The Agnosticism of Herman Melville

By Carole Cohen

Herman Melville is generally regarded as the greatest American writer of the 19th century and by some as the greatest American writer of any period. He is known by just a few of his works—Moby Dick, Billy Budd, and "Bartleby the Scrivener"—and is generally assumed to be a writer about the sea, albeit in a deep philosophical vein. What is not well known at all is that Melville was a doubter, an agnostic, a critic of religion, and that his livelihood as a writer was seriously compromised by his heterodox views.

Melville had been raised in the Dutch Reformed Church, his mother’s religion, but the premature death of his father and the poverty that followed forced Melville out into a world that taught him very different lessons. His first books, Typee and Omoo, fictionalized accounts of his whaling voyages and rovings around the South Pacific, were enormously popular. However, their critical comments on the work of missionaries among the Polynesians outraged the missionary societies, and he was accused of impiety and immorality.

Melville’s greatest work, Moby Dick, received some thoughtful and perceptive reviews when it appeared in 1851, but many critics were baffled by it, and the influential church-related organs found it profane and indecent. One went so far as to maintain that Melville and his publishers were in danger of eternal damnation for the evil influence the book would have upon readers. What would these religious critics have thought had they seen the letter Melville had written to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne? In it Melville announced that he had written "a wicked book" and "baptized" it in the name of the devil.

In his next work, the little-read Pierre, Melville created a protagonist who tries to act strictly according to Christian tenets of duty and self-sacrifice. Filled with these mystic imperatives, Pierre pursues a course of action that ultimately destroys four lives, including his own. The Confidence Man, Melville’s last full-length prose work, is a satire on human gullibility. In a series of sketches, the devil assumes various disguises to deceive in the name of trust. Both of these books suffered an even worse fate than Moby Dick.

Although Melville continued to write for the remainder of his life, he could no longer earn a living by his pen. He worked for 19 years as a customs inspector in New York, and by the time of his death in 1891, he had been largely forgotten. Like his character Bartleby, he "preferred not to" write the kind of books that would have sold, and the books he did write were reviled or ignored for their heterodox religious views and their ambiguities. When Melville dedicated The Confidence Man to "victims of auto-da-fe," he was including himself among them.

In 1856, after an extended conversation with Melville, Hawthorne made the following entry in his journal: "Melville…began to reason of Providence and futurity, and everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’….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…."

Heterodoxy of all kinds was inherent in America from its very beginnings. It took root in the freedom that the wilderness conferred upon settlers and adventurers; it became manifest in the quest for religious freedom; and it was the natural outcome of the Enlightenment spirit of the Founders. It is not surprising that Herman Melville, our greatest writer, should have been an iconoclast.