Hershel Parker on Herman Melville, and Walter J. Ong’s Thought Thomas J. Farrell Professor Emeritus in Writing Studies University of Minnesota Duluth

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Hershel Parker on Herman Melville, and Walter J. Ong’s Thought

 

Thomas J. Farrell

Professor Emeritus in Writing Studies

University of Minnesota Duluth

Web: www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell

Email: tfarrell@d.umn.edu

 

 

In order to get into a proper spirit to read Hershel Parker’s massively researched biography of Herman Melville (1819-1891), I found it necessary to try to see a parallel trajectory in my own life. No, I did not embark as a sailor on a whaler when I was around 22 years old, and I did not publish embellished tales of my adventures such as Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847).

However, Parker ends volume one (1996) of his two-volume biography with Melville presenting Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) in person with a copy of Moby-Dick (1851) so that he could see the look on Hawthorne’s face when he saw that Melville had dedicated the book to him. Taking a hint from this gesture on Melville’s part, I figured out a trajectory in my own life involving an older scholar whose work I much admire.

In any event, my way of proceeding to try to relate my own life to Melville’s own extraordinary life might not work as a way for you to proceed to read Parker’s massive biography. Than again, it might work for you if you try it.

Now, when I was an idealistic sixteen-year-old, I published my first op-ed commentary in my high school newspaper supporting the spirit of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address. As I subsequently followed the news, I admired President Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis and his support for the black civil rights movement led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. However, President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

I heard Dr. King speak on Monday, October 12, 1964, on the campus of Saint Louis University (SLU), the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri. On October 14, 1964, Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Subsequently, I traveled by bus with other students from the St. Louis area to join the last leg of Dr. King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, where I once again heard him speak on March 25, 1965. However, as everybody knows, Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. Later in 1968, the Chicago police rioted against demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

But those two assassinations did not dampen my idealism. Over ten years (1969-1979), I taught roughly 1,000 black inner-city youth in open admissions postsecondary educational institutions. In addition, I started publishing about inner-city open admissions students using the work of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter Jackson Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University. Over the years, starting in the fall semester of 1964, I took five courses from Ong at SLU.

In the 1970s and the 1980s, I drew on Ong’s thought in my professional publications, including the following:

(1) “Open Admissions, Orality, and Literacy” in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, volume 3 (1974): pages 247-260;

(2) “Reading in the Community College” in College English, volume 37 (1975-1976): pages 40-46;

(3) “Literacy, the Basics, and All That Jazz” in College English, volume 38 (1976-1977): pages 443-459;

(4) “Developing Literacy: Walter J. Ong and Basic Writing” in the Journal of Basic Writing, volume 2, number 1 (1978): pages 30-51;

(5) “Differentiating Writing from Talking” in College Composition and Communication, volume 29 (1978): pages 346-350;

(6) “The Female and Male Modes of Rhetoric” in College English, volume 40 (1978-1979): pages 590-593;

(7) “Scribes and True Authors” in the ADE Bulletin, Serial number 61 (May 1979): pages 9-16;

(8) “The Lessons of Open Admissions” in the Journal of General Education, volume 33 (1981): pages 207-218;

(9) “IQ and Standard English” in College Composition and Communication, volume 34 (1983): pages 470-484;

(10) “A Defense for Requiring Standard English” in the journal Pre-Text, volume 7 (1986): pages 165-180.

Now, Ong discusses my article “Literacy, the Basics, and All That Jazz” in the January 1977 College English in his September 1978 article “Literacy and Orality in Our Time” in the ADE Bulletin: A Journal for Administrators of Departments of English in American and Canadian Colleges and Universities, Serial Number 58 (pages 1-7) – Ong’s most widely reprinted article.

My essay “Literacy, the Basics, and All That Jazz” and Ong’s essay “Literacy and Orality in Our Times” are both reprinted in the 1987 book A Sourcebook for Basic Writing Teachers, edited by Theresa Enos (pages 27-44 and 45-55, respectively). Ong’s essay “Literacy and Orality in Our Times” is also reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (2002, pages 465-478).

