One's Own Faith: Melville's Reading of The New Testament and Psalms

One’s Own Faith: Melville’s Reading of The New Testament and Psalms BRIAN YOTHERS University of Texas at El Paso A s Pierre Glendinning wrestles in vain with the task of producing a book that will measure up to the titanic ambitions of his soul, Melville’s persistently intrusive narrator meditates on the meaning of nature for the novelist: Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby combining and selecting as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood. (NN Pierre 343) If we substitute “Scripture” for “Nature” in this formulation, we have a fair understanding of Melville’s approach to his reading of sacred texts. In particular, Melville’s annotations in his copy of The New Testament and Psalms (one of several biblical volumes in his library) reveal neither the submissiveness of the conventional religious reader nor the scorn of his most skeptical characters. Rather, his reading is shaped by sometimes competing, sometimes complementary methods of analyzing, rearranging, interpreting, and questioning the narrative and poetic structures as well as the ethical and dogmatic assertions of the texts he encounters. In this essay, I discuss Melville’s marginalia in his copy of The New Testament and Psalms (New York: American Bible Society, 1844), which, according to his inscription opposite the title page, he received from his Aunt Jean Melville in 1846. Melville’s markings in this volume, some of which have been erased and are recoverable only by means of careful scrutiny, indicate how his personal religious thought is inextricably intertwined with his sense of vocation as a novelist and a poet. To begin with, his reading of Jesus’ parables and character shows a novelist intent upon justifying his craft as a means of communicating the truth through fiction. Second, his markings of the Sermon on the Mount and the epistles reveal Melville’s strong attraction to the most uncompromising ethical doctrines associated with Christianity, reflected throughout Melville’s fiction and poetry. Third, his markings of the Psalms, the Gospel of John, and the Pauline epistles, demonstrate Melville’s C 2008 The Authors
C 2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Journal compilation
LEVIATHAN A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 39 B R I A N Y O T H E R S interest in natural theology and the human capacity for absorption into the divine, revealing the author to be something of a wounded lover of humanity, at times ungodly precisely because of his belief in the godlike capacities of men and women. Finally, Melville’s markings are intensely personal, addressing concerns about his own faith and spirituality. Each of these four strands of annotation affords us new insight into Melville as novelist and man.1 The Craft of Writing and the Stories of Jesus M elville marks the Gospels far more heavily than any other portion of the New Testament. Of the synoptic Gospels, he demonstrates a strong preference for Matthew, which contains the longest renditions of most of the parables and the fullest statement of Jesus’ social ethics as expounded in the Sermon on the Mount. Melville also marks the Gospel of John heavily, with particular attention to the contrast between exclusivist messages of judgment and damnation and inclusivist messages of universal love and human dignity. Given his annotations to Matthew, Melville is concerned with the person of Jesus on two levels. First, he follows the development of Jesus’ character throughout the gospel accounts. The Jesus who emerges through the lens of Melville’s annotation is the heroic outsider who dares to speak the truth and expresses bitterness over the ways in which the truth is frequently betrayed. This Jesus exemplifies the most desirable traits in many of Melville’s characters and a plumb line against which to measure the possibilities of humanity. Second, Melville seems attracted to Jesus as a fellow teller of stories. He scores the parables frequently, and even more frequently focuses on Jesus’ discussion of his method in telling parables. In the earliest passage from Matthew that Melville marks, Jesus’ courage and personality are paralleled to those of his forerunner, John the Baptist. Melville scores the references in Matthew 3.3-4 to John as “a voice crying in the wilderness,” his idiosyncratic manner of dress (camel’s hair and a leathern girdle), and diet (locusts and honey). Melville makes use of the “cunning alphabet” provided by this passage when he describes the relation of “Vivenza” 1 My treatment of the marginalia here is necessarily selective, and constitutes a portion of my work on the introduction and notes to a new edition of Melville’s marginalia in The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ: Translated out of the Original Greek; and . . . The Book of Psalms, Translated out of the Original Hebrew (New York: American Bible Society, 1844) to appear at Melville’s Marginalia Online, ed. Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon, http://www.boisestate.edu/melville/. In what follows, I have made use of Walker Cowen’s “Melville’s Marginalia” (Diss. Harvard University, 1965), Mark Heidmann’s revisions to Cowen’s transcription (in “The Markings in Melville’s Bibles,” Studies in the American Renaissance 1990, 342), and my own consultation of the volume, ∗ AC85.M4977.Zz844b, by permission of Houghton Library. 40 LEVIATHAN O N E ’ S O W N F A I T H (a thinly disguised allegorical portrait of the United States) to the rest of the world in Mardi: Or Vivenza might be likened to St. John, feeding on locusts and wild honey, and with a prophetic voice crying to the nations from the wilderness. Or, child-like, standing among the old robed kings and emperors of the archipelago, Vivenza seemed a young Messiah, to whose discourse the bearded Rabbis bowed. (NN Mardi 472) Notably, Melville in Mardi connects the imagery of America as John the Baptist in the first sentence to imagery of America as the young Jesus instructing his elders in the temple of Jerusalem (a passage not marked in Melville’s New Testament) in the second. This connection is reflected in Melville’s markings of the narrative of Jesus’ life, particularly through his concern with Jesus’ personal authority, and the contrast between this personal authority and the institutional authority of the scribes with whom he argued. Melville’s copy of The New Testament and Psalms offers additional confirmation of Melville’s concern with Jesus’ character and authority in the form of a note he inscribed on the volume’s