My objective in this preliminary chapter will be to survey religious and theological sentiments within various social strata between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in both Europe, the American colonies, as well as the United States. In order to make any substantial claim about the way Melville responds to the Bible in literary form, I first ask at what point the Bible becomes susceptible to these kinds of textual interrogations. When does the Bible become a literary document? What are the reasons and consequences for this development? And how do they impact other intertextual dealings with the Old and New Testament? In answering these questions, it is imperative to look beyond the edges of the nineteenth century, and occasionally even beyond the eighteenth century, to track intellectual currents and make visible the
germination of ideas regarding the authority of the Bible. Doing so enables me to trace the various intellectual traditions in which Melville’s texts inhabit and to sketch out a genealogy of literary approaches to the Bible. This revised genealogy not only records the Bible’s shifting cultural currency in the wake skeptical challenges but also considers how its authority is often effectively undermined by those in charge of formulating exegetical practice. The way Melville mediates this process and discerns the multifarious forces behind it is more complex than has heretofore been stated. His mediation certainly consists of more than a mere osmotic assimilation of German higher criticism. In fact, the dynamism of many of his texts stems from their
oscillating between deism, skepticism, Baconian empiricism and religious nostalgia.13 Finally, mapping the American intellectual landscape in this way enables me to addresses two of my
13 As my analysis will show, the utility of Melville’s work as a window on these manifold discussions
concerning the Bible lies in the fact that his form never completely congeals so as to restrict his ability to react to new ideas and discourses. Until the end of his career, he continuously experiments with new voices, types, and established literary formats, for instance, the dialog.
main complaints with existing author-centered scholarship on Melville: one, the claim that Melville displays unorthodox and radically skeptical views in his writing that alienated
contemporary readers; and two, the related biographical claim that his wide reading was a unique phenomenon that presaged high modernist sensibilities.
Historical contextualization is not its own boon, however. Historiography, rather, allows me to put in relief the licensed and unlicensed textual dealings with the Bible at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Jonathan Sheehan identifies one possible starting point for this
investigation when he places the origin of what he calls the “cultural Bible” in the eighteenth century.14 Up to this point, biblical scholarship had posited theological truth as the authorizing mechanism behind Biblical authority. However, Enlightenment continental theologians
inadvertently unleashed a veritable avalanche of methodologies upon Scripture in order to
reassert its authority. As Sheehan notes, scholars in Germany and England in particular sought to build a Bible whose authority was distributed across a variety of disciplinary
domains. Moving beyond the King James and Luther Bibles [. . .] scholars and literati dedicated themselves to the production of new translations that collectively reshaped the authority of Scripture. The Enlightenment Bible was [. . .] never singular, always plural. (xiii)
Translation, for one, had been the primary mode of scholarship up until the seventeenth century, with Luther’s translation as well as the Geneva and the King James Bible standing as paragons of the political character of this practice. For translators, the issue of the inspired interpreters of the Bible was key: earlier translators had claimed inspiration when translating the text and sourced their claim back to the supposed inspiration of the original authors of the Testaments. In fact, the King James Bible which Melville and his contemporaries still used, was amongst the most inaccurate translations. Textual authority derived from translation and consequently appeared
14 Sheehan discusses different reconceptions of the Bible within cultural consciousness to characterize his
more and more dependent on political impetus rather than authentic inspiration. Biblical
authority began to seem arbitrary even to lay observers, for if the contents of the Bible could be falsified, such consistency would imply that the Bible did not contain immutably divine truth after all. Similarly, the new historicist methodology revealed the Bible’s anthological structure. Canonization in the OT, for instance, depended on consensus among different, first-century Jewish groups, as well as the manifold translations and revisions from Aramaic to Hebrew and Greek. Given the political nature of translations in European early modernism, these early translations, too, were all but politically disinterested. Beyond that, translation and interpretation required both technical skill as well as divine inspiration. For the Protestants in particular,
translation was an instrument for cleansing the Bible from the misconceptions and corruptions of human accretions. Thus exegesis, especially in eighteenth-century England, was very much political. And in the wake of the Enlightenment, the fight over the singular soul of Scripture arguably ended only when the Bible became multiple.