In any event, after my essay “Literacy, the Basics, and All That Jazz” was published in the January 1977 College English, I read Eric A. Havelock’s 1978 book The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato. I was especially impressed with his chapter on “The Early History of the Verb ‘to Be’” (pages 233-248). It prompted me to change my tune about literacy, the basics, and all that jazz, which I did subsequently in my 1983 article “IQ and Standard English,” in which I presented a hypothesis that could be tested, but it has not been tested – yet.

As Havelock knew, the classic study of the verb “to be” in ancient Greek is Charles H. Kahn’s 1973 500-page book The Verb “Be” in Ancient Greek. In 2003, Hackett Publishing Company reprinted his book with a lengthy new “Introduction” by Kahn (pages vii-xl).

My 1986 essay “A Defense for Requiring Standard English” is reprinted in the 1995 book Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, and Boundaries, edited by William A. Covino and David Jolliffe (pages 667-678).

In Ong’s 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness, he discusses my 1979 article “The Female and Male Modes of Rhetoric” (pages 75-76).

In Ong’s 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, his most widely translated book, he discusses my 1978 articles “Developing Literacy: Walter J. Ong and Basic Writing” and “Differentiating Writing from Talking” (page 160).

Now, to get into the spirit for reading volume two of Parker’s massive biography of Melville, I will have to call on certain other experiences in Ong’s life and family background.

Now, Walter Jackson Ong, Sr., was a Protestant until his deathbed conversion to Catholicism. But Walter Jr.’s mother was a Catholic. Consequently, Walter Jr. and his younger brother Richard were raised and educated as Catholics – both boys attend the Jesuit high school and college in Kansas City, Missouri. Therefore, Walter Jr. grew up with both Protestant and Catholic family members.

The middle name that Walter Sr. and Walter Jr. shared commemorated the family’s relationship with the infamous President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845; president, 1829-1837).

Their Ong family ancestors left East Anglia on the same ship that brought Roger Williams to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 – roughly five years before the founding of Harvard College in 1636. However, at that time, their family name was spelled “Onge”; it is probably related to the English name “Yonge.”

Around the time of the 300th anniversary of the founding of Harvard College, the alcoholic atheist Harvard English professor Perry Miller (1905-1963) published his massively researched 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. In it, he describes to the best of his ability the work of the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572), whose work in logic (also known as dialectic) dominated the curriculum at Harvard College – just as it dominated the curriculum at Cambridge University in East Anglia about the same time. However, in the end Miller calls for somebody to undertake a fuller study of Ramus’ work.

Roughly a decade later, the recently ordained Father Ong stepped forward to undertake such a study, with Miller serving as the director of his massively researched doctoral dissertation at Harvard, which Harvard University Press published, slightly revised, in two volumes in 1958: (1) Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason and (2) Ramus and Talon Inventory, a briefly annotated listing of more than 750 volumes by Ramus and his followers and his critics that Ong located in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe.

 

 

Herman Melville (1819-1891) came from a Dutch Calvinist background (primarily from his mother), which inculcated in him a strong sense of the depravity of humans, the dark consequences of Original Sin.

Both of his grandfathers were heroes of the American Revolutionary War: his Scottish paternal grandfather Major Thomas Melvill (1751-1832) and his Dutch maternal grandfather General Peter Gansevoort (1749-1812), the Hero of Fort Stanwix. (Later, the family began spelling their surname with a final -e, Melville.)

To this day, Americans celebrate the founding of our experiment in a representative republic as a form of democratic government on July 4th because the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776. But Herman Melville’s ancestors were not slaveholders, as were President George Washington and President Thomas Jefferson.

Figuratively speaking, some have described our tragic American heritage of slavery as our collective Original Sin. In any event, I write in the aftermath of the black man George Floyd’s death while handcuffed in the custody of four white police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25, 2020, and in the wake of the black man Rayshard Brooks’ death by two gun shots in the back as he was running away from two white police officers in Atlanta, Georgia, on June 12, 2020. Coming in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and the accompanying economic crisis, these unnecessary deaths of black men are unsettling, to say the least.

