“Our Own Periodical Pulpit”: Thomas Carlyle's Sermons

Abstract

For more than a century and a half, literary scholars have drawn on imagery of prophecy to describe writings of Thomas Carlyle. authoritative commands, wholesale denunciations, exhortations to understand the emphatic language and syntax of one crying out in wilderness--all of this makes it difficult to describe Carlyle's work without recourse to word and its variants. Accordingly, many critics have seen in Carlyle's major works an increasing propensity to imitate tone and style of Hebrew prophets. Chartism (1839), Past and Present (1843), and especially Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), with their frequent use of acrimony and malediction and their broad hints of prognostication, participate openly in prophetic tradition. lectures constituting On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and Heroic in History (1841) reveal that Carlyle's ideas on heroic were closely bound up with prophetic; not only Mohammed, on whom The Hero as Prophet is based, but also Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, and Dante Alighieri are given prophetic characteristics. However, in earlier works--the periodical essays, Sartor Resartus (written 1830-31), and French Revolution (1837)--the prophetic is much less in evidence, though not altogether absent: 1828 essay Signs of Times purports, obliquely, to read future in present events, and present-tense narration of French Revolution often mimics tone of a biblical prophet overseeing disaster (Rosenberg 34). Clearly, however, there is a difference with regard to prophetic between Carlyle's earlier writings and those of 1840s and 1850s. What distinguishes two? Margaret Rundle accounts for difference by noting Carlyle's early interest in German philosophy and literature, which in her rendering is more communitarian in spirit and thus less likely to be expressed in vitriolic terms. I find this unpersuasive, assuming as it must that Carlyle read Germans in order primarily to understand and adhere to whatever they might teach, rather than, as is well known in Carlyle scholarship, to bend their ideas into a shape that met his own intellectual needs. Rundle is correct, even so, in discerning that Hebrew prophets are far less in evidence in Carlyle's earlier career. confusion lies in undeniable fact that Carlyle's writing, early as well as late, exhibits declamatory characteristics. Carlyle writes as though he is shouting; even in stylistically straightforward early works tone is emphatic, at times heated. In Christian theology concept of prophecy is related to, but far from synonymous with, concept of preaching. Most obviously, Old Testament concept of prophecy involves prediction, whereas New Testament concept of preaching does not; duties of former have almost exclusively to do with relaying words of God in a direct and verbatim way, while preacher has access only to written Word and has pastoral responsibilities as well. Still, both Old Testament prophet and New Testament preacher preach: both are called upon to relay and interpret Word of God to people who, whether receptive or stiff-necked, need to hear it. With regard, then, to Carlyle's writing from 1820s and 1830s, to concentrate on his use of Old Testament prophets obscures one major aspect of his thinking--namely, degree to which Protestant doctrines of preaching color his ambitions. Carlyle was raised by Seceder-Presbyterian parents in a time and place--he was born in 1795 in Ecclefechan, a small town in southern Scotland--in which weekly sermon was considered by far most important aspect of religious life, indeed of life itself. Although by 1820, after having trained for ministry for two years, he ceased to believe in Christianity, he continued to strive to satisfy himself that he had not after all betrayed his own religious heritage. …