Now, for a medieval Roman Catholic synthesis of religious faith and reason that is not tortured by religious doubt, see the 2020 edition of Fox's "interview" book Sheer Joy: [Four] Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality, mentioned above.
Now, in terms of the subtitle of Ong's 1958 book, Aquinas is a stellar example of the Art of Discourse. For Ong, the exemplars of the Art of Reason (in the so-called Age of Reason; also known as the Enlightenment) are not only Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and his allies, but also Locke, Descartes, Kant, and others. As odd as it may sound, even though I have no reason to think that Melville was familiar with Aquinas' thought, in Clarel, the semi-autobiographical but idealized character Rolfe comes across as something of a practitioner of the Art of Discourse in the wide-ranging spirit of Aquinas - and so does the narrator (presumably the voice of Melville at a more advanced age than the version of Melville idealized in Rolfe).
For a more recent Roman Catholic synthesis of religious faith and reason that is also not tortured by religious doubt, see Ong's 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God, mentioned above. But the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) did not publish his poetry in his lifetime - his poetry was published posthumously early in the twentieth century. So Hopkins had no influence on Melville.
No doubt Melville notices in Clarel that, in effect, the genius of Roman Catholicism is its adaptability. (For the record, I am not trying to convert anyone to Roman Catholicism.) But Bezanson is not particularly impressed by this recognition of Catholicism's adaptability in Clarel, whereas Knapp is.
The name "Clarel" calls to mind that American Enlightenment that included the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the eventual adoption of the U.S. Constitution. But we should note that the very term "Enlightenment" invokes a light v. darkness contrast. In other words, in the print culture that emerged in Western culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s, educated people in the prestige culture tended to fancy themselves as agents of light and tended to see earlier instantiations of Western and other cultures as representing darkness.
This tendency to project darkness on different cultures is captured famously in Joseph Conrad's short novel The Heart of Darkness (1899). For a perceptive discussion of Conrad's short novel, see Ong's article "Truth in Conrad's Darkness" in Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas (University of Manitoba Press), volume 11, number 1 (Fall 1977): pages 151-163, which is reprinted in volume three of Ong's Faith and Contexts (1995, pages 186-201).
In nineteenth-century America, the light v. darkness imagery tended to be associated with individualism v. community imagery - in which the community polarity could be imagined as tribalism - you know, like the cannibals in the South Seas among whom young Melville had lived. Thus tribalism could be imagined as aligned with darkness. But this way of imagining the world was bad news for American Indians whose ancestors had lived in tribes - as had the early tribes of ancient Israel commemorated in the Hebrew Bible.
Now, early in Knapp's 1971 book, he 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 [sic] through mercy and grace of a sovereign God, to belief in the potential divinity in every man [sic]'" (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 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 [sic] 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 the Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) 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).
For a perceptive discussion of Kierkegaard, see the lay American Catholic philosopher James Collins' 1953 book The Mind of Kierkegaard. Collins also discusses Kierkegaard briefly in his 1952 book The Existentialists: A Critical Study (esp. pages 3-24, 31-39, 98-101, and 145-147).
Now, Knapp says, "However, in spite of their differences, they [i.e., existentialists] all begin with man [sic], 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).
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