front pastedown. There Melville has copied a lengthy passage identified by James Duban as being from Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, in which the Christlike individualist is said to be one who “stands firm to his point” and “goes on his way inflexibly,” daring “to equal himself with God; nay, to declare that he himself is God”: “In this manner is he wont from youth upwards to astound his familiar friends; of these he gains a part to his own cause; irritates the rest against him; and shows to all men, who are aiming at a certain elevation in doctrine and life, what they have to look for from the world” (italics signify Melville’s underlining).2 The excerpt is ambiguous in its relation to the orthodox Christian doctrine of the incarnation, but it clearly indicates that Jesus is a model to be followed by “the nobler portion of mankind” (Duban 7). In underlining the passages on firm inflexibility, Melville seems concerned with the degree to which Jesus was a non-conformist, like Melville’s most interesting characters, including those who possess religious faith, those who reject it, and those who remain uncertain. The lines “he stands firm to his point; he goes on his way inflexibly” could be applied to a devout character such as Father Mapple, but they could also be applied to a dæmonic character such as Ahab. Figures who are not associated entirely either with faith or with blasphemous rebellion also partake of this trait: Bartleby, Billy Budd, and characters such as Celio and Ungar, in Clarel. 2 James Duban, “‘Visible Objects of Reverence’: Quotations from Goethe in Melville’s Annotated New Testament,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 9.2 (June 2007): 1-23. A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES 41 B R I A N Y O T H E R S Melville’s interest in Jesus’ capacity to “astound” appears as well in his response to Matthew 7.28-29, where the people are “astonished” by the fact that Jesus taught “as one having authority, and not as one of the scribes.” Melville marked this passage with an “x” and wrote annotations in both the top and bottom margins. That someone might have considered these annotations to be blasphemous or scandalous is suggested by the fact that the top and bottom margins to this page have been clipped out. Throughout the gospels, Melville continued to mark passages that relate to the sense of authority that Jesus projected through his teaching and the contrast between Jesus’ teaching and that of his more established contemporaries. In addition to Jesus’ authority, Melville’s markings reveal a strong interest in Jesus’ humanity. Particularly in the Gospel of Matthew, Melville marks passages that seem to show Jesus behaving in odd or idiosyncratic ways. For example, Melville makes a point of scoring the moment in Matthew 21.18– 19 when Jesus curses a fig tree because it does not have any fruit. Cursing a fig tree might be seen as a petulant act for the kind of “true Philosopher” described in the pastedown inscription. Nevertheless, Melville seems taken with this divinely inflexible Jesus, a figure with the capacity to surprise and disturb, indeed “astonish,” his readers. This interest in Jesus’ personality becomes more pronounced in Melville’s marginalia for the events leading up to the crucifixion. In Matthew 26.45, Melville underscores the moment when Jesus says to his disciples “Sleep on now, and take your rest,” and writes at the top of the page, “This is ironical.” Melville’s interest in Jesus’ use of irony in this passage is significant. A consummate ironist himself, Melville in this instance seems to identify strongly with the sarcastic tone with which Jesus expresses his disappointment in his disciples. The annotation helps to clarify what sort of “pure Exemplar” (NN Clarel 4.34.21) Melville regards Jesus as being. Melville’s Jesus is susceptible of imitation precisely because of his readily evident humanity—his divine inflexibility is wedded to an emotional life that includes loss and frustration, and in giving this interior life expression, he manipulates verbal tropes expertly. Given his crafting of double meanings, and admiration for Hawthorne’s ability to “deceive, egregiously deceive, the superficial skimmer of pages” (NN Piazza Tales 251), it is not surprising that Melville was attracted to Jesus’ parables in Matthew 13.10-11. For instance, he scored Jesus’ answer to the question “Why speakest thou to them only in parables?” placing an “x” and two curved lines in the margin next to the response: “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.” Just as only some of Jesus’ listeners can know “the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven,” Melville’s writing requires an “eagle-eyed reader.” 42 LEVIATHAN O N E ’ S O W N F A I T H Later in the same chapter (Matt. 13.34-5), Melville also scored a passage that discusses the nature of the parables: All these things spake Jesus unto the multitudes in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them: That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world. Taken together, the two passages from Matthew 13 identify a parable as a story that conceals as much as it clarifies. The parables here are both hyperbolically revelatory (extending even to the “things which have been kept hidden from the foundation of the world”) and deliberately obscure (it is only to the disciples that it is “given” to know “the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.”). The image of Jesus that Melville’s markings point to is that of a storyteller who deliberately bewilders much of his audience. Imitatio Christi may seem like an unlikely dictum for Melville’s often challenging strategies for bewildering and estranging his own audience, but Melville’s markings in the Gospel of Matthew suggest that he regards Jesus’ use of parables as a model for his own complex and sometimes off-putting narrative strategies. One of Melville’s markings in the Gospel of John exemplifies this emphasis particularly well. In John 10.24, Jesus’ interlocutors ask, “How long dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly.” Melville has underlined the first sentence once and the second sentence twice, and scored the entire passage in the side margin. An annotation below has been thoroughly erased. The cadence of the first part of this verse is reminiscent of the line “Wherefore ripen us to pain?” from the epilogue to Clarel and the line “How long dost thou make us to doubt?” is quoted almost directly (“How long wilt make us still to doubt?”) in Clarel 1.13.74. The second part of the verse can be read