer has selected, as his particular field of inquiry, the religious thought of Carlyle. He realises that this is no small task, since it posesses infinite ramifications. It is his purpose only to delineate the major ideas of Carlyle, and to discover both their sources and their relation to his religious and ethical thought, his interpretation of history, and his world-view in general. Ho writer ever conducted a literary career with a more urgent sense of a religious mission. The passion to convert men, and to save them from the materialism and utilitarianism which had nearly engulfed himself, possessed him as it only rarely does even the evangelists of the Christian message. The same devotion which, but for the peculiar failure of the church in the time of his youth to meet the attacks of the Age of Reason, would have poured itself out in the pulpit, was rechanneled into his books. There, as readers, we are addressed personally by his unique method of direct exhort- 1, In a letter to his mother, January 2, 1827, he wrote, "You must accept this ! Life of Henry Martyn1 as a new year's gift from me; and while reading it believe that your son is a kind of missionary in his way not to the heathen of India, but to the British heathen, an innumerable class whom he would gladly do something to convert.." (Froude,i,p,378.) Vt % #i ation a literary style comparable only to the best of preach ers and the prophets of the Old Testament, Required reading for those who wish to ^discover the se cret of Carlyle T s "literary priesthood" is a few pages of his first original book, The Life of Friedrich Schiller, published in 1825. There he takes pains to translate two paragraphs from the German romantic writer 1 s Tiber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen a passage which was so important to him that he told Jane Welsh she must get it by heart and re peat it every day along with her devotionsI "It is my creed, o expressed with Schiller's eloquence. 1* Here we find the just ification for the harsh behavior of the 19th century1 s Diogen es, for the uncompromising tone of the admonitory utterances he addressed to the optimistic Age of Liberalism* " T The Artist, it is true, 1 says Schiller, T Is the son of his age; but pity for him if he is its pupil, or even its favourite I Let some beneficent Divinity snatch him when a suckling from the breast » of his mother, and nurse him with the milk of a better time; that he may ripen to his full stature beneath a distant Grecian sky. And having grown to manhood, let him return, a foreign shape, into his century; not, however, to delight it by his presence; but terrible, like the Son of Agamemnon, to purify it... rff But how is the Artist to guard himself from the corrupt- 3U See pp. 199-202. £* Love Letters, ii, p.93. vi i ions of his time, which on every side assail him? By despis ing its decisions. x.et him look upwards to his dignity and his mission, not downwards to his happiness and his wants. Tree alike from the vain activity, that longs to impress its traces on the fleeting instant; and from the discontented spirit of enthusiasm, that measures "by the scale of perfect ion the meagre product of reality, let him leave to common sense, which is here at home, the province of the actual; while he strives from the union of the possible with the necessary to bring out the ideal. This let him imprint and express in fiction and truth, imprint it in the sport of his imagination and the earnest of his actions, imprint it in all sensible and spiritual forms, and cast it silently into ever lasting Time. 1 " Commenting on Schiller, not so much as an individual genius, as the type of what all literary men should "be, Car- lyle declares, "Literature was his creed, the dictate of his conscience; he was an Apostle of the Sublime and Beautiful, and this his calling made a hero of hi$." (Thus, early in 1825, we see the embryo of Carlyle T s formulation of the Cal- vinistic idea of the "called" as elect "heroes".) 1 ". ..(Gr)en- uine Literature includes the essence of philosophy, religion, art; whatever speaks to the immortal part of man. 5he daughter, she is likewise the nurse of all that is spiritual and exalted in our character. The boon she bestows is truth *.,o£ moral feeling, truth of taste, that inward truth in its 1. See below, pp.236ff and 311. «/ viil thousand modifications, which only the most ethereal portion of our nature can discern... The treasures of Literature are thus celestial, imperishable, "beyond all price: with her is the shrine of our test hopes, the palladium of pure manhood; to "be among the guardians and servants of this is the noblest funct ion that can "be intrusted to a mortal. Genius, even in its faintest scintillations, is f the inspired gift of God 1 ; a sol emn mandate to its own-.er to go forth among his brethren, which the heavy and polluted atmosphere of this world is forever threatening to extinguish. Woe to him if he turn this inspir ed gift into the servant of his evil or ignoble passions; if he offer it on the altar of vanity, if he sell it for a piece of money!" These are words which are comparable only to the commiss ion of Isaiah in the Temple or the solemn charge to ministers upon ordination to the service of God. Only by comprehending their import with especial attention to Schiller's call to the literary man, "terrible, like the Son of Agamemnon", to purify his age can we understand the prophetic character of Car- lyle's books, and avoid the mistake of attributing his "dia tribes" to the "splenetic eccentricities of an old man." Robbed of the complacency which "belonged to the time of our grandfathers, we are perhaps, today, more receptive to Car- lyle f s sharp utterances, and less inclined to call them "dia tribes". The keys to Carlyle T s character are to be found in the ex- ix tremities of the "old-fashioned" world-view of the Calvinists, with their spiritual perspective that reached up to heaven and down to hell. They are reverence and defiance, the only two responses which he deemed appropriate to good and evil, divided as they are from each other "by an "infinite difference". He humorously referred to those who were less rigorous than him self, such as Leigh Hunt, as members of the "Amalgamation of Heaven and Hell Society", The two characteristic moods of reverence and defiance show Carlyle to be what is popularly known today as an "existential thinker".