Lost and Found
Thomas Carlyle's struggle to keep his traditional faith is not one lost on much of today's audience (though his language is). In our excerpts from Sartor Resartus, Carlyle rejects his old faith while searching for something new to replace it with.
Carlyle's weariness with the hypocrisy running rampant among many practitioners of organized religion is still echoed to this day, and it helps to solidify disdain for his current faith. "Full of religion ... he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious."[1] He does not dismiss God, he instead questions his motives, for in them he can see no rhyme or reason. If there is a God, he is "at best an absentee God, sitting idle."[2]
There was a point in my life where I, too, struggled with my faith. I could, at times, agree with Carlyle: "to me the Universe ... was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference";[3] however, unlike Carlyle, who aimed to replace his faith with some new truth, I turned to atheism -- I replaced my faith with indifference.
Carlyle passes through his Centre of Indifference, "through which whoso travels from the Negative Pole to the Positive must necessarily pass."[4] The journey is as important as the destination itself, for upon arrival the truth seems that much clearer having discovered it for one's own self. Carlyle calls not for torches with which to burn, but for hammers with which to build, finding his new faith an amalgamation of old and new, both the foreign and the familiar. He finds beauty in nature, in man, and in the universe itself. "The Universe is not dead and demonical ... but godlike."[5]
While my journey was cyclical, taking me back to where I began, culminating in a reaffirmation of my faith, Carlyle's journey takes him someplace different. Whatever the case may be, it remains to be said: the importance of the journey cannot be understated.
Notes
1. Thomas Carlyle, "Sartor Resartus," in Victorian Literature, ed. Jerome Bump (Austin: Jenn's Copy & Binding, 2006), 367.
2. Ibid., 367.
3. Ibid., 367.
4. Ibid., 368.
5. Ibid., 369.