Abstracts

ALA 2010—San Francisco

Melville and Religious ExperienceCHAIR: BRIAN YOTHERS, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO

Participants in “Melville and Religious Experience” panel at ALA 2010, from left to right:William E. Engel, Jonathan A. Cook, Richard Hardack, Peter Norberg, Brian Yothers.

Few writers have engaged more subtly or more broadly with the sub-ject of religious experience than Melville. On both a cognitive andan affective level, Melville’s work is in dialogue with a staggering

range of religious traditions. Panelists were invited to consider the following

C© 2010 The AuthorsJournal compilation C© 2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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questions: How does Melville represent belief, unbelief, and tensions andaccommodations between the two? Within the context of American Protestantreligious culture, what roles do Calvinism, Arminianism, Unitarianism, orMethodism play in Melville’s art? How does Melville negotiate the relationshipbetween the universal and the particular in his treatment of religious experi-ence? To what degree is Melville’s representation of religious experience fluidover the course of his career? To what degree does his religious thought remainconsistent? The panel illuminated one of the most vexed areas of Melvillescholarship: the nature of Melville’s responses to ideas, texts, and individualsassociated with multiple religious traditions across his career.

Melville’s Miltonic Notion of Providence: A Case Study of Moby-Dick, Chap-ters 82-83William E. EngelUniversity of the South

M ilton’s Calvinist notion of prevenient grace, fundamental to hisepic’s recessed theological armature, became a topic for the mostserious kind of jesting in Moby-Dick. I seek to clarify Milton’s ideas

about providence (especially that mode of grace that anticipates repentance),and then to indicate the extent to which this theme is appropriated andinscribed in Moby-Dick. Focusing on Melville’s use of the Old Testament, Jonahin particular, I assess Melville’s own brand of serio-comic biblical exegesis,which is indebted to Milton’s idiosyncratic shuffling of doctrines and is conso-nant with his confident yoking of classical and scriptural allusions. Not onlyis this seen in Melville’s linking of Perseus and Jonah in the role-call of thefirst whalers (NN Moby-Dick 361-62), but also in his reference, from the veryoutset, to the “police officer of the Fates” (NN Moby-Dick 7).

Three main passages in Paradise Lost, when seen together, triangulateMilton’s complicated theology, especially where salvation is concerned. Thefirst indicates that some God has created the Elect and will protect them fromall inclination to sin owing to “special grace” (PL 2.1030-33). A pronounce-ment from God the Father describes a “peculiar grace” for those “Elect abovethe rest” (PL 3.183-84). The last concerns “prevenient Grace” finding its way toAdam and Eve, which “descending had removed / The stony from their hearts”(PL 11.3-5). Milton’s theology is an amalgam of traditional Old Faith Catholi-cism in the style of Augustine, austere Calvinist doctrine that differentiatesbetween the Elect and the non-Elect (thus abrogating the need for free will),and Arminianism, based on the ideas of the Dutch reformed theologian JacobusArminius (1560-1609), who broke with the Calvinist mainstream. Melville was

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reared in the Dutch Reformed church and would have been thoroughly familiarwith the main tenets of both Calvin and Arminius. Like his namesake in theOld Testament, Ahab rejects reconciliation, let alone salvation; he is hell-benton wreaking vengeance and willing to die exercising his will. Whatever elsewe may think of the albino whale, “cetology is code for theology”; like theArminian view of God, the whale tests, though does not control, the resolve,will, and faith of its mortal pursuers.

Comparative Religion and Competing Orthodoxies in Melville’s ClarelPeter NorbergSaint Joseph’s University

The remarkably rich interreligious dialogue that is central to the move-ment of Melville’s epic poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in theHoly Land may productively address contemporary efforts to find ways

of mediating cultural and political conflicts rooted in differing theologicalconceptions of the world. However, one will not find in the many-sidedargument of Clarel positive affirmation of the religious heterodoxy that thepoem presents as the result of modern globalization. Through the mediation ofits protagonist Clarel, the poem consistently confronts readers with a desire fororthodox belief that raises crucial questions about our ability to conceptualizereligious heterodoxy as a positive condition of globalization. One of Melville’slesser-known sources for Clarel, Robert Curzon’s A Visit to Monasteries in theLevant (New York: Putnam, 1849), illustrates this point. Walter Bezanson firstidentified Ch. 16 of Curzon’s travel narrative as Melville’s source for Rolfe’sview that Jerusalem serves to “Atheize” Muslims and Christians alike. Duringthe Easter celebration of 1834, rivalry among competing sects of Protestantand Greek Orthodox Christians sparked a riot in Jerusalem. The city’s Muslimgovernor, Ibrahim Pasha, was caught up in the conflict, which began inside theChurch of the Holy Sepulcher. When Curzon asked the governor to call an endto the Easter celebration, Pasha refused because such an intervention would beinterpreted as an Islamic persecution of the Christian sects. Rolfe’s reportedincident illustrates how “furious zeal and frenzying faith” can undermineorthodoxy as thoroughly as the secular materialism that follows from modernindustrial progress in the Western world (3.16.65).

