Is Herman Melville's 18,000-line centennial poem Clarel (1876) worth reading today? If you are interested in religion and religious traditions in American culture today, then you might read his long jeremiad about American culture in his day to stimulate and provoke your own reflections on American culture today. William Potter's 2004 book can help us explore how to understand Melville.

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) July 8, 2020: Herman Melville (1819-1891), whose paternal and maternal grandfathers were heroes of the American Revolution, heroically devoted years of his life in obscurity as a minor customs official in Manhattan to writing his long centennial poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) - an American Protestant jeremiad in the well-established tradition that Sacvan Bercovitch describes in his book The American Jeremiad (University of Wisconsin Press, 1978; 2nd ed., 2012), in which he discusses Melville from time to time (see the index entry for Melville for specific page references).

However, without ever adverting explicitly to the American Protestant jeremiad tradition in general, or to Bercovitch's book in particular, William Potter (born in 1955; Ph.D. in English and American Literature, City University of New York, 1998) otherwise extensively reviews pertinent related literature in his 2004 book Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds (Kent State University Press). As Potter explains on page xiii, the expression "the intersympathy of creeds" is taken from Melville's poem Clarel (Part 1, Canto 5, Line 207 - or, for short, 1.5.207).

An overview of Potter's book is in order. After the title page and the copyright page, the book includes the following parts:

Dramatis Personae [Names of Nine Characters, with Lines from the Poem Describing Each One] (page v)

Contents (page vii)

Acknowledgments (pages ix-x)

Introduction (pages xi-xxii)

Chapter 1: Clarel and Nineteenth-Century Comparative Religion (pages 3-9)

Chapter 2: Melville as Comparative Religionist (pages 10-19)

Chapter 3: Nineteenth-Century Comparative Religion and the Evolutionary Model (pages 20-24)

Chapter 4: Manifest Destiny and the "American Religion" (pages 25-37)

Chapter 5: Protestantism, Science, and Democracy in Clarel (pages 38-47)

Chapter 6: Beginnings: The Protestant Problem (pages 48-61)

Chapter 7: "Jerusalem" [Part 1 of Clarel] (pages 65-92)

Chapter 8: "The Wilderness" and "Mar Saba" [Parts 2 and 3] (pages 93-122)

Chapter 9: "Bethlehem" [Part 4] (pages 123-146)

Chapter 10: Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism [And Certain Other World Religions] (pages 149-177)

Chapter 11: Judaism and Christianity [Including Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox Traditions] (pages 178-210)

Notes (pages 211-225)

Works Cited (pages 227-233)

Index (pages 235-240)

In the index of Potter's book, we do find "intersympathy of creeds" (page 237). However, even though it contains an entry on "orthodoxy," it does not contain entries for the terms "creed(s)" and "heterodox(y)" - terms that occur frequently throughout Potter's densely packed book. Similarly, it contains an entry for "doubt" (page 236), but no entry for "faith" or "belief."

In any event, Potter structures the adult Melville's inner wrestling in terms of head versus heart, and then Potter discusses the theme of the tempered heart in the poem. In the index, "tempered heart" theme is an entry (page 239). But there are no entries for "head" or "heart."

Now, Potter quotes a "memorable comment by Melville in a June 1851 letter to [Nathaniel] Hawthorne: 'I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head! I had rather be a fool with a heart, than Jupiter Olympus with his head'" (page 57). But I am reasonably sure that Melville evolved into this position only after he had first embraced the "head" positions he inherited from his mother's and his father's Protestant religious backgrounds.

However, Potter himself does not turn his attention to Melville's own personal religious beliefs until we get to pages 204 and 205, where Potter at long last discusses Melville's mother's South Reformed Dutch Church with "its stern [Calvinist] doctrine and teachings" "about Original Sin" (page 204) and then discusses Melville's father's less stern Protestant religious background (page 205). In addition, Potter briefly discusses Melville's own adult religious practices (page 205). In my estimate, Potter should have worked up a profile of Melville's own personal religious beliefs early in the book.

Let me now make my point about Melville's own personal religious beliefs in a different way. Could we see his wrestling with religious thought in Clarel (1876) as largely a report of his wrestling in his own psyche between his mother's Protestant religious background and his father's Protestant religious background - with both religious backgrounds amplified by respectively allied American and European "head" positions and tendencies?

Both of those parental Protestant religious backgrounds do not include Jewish or Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox traditions - three other Western religious traditions discussed in the poem (along with numerous non-Western religious traditions).

