Thomas Carlyle’s Crisis of Faith
Although Carlyle’s style in this piece is complicated and ornate even by nineteenth century standards, the substance of his spiritual autobiography, Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Re-tailored), provides a good illustration of the passionately spiritual and yet critically-minded quality of the work from that period.
Carlyle’s style in the excerpts that follow is further complicated by his use of two fictional characters to present his own experiences. I have not attempted to distinguish or identify the characters because doing so wouldn’t add to our understanding of his experience and would detract from its readability.
From Sartor Resartus
The following abridgment consists of direct quotations presented without commentary and in the same order in which they appear in Carlyle’s text.
The Everlasting No - Book Second, chapter VII:
He himself says once, with more justice than originality: “Man is, properly speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession but Hope; this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope.” What, then, was our Professor’s possession? We see him, for the present, quite shut-out from Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely, all round into a dim copper firmament, pregnant with earthquake and tornado. … Doubt had darkened into Unbelief…
…for man’s well -being, Faith is properly the one thing needful; …with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and without it, Worldlings puke-up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury … for a pure moral nature, the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of everything. Unhappy young man!
What do you think? Is loss of belief the loss of everything? Why or why not? Note that Carlyle appears to use the words hope, faith, and belief interchangeably.
Carlyle’s style in the excerpts that follow is further complicated by his use of two fictional characters to present his own experiences. I have not attempted to distinguish or identify the characters because doing so wouldn’t add to our understanding of his experience and would detract from its readability.
From Sartor Resartus
The following abridgment consists of direct quotations presented without commentary and in the same order in which they appear in Carlyle’s text.
The Everlasting No - Book Second, chapter VII:
He himself says once, with more justice than originality: “Man is, properly speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession but Hope; this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope.” What, then, was our Professor’s possession? We see him, for the present, quite shut-out from Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely, all round into a dim copper firmament, pregnant with earthquake and tornado. … Doubt had darkened into Unbelief…
…for man’s well -being, Faith is properly the one thing needful; …with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and without it, Worldlings puke-up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury … for a pure moral nature, the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of everything. Unhappy young man!
What do you think? Is loss of belief the loss of everything? Why or why not? Note that Carlyle appears to use the words hope, faith, and belief interchangeably.
Posted by Paul at 9:45 AM Permalink
20 Comments:
So to me some relevant questions might be: Are hope, faith, and belief interchangeable? If not, how are they to be distiguished? How are they related?
CRYSTAL: So faith = belief and having hope depends on having faith/belief?
John Cowper Powys used to talk of a person's "life-illusion" and I think he was speaking of the same thing as hope, faith and belief in your extract or in your current thinking.
I think the simplest answer is that we are frightened of randomness and chaos. We want a path. We want "The Force" to be with us.
It is natural for us to interpret experience, so that whenever something happens we can place it into the incomplete jigsaw puzzle of our memories and see some kind of coherent picture; one moreover which does not incline us to despair. Life is too hard---we are forced to devote so much energy and concentration to mere survival and minimum comforts---for us to pursue purposelessly, unless we can see and enjoy rewards. If we cannot have joy now, we want meaning that gives us promise of joy.
Those who have learned how to play the game of life, or perhaps I should say those who successfully follow strategies which reward them with good feelings in some semi-predictable way; such people are better positioned to depend on minimal levels of belief. Thus Albert Camus was an atheist who saw life as the Myth of Sisyphus, in which the hero is compelled to push a rock up a hill, knowing that when he reaches the top the rock will roll down under its own weight, again and again forever. This he called his philosophy of the Absurd.
Why is the Absurd not enough for all of us? To me this is the more interesting question to be investigated.
I am most in the moment when I am fully experiencing and accepting what the moment has for me, whatever it may be . . .
Think about it. How often, in any given moment, we are somewhere else. In the past, lamenting some past mistake or wallowing in some past glory-- mistakes and glories we can neither change nor relive. Or in the future, worrying about some possible disaster or wishing for some possible goal-- disasters and goals that most often never arrive. In our heads, in our minds. All over the place. Everywhere. Except right here, right now. The moment, where we actually have a chance to act, or not act, as the case may be. A chance to be fully present with whatever the flow of life puts in our path . . .