Now, Melville’s father Allan Melvill (1782-1832) died unexpectedly, and his mother Maria Gansevoort Melvill (1791-1872) did her best to hold her family together. But his father’s death brought an end to young Herman’s formal education – roughly equivalent to young William Shakespeare’s limited formal education in his day. Nevertheless, Melville remained a lifelong autodidact.

Around the age of 22, young Melville embarked as a sailor on a merchant ship and then on a whaler, thereby gaining in a few years enough memorable experiences to fuel his subsequent literary career. Subsequently, he published embellished tales of his adventures in Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), which brought him literary celebrity.

At a certain juncture, the still relatively young autodidact author was deeply impressed by the dark explorations of the fifteen-year-older author Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). Subsequently, Melville dedicated his massive novel Moby-Dick (1851) to Hawthorne. Melville turned 32 in 1851, and he lived to 1891, just after he had turned 72 – without ever establishing the merited literary renown that Hawthorne had enjoyed in his lifetime – well before 1851 when Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to him.

The still relatively young Melville may not have been mistaken in his assessment of Hawthorne’s merits up to 1851. Nevertheless, the still relatively young author may have been extremely immoderate in some of his expressions of admiration of Hawthorne. As we will see momentarily, with the distance of years, the older Melville would have occasion to reflect further on Hawthorne later in life – revisiting their earlier relationship about a decade after Hawthorne’s death in 1864 – in his long centennial poem that was published in 1876.

Now, the American Civil War (1861-1865) had been fought to hold the young republic together as one nation. President Abraham Lincoln had presided over the Union victory over the Confederacy of the Southern slave-holding states.

Which would make the centennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence all the more important to celebrate in 1876. For this momentous occasion, Melville labored mightily on his 18,000-line poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. In addition to the title character, the other characters on the pilgrimage include the highly articulate Rolfe (based on a somewhat younger Melville) and Vine (based loosely on Hawthorne). But whatever hopes Melville may have had for this ambitious long poem to resurrect his literary fortunes were dashed. As mentioned, he lived on to 1891 without ever receiving the merited literary renown Hawthorne had achieved in his lifetime.

Even though the cultural context of Melville’s long centennial poem includes the Civil War, the context for the action of the poem is the Holy Land, not American soil, even though certain key characters, including the title character, are Americans. The title character is presented to us as a young American Protestant divinity student, but his exact age is not given. As we consider the various religious and spiritual issues raised throughout the poem, we should not forget that the First Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church opened on December 8, 1869, and adjourned on October 20, 1870, according to the Wikipedia entry about it. It is best known for the doctrine of papal infallibility. In any event, various nineteenth-century popes addressed certain theological and spiritual issues that are also represented in Melville’s centennial poem.

For further discussion of the First Vatican Council, see the American Jesuit church historian John W. O’Malley’s 2018 book Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church.

For a lay American Catholic historian’s discussion of the history of American Protestant theological and spiritual movements, see Garry Wills’ 2007 book Head and Heart: American Christianities.

Now, because Rolfe in Clarel seems to be somewhat younger than Melville was at the time when he was writing his centennial poem in the 1870s, the revisiting of the intense Melville/Hawthorne relationship of, say, 1851 appears to have been part of Melville’s past by the time when he wrote his centennial poem in the 1870s. However, in addition to noting how Rolfe seems to be a version of Melville, we should note that the narrator in the poem is another version of Melville – giving us two versions supposedly of Melville’s voices in the poem of interacting voices.

For further discussion of the narrator’s voice in the poem, see Stan Goldman’s 1993 book Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in Clarel (pages 106-112 and the accompanying notes).

Now, in terms of critical recognition for Clarel, Yale’s literary critic Harold Bloom includes Clarel in his appendix in his 1994 book The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages (page 514), where he lists it as one of five work by Melville (and where he also lists four works by Hawthorne). However, in Bloom’s 2002 book Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Minds, he discusses Melville as one exemplary mind, but without mentioning Clarel (pages 305-313; Bloom also discusses Hawthorne, pages 300-304). Even though Bloom apparently published no detailed discussion of Clarel, he did reprint Bryan C. Short’s 1979 essay “Form as Vision in Clarel” in two different collections of literary criticism that he edited.

