3 - Melville’s Beard I: Religion, Ethics, and Epistemology

Summary

Neither Biographical Examinations of Melville the artist nor aesthetic inspections of his portraits have been able to dispense with the category of criticism that deals with Melville as a thinker. Indeed, this has been a source of anxiety for both biographical and aesthetically oriented critics: in 1938, Charles R. Anderson, one of Melville’s most influential biographical critics, complained humorously about Melville’s beard and the wisdom it was taken to imply, suggesting that reading Melville for evidence of his philosophical or religious thought was squeezing out considerations of his life and experiences. Warner Berthoff, one of Melville’s most insightful aesthetically oriented critics, began his superb study The Example of Melville (1964), by stating that he would not be dealing with Melville’s work as “a provider of ‘scripture’” (3), thus acknowledging the degree to which Melville has been regarded as precisely a “provider of scripture” by admirers over the years. The pages that follow discuss critics who have approached Melville in religious or philosophical terms as a prophet, sage, or both.

The debates that have grown up around Melville as thinker have tended in two directions: one set of discussions has sought to define the contours of Melville’s religious thought in terms of both his works and what one can reasonably surmise about his personal belief system, and the other major set of discussions has attempted to situate Melville in relation to the major American philosophical movement of Melville’s time, Transcendentalism, and its precursors in European and Asian philosophical thought. Since these two strands are so closely interwoven with each other, I consider them as a unit, although I will be pointing out the varying emphases on religious or philosophical thought that appear along the way. Just how interconnected these emphases can be is apparent in the efforts of numerous mid-twentieth-century critics to claim Melville as a proto-existentialist. The combination of the religious and the philosophical in so much of Melville criticism reflects a leading characteristic of Melville’s work, in that he approaches religious questions with an irreverently analytical eye, and philosophical issues with an emotional and ethical intensity often associated with religious belief. The scriptures that Melville provides in his writings, to use Berthoff’s analogy, are both religious and secular, and like all scriptures, have proved widely variable in the range of interpretations they inspire.