The "Irreligion of Thinking Men": Melville's Materialist Genealogy

Abstract

The "Irreligion of Thinking Men":Melville's Materialist Genealogy Elizabeth Adams (bio) On 20 November 1856, after spending an afternoon with his friend Herman Melville at the sand dunes near Southport, England, Nathaniel Hawthorne penned his famous journal description of Melville's religious uncertainty: Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.1 Despite his Christian upbringing in the Dutch Reformed Church and his later affiliation with the Unitarian Church [End Page 1] following his marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, Melville continually struggled with religious belief, unable, as Hawthorne so eloquently observes, to either fully embrace or denounce Christian faith. Melville's religious struggle has long fascinated scholars who study his writing's various religious and philosophical underpinnings. Most agree that, throughout his life, Melville experienced a religious skepticism that significantly informed his work, fueling, for instance, his meditation on the problem of evil in Moby-Dick (1851) and his earnest quest after faith in Clarel (1876). This skepticism fed his philosophical roving, preventing him from settling upon any one explanation of truth and resulting in the philosophical eclecticism that so characterizes his work. Regarding the final years of his life, however, some scholars have searched for an ultimate resting point in Melville's religio-philosophical wanderings and have turned to Billy Budd, Sailor (1924), a tale written near the end of Melville's life and published only after his death, for answers about his "last will and spiritual testament."2 Several foundational critics have interpreted Billy Budd as Melville's final "testament of acceptance," or testament of Christian faith, while subsequent interpretations have alternately read Billy Budd as Melville's final, ironic refutation of Christian theology.3 More recently, however, scholarship has conveyed the extent of Melville's ongoing and wide-ranging search for truth, linking him to such diverse belief systems as Calvinism, Unitarianism, Buddhism, Paganism, and Stoicism.4 Perhaps Brian Yothers best encapsulates Melville's religious and philosophical multiplicity when he connects Melville to "the sort of rebellious religious individualism that we associate with Captain Ahab, and that pushes an individual at once toward martyrdom for a personal understanding of the truth and toward a ferocious denunciation of those falsehoods and half-truths that the individual sees as being in conflict with this transcendent vision."5 Rather than passively accepting [End Page 2] any one belief system, Melville continually sought his own individual truth from among multiple creeds. My study contributes to this almost century-long conversation about Melville's religio-philosophical doubts and beliefs by arguing that the Greek philosopher Lucretius' materialism is a hereto-overlooked philosophical source that preoccupied Melville throughout his life, particularly in his final years. Recognition of Lucretius' influence on Melville's late work proves important to this conversation, for it questions the claim that he found religious certainty at the end of his life, supplements current understandings of his philosophical pluralism, and provides an explanation for his attraction to the idea of annihilation. More broadly, when considered alongside recent studies discussing his work's materialist aspects, Melville's engagement with Lucretius provides source evidence that complicates straightforward notions of him as a romantic idealist, and, when considered alongside examinations of Lucretius' influence on other nineteenth-century authors, Melville's engagement with Lucretius appears as one instance of a wider cultural struggle to face the simultaneously Classical and thoroughly modern idea of a purely material world. After discussing Lucretius' materialism and demonstrating Melville's awareness of Lucretius' philosophy through his reading of Bayle's dictionary and...