Melville's Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America by Damien B. Schlarb

Abstract

Reviewed by: Melville's Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America by Damien B. Schlarb Ariel Silver Damien B. Schlarb Melville's Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xiv + 252 pp. In his reading of the Book of Genesis in The Beginning of Wisdom (2003), Leon Kass is guided by philosophia, the love and pursuit of wisdom. He quickly acknowledges that scripture is not often read in this manner, especially by scholars of the Bible, whose training in higher criticism has led them to focus more on textual sources and the "sensibilities and prejudices of an ancient people" (2). These source critics read the Bible much as do literary critics—as literature more than as an aid to wisdom. Melville was neither a biblical scholar nor a literary critic, but in his elegant new book, Melville's Wisdom, Damien Schlarb contends that Melville seeks to demonstrate through his literary work that the Hebrew Bible can be read in a "reflective and philosophic spirit" (Kass, Leon R. The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 2) and that this manner of reading is modeled on the wisdom literature found within the biblical text. In his effort to recover the language and ethics of biblical wisdom, Schlarb asserts that Melville charts a course between the "Scylla of epistemological deadlock and the Charybdis of moral relativism" (20), leading him to theological as well as cultural insight. Literature begins to function as a new form of exegesis, which Melville deploys to try to deeply understand both the biblical text and the religious culture emerging in the midst of modern life. This spirit of philosophia animates Melville, and leads him, through the wisdom literature of the Bible, to what Schlarb calls the "hermeneutics of contemplation" (19). Like Ahab circling the leviathan, drawing ever closer, numerous scholars have sought to apprehend the acute nature of Melville's relationship to the Bible. This search began in earnest after World War II with the publication of Melville's Use of the Bible (Nathalia Wright, 1949) and Melville's Quarrel with God (Lawrance Thompson, 1952), works devoted to the ways in which Melville read biblical prose and poetry. Later works attended more to the religious, political, and cultural milieu informing Melville's biblical interpretations. The [End Page 108] more recent religious turn in literary studies has deepened this search and made it both more incisive and more expansive. In Melville's Bibles (2008), Ilana Pardes seeks to bring together these two previous strains of scholarship on Melville and the Bible: his reading of biblical texts and his reading of cultural contexts through his literary oeuvre. Melville's Bibles focuses principally on Moby-Dick, as does Jonathan A. Cook's Inscrutable Malice (2012). Where Pardes sets biblical texts and characters in Moby-Dick in conversation with multiple modes of biblical exegesis in antebellum America, Cook focuses more on the moral and religious questions which animate Melville's engagement with biblical sources. Melville's interrogation of theodicy—the attempt to reconcile divine justice with the presence of evil—leads him directly to Job. The omnipresence of Job in Moby-Dick points to Melville's interest in biblical wisdom, a genre that informs not only Job, but also Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. In Melville's Wisdom, Schlarb expands beyond Job and Moby-Dick to uncover the ways in which Melville works out his epistemology of skeptical devotion through the body of wisdom literature. At a time when the emerging modern world sought to both affirm and displace religious culture and the language of scripture, Melville discovered in the wisdom texts of the Hebrew Bible a contemplative approach that could lead to syncretic knowledge apart from either the dogma of religion or science. Having discovered that both superstition and empiricism are irredeemable, Melville looks instead for an approach that can respond to his inexhaustible call for inquiry and introspection. Wisdom, grounded in experience and reflection, transcends explanatory systems to arrive at its own moral vector: ambiguity and multiplicity. As Schlarb explains in his discussion on the Book of Job: "What remains in the wake of religious and scientific fervor...