in relation to Melville’s own religious doubts and uncertainties, or as the irritable cry of an audience tired of ambiguity, with Melville like Jesus as an author refusing to be unambiguously plain. The epistemological uncertainty that forms such an important part of Melville’s work, both thematically and in terms of his authorial strategies, is thus closely correlated to Melville’s reading of the Gospels. Melville’s interest in Jesus’ rhetorical strategies and in the uncertainty of the parables extends to the scenes in which Jesus answers questions posed by his disciples. In John 9.2, the disciples ask whether a man’s blindness is the result of his own sin or that of his parents. Melville’s marginal comment is that “This leading question seems evaded in the following verses” (See Fig. 1). In those verses, Jesus’ response is to cure the blind man, a miracle, but an A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES 43 B R I A N Y O T H E R S Fig. 1. Page 171 of Melville’s copy of The New Testament and Psalms (New York: American Bible Society, 1844) displaying his annotation to John 9.2: “This leading question seems evaded in the following verses.” ∗ AC85.M4977.Zz844b, by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University. 44 LEVIATHAN O N E ’ S O W N F A I T H evasion of the disciples’ question that leaves room for doubt and interpretation. Because he is attracted to the writers of the Gospel and to Jesus himself as masters of narrative, Melville reads the New Testament and Psalms as a novelist as well as a religious seeker. However, his focus on Jesus also reveals his interest in the ethical precepts that Jesus taught. The Scales of the New Testament: Ethics and Radical Christianity S cholars have rightly acknowledged Melville’s resistance to religious orthodoxy.3 This acknowledgment, however, can at times obscure how deeply engaged Melville was by the ethical precepts of Christianity. This engagement is evident in Melville’s extensive markings of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and of the ethically directed moments in the epistles. Melville marks the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) at regular intervals, focusing on divorce, wealth, and poverty, and what Melville calls in Pierre the “gratuitous return of good for evil” (NN Pierre 215). Melville’s use of marginalia is heaviest in Matthew 5, where he marks verse 22, which equates anger with murder; verses 27-28, which equate lust with adultery; verse 32, which equates divorce with adultery; verses 33-7, which condemn the swearing of oaths and command listeners to “let your communication be Yea, Yea; Nay, Nay”; verses 38-9, which reject the older saying “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” in favor of the command to “turn the other cheek” (See Fig. 2); verses 40-2, which call for generous giving; and finally verse 44, which concludes “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.” The degree to which Melville incorporated the Sermon on the Mount into his writing is striking. In Typee, Melville refers to a missionary woman who was “insufficiently evangelized” to return good for evil after being humiliated by Marquesan islanders (NN Typee 7). In Mardi, Babbalanja interrogates the devout follower of Alma (Jesus in the Mardian archipelago), who converses with Taji’s band of travelers about the congruence of his community’s beliefs and their lives: 3 For discussions of Melville’s religious thought, see James Duban, Melville’s Major Fiction: Politics, Theology and Imagination (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983); Lawrance Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel with God (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); William Braswell, Melville’s Religious Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1943); Joseph Knapp, Tortured Synthesis: The Meaning of Herman Melville’s Clarel (New York: Philosophical Library, 1971); Ronald Mason, The Spirit Above the Dust (Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1951); Vincent Kenny, Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Spiritual Autobiography (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973); Stan Goldman, Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in Clarel (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993); and William Potter, Melville’s Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005). A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES 45 B R I A N Y O T H E R S Fig. 2. Page 9 of Melville’s copy of The New Testament and Psalms (New York: American Bible Society, 1844) displaying his markings to verses in Chapter 5 of the Book of Matthew. ∗ AC85.M4977.Zz844b, by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University. 46 LEVIATHAN O N E ’ S O W N F A I T H “Tell me not of your endeavors, but of your lives. What hope for the fatherless among you?” “Adopted as a son.” “Of the one poor, and naked?” “Clothed, and he wants for naught.” “If ungrateful, he smite you?” “Still we feed and clothe him.” (NN Mardi 626) Babbalanja gives priority to ethics over dogma with his opening question, and he presses the follower of Alma to demonstrate his faith by means of actions that correspond to Jesus’ specific commands in Matthew 5. The description of community life in Serenia also parallels Acts 2.44-5, which Melville scored; it states, “And all that believed were together, and all had things in common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” Melville places the Sermon on the Mount at the center of Christian belief in White-Jacket, this time in the service of an explicitly pacifist argument: Say on, say on; but know you this, and lay it to heart, you war-voting Bench of Bishops, that He on whom we believe himself has enjoined us to turn the left cheek if the right be smitten. Never mind what follows. That passage you cannot expunge from the Bible; that passage is as binding upon us as any other; that passage embodies the soul and substance of the Christian faith; without it, Christianity were like any other faith. And that passage will yet, by the blessing of God, turn the world. But in some things we must become Quakers first. (NN White-Jacket 320) Here, as in Mardi and the humorous aside in Typee, human beings become “evangelized” insofar as they are prepared to return good for evil. Similarly, when Ishmael refers to “the scales of the New Testament” in the opening chapter of Moby-Dick, he alludes to the strict measurement of virtue that Jesus has provided in Matthew 5, and when he chooses to worship Queequeg’s idol Yojo, Ishmael’s