Clothes make the God

“Clothes gave us individuality, social polity; clothes have made men of us, they are threatening to make clothes-screens of us.” All our earthly interests are “hooked and buttoned together and held up by clothes . . . . Society is founded upon cloth.”

This is one of the central theses of Thomas Carlyle’s Victorian satire, Sartor Resartus . For Carlyle, clothes are not only the center of social theory, but of ontology. As J. MacMillan Brown explained in his The Sartor Resartus of Carlyle, a Study (104-110), religion itself is a matter of clothing:

“We are . . . , even at our best and most abstract at the mercy of a ‘vesture of decay that doth grossly close us in,’ and close in the spirit of creation. Even the loftiest seer and philosopher must think in concrete forms, in images that belong to time and space; he cannot penetrate the veil which the earth-spirit is weaving.”

Time and space are the limits of our knowledge, and that means we can never see the “Omnipresent and Eternal, the spirit who has no limitations of space or time.” Thus, for Carlyle, “There is no finality in religion, in our idea of God, til we can strip off time and space from our thoughts and modes of thinking.” We need to realize, as Carlyle put it, that “this so solid-seeming world is but an air-image, our Me the only reality; and Nature, with its thousandfold production and destruction, but the reflex of our own inward force, the phantasy of our dream.”

This might appear to be a brief for “Adamitism,” the sixteenth-century notion that the innocence of Adam and Eve continued and should be expressed in nudism. Carlyle is no Adamite, though. He is a “Sansculottist,” as Brown says, “an unbreeched believer in the people.” Carlyle’s anti-Rousseauian maxim was, “Nature is good, but she is not the best.” Clothes hide; clothes provoke shame; clothes mark us from well-adorned animals. But clothes also are expressions of human spirit. Carlyle’s Teufelsdrockh imagines kings and courtiers stripped of all their finery, but he finally endorses the world made of clothes.

In religion, though, nudism is the goal. Teufelsdrockh wants to see naked divinity, and thinks that stripping away the veil is the only true religious impulse. In this, Carlyle expresses a Victorian version of Judaizing, in two ways: First, because he implicitly denies that God has emerged from behind the veil to show His face in the face of Christ; second, because, believing in a still-veiled God, he thinks that stripping back the veil is the only way to find Him. On the contrary: Christian orthodoxy agrees that the clothes make the God, but the clothes that make God are not the veils that hide but the flesh that reveals God’s glory.