But Potter says, "One of the reasons Melville seems to demonstrate what is, for him, a newfound respect for Catholicism in Clarel - a respect much remarked upon by critics of the poem - may well be that in its tradition and rites it both complements and empowers the faith of its believers, and thus provides a means to endure the tribulations of the world" (page 99).

Enduring the tribulations of the world seems to me to be the central point of the poem. If one's religion can help provide one with a support system for enduring the tribulations of the world, more power to it.

Because Melville had no significant contact with Catholics, his earlier anti-Catholic views grew out of his American Protestant cultural conditioning. In a flash-forward to today, we should note that the former American Catholic Philip Jenkins has published the 2003 book The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (Oxford University Press) and the American Jesuit Mark S. Massa has published the 2003 book Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York: Crossroad).

In another flash-forward to today, we should note that Pope Francis advances jeremiads against capitalism and materialism and consumerism that carry forward certain aspects of Melville's jeremiad in Clarel.

In any event, Melville's "newfound respect for Catholicism in Clarel" is part of the broader "spirit of respect accorded all religions and their rites and traditions" in Clarel, according to Potter (page 124) - a theme he also finds expressed in "Max Muller (Chips from a German Workshop [1869, page] xxiii), Carlyle (Sartor Resartus [pages] 230-231), and Tennyson (Idylls of the King)."

Now, in the index, there are entries for the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism, Confucius, Christianity, comparative religion, Confucius, the Dhamapada, Faizi, Gilgamesh, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, the Koran, Luther, Muslims, Protestantism, the Ramayana, religion, the Song of Roland, Taoism, the Zend-Avesta, Zionism, and Zoroastrianism. Clearly religious figures and religious traditions dominate Potter's discussion of Melville and his 1876 poem.

However, in general, each big thing that Melville studied eventually led him to take a not uncritical view of it, which of course gives Potter much to explain about Melville's not uncritical views.

Now, in the index, there are entries for twenty-one characters in the long poem: (1) Abdon, (2) Agar, (3) Agath, (4) Arnaut, (5) Belex, (6) Celio, (7) Clarel, (8) Derwent, (9) Djalea, (10) the Dominican priest, (11) Don Hannibal, (12) the Lyonese, (13) Margoth, (14) Mortmain, (15) Nathan, (16) Nehemiah, (17) Rolfe, (18) Ruth, (19) the Syrian Monk, (20) Ungar, and (21) Vine. (In the 1991 edition of Clarel, Walter E. Bezanson discusses thirty-two major and minor characters in the poem.)

Of the twenty-one characters that Potter lists in the index, eight are Americans: (1) Agar, (2) Clarel, (3) Nathan, (4) Nehemiah, (5) Rolfe, (6) Ruth, (7) Ungar, and (8) Vine (page 52).

The three characters who seem to represent American Protestantism are the young divinity student Clarel, Rolfe (based on Melville circa 1851, about the time of his June 1851 letter to Hawthorne quoted above), and Vine (loosely based on Hawthorne circa 1851). But they are not identified with any particular forms of American Protestantism - it seems that Melville deliberately makes them non-denominational, as Potter notes (page 48).

But Potter also offers other ways to categorize the pilgrims: "Clarel, Rolfe, Vine, Derwent, Nehemiah, Nathan before his conversion [to Judaism], and the [Scottish] Presbyterian Elder are all of Protestant background, but of a decided variegated aspect and belief - the Presbyterian Elder brings to his atheism all the harsh and uncompromising aspect of his Calvinist background. So it is with the Catholic characters Celio, Salvaterra, Ungar, Don Hannibal, and the Dominican; with the numerous Greek Orthodox characters encountered in the poem, especially at Mar Saba [in Part 3 of the poem]; with the Jewish characters Abdon, the converted Nathan, Agar, Ruth, Margoth, and the Lyonese, the archetypal Wandering Jew; with the Islamic characters Djalea, Belex, the Arnaut, many important unnamed shepherds and guards, and so forth" (page 18).

But certain criticisms of Potter's ambitious book are warranted.

(1) On page xv, Potter says, "Clarel is, by far, Melville's most embittered and sustained critique of America." Yes, to be sure, it is a sustained critique of America. But just how embittered in Melville? Shouldn't a jeremiad be cutting?