humorous moral reasoning draws directly from the very ethical commands that Melville marks so heavily in the Gospel of Matthew. Moby-Dick is threaded with oblique references to the Sermon on the Mount, often in relation to Quaker pacifism. In Chapter 81 of Moby-Dick, “The Pequod Meets the Virgin,” Ishmael notes ruefully that the aged whale that Flask sadistically kills “must die the death and be murdered, to light the gay bridals and merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES 47 B R I A N Y O T H E R S churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all” (NN MobyDick 357). Since the Pequod is Quaker-owned and funded, with Bildad appearing as a pious Quaker and Peleg and Ahab sharing a Quaker upbringing, the “solemn churches” that preach “unconditional inoffensiveness” may reasonably be identified with the historic peace churches, such as the Quakers and Mennonites, who reject violence on the grounds of Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount. Churches that embrace just war theory, for example, may embrace inoffensiveness on most occasions, but they cannot be said to embrace “unconditional inoffensiveness.” In this passage, Melville suggests that “unconditional inoffensiveness” is essential to uncompromising Christian piety even to the extent of suggesting the hypocrisy of any church that requires lighting to achieve such a benign state. Melville’s interest in pacifism extended beyond the Quakers to the Dunkers, a small Pennsylvania German denomination that eschewed warfare, lawsuits, and the swearing of oaths. For instance, in Israel Potter, Melville has Israel declare, “Poor Richard ain’t a Dunker, that’s certain,” in his critique of Benjamin Franklin’s worldly wisdom (NN Israel Potter 54). Melville’s awareness of the Dunkers may be evident in his marginal scoring of John 13.14-16 in which Jesus commands the disciples to wash each other’s feet: foot-washing at every communion is a central element of Dunker and Mennonite practice.4 Melville puts a meditation on the Catholic practice of washing feet on Holy Thursday into Ahab’s address to the crew in “The Quarter-Deck,” which indicates the range of Melville’s awareness of the practice (NN Moby-Dick 166). The most extensive meditation on the code of ethics expounded in the Sermon on the Mount appears in Pierre. Melville continues to represent the Sermon on the Mount as a touchstone of moral wisdom, but he also includes an extensive critique of its applicability to contemporary life in the form of Plotinus Plinlimmon’s pamphlet and the material prefatory to Pierre’s reading of it. Melville’s narrator begins by reflecting on a troubling contradiction: that the putatively Christian nations of Europe and America are the “most Mammonish” parts of the world. To comprehend this, he turns directly to the Sermon on the Mount, calling it “the greatest real miracle of all religions” (NN Pierre 207-8). The narrator argues that the sublimity of the Sermon makes the entire world seem false by comparison. Plinlimmon’s pamphlet, then, seeks to comprehend the relationship of the Sermon to the everyday world, and to discover whether one or the other must be a lie. Plinlimmon argues that 4 See John L. Ruth, The Earth is the Lord’s: A Narrative History of the Lancaster Mennonite Conference (Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 2001) and Carl Bowman, Brethren Society: The Cultural Transformation of a Peculiar People (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) for discussions of Mennonite and Dunker religious practices, respectively. 48 LEVIATHAN O N E ’ S O W N F A I T H the Sermon on the Mount can be true in a heavenly sense, while a “virtuous expediency” is the best code of ethics available for the modern world, and he suggests that the history of bloodshed within Christianity demonstrates that “the chronometrical gratuitous return of good for evil” cannot be considered to be true in the context of the modern world.5 Plinlimmon’s skepticism about the possibility (or even advisability) of living according to the standards of the Sermon on the Mount is dramatized in the closing scenes of Pierre, when Pierre confronts his cousin Glen and chooses vengeance over the “gratuitous return of good for evil.” When Glen strikes “Pierre across the cheek,” leaving a “half-livid and half-bloody brand,” Pierre not only fails to turn the other cheek; he also fails by a wide margin to conform even to the older standard of “an eye for an eye,” taking disproportionate vengeance by murdering Glen (NN Pierre 359). Pierre falls short of the standards of “virtuous expediency” even though he is presented as a more admirable character than a figure like Reverend Falsgrave, who simply excuses himself from adhering to the demands of the Sermon on the Mount. “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and The Confidence-Man also engage the ethical precepts of the New Testament that Melville marked, and both indicate Melville’s pessimism about the possibility of applying the law of love to the nineteenth century. The narrator of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” recognizes that, according to the Gospel of Matthew, his obligation to look after Bartleby is as absolute as it is impractical, given the standards of Wall Street. Much of the pathos of the story is derived from the narrator’s inability to synthesize the values of commercial society with the demands of the Sermon on the Mount. The Confidence-Man begins with an invocation of 1 Corinthians 13, which articulates Paul’s definition of Christian love, and asserts the primacy of love over faith and hope. Melville marked the summary at the beginning of this chapter with three crossed checks. In a reference to this passage, the mute stranger in The Confidence-Man holds up placards bearing quotations from 1 Corinthians 13: “Charity thinketh no evil,” “Charity suffereth long and is kind,” “Charity endureth all things,” “Charity believeth all things,” and “Charity never faileth”—all of which point to the contrast between Pauline ideals and life on the Fidèle (NN CM 4-5). Melville’s concern for ethics appears as well in two marked passages in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and the Epistle of James. Both Paul and James use the example of Abraham to consider the relationship between faith and 5 See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 28-30, for an influential discussion of Plinlimmon’s pamphlet. A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES 49 B R I A N Y O T H E R S works. James 2.14, which asks whether faith without works can