On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in HistoryCarlyle, Thomas
Philosophy
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
Carlyle, Thomas
Hero worship; Heroes
Mahomet's Creed we called a kind of Christianity; and really, if we
look at the wild rapt earnestness with which it was believed and laid
to heart, I should say a better kind than that of those miserable Syrian
Sects, with their vain janglings about _Homoiousion_ and _Homoousion_,
the head full of worthless noise, the heart empty and dead! The truth
of it is embedded in portentous error and falsehood; but the truth of
it makes it be believed, not the falsehood: it succeeded by its truth.
A bastard kind of Christianity, but a living kind; with a heart-life in
it; not dead, chopping barren logic merely! Out of all that rubbish
of Arab idolatries, argumentative theologies, traditions, subtleties,
rumors and hypotheses of Greeks and Jews, with their idle wire-drawings,
this wild man of the Desert, with his wild sincere heart, earnest as
death and life, with his great flashing natural eyesight, had seen into
the kernel of the matter. Idolatry is nothing: these Wooden Idols
of yours, "ye rub them with oil and wax, and the flies stick on
them,"--these are wood, I tell you! They can do nothing for you; they
are an impotent blasphemous presence; a horror and abomination, if ye
knew them. God alone is; God alone has power; He made us, He can kill
us and keep us alive: "_Allah akbar_, God is great." Understand that His
will is the best for you; that howsoever sore to flesh and blood, you
will find it the wisest, best: you are bound to take it so; in this
world and in the next, you have no other thing that you can do!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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