But perhaps Melville over-estimated the value of his poetry in Clarel – or perhaps the literary critic needed to properly evaluate the value of his poetry in Clarel has not yet emerged, even though literary critics have produced book-length studies of it, including the American Jesuit Joseph G. Knapp’s sensitive and perceptive 1971 book Tortured Synthesis: The Meaning of Melville’s Clarel.

Early in the book, Knapp says, “The real interiority of all being is its informing form, which exists analogously in all things” (page 18).

As Knapp would most likely have known from his Jesuit training in philosophy and theology, Aquinas also discusses this.

In addition, Knapp says, “By Melville’s time there had occurred ‘that alteration from belief in the salvation of man through mercy and grace of a sovereign God, to belief in the potential divinity in every man’” (page 41; Knapp is quoting Matthiessen).

Aquinas discusses this kind of process as deification (see this term in the index of the 2020 edition of the Reverend Dr. Matthew Fox’s book Sheer Joy for specific page references).

Now, Knapp also says, “Derwent will not dive [into himself and his own psyche] and – in Melville’s values – will never arrive at greatness. His optimism, based on evolutionary progress, does not answer man’s profoundest questions about himself, about evil, about the universe, and God. He is not even interested in searching. Derwent is not a pilgrim; he is only a tourist” (page 52).

Aristotle and Aquinas discuss greatness, as does the American Jesuit literary scholar Maurice B. McNamee in his 1960 book Honor and the Epic Hero: A Study of the Shifting Concept of Magnanimity in Philosophy and Epic Poetry.

Now, because existentialist philosophy and literature was still in vogue in the early 1960s when Knapp was working on his 1962 doctoral dissertation at the University of Minnesota, it is not surprising that he would invoke Kierkegaard in his discussion of Clarel – specifically, K’s discussion of commitment (which terminology Ong also borrows from K’s thought – in one or more of his four Macmillan books: 1957, 1959, 1962, and 1967).

Now, Knapp says, “However, in spite of their differences, they [i.e., existentialists] all begin with man, with subjectivity, and with personal freedom; they all share a characteristic repugnance for bodies of beliefs that can be gathered together into systems. This subjectivity is not the same as subjectivism. Subjectivism falsifies the object; subjectivity goes beyond the object” (page 62).

Similarly, but far more succinctly, Ong discusses “the present-day subject-oriented (not simply ‘subjective’), historical-minded Catholic theology” in his 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God (page 95; but also see 83 and 130).

Now, in the 1991 edition of Clarel, Walter E. Bezanson says, “Overwhelmingly these [pilgrims in Clarel] are hommes deracines. They have, or had, their trades or professions, but if a single one of the major figures has wife, children, or relatives, or in any nameable sense belongs to a specific community [as Melville himself did], we do not know it; the absence of surnames expresses this. The sense of being ‘cut off’ – a key phrase of the poem (e.g., 1.14.24, 2.7.21) – is an arranged condition of the narrative” (page 578).

In addition, Bezanson says, “almost all have experienced disaster” (page 578). Knapp would have read the counterparts to these sentences in Bezanson’s 1960 edition of Clarel.

Now, much later in the book, Knapp says, “Previously Rolfe has ridiculed the claims of science made by Margoth, but when he speaks to Ungar he discloses his latent doubt about his own conviction. Rolfe also significantly relinquishes his rank as major guide in this same conversation with Ungar. For the first time he asks Clarel for his opinion – reversing the usual role of interpretive intelligence – in his attempt to decide whether Ungar is a wise judge of human experience. This reversal of roles will ultimately show Clarel that in spite of the help he has received from guides he will have to settle his own conscience for himself” (page 94).

As Knapp may have known from his Jesuit training in philosophy and theology, Aquinas has a lot to say about conscience.

Now, for a relevant related reading that is not explicitly about religious faith and belief, as Melville’s Clarel is, see Thomas D. Zlatic’s lengthy article “Faith in Pretext: An Ongian Context for [Melville’s 1857 Novel] The Confidence-Man” in the anthology Of Ong and Media Ecology (2012, pages 241-280).