Faith, hope, and belief? Interchangeable and indistinguishable emanations from the heart. Makes my head hurt if I think about them too much, but I like how they feel . . .
I've enjoyed the moment, commenting on your blog . . .
Makes me think of the Indigo Girls lyric-- "the less I seek my source for some definitive, closer I am to fine" . . .
In any case, while this has the virtue of, as you say, representing a minimal level of belief in the sense that it's not highly elaborated, that doesn't necessarily make it compelling intellectually or, especially, in terms of making sense of life in a way that everyone would find coherent or meaningful. So it doesn't surprise me that this outlook doesn't widely prevail but is one of a large number of beliefs about what we're all doing here.
OCEANSHAMAN: If you haven't already read Thich Nhat Hanh's "The Miracle of Mindfulness" you'd certainly find him a kindred spirit. I wonder, however, if it's the case that mindfulness or present-centeredness, as important as so many of us find this is for contributing to peace and sanity, makes faith/hope/belief without relevance to the human condition.
CRYSTAL: I hadn't thought of that, but I think I see what you mean. To believe in God isn't necessarily to have faith in God - for example, in the mind of someone convinced they're going to hell!
As I mentioned above to Vincent, it's been a long time since I did any reading in existentialism, but that's basically my impression too - that the belief here is that human life has no lasting, higher, transcendent, (wider, broader, deeper - more than what we now experience) meaning.
It also strikes me that the existentialists seemed to find great meaning - higher meaning, self-transcendent meaning? - in articulating what they saw as truth.
As for faith, hope, and belief, I consider them absolutely relevant, but less intellectually so much as experientially . . .
As in that the faith, hope, and belief that can be named, like the Tao, are not true faith, hope, and belief . . .
As in show me faith, hope, and belief, don't tell me about it . . .
They manifest far more powerfully in actions than in words . . .
But, then again, the more I write, the less I'm sure I know . . .
Time to put on a Dead bootleg, fold laundry, and do dishes . . .
True spiritual action . . .
Namaste, my new-found friend . . .
For me, knowing with some clarity what I am and am not talking about is a tool for helping me stay on track experientially and in my actions as well as for perhaps being of some use to others in this area. (In the book more than the blog.)
Talking about these matters, especially speculative, metaphysical talk and discussion/debate over the highly elaborated particulars of belief systems, can be a distraction - at least that's how I've found it. Not so much when I was younger, when grappling with systems of belief was important and meaningful for me. But certainly at this point in my life.
Like taking poison and hoping it hurts the one your angry at . . .
Like picking up a hot coal to throw at another, only to find your own hand burned . . .
Usually when people use the word God they refer to an entity existing in distinction from nature - the Creator who made creation. So far as I'm aware, this idea of God is beyond proof (or disproof) since it posits a supernatural Entity - and the only experiences we can reliably share and communicate about convincingly are of the natural world or "life as we know it" so to speak.
With regard to supernatural realms and entities, there are, of course, people who claim to know such things. But if they do, it's not any kind of knowledge that can be demonstrated to others.
Still, I do think there's a lot we can know about our experiences and a lot we can understand about their significance.
You didn't elaborate, but as far as anger goes, I was very glad that at the time of my disease onset I didn't believe in the idea of a God who's all powerful in the sense of being able to do anything S(he) wants, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Otherwise, in addition to the sort of global anger you go through as you watch yourself lose your entire way of life, then your job, then your ability to walk etc., and deal with your HMO, and the egos of doctors... I would have also felt really angry at God for letting this happen to me.
So belief in a God who's all powerful in that sense can cause problems if things go badly enough in your own life, a loved one's life, or you just, for whatever reason, become more attuned to the massive human suffering going on around the world every day.
MARK: Picking up on what Enemy of the R has raised: what would someone replace belief with?
OCEANSHAMAN: Speaking personally, I've found that while I can't say anger was never any good, usually it wasn't. Chronic forms, in particular, I found I needed to work past for my own sake.
RAFFI and KATHY: Hmm... Very contrasting comments! If I'm reading correctly, one essentially says "Hope is everything" and the other "Hope - who needs it!?"
Well, at least your names seem to rhyme, lol...
I wonder if there's a middle ground here.
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