save you (and strongly implies that the answer is “no”), is check-marked and scored in the side margin. James 2.18, which concludes with “shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will show you my faith by my works,” is similarly checked and scored. There is no indication here that Melville is expressing anything other than his interest in the logic of the argument. But Romans 4 is a different matter. Melville marked verse five—which argues that someone who “worketh not but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness”—with a double score in the side margin. He marked with an “x” verse six, which describes the “blessedness of the man unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works,” adding a comment at the bottom of the page that has been erased. The evidence here suggests that Melville prefers James’s emphasis on works to Paul’s emphasis on faith.6 The apparent prioritizing of works over faith would put Melville on the Catholic side of the sixteenth-century Reformation controversies—the Council of Trent’s formulation was “faith working in love” as opposed to Martin Luther’s “faith alone”— and on the Arminian and Unitarian side of the nineteenth-century arguments over the same issue of justification.7 This preference becomes particularly relevant to any reading of Clarel, a poem that expresses considerable sympathy for Catholic doctrine through the figures of the Dominican monk and Ungar.8 Melville’s marking of the New Testament highlights the ethical precepts woven throughout Melville’s fiction and poetry, which evince a series of nuanced thought experiments that explore whether these precepts can be consistently applied in life. Early works mixed admiration and pessimism with regard to Christian ethics, but his pessimism increasingly shapes the tone of his later works. Melville resists concluding that the most rigorous ethical teachings in the New Testament are obligatory for nineteenth-century individuals, but he also resists classifying anything that falls short of adherence to these teachings as a true or meaningful form of Christianity. This resistance resonates with both the “counsels of perfection” associated with Roman Catholic and Eastern 6 For a searching analysis of Melville’s use of Pauline theology and tropes in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” see Jonathan A. Cook’s essay in this issue of Leviathan. 7 See Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (3rd ed., New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) for a thorough discussion of the relation of faith and works in the doctrine of justification since the Reformation. 8 For further discussions of Catholicism in Clarel, see Walter Bezanson, “Historical and Critical Note,” in NN Clarel 549-50. See also William Ellery Sedgwick, Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1944); Joseph Knapp; and William Braswell. 50 LEVIATHAN O N E ’ S O W N F A I T H Orthodox monasticism and with the strand of perfectionism within Protestantism associated with the Radical Reformation.9 “Humanity, Thou Strong Thing”: The Incarnation and Humanism M elville’s fascination with Jesus’ personality and ethics can best be understood in light of how he relates Jesus to the rest of humanity. Two passages from Melville’s work are especially pertinent here. In “The Chola Widow” (Sketch 8 of The Encantadas), Melville relates the story of the abandoned Hunilla, whose suffering and faith rise to Christ-like proportions. At the climax of Hunilla’s story, Melville’s narrator exclaims, “Humanity, thou strong thing, I worship thee, not in the laurelled victor, but in this defeated one” (NN Piazza Tales 157). Here, the Gospel trope of redemptive suffering applies to all of humanity, but most specifically to the “defeated.” This extension of Christlikeness is repeated in Clarel. Ungar, a Catholic exConfederate soldier of Cherokee descent, argues that because present sufferers (with their “Calvary faces”) lack the “balm” of the foreknowledge of ultimate victory afforded to Jesus, their suffering may be more severe than his. Melville’s narrator reinforces this connection between Jesus’ sufferings and the suffering of humanity in the penultimate canto of Clarel when he refers to the Christians, Jews, and Muslims who are making their way through Jerusalem as “crossbearers all” (NN Clarel 4.34.44). An identification with Christ’s glory and pain becomes, then, the common fate of humanity, not the exclusive preserve of any one religious tradition. Melville’s New Testament marginalia reflect this reverence for humanity in two ways. First, Melville registers suspicion, even anger for Christian or Jewish exclusivism.10 Second, he marked several passages that emphasize the dignity of humanity and suggest that salvation may be open to those outside the Christian community. Perhaps the strongest expression of Melville’s repugnance toward exclusivism appears at the end of the book of Revelation. While Melville’s markings of the earlier portions of Revelation indicate neither agreement nor skepticism, and may simply note imagery, his treatment of the last verse of the New Testament is a different matter entirely. The verse states that anyone who 9 For a detailed discussion of “evangelical perfection” across Christian denominations, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture (Since 1700), vol. 5, The Christian Tradition; A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 146-62. 10 In contemporary religious studies, exclusivism refers to the belief that all religions other than Christianity are false and possibly demonic. Inclusivism refers to the belief that other religions share in divine revelation and that non-Christians may also be among the elect. A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES 51 B R I A N Y O T H E R S “shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life” (Rev. 22.19). Melville has crossed out the entire verse, and his annotation at the bottom of the page has been cut from the page. Melville’s reaction to this passage was clearly intense and perhaps fiercely negative. Why, we must ask, did this final scripture elicit such a powerful response? In it, salvation seems to depend on an individual’s adherence to Christian dogma. Melville’s putatively angry response to the verse can be correlated to his preference for ethics over dogma in his markings of James and Romans, and to his desire to find a message of hope in the Bible for those who were not explicitly members of the Christian faith. Such moments appear in Melville’s markings of the predestinarian passages in Romans 