3 - Natural supernaturalism in Thomas Carlyle and Richard Owen

Summary

If Frankenstein articulates the frustrations of an apparent mismatch between body and mind, Sartor Resartus promotes a productive dialectic between these two conflicting ways of encountering the world. Carlyle broadens the terms of the specifically human body/soul dichotomy into a dualism of the entire cosmos, and translates those terms into two ways of viewing the world: the natural and supernatural respectively. For Carlyle, the natural perspective alternately conceals and reveals the supernatural, which in turn continually makes and remakes the natural. Although the natural and supernatural points of view are frequently at odds, they neither cancel one another out nor tie one another up in an endless stalemate. Rather, a dialectical conversation between the two modes of explanation produces an organic, continually developing body which gives shape and tangibility to the inner, living experience of the holy. The tailor is retailored; makers are themselves remade. In comparison to Mary Shelley's vision in Frankenstein, Carlyle's practitioner of sympathy not only tolerates the conflict between inner and outer points of view, but also finds in their interaction the source of transformation and renewed meaning.

This chapter will argue that Thomas Carlyle, in Sartor Resartus, and Richard Owen, in his anatomical writings, both employ two ways of reading one infinite world. Both of them accept – even revel in – disjunctions between prophetic and natural ways of knowing, using those differences to reinvigorate some of the outdated metaphors of natural theology.