Historical transcendentalism in the works of Carlyle, Newman, and Browning

Historical transcendentalism--my coinage is intended as an explicit corollary of Thomas Carlyle's well-known "nature supernaturalism"--describes the Victorian resolution of the opposing claims of historical empiricism and religious transcendence. By making history the vehicle of transcendence, certain Victorian writers obviated the attacks which were being made on the traditional sources of revelation, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature; in an age which was beginning to read the Bible historically, these writers responded by reading history biblically.;In The French Revolution (1837) Carlyle makes his history by speaking it, locating transcendence in his own prophetic voice while evoking a spiritual order underlying the chaos of history. In the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) John Henry Newman defends the apparent vagaries of ecclesiastical and personal development by an appeal to the historical process, a process viewed providentially by a writer who is at once a Catholic and a Victorian. In The Ring and the Book (1868-69) Robert Browning finds Biblical patterns in the obscure history of The Old Yellow Book in an attempt to justify the ways of men to God, that is, to sanctify the course of human events.;In the union and history and transcendence, each of these works may be seen as efforts to retain the theological spirit which had been ushered into the century by Coleridge and which was now being dismissed by the positivist Religion of Humanity. By means of its Biblical reading of history, historical transcendentalism was a method perfectly suited to an age which G. M. Young perceptively recognized as "morally conservative and intellectually progressive.".;This Biblical reading of history stresses both the developmental continuity of human events and the disjunctive intercessions of Providence; it not only posits God as the Author of history, it invests the prophetic historian with the divine responsibility to give language and form to what Carlyle called the "inarticulate Bible" of history.