After all, on page 105, Potter refers to "implacable wrath." But if Melville is embittered, as Potter says, then isn't he expressing his implacable wrath by writing Clarel? But if he is not embittered nor motivated by implacable wrath, then what would move him to write such a sustained jeremiad? The Homeric epic the Iliad is about the wrath of Achilles. But is Clarel about the wrath of Melville?

On page 11, Potter says, "Clarel is, to be sure, an extremely vitriolic and embittered work that treats in considerable detail the Christian spiritual crisis of the nineteenth century." No doubt it does treat in considerable detail the Christian spiritual crisis of the nineteenth century. But just how vitriolic and embittered is it? Shouldn't a jeremiad be cutting?

Because Potter uses the word vitriolic to characterize Melville's tone and attitude in Clarel, I should point out here that Melville himself uses the capitalized term Vitriolist(s) three times pejoratively in the 1991 edition of Clarel: pages 126 (Line 112), 183 (Line 48), and 218 (Line 178). So by characterizing Melville as vitriolic in Clarel, is Potter suggesting that Melville himself should be lumped together with the Vitriolists he himself rejects?

On page 32, Potter says, "It is precisely these kinds of attitudes that Melville takes so severely to task in his withering critique of America throughout Clarel." Ah, withering critique strikes me as a fair and accurate characterization of Melville's centennial poem.

(2) On page xvii, Potter says, "Some [nineteenth-century Christians], such as Cardinal [John Henry] Newman, steadfastly refused to accommodate the discoveries of science and clung obstinately to their religious beliefs, but they were very few." But Potter provides no accompanying note to support his allegation about Newman's take on science.

In Walter Jost's 1989 book Rhetorical Thought in John Henry Newman (University of South Carolina Press), Jost discusses Newman's various views of science (pages 142-143, 162-169, 275n58, 276n63, and 279nn27-28). In Ian Ker's massive 1988 800-page book John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford University Press), Ker discusses Newman's various views of science and religion (pages 258, 395-396, 541, 624, 669, 704, 729-730, 734-735, and 744).

(3) On pages 26 and 50, Potter quotes an historical source from Miller. However, in his Works Cited, Potter lists no Miller. Thanks to the database WorldCat, and to Potter's specific statements on pages 26 and 50, I have identified the source as Perry Miller's The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Harvard University Press, 1950).

However, it strikes me that Miller's 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press) is most relevant to Potter's interest in American Protestants, especially Miller's detailed discussion of the Protestant educational reformers Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and Omer Talon (c.1510-1562) (see the index for specific pages references ). Miller tried to understand their thought to the best of his ability, but he ended up calling for further study of their thought.

About a decade later, the American Jesuit Walter J. Ong (1912-2003) stepped forward to undertake his doctoral studies at Harvard, with Miller as the director of his massively researched doctoral dissertation - 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 (2) Ramus and Talon inventory, a briefly annotated listing of more than 750 volumes that Ong had tracked down in over 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe by Ramus and Talon and their allies and critics.

Briefly, the Art of Discourse in the subtitle of Ong's book includes the use of reason by medieval Roman Catholic philosophers and theologians such as the Italian Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274) - which will be rejected in the Age of Reason because of its alleged mysticism. By contrast, what Ong refers to as the Art of Reason refers to reason as Potter uses the term throughout his book.

I am sorry to report that Potter is not the only American scholar who is not familiar with Miller's 1939 book and Ong's 1958 books. In the American Jesuit philosopher and theologian Donald L. Gelpi's 2000 book Varieties of Transcendental Experience: A Study in Constructive Postmodernism (Collegeville, Minnesota: A Michael Glazier Book/ Liturgical Press), Gelpi discusses what he refers to as the American Protestant dialectical imagination, which is more accurately understood as the Ramus and Talon dialectical heritage in American Protestantism (pages 82, 132, 164, 172, 174, 192, 193, 206, 223, 224, 280, 281, and 282) - which Gelpi contrasts with the Roman Catholic analogical imagination.

(4) Now, on page 39, Potter says a number of things that deserve comment. For example, he says, "In its theoretical implications, Protestantism was a revolt of reason against (Catholic) mysticism, a revolt that tacitly allied with much of the endeavor of Renaissance humanism, which had similarly striven to conceive and comprehend the world according to a rational basis."

But what is this supposed Catholic mysticism? Certain Protestant thinkers, such as Kant, operationally defined the metaphysical thought of medieval thinkers such as Aquinas as mysticism! However, Kant evidently never studied Aquinas' thought. the use of reason by medieval Roman Catholic philosophers and theologians such as the Italian Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274).