Even though Zlatic ably discusses the American Jesuit Walter J. Ong’s thought, he does not happen to advert explicitly to Ong’s short article that is explicitly about religious faith and belief, “Mimesis and the Following of Christ” in the journal Religion and Literature (University of Notre Dame), volume 26, number 2 (Summer 1994): pages 73-77, which is reprinted in volume four of Ong’s Faith and Contexts (1999, pages 177-182).

As Ong describes “the Following of Christ,” each follower’s pilgrimage in life is unique. However, it does not necessarily follow that each follower in “the Following of Christ” constitutes a church unto himself or herself. No, Christians involved in “the Following of Christ” may band together with certain other Christians, as Ong himself banded together with other Roman Catholics in the Roman Catholic Church.

For the medieval Italian Dominican philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas’ multi-dimensional thought about disciples as followers of Christ the teacher, see page 371 of Fox’s book Sheer Joy, mentioned above.

Now, in the second volume of Parker’s biography of Melville (2002), Parker devotes a lot of attention to Melville’s composition of Clarel, which is divided into four parts: (1) “Jerusalem” (1870; pages 695-701); (2) “The Wilderness” (1871; pages 724-733); (3) “Mar Saba” (1873; pages 768-772); and (4) “Bethlehem” (1874-1875; pages 778-782). Parker then discusses the publication and disappointing reception of Clarel (pages 790-814).

Now, among other things, Parker says, “Through the pilgrims’ conversations, Melville explores the bitter legacy of Christianity, which he sees as separating man [sic] from nature” (2002, page 696).

Disclosure: I come from a Roman Catholic background. In my years of undergraduate studies at Jesuit educational institutions (1962-1966), I studied the thought of the famous medieval Italian Dominican philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274) in the required core curriculum philosophy courses, and I majored in English. The American Catholic historian Philip Gleason of the University of Notre Dame captured the spirit of American Catholic higher education in the title of his 1995 book Contending with Modernity: [American] Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century.

Now, Parker may have correctly stated that Melville sees Christianity “as separating man [sic] from nature.” But this was not Aquinas’ view – nor was it the view of the medieval Italian St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), the founder of the Franciscan order and the author of the famous “Canticle of Brother Sun” – or the view of the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), author of the posthumously published poem “God’s Grandeur.” (All of Hopkins’ poems were posthumously published, so there is no chance that Melville would have known of his poems.)

Indeed, twentieth-century Roman Catholics were contending with modernity at least in part to challenge the view that Parker attributes to Melville. Which raises the question of just how accurately does Melville represent Roman Catholicism in the various conversations in Clarel.

For a sampler of Aquinas’ thought from 52 of his works in Latin, see Fox’s recently reissued book, now with an index (pages 533-542), Sheer Joy, mentioned above.

For further discussion of St. Francis of Assisi, see the French Franciscan Eloi Leclerc’s 1977 book The Canticle of Creatures: Symbols of Union: An Analysis of St. Francis of Assisi, translated by Matthew J. O’Connell (orig. French ed., 1970).

For further discussion of Hopkins, see Ong’s 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God, mentioned above.

Now, in 2020, Fox has also published the short new book titled The Tao of Thomas Aquinas, in which he claims to have captured the essence of Aquinas’ thought in 31 short chapters, 30 of which are keyed to Sheer Joy. Two of the chapter titles will suffice here to show Aquinas’ view of nature, Chapters 3 and 4.

3. Revelation comes in two volumes: Nature and the Bible (pages 17-19 in Tao; keyed to page 59 in Sheer Joy, but also see pages 78 and 80-81 and the “Contemplation to Attain Love” in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola [1491-1556], the founder of the Jesuit religious order [standardized numbered sections 230-237]).

4. The greatness of the human person consists in this: that we are capable of the universe (pages 21-23 in Tao; keyed to page 138 in Sheer Joy, but also see page 142 and St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of Brother Sun” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur,” as mentioned above).

Now, if Parker is correcting in saying that Melville sees Christianity “as separating man [sic] and nature,” then Aquinas is certainly one Christian thinker who does not separate humans from nature.