Seen in conjunction, the very multiplicity of the enterprises launched to restore the Bible’s authority during the Enlightenment, ironically eroded its authority by turning Scripture into a “project” rather than an object (Sheehan 91). The Bible, in Sheehan’s words, spoke with multiple voices, and “Its authority had no essential center, but instead coalesced around four fundamental nuclei. Philology, pedagogy, poetry, and history” all of which began to be seen as giving distinct answers to religious questions (91). As the means of exegetical legitimization of Biblical authority became fragmented, the Bible’s authority came to be rooted not in theology, but in what Sheehan calls “the complex of literature, teaching, scholarship, and history that came to be called culture” (Sheehan 91).15
15 Sheehan defines the Enlightenment by its desire to solve the theological problems of the past as well as
One of my underlying agendas in the subsequent chapters is reading Melville in the context of this shift from a theological to a cultural Bible. By contextualizing Melville’s texts within the findings of Sheehan and others, I follow Christopher Grasso’s and Rita Felski’s respective arguments that literature is sensitive to the intricate fault lines in grand social phenomena and can therefore function as an access point to the complex shifts in exegetical technique and religious sentiments of the nineteenth century (Felski, Uses 16). As such, I will consider the state of American theological and religious thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from two categorical angles: that of clerical specialist institutions, which includes debates on theology, exegetical technique and institutional politics, and that of lay culture, which encompasses the various means by which lay audiences engaged scripture and how those
encounters reciprocally shaped the discourses of Scripture, nationalism, foreign politics, and empirical science.
My narrative takes its cues from historical studies that consider phenomena such as the scientific revolution and its effects on religious thought as gradual transformative processes rather than hereditary, mythical conflicts. Unfortunately, quantitative studies on religious thinking and the knowledge base of lower- and middle-class citizens remain scarce, as they depend on church attendance records and membership ledgers—data that is often incomplete or unreliable. By the same token, sweeping statements about the state of American religion in the nineteenth century frequently amount to little more than inaccurate generalizations; one example is the radical character historians have traditionally attributed to the so-called Darwinian
revolution and the significance of the conflict between science and religion. By the same token, the proliferation of sectarianism—especially evangelicalism and its mission of communal
communication tools, and new or revived techniques of data organization and storage—that the eighteenth century
transformation—as well as the many symbiotic relationships between spiritualism and economic enterprise (e.g., print-distribution networks, lecturing circuits) make it impossible to dismiss religion as merely another monolithic ideology.
With this historical survey, I begin to partially answer Ebel and Murison’s call for a reconsideration of the object of religion in literary studies beyond the simply binary of ‘good/bad’ (3). Albeit that my overall argument aims specifically at Biblical exegesis, the perception of the Bible and its theological contents in any epoch are obviously tied up with contemporary religious sentiments. Thus, I will begin with rather broad strokes to talk about the ideas that informed religious life from the middle of the eighteenth-century onwards and
supplement my narrative with details illustrating particular facets of communal transformation as I go along.16
Seeing that the wisdom books are part and parcel of my primary object of this study, my survey will be biased insofar as I focus on the cultural afterlives of the OT in America and Europe. A case in point is Eran Shalev’s American Zion (2013), a study of political thought in the Early Republic as impacted by OT theology. Shalev contests that “[. . .] American national culture was carved out in a deeply Hebraic setting” (14). There is a marked difference between late eighteenth-century Europe and the early United States in terms of their respective cultural sensibilities towards the Bible in general and the OT in particular. This difference becomes discernible in the different velocities with which both cultures detached themselves from OT- centered theologies. In Europe, as Sheehan observes, “[t]he shift from a biblical to a neo-
16 Historians who challenge this narrative advocate for a more thoroughgoing examination of the complicity
of science and religion for much of the period I reference here. Michael Ruse, whose Darwinian Revolution remains current on the topic, is sensitive to the fact that any serious discussion of scientific revolution in the nineteenth century must acknowledge various strands that weave through the narrative of empirical discovery (xiii). Similarly, Peter J. Bowler notes that the foregrounding of the bitter rivalry between science and religion in the nineteenth century is, to a large extend, a twentieth-century fabrication. Darwin’s theories in particular were subsumed under the umbrella concept of progress and therefore initially remained compatible with the design argument (Bowler 5). Hence the revolutionizing character of what Darwin and others produced only unfolded gradually.
humanist paradigm was profound [. . .] and required a total realignment of values away from Hebraic norms and toward classical or nationally normative ones” (xiv). In contrast, Shalev stresses that while “By the late eighteenth century the moment of Hebraic introspection was long over in Europe,” political rhetoric usurped the emphasis on OT theology that Calvinist exegesis had ingrained in its congregants prior to its demise (3). In the wake of the Revolution, American political discourse fervently latched on to this rich and specifically defined cultural reservoir:
The Old Testament biblicism, the identification of the United States as a God- chosen Israel, provided a language to conciliate a modern republican experiment with the desire for biblical sanction; it could thus help alleviate anxieties related to the limits of human authority and legitimize the unprecedented American federal and republican endeavor. Tense and contradictory, republican and biblical, the early United States was forward looking and, [. . .] ‘primitivist,’ or deeply attracted to the narratives, language, and ordinances of biblical times. (2)
The American republican experiment therefore hinged upon its identification with political Israel, a rhetorical move that has its roots in Calvinist exegesis and the hermeneutics of typology (Shalev 4). As such, the United States preserved the reverence for OT theology, among other arenas, in its political discourse. And while Shalev’s point deserves more attention, I will first turn to the demise of Calvinism and its consequences for Biblical hermeneutics.