Potter goes on to quote Vassilis Lambropoulos as claiming, not entirely accurately in my estimate, that Renaissance humanists saw Protestant religious reformers as allies with the humanist educational reformers "in the struggle of their educational movement against scholasticism."

But what was this scholasticism against which the Renaissance humanist educational reformers saw themselves as struggling? Potter does not operationally define and explain this term - which he himself later uses, as we will see momentarily.

Moreover, there was a phenomenal Renaissance educational movement among Roman Catholics, spearheaded by the recently founded Jesuit order. Concerning the remarkable spread of Jesuit education, see the American Jesuit church historian John O'Malley's 1993 book The First Jesuits (Harvard University Press, esp. pages 200-242). Concerning Renaissance humanism as an educational movement, see the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist Walter J. Ong's 1967 encyclopedia entry on "Humanism" that is reprinted in volume four of Ong's Faith and Contexts (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999, pages 69-92).

Potter also says, "In contrast to mysticism and the authority of Rome, Protestantism, in its most fundamental implications, required that its adherents regard the natural world according to the dictates of the intellect and reason [but not reason as discussed by Aquinas], since it was maintained that the natural world had been deliberately designed and arranged by its creator in such a fashion as to enable it to be 'deciphered' accordingly" (my emphasis).

Then Potter adds a note in which he offers the only instance in his book of a flash-forward to our contemporary American scene. On page 215, in note 2, Potter says, "This view [of God's design of the natural world], the so-called argument from design, is still employed by [Protestant] fundamentalist and creation Christians, usually in an effort to show that the universe was created by an intelligent being (and thus to negate theories of evolution)." That much is true about certain American Protestant fundamentalists who advance the argument by design. However, it is also possible for certain other Christians and Jews to embrace God as the creator of the universe and embrace, at least in broad outline, evolutionary theory - as Ong, for one, does.

(5) On pages 48 and 49, Potter discusses Mircea Eliade's thought about what he styles as Great Time (or sacred time) versus what he refers to as "'the tyranny of Time'" (meaning ordinary profane time). Then Potter says, "As Protestants [Clarel, Rolfe, and Vine as non-denominational Protestants], they look away from the formalism and ritual, and to this degree they stand apart from the icon-making traditions of belief and worship depicted elsewhere in the poem, such as Judaism, Islam, and the Greek and Catholic branches of the Christian church."

Ong is fond of referring to Eliade's work. For example, see his 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, pages 15, 113, 132, and 161-164), the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University. In Ong's bibliography, he lists three books by Eliade. However, in other works, Ong refers to still other books by Eliade.

Concerning the icon-making tradition in Western Christianity, see Hans Belting's 1994 book Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, translated by Edmund Jephcott (University of Chicago Press).

Concerning Protestant iconoclasm, see John Phillips' 1973 book The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535-1660 (University of California Press) and Joseph Leo Koerner's 2004 book The Reformation of the Image (University of Chicago Press).

In any event, because I see Eliade as part of Jung's circle, I would point out here that Potter's 2004 book can double as broad introduction to the comparative religion thought that Jung and his circle studied.

(6) On page 51, Potter says, "So constrained are the three [non-denominational American Protestants Clarel, Rolfe, and Vine] that any effort to transcend the bonds of self only seem to result in awkward silences and glances or clumsy attempts at intimacy." Then on page 216, in note 1, Potter says, "There are at least twenty such 'silences' or moments without words in Clarel. . . . These 'silences' occur in the following cantos:

"Part One, 'Jerusalem': 11, 15, 16, 22, 28 (twice), 30, 33, 42

"Part Two, 'The Wilderness': 27 (twice), 30, 33

"Part Three, 'Mar Saba': 8, 24, 30

"Part Four, 'Bethlehem': 6, 13, 16, 32."

In other words, there are no I-Thou encounters (in Martin Buber's terminology).

Now, when we turn our attention to Ong's thought, we should note that he regularly celebrates what the Jewish philosopher and religious thinker Martin Buber refers to as I-Thou encounter between two persons. But no I-Thou encounters occur in Melville's Clarel - and Potter does not happen to advert explicitly to Buber's most famous book. However, Ong adverts explicitly to I-Thou personal encounter so frequently that I have included a reference to it in the subtitle of my book about Ong's life and work, Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology and the Word and I-Thou Communication, 2nd ed. (New York: Hampton Press, 2015; 1st ed., 2000).