8-10, all of which lead to annotations that have been erased. The converse of Melville’s mix of anger and resentment in regard to dogmatic exclusivism is his attraction to passages that exalt the moral and intellectual capacities of human beings. However much we may assume a tendency in Melville toward misanthropy, his profound reverence for human beings and his inclusivism are evident in his markings in the New Testament and Psalms. Melville marked Psalm 8.3-5, a passage that eloquently considers the splendor of the universe and exults in the prominent position that God has given to human beings, identifying the position of humans as “a little lower than the angels.” He also marked with three crossed checks the summary at the beginning of the chapter, which reads, “God’s glory is magnified by his works, and by his love to man.” Perhaps even more significantly for an understanding of Melville’s humanism, he also marked Psalm 19.1-5 with a single line in the side margin. The verses read: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shewest his handy work. Day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.11 This passage asserts that the divine is manifest in the natural world, and implies that nature transcends language and culture. 11 Melville’s description of the newly bathed sailors in the “Stowing Down and Clearing Up” chapter of Moby-Dick appears to echo the imagery of “a bridegroom coming out of his chamber” (NN Moby-Dick 428). 52 LEVIATHAN O N E ’ S O W N F A I T H These markings in the Psalms are paralleled by other markings in the New Testament section of Melville’s annotated volume. Melville marked with a check Matthew 12.42, which compares the “queen of the south” favorably with the “present generation.” The queen of the south, also known as the Queen of Sheba (1 Kings 10.1-13), was not a member of the Israelite nation, but her earnest seeking after King Solomon because of his reputation for wisdom is honored by Jesus in this passage. The idea that nature, reason, and the earnest pursuit of truth can lead to valid knowledge about the divine is also expressed in Romans 1.19-20, which Melville scores: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” In the Gospel of John, the source of many of the most exclusivist passages that Melville scores, and at times argues with, Melville marks John 12.47, which reads, “And if any man hear my words and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.” By contrast, Melville scores Jesus’ forthrightly exclusivist declaration “Salvation is of the Jews” in John 3.22 as “a partisan hope.” Markings such as this one and those that accompany passages in which Jesus argues with the scribes and Pharisees have been read by Cowen and Heidmann as representing an anti-Judaic strand in Melville’s markings. However, a broader view is that Melville was drawn to inclusivist theology whether Christian or Jewish, and was skeptical about exclusivist theology regardless of the source. In the vein of inclusivist, natural theology, Melville seems to have been strongly drawn to New Testament passages that connected the preaching of the apostles to pre- or non-Christian philosophers. He underlined and marked with an “x” Paul’s reference in Acts 17.28 to “your own poets” and in a note at the bottom identified Aratus as the poet to whom Paul is referring. Melville also identified the “prophet of their own” as Epiminedes, who is quoted in Titus 1.12 as saying that “Cretians [sic] are all liars.” Nathalia Wright and Mark Heidmann have both confirmed that the identities of these two figures were widely available in nineteenth-century biblical commentaries.12 What seems compelling, however, is that Melville bothered to track these references down. In light of both his markings in the Bible and his favorable descriptions of South Seas islanders in Typee, Omoo, and Moby-Dick, Melville’s interest in the presence of classical philosophers and poets in the New Testament can serve as yet another instance of his impulse towards inclusivism. Melville’s inscription on the rear pastedown of his copy of the New Testament and Psalms illuminates this strand of his marginalia. The back inscription is linked to John 10.34-6, which deals with the divinity of man, 12 See Heidmann 348; Wright 13. A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES 53 B R I A N Y O T H E R S and bears in the margin Melville’s cross-reference: “See the flyleaf at the end.” On the flyleaf, the inscription in ink reads Who well considers the Christian religion, would think that God meant to keep it in the dark from our understandings, and make it turn upon the motions of our hearts. St. Everemont [sic] Given the content of John 10.34-6, which refers to human beings as “gods,” however, it seems likely that Melville intended to point primarily to the quotation on the rear pastedown which deals with “similarity to divinity” rather than to the shorter flyleaf quotation. The pastedown quotation, which James Duban has identified the as a passage from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, is worth quoting at length: If we conceive it possible, that the creator of the world himself assumed the form of his creature, and lived in that manner for a time upon the earth, this creature must seem to us of infinite perfection, because susceptible of such a combination with his maker. Hence in our idea of man there can be no inconsistency with our idea of God: and if we often feel a certain disagreement with Him & remoteness from Him, it is but the more on that account our duty, not like advocates of the wicked Spirit, to keep our eyes constantly on the nakedness and wickedness of our nature: but rather to seek out every property & beauty, by which our pretension to similarity with the Divinity may be made good. This quotation makes the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of Christ the grounds for the godlikeness of humanity. It prefigures the more stirring moments in nineteenth-century Unitarian sermons such as William Ellery Channing’s “Likeness to God,” where Channing argues that the foremost duty of human beings is to recognize and develop the glimmerings of divinity within their own souls, and it parallels Ralph Waldo Emerson’s claim in “The Divinity School Address” that Jesus’ greatness consists in his status as a representative of human possibility. The fact that Melville bothered to include this inscription in ink at the end of his copy of the New Testament and Psalms indicates that he found the ideas expressed in it appealing. Any conclusions about Melville’s agreement with the passage