CARLYLE, THOMAS. – Scottish writer, born at Ecelefechan on 4 December 1795 and died in London on 4 February 1881. After abandoning his attempts to pursue an ecclesiastical career and, later, that of a lawyer, he faced a difficult life through elementary teaching and collaboration with various journals.
His first volumes, the translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1824) and The Life of Schiller (1825), demonstrate his inclination toward German culture, which also dominates in Sartor Resartus (1833–34, published in volume in 1838: a kind of spiritual autobiography, constructed around the philosophy of clothing—an investigation of what is transient and fictitious, and of what is substantial and eternal in the world) and in the History of Frederick II of Prussia (1858–65). In 1865 C. was appointed rector of the University of Edinburgh. His reputation as a historian, which began with The French Revolution (1837), was reaffirmed by Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845). In 1841 he published the lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), which embody his antidemocratic conception of history, understood as the creation of superior spirits. In Past and Present (1843), he set against the unhappy present, created by the economic and social revolution, the happy Middle Ages, portrayed above all in the ordered community of its monks. Everything he saw around him sharpened his irritation and inspired the fury of his writing, which included in its condemnation both the Oxford Movement and Darwin’s research. As for Christ and Christianity, C. had the good taste not to include Jesus among his human heroes. Chesterton defined C.’s religion as follows: «... in truth he had a certain sympathy for the enormous and vague gods of that sad but manly religion of nature which seems to have filled the darkness of the north before the coming of the Roman Eagle or the Christian Cross. This was united in him, allowing for certain skeptical omissions, with the terrible God of the Old Testament, of whom he had heard speak in the dominical lands of his childhood; and thus he proclaimed (against rationalists as against Catholics) a kind of pagan Puritanism: Protestantism deprived of its Christian elements».