(7) On page 124, Potter says, "This move [in the poem] into the political realm introduces the next major comparative religion pattern in Clarel, that is, the spirit of respect accorded all religions and their rites and traditions - even when it is obvious they no longer carry any metaphysical truth - as a means of organizing and maintaining cultural and societal interests." I would characterize this spirit of respect as ecumenical. In the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the Roman Catholic Church formally and officially embraced such an ecumenical spirit of respect for Judaism and other world religions.

(8) On page 141, Potter sums up one of Melville's centennial poem's patterns as "the knowledge derived of suffering." However, nowhere in Potter's book does he mention the similar theme in Aeschylus.

(9) On page 142, Potter sums up the various intellectual currents that contributed to what Melville and others at the time refer to as annihilation of self. We can perhaps fairly characterize this process as unselving, in a manner of speaking. There appears to be no evidence that Melville ever claimed to have experienced the optimal experience of unselving, however that may be described. But I should point out here that a psychotic break can also be referred to as a kind of unselving, the kind in which ego-consciousness is overthrown by the person's unconscious.

However that may be, in Ong's 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press), the published version of Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, Ong refers to selving in God (esp. pages 119 and 143-144) - which strikes me as something radically different from unselving. But selving in God is basically the way in which humans participate in God in the process known as deification. Here are some historical studies of the idea of deification:

Norman Russell's 2004 book The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford University Press). A. N. Williams' 1999 book The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford University Press). Bernhard Blankenhorn's 2015 book The Mystery of Union with God: Dionysian Mysticism in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas (Catholic University of America Press). Daria Spezzano's 2015 book The Glory of God's Grace: Deification According to St. Thomas Aquinas (Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University; distributed by the Catholic University of America Press).

But the process of deification is presumably part of the mysticism rejected by Protestants, and so we find no explicit mention of this process in Potter's book or in Melville's centennial poem.

(10) On page 144, Potter says, almost as an aside, "Much religious orthodoxy, in particular Christian orthodoxy, is predicated upon reason and understanding; the ideas of Scholasticism, for example, work well enough if God is a rational being" - as God is in Aquinas' thought.

For an accessible sampler of his thought, see the 2020 edition of Reverend Dr. Matthew Fox's book Sheer Joy: [Four] Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality (Mineola, New York: Ixia Press/ Dover Publications). Concerning deification, mentioned above, see pages 33, 154-156, 162-164, 170-171, 255-256, 305-307, and 380. Incidentally, Fox sees certain statements that Aquinas makes as broadly compatible with evolutionary theory (pages 125-132).

In conclusion, as I stated above, I am reasonably sure that Melville from an early age first embraced the "head" position of his mother's and father's respective Protestant religious backgrounds - and then later in life evolved into holding the "heart" position he describes in the June 1851 letter to Hawthorne. In short, ideas have consequences, as Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963) reminds us in his 1948 book Ideas Have Consequences (University of Chicago Press).

In my own personal experience, and in my admittedly limited view of other people, it strikes me that people do not change their minds about issues that are significant to them ("head") without undergoing a concomitant change of heart about the issue in question. For this reason, the tempered heart theme in Clarel strikes me as an ideal worthy of being embraced.

Ah, but will poetry-reading Americans and others in the English-speaking world change their minds about reading Clarel as a significant landmark in our cultural history? I would suggest here that the trick to drawing fruit from reading Clarel involves what Gelpi refers to as the Roman Catholic analogical imagination, mentioned above - that is, the reader of Clarel must be able not only to see himself or herself in each character, to one degree or another, but also to see others in his or her life as analogous to each character. In this spirit, I noted above that Pope Francis' jeremiads resemble certain aspects of Melville's jeremiad in Clarel.

Now, Melville sketches the characters in Clarel in sharp outlines. However, certain academic secularists today do not seem to respect religion and religious traditions. Among Melville's sharply drawn characters, such secularists do not seem to be analogous to any of them, unless we add further distinguishing details about certain characters and certain secularists. However, I would suggest that some secularist academics may be analogous to the various people Melville mentions in each of the three passages in which he uses the term Vitriolist(s), mentioned above.

Now, Potter has helped me deepen my understanding of Melville both as a product of his times and as a critic of his times in his centennial jeremiad Clarel. Robert Browning famously said, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for." Melville's reach in his centennial jeremiad surely exceeded his grasp. It is a wonder that he sustained himself in writing such a long and complex poem - which Potter's 2004 book helps clarify