must, however, be tempered by the fact that he wrote an annotation at the bottom of the rear pastedown that has since been erased so vigorously that no words or even individual letters have been recovered. Both the Melville who was sufficiently attracted to this passage to reproduce it in ink and the Melville who added an annotation that was 54 LEVIATHAN O N E ’ S O W N F A I T H sufficiently scandalous that a conscientious family member eradicated it are present in Melville’s novels. Mardi, for instance, is replete with ideas analogous to those expressed in the passage from Goethe. Melville might be said to parallel Goethe’s arguments with the old man from Serenia, who expounds his faith in Jesus-like Alma: All that is vital in the Master’s faith, lived here in Mardi, and in humble dells was practiced, long previous to the Master’s coming. But never before was virtue so lifted up among us, that all might see; never before did rays from heaven descend to glorify it. But are Truth, Justice, and Love the revelations of Alma alone? Were they never heard of till he came? Oh! Alma but opens unto us our own hearts. Were his precepts strange, we would recoil—not one feeling would respond; whereas, once hearkened to, our souls embrace them as with the instinctive tendrils of a vine. (NN Mardi 626) The compatibility of the old man’s words with the passages from St. Everemond and Goethe and the marked passage of John 10.34-6 is evident. The old man sees the greatness of Alma in his ability to dramatize the strains of goodness already present in the human heart. In John 10.34-6, Jesus argues that he cannot be accused of blasphemy for referring to himself as the Son of God because those “unto whom the word of God came” are referred to as gods in the law. John 10.34-6 thus downplays the absolute distinction between Jesus and other men of good will that is built up at many other places in the Gospel of John, and with which Melville’s marginalia often seem to argue. For example, earlier in the same chapter [John 10.8], Jesus says “All who came before me are thieves and robbers.” Melville underlined the word “All,” and wrote a comment at the bottom of the page that has been thoroughly erased, perhaps indicating that he took exception to the verse in a way that a family member might have regarded as impious. The juxtaposition of Melville’s seemingly negative response to John 10.8 and his seemingly approving response to John 10.34-6 is helpful in understanding Melville’s view of Jesus. Melville was attracted, as the front pastedown quotation from Goethe indicates, by Jesus’ divine inflexibility and godlikeness, but he also was drawn to the humanist position of seeing Jesus as one who opens the human heart to its own possibilities as exemplified in the quotation on the rear flyleaf. Even so, and perhaps tellingly in light of the erased annotation at the bottom of the passage from Goethe, we know that the travelers in Mardi ultimately do not remain with the followers of Alma. Moreover, we cannot ignore the serious strain of pessimism in Melville’s later work: from Plinlimmon’s pamphlet to Claggart A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES 55 B R I A N Y O T H E R S in Billy Budd, Melville stresses the malignity of human nature alongside its more divine propensities. If Jesus’ example reflects something of the grandeur of human moral possibilities, Melville is nonetheless unable to omit what in “Hawthorne and his Mosses” he calls, “something, somehow like original sin” (NN Piazza Tales 243). This tendency, which is at least partially antithetical to Melville’s tendency to highlight the divinity of humanity, appears in Melville’s frequent markings of Psalms that deplore the treachery and cruelty of the psalmist’s enemies. The fact that Melville’s reverence for human possibility coexists with a lively sense of the human capacity for cruelty and exploitation helps to explain why he so often, as in the case of Hunilla and the multireligious “cross-bearers” in Jerusalem, uses the suffering of the innocent to bridge the gap between humanity and divinity. The ambivalence towards America that surfaces so frequently in Melville’s work is also closely related to the ambivalence about human nature that is reflected in the marginalia. For Melville, reverence for the godlike possibilities of humanity and American nationalism were closely related in the early portions of his career. In his later, more pessimistic moments, his critique of American hypocrisy easily slides into a sense of disillusionment with humanity as a whole. Melville draws heavily on New Testament tropes for redeemed humanity in his pæans to America in Mardi, White-Jacket, Redburn, and Moby-Dick. In Mardi, as noted above, Melville makes “Vivenza” both John the Baptist and the potential Messiah among the nations of the novel’s imaginary archipelago. In White-Jacket, Melville continues this Messianic imagery with a frequently quoted rhetorical flourish: Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings. And let us always remember that with ourselves, almost for the first time in the history of earth, national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we cannot do good to America but we give alms to the world. (NN White-Jacket 151) This faith in America as exemplar of the best possibilities within humanity is echoed as well in Redburn, when Melville refers directly to Acts 2.5, which he had marked with a single line in the side margin in his New Testament. The verse reads, “And there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven,” and the context is the descent of the Holy Spirit and the granting of the gift of tongues to the apostles. Melville applies this moment to the future of America in Redburn: 56 LEVIATHAN O N E ’ S O W N F A I T H Then shall the curse of Babel be revoked, a new Pentecost come, and the language they speak shall be the language of Britain. Frenchmen, and Danes, and Scots; and the dwellers on the shore of the Mediterranean and regions round about; Italians and Indians and Moors; there shall appear to them cloven tongues as of fire. (NN Redburn 169) These passages, in concert with Ishmael’s invocation of the “great democratic God” in Moby-Dick, indicate that in his early years Melville saw democracy in general and America in particular as an embodiment of the sort of human possibility that he found in the New Testament and Psalms (NN Moby-Dick 117). That he revised this view later in his career can be seen in Ungar’s pessimistic meditation on America in Clarel: “To Terminus build fanes / No new world to mankind remains” (NN Clarel 