The Hero as Prophet: Carlyle


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On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) is a series of six lectures representing Thomas Carlyle's views of how societies are formed by the "reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise." Carlyle characterizes history as a sequence of phases of worship, whose object passes from God to the God-inspired to secular visionaries (including poets and authors of heroic stature). This historical progression toward greater humanism is reminiscent of "the death of God" (ala Nietzsche).
For Carlyle, Muhammad is the emblem of "the hero as prophet." Citing Muhammad's unwavering faith and fortitude of mind as the marks of the true hero, he praises his strength and leadership in disseminating Islam. Encouraging his reader to see not the faults but the truth in Muhammad's teachings, Carlyle shows how he lifted the Arab Nation out of darkness through earnestness and "a word they could believe."
Carlyle was a major figure in the mid-nineteenth century, palpably influencing his contemporaries long after their reputations have outlasted his. Representative Men (1850) is Emerson's later (and better-known) version of Carlyle's thesis. And Melville's eulogy to Hawthorne in "Hawthorne and His Mosses"--written shortly after borrowing On Heroes--may have been encouraged by it.
For this meetup, we will read lecture 2 ("The Hero as Prophet") from On Heroes and Hero Worship.
On Heroes and Hero Worship:
Deeper dive:
- "...I am the Vailed Persian Prophet; I, the man in the iron mask; I, Junius." (Mardi, 2.97)
- "If the devout and exemplary Mussulman who dying fast in the faith of his Prophet anticipates reclining on beds of roses, gloriously drunk through all the ages of eternity, is to be waited on by Houris such as these..." ("Fragments from a Writing Desk")
- "And, like that old exquisite, Mohammed, who so much loved to snuff perfumes and essences, and used to lounge out of the conservatories of Khadija, his wife, to give battle to the robust sons of Koriesh; even so this Rio land-breeze comes jaded with sweet-smelling savours, to wrestle with the wild Tartar breezes of the sea." (White-Jacket, 65)
- "...that sudden rolling march is magical as the monitory sound to which every good Mussulman at sunset drops to the ground whatsoever his hands might have found to do, and, throughout all Turkey, the people in concert kneel toward their holy Mecca." (White-Jacket, 69)
- "With the Articles of War in one hand, and the cat-o’-nine-tails in the other, he stands an undignified parody upon Mohammed enforcing Moslemism with the sword and the Koran." (White-Jacket, 72)
- "‘Allah! Allah! Mohammed! Mohammed!’ split the air; some cried it out from the Turkish port-holes; others shrieked it forth from the drowning waters, their top-knots floating on their shaven skulls, like black snakes on half-tide rocks. By those top-knots they believed that their Prophet would drag them up to Paradise, but they sank fifty fathoms, my hearties, to the bottom of the bay." (White-Jacket, 75)
- "Still more, these songs are pervaded by a true Mohammedan sensualism..." (White-Jacket, 90)
- "For the Immeasurable’s altitude is not heightened by the arches of Mahomet’s heavens." (Mardi, 1 .75)
- "Their Historians affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy’d of Mahomet, came from this Temple..." (Moby-Dick, 104)
- "...it was one of his own little femininenesses—of the sort sometimes curiously observable in very robust-bodied and big-souled men, as Mohammed, for example—to be very partial to all pleasant essences." (Pierre, 5.3)
- "Mohammed hath his own dispensation." (Pierre, 21.3)
- "And Rabelais’s pro-wine Koran no more trustworthy than Mahomet’s anti-wine one.” (Confidence-Man, 24)
This meetup is part of a series on The Crescent and the Cross.

The Hero as Prophet: Carlyle