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spirituality had begun to £loat free, as it were, becoming a mysterious
romantic trait that meant one was "above" the stale and false world of
conventional bourgeois life - a world that reeked of hypocrisy and
vacuity. In this sense, Rousseau was the first "spiritual" man in Europe -
the prototype for thousands of others, who looked down especially on
the world of commerce.
Spirituality also came to be associated with the distinctive ethos of
a people. Some "races" were more spiritual than others. Though con–
ventional Christian thought still said that spirituality was something that
everyone could aspire to insofar as God's grace is available to all, for
some German Romantic writers spirituality was something you were
more likely to have if you were German rather than, say, French. More–
over, as spirituality began to lose its connection with conventional reli–
gious worship, so materialism changed its meaning - or, rather, added
vague new meanings. Materialism was still a philosophical notion and it
still referred to a narrowly acquisitive outlook, but it also came to be
seen as a destructive modern force, one that destroyed old values.
Such ideas can be found in the work of the English essayist and his–
torian, Thomas Carlyle. Throughout his life Carlyle inveighed against
materialism, which he called the "Pig Philosophy." Materialism, he ar–
gued, was a world-view that ignored the profound spiritual depths men
are capable of. Carlyle also blamed materialism for the exploitation of
the agricultural and industrial poor. In 1831, when Tocqueville was in
the United States gathering material for
Democracy in America,
Carlyle
published "Characteristics," in which he attacked the "frightful materi–
alism" predominant in England and France and praised the spiritual values
evident in "the higher literature of Germany," where he saw "the
beginning of a new revelation of the Godlike." According to Carlyle,
materialism in all its guises - as a philosophical outlook or as "fierce
Mammon-worship" - is responsible for England's being a sick, cold,
cruel
society, where "the old ideal of Manhood has grown obsolete,"
and "Heroic Action is paralysed." If in "Characteristics," Carlyle offers
some hope that materialism is waning - "there are streaks of a dayspring
in
the east," - in later essays he is more given to despair. In the first of his
"Latter-Day Pamphlets," written in 1850, he sounds a desperate note:
"These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the
ruin is not to be total and final!"
.
Carlyle's exhortations are immoderate and vague, yet in Inany ways
he is less radical than he appears. His calls for spiritual renewal have their
roots in his stern Calvinist upbringing. His spirituality strays from its
Christian roots, but never completely leaves it. Despite the German con–
nection, Carlyle seems part of the English dissenting Protestant tradition