4.22.157). Melville’s marginalia to Romans 13 may be of help in understanding his more restrained response to human possibilities later in his career. Here, Paul exhorts the Romans to be obedient even to unjust state authority, emphasizing in verse 4 (a passage Melville scored with an “x” in the margin) that the magistrate is “the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” Yet, again, though Melville’s annotation at the bottom of the page has been erased, some of the marks that remain suggest a resistant reading. I read the annotation as follows: “If [undeciphered] the true faith [line break] Christ [undeciphered].”13 Although it is impossible to be certain of Melville’s meaning here, what is recoverable might suggest that Melville was setting up an opposition between Paul’s scripture and Christ’s teachings; thus, we may argue, Melville was questioning the passage. Melville’s poetry, however, gives us reason to suspect that his view of Paul’s understanding of authority changed over the course of his life. In one of Melville’s more sardonic Civil War poems, “The House-top,” Melville revisits the question of authority and seems to approve, however ambivalently, of the policy modeled on “wise Draco” that subdues the mobs of rioters who have committed atrocities on the streets of New York. He concludes by acknowledging the “grimy slur on the Republic’s faith implied/ Which holds that man is naturally good, / And—more—is nature’s Roman, never to be scourged” (25–7).14 In Clarel, Melville also seems to move closer to agreement with the text of Romans 13: Ungar’s argument in defense of the Catholic Church is based in no small part on the need for civil order, and Melville’s final work, Billy Budd, probes the relationship between wisdom 13 Cowen and Heidmann both read the first word as “it,” but recently recovered words in the erasure convince me that “if” is the more likely reading. 14 Robert Penn Warren, Selected Poems of Herman Melville (New York: Random House, 1967), 127. A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES 57 B R I A N Y O T H E R S and authority relentlessly. The reverence for human possibility implied by the quotation from Goethe and many of Melville’s markings in the New Testament is set against a stark acknowledgment of the actual failings of human beings. “The only kind of Faith—one’s own” I n reading Romans 14.22, Melville paused to underline this sentence: “Hast thou faith? Have it to thyself before God.” And in the top margin, he inscribed an elliptical response: “The only kind of Faith—one’s own.” This and other marginalia in the New Testament and Psalms constitute a compelling chapter in Melville’s spiritual autobiography and contribute greatly to our understanding of his own kind of faith and how it related to his personal life. Perhaps the most poignant markings are those of passages that deal with loss and comfort. Melville marks the psalmists’ pleas for comfort, Jesus’ promise of a comforter to be sent after his ascension, and the promise that in the New Jerusalem every tear will be wiped away. Heavily marking Matthew 23.37-8 and Luke 13.34-5, Melville acknowledges the moments at which Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, “which killest the prophets,” and expresses longing to gather “thy children together as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings.” Melville’s close attention to these verses, which expose an eagerness to do away with prophets, is characteristic of his pessimism about the possibility of communicating truth to the wider public. The powerful personal allusiveness of these annotations compels us to ponder what Melville’s response to the New Testament and Psalms suggests about the contours of his own religious thought. Let me offer some tentative conclusions. First, readings of Melville’s religious thought that portray him as either an unambivalent skeptic or as an ultimately reconciled believer seem incomplete in light of the complexity of his marginal responses to scripture. A careful reading of Melville’s marginalia to the New Testament and Psalms suggests that Ishmael’s famous description of the interdependency of faith and doubt as consisting of “doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly” might indeed be of profound autobiographical significance for Melville (NN Moby-Dick 374).15 Second, we cannot draw the line where Melville the individual wrestler with faith and doubt ends and Melville the artist begins. Melville’s reading of the Bible is integrated thoroughly with his fiction and poetry, and his marginalia reflect the same oscillation between reverence and blasphemy and hope and despair. Third, Melville’s markings in the New Testament reflect the same careful attention to religious and cultural 15 Melville’s markings in his New Testament correlate well with Stan Goldman’s argument in Melville’s Protest Theism that Melville’s approach to matters of religious belief is marked by both reverence and protest. 58 LEVIATHAN O N E ’ S O W N F A I T H difference that plays such a vital role in his writing. Melville marks numerous passages that serve as flash points of controversy between Catholicism and Protestantism, Calvinism and Arminianism, magisterial Protestantism and Anabaptism, and Unitarianism and Evangelicalism. Ultimately, Melville’s marking of these passages seems to point not to a definitive choice of one of these theological and philosophical options, but rather to Melville’s ability to manipulate contradictory understandings of Christianity as part of the spiritual “cunning alphabet” that he uses in crafting his fiction and poetry. Finally, Melville’s religious thought contributes immensely to any compelling portrait of his personality as an author or as an individual. Melville himself hints at this in White-Jacket: Yet though all this be so, nevertheless, in our own hearts, we mold the whole world’s hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods. Each mortal casts his vote for whom he will to rule the worlds; I have a voice that helps to shape eternity; and my volitions stir the orbits of the furthest suns. In two senses, we are precisely what we worship. Ourselves are Fate. (NN White-Jacket 320-21) From the markings and words of Melville’s marginalia to the New Testament and Psalms, and from the resultant echoes in his imaginative writing, we can begin to make out the contours of Melville’s “own faith” and “own gods.”16 16 I am grateful to John Bryant and Steven Olsen-Smith for their many helpful comments and suggestions regarding this essay. A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES 59