Thomas Carlyle's religiously skeptical writing has had difficulty shedding the influence of its nineteenth-century reception. Carlyle's Victorian biographer, James Anthony Froude, claimed that he was a “Calvinist without the Theology” (quoted on ix) and that, as Brent E. Kisner summarizes, he disseminated “fictional religiosity” (436). Friedrich Nietzsche declared him “an English atheist seeking to be honoured for not being so” (quoted on 437). Such memorable reductions have, at times, limited the way modern critics account for the complex and often competing historical, cultural, and theological contexts in which Carlyle's Sartor Resartus condemns outworn orthodoxy or in which his Latter-Day Pamphlets inveighs against the Christian clergy. This special issue of Literature and Belief begins redressing the problems created for modern criticism by this reception.

In the editor's preface, Paul E. Kerry claims that Carlyle “is threatened with marginalization within Victorian studies discourse” (ix). For Kerry and the volume's nineteen other authors, Carlyle's marginal position in the critical “discourse” is, in part, the unintended effect of a more general lack of recent interest in Victorian theology and religious practice. This focused examination of Carlyle's practical and theoretical positions on faith and belief is not simply meant to counter the influence of Froude’s and Nietzsche's readings of his religious skepticism. The critical collection also aims to model and encourage more historically and culturally contextualized explorations of the way Victorian religious belief was the subject of problematically diverse, often paradoxical and anxiously debated, writing. The authors in this volume begin to do that important work, although their ambitions occasionally overreach the bounds of the short critical essay.

Some of the authors critique Froude and Nietzsche for misapprehending Carlyle's personal beliefs. Manuscript evidence does not tell a coherent narrative about his beliefs, and those contradictions come out in the volume. Frances Frame numerically recounts incidences of biblical citation in Carlyle's correspondence (338ff.) to claim that he relied on the Bible to manage “anxious” feelings “about an issue, a relationship or both” (338). Contrarily, Ian Campbell demonstrates how Carlyle's correspondence tracks how his religious studies at the University of Edinburgh led him away from Christian theology to the more “exciting” (16) writings of Scott, Goethe, Schiller, and other philosophers and poets (1–23). The less interesting articles ask what Carlyle “really” believed. The more interesting ones attempt to situate his (ir)religious writing in relation to other contemporary ways of thinking about faith, rationality, science, idealism, and history. The volume reveals how difficult it is to make any totalizing claims about Victorian faith.

Some of the volume's most compelling contributions explore how Carlyle's writings deploy skepticism in relation to other theological and philosophical discourses. Caroline McCracken-Flescher, for example, widely reviews Carlyle's writing to reveal a discourse of “transcendent secularism” that supplements the “overanxious religiosity” of contemporaries like Edward Irving (29). Carlyle's prophetic rhetoric resolves a tension between secular forms of philosophical reasoning and spiritual faith and deploys skepticism to rebuild a more self-critically rationalized, if unorthodox, theology. Ralph Jessop playfully examines Carlyle's “doctrine of undecidability” (382) and demonstrates the role of Enlightenment rationalities in Carlyle's “agnosticism” (381ff.). He juxtaposes Carlyle's skeptical writing to Scottish Enlightenment revisions of Enlightenment rationality and to Hume's writing on miracles to show that Carlyle was not alone in his contestation of orthodox religion. John M. Ulrich extends this point by reading Carlyle's prophetic “Signs of the Times,” in the context of other 1820s “millenialist oratory and publications” (61), including the “annual prophecy conferences” of Henry Drummond, MP (69), parliamentary documents, and periodical writing. Millennialist writing itself was divided about whether to look backward to traditional spiritual practices and texts in assuaging anxiety about modernization or to look forward to a “progressive” mix of “secular” and spiritual forms of faith (64) as the basis for an entirely new type of social organization.

One the strongest essays, by Jude V. Nixon, proposes that Sartor Resartus helped popularize and theorize the applications of “the emerging science of thermodynamics” (166). Nixon illustrates how Victorian theories of energy subtended writing about “progress and change in a world itself fluid, changeable, and progressive” (176). Contesting static orthodoxy was much akin to seeing the dynamism inherent in the natural world: energy, according to the first law tempts to define his supposedly assertive beliefs” (220). Lowell T. Frye similarly reads the “intemperance” of Carlyle's prose in Latter-Day Pamphlets as participating in a “metaphysical and epistemological shift” (199). Frye suggests that “epistemological indeterminacy” (202) and rhetorical incoherence perform a remaking of religious and intellectual systems. James Evans similarly highlights themes of disorder, specifically examining metaphors of intoxication to interpret how Carlyle's ecstatic writing will revise faith and the ordering principles of a religious “society” (331).

One criticism of the volume is that the Nietzsche citation is too spartan: one suspects a straw man here. Nonetheless, these essays paint a picture of a conflicted thinker whose writing offers philosophical problems rather than simple sources of information in its treatment of spirituality and belief. In this sense, the strength of this volume lies in the diversity of its arguments. Rather than flatten the methodological tensions between the essays, the collection leaves them for the reader to adjudicate. For example, while Rodger L. Tarr's piece verges on Christian apology, aggressively demanding that his “dear readers” understand “that Carlyle did care about God, Jesus Christ, and all that” (142), Ruth apRoberts joins Nixon, Jessop, Frye, and others in examining Carlyle's more radically skeptical stances toward Christianity as “merely one myth among others” (110). The authors are often in disagreement: what Kinser calls the “heteroglossia in action” (435) of Carlyle's own writing becomes a constituent feature of the critical text as well.