In Knapp’s 1971 book Tortured Synthesis: The Meaning of Melville’s Clarel, mentioned above, he mentions the nineteenth-century American author Orestes Brownson, a famous convert to Roman Catholicism (page 98). Knapp says, “For Brownson: ‘The greatest and most serious difficulty in the way of the unbeliever [converting to Roman Catholicism], is his [or her] inability to reconcile faith and reason, that is the Divine plan in the order of grace with the Divine plan in the order of nature’” (quoted on page 98 from Henry F. Brownson’s 1900 book Orestes A. Brownson’s Latter Life: From 1856 to 1876, page 387).

Aquinas discusses divine providence in Sheer Joy (pages 235 and 256).

Knapp also says, “In the early explanatory canto, “The Sepulchre” [Part 1: Jerusalem, Canto 3. The Sepulchre, lines 1-200], Melville sets up his problems – [including] the natural-supernatural dichotomy [among others]” (page 110).

But the supposed natural-supernatural dichotomy is not a problem in Aquinas’ thought. For example, his discussion in Sheer Joy of deification as one part of the natural-supernatural interaction (see pages 33, 154-156, 162-164, 170-171, 255-256, 305-307, and 380).

For scholarly studies of Aquinas’ thought about deification, see (1) A. N. Williams’ 1999 book The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas; (2) Bernhard Blankenhorn’s 2015 book The Mystery of Union with God: Dionysian Mysticism in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas; and (3) Daria Spezzano’s 2015 book The Glory of God’s Grace: Deification According to St. Thomas Aquinas.

For the record, I am not trying to convert anyone to Roman Catholicism. Even though Aquinas is obviously a canonized saint, I think that a lot of people today could read his thought and be impressed with what he says but without necessarily converting to Catholicism.

It strikes me that much of what Aquinas says in Sheer Joy is relevant to certain aspects of Clarel, especially what he says about despair, faith, fortitude, and hope (see the index in the 2020 edition for specific pages references to his thought about these topics).

Now, in Hershel Parker’s 2008 “Foreword” to the 2008 500-page edition of Clarel (pages xiii-xxvii), he provides us with concise background information about Melville and his centennial poem. The 2008 500-page edition of Clarel includes the text of Melville’s centennial poem published in the 1991 900-page edition that includes extensive editorial material, as Parker himself points out on page xxvii.

In Parker’s 2008 “Foreword,” among other things, he says, “Melville had little experience with Catholicism, other than being defended by some Catholic reviewers who were delighted at his criticism of the Protestant missionaries in the South Seas, but he knew from American magazines and newspapers of ‘the ecclesiastical crisis’ in England and knew something, most likely, about John Henry Newman’s turning to Catholicism. In Clarel, Rolfe suggests that Protestantism, in the grand battle between Roman Catholicism and ‘the Atheist,’ would not be a contender for dominance: Protestantism would figure only as a ‘base of operations’ covertly used ‘By Atheism’ (‘The Wilderness,’ Canto 26). Taught the doctrine of total depravity by his mother’s Dutch denomination, Melville carried the lurking idea of original sin along when he married into a Unitarian family. More than any other poet of his time, he was tormented by the wish that one could obey Jesus absolutely (as in what Jesus said to the rich young man) and by the certain knowledge that any attempt to put Jesus’ words into practice would end in disaster” (page xxv).

Of course, Parker’s careful wording here that “Melville had little experience with Catholicism” tells us nothing about Melville’s reading about Catholicism and Catholic saints and theologians – the kind of reading that Knapp would be interested in noting.

For further discussion of Newman, see Ong’s 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God, the published version of Ong’s 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto (pages 18-19, 24, 90, 95-96, 119, 124-126, and 132-133). Also see Ong’s 1946 article “Newman’s Essay on Development on Its Intellectual Milieu” in the Jesuit-sponsored journal Theological Studies, volume 7, number 1 (March 1946): pages 3-45. It is reprinted in volume two of Ong’s Faith and Contexts (1992b, pages 1-37).

Now, if it is the case that Melville “wish[ed] that one could obey Jesus absolutely (as in what Jesus said to the rich young man),” then I have to wonder what Melville thought of the medieval voluntary poverty movements that gave rise to the Dominican and Franciscan religious orders in the Roman Catholic Church.