Spiritual Rebirth

Greetings,

            Thomas Carlyle, the English writer, thinker and man of great influence, experienced a striking spiritual rebirth which is related in Sartor Resartus (1834). Put briefly and prosaically, it consisted in a sudden clearing away of doubts as to the beneficent organization of the universe; a semi-mystical conviction that he was free to think and work, and that honest effort and striving would not be thwarted by what he called the “Everlasting No.”

            This is from Book II of Sartor Resartus:

            But indeed Conviction, were it never so excellent, is worthless till it convert itself into Conduct.  Nay properly Conviction is not possible till then; inasmuch as all Speculation is by nature endless, formless, a vortex amid vortices: only by a felt indubitable certainty of Experience does it find any centre to revolve round, and so fashion itself into a system.  Most true is it, as a wise man teaches us, that “Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action.”  On which ground, too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service: “Do the Duty which lies nearest thee,” which thou knowest to be a Duty!  Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.

            May we not say, however, that the hour of Spiritual Enfranchisement is even this: When your Ideal World, wherein the whole man has been dimly struggling and inexpressibly languishing to work, becomes revealed, and thrown open; and you discover, with amazement enough, like the Lathario in Wilhelm Meister, that your “America is here or nowhere”?  The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man.  Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live be free.  Fool, the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matter whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou givest it be heroic, be poetic.  O thou that tirest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a Kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, “here or nowhere,” couldst thou only see!

Yours & His,

DED