Yet despite his undermining of fanatical ultra-orthodoxy, Melvillenonetheless repeatedly presents figures of Christian orthodoxy that counter-balance the skeptical heterodoxy supported by Rolfe’s forays into comparativereligion. This is especially evident with Salvaterra, the Franciscan monk whochecks Rolfe’s skepticism in Book 4. After the encounter with Salvaterra,

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Rolfe acknowledges that one should not place “too much stress / Upon thecarnal manliness: / The Christliness is better,” and then asks rhetorically “Tooorthodox is that?” (4.14.104-8). The sort of orthodoxy Melville would havehis readers retain is an Imitatio Christi that heeds the suffering of others.Exploring Melville’s criticisms of democracy in the context of the poem’srunning theological debate enables us to gauge the extent to which the poem’sChristian framework can help us imagine genuine interreligious dialogue.

“Perpetual telegraphic communication”: Melville’s Critique of EmersonianPantheismRichard HardackBerkeley, CA

Emerson and Melville converge on the issue of pantheism, which de-ifies natural law instead of an anthropomorphic god. If, as OrestesBrownson claims, Protestantism ends in transcendentalism, then tran-

scendentalism ends in pantheism, in a logical progression toward antinomi-anism. Pantheism emerges from the dissolution of a centralized church andrepresents a nexus of tensions in America between Protestant and Catholicnotions of authority and identity, which Emerson and Melville dramatize intheir works. Their parallel developments of pantheism are a form of call andresponse. Emerson and Melville not only invoke similar ideas but also use thesame phrases to describe god in relation to nature, suggesting a “perpetualtelegraphic communication” between them regarding “the great god Pan,”who provided a shared heuristic for a system of transcendental male self-representation. (Melville might have heard Emerson use the telegraphic phraseat a lecture in Boston in 1849.)

Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre idealize, stage, and vilify the precepts ofpantheism. In Mardi, Melville playfully asserts, “the same life that moves thatmoose, animates alike the sun and Oro. All are parts of One” (NN Mardi615), which iterates Emerson’s claim in “The American Scholar” that “It isone light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animatesall men.” Melville then narrativizes his disillusionment with pantheism in theinterplay between the pantheistic Ishmael and the explicitly anti-pantheisticAhab; and he renounces Emersonian pantheism in Pierre: as Pierre chides,“thy Pantheism, what was that? Thou wert but the pretensious, heartless partof a man” (NN Pierre 302). When Pierre asserts that the institutions of acontradictory America “possess the divine virtue of a natural law” and that“green is the peculiar signet of all-fertile Nature herself” (NN Pierre 9), hefeigns to contradict “Nature,” where Emerson claims that “The whole code

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of [nature’s] laws may be written on . . . the signet of a ring . . . . Nature isalways consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws.” Melville wasresponding to Emerson’s religious ideas and even syntax, and foregroundinga demonology of pantheism that Emerson acknowledged only in moments ofreligious crisis.

Melville and Religious Experience: A ResponseJonathan A. CookNotre Dame Academy, Fairfax, VA

Religious themes, ideas, language, and symbolism—principally thoseassociated with Christianity but also extending to a wide range ofother faiths—pervade Melville’s fiction and poetry. Yet the religious

dimension to Melville’s writing is characterized by a fundamental paradoxgrowing out of the writer’s lifelong skeptical interrogation of the very natureof religious faith. Much of Melville’s writing was fundamentally a critique ofChristianity in which he cast doubt on its doctrinal foundations, includingideas of Christian morality, providence, original sin, the immortality of thesoul, and perhaps most importantly, the benignity of the creator. At the sametime, Melville was incapable of abandoning the formative influence of theChristian faith, for he was emotionally and psychologically wedded to manyof its principles; and indeed the life of Christ provided a seemingly necessaryarchetypal pattern for both his moral understanding and creative imagination.Christianity and religion in general thus provided an essential structure ofmeaning without which the modern individual was seemingly morally adrift.

Hawthorne’s well-known record of his meeting with Melville in Liver-pool in November 1856 indicates, first, that Melville seems caught in endlessspiritual flux. Second, Melville was haunted by his loss of faith; as a disbelieverin Christianity, he nevertheless quested for the certainty of belief in a god who“lies beyond human ken.” Third, his resignation to being “annihilated” impliesthe formal end of his belief in a spiritual afterlife—a foundational dogma ofthe Christian faith. Fourth, Melville’s seemingly obsessive-compulsive returnto the discussion of metaphysics is also the stance of a philosophical skeptic,trained to doubt absolute truths and suspend final judgment. Finally, Melville’songoing debate between head and heart, skepticism and faith, resembles thereligious dilemma of leading English writers. Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, Mill,Ruskin, Eliot, and Hardy are Melville’s true contemporaries in the Victoriancrisis of faith, writers whose spiritual biographies all contain similar recordsof doubt, deconversion, disillusionment, and depression. Given its centralityto his creative vision, the subject of religion in Melville studies should be one

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of the most active and exciting; yet academic criticism routinely ignores thisdimension to Melville’s writing. Today, however, our three panelists beginto help us reorient our critical views toward Melville as a supremely giftedreligious and philosophical artist and thinker whose insights into the problemof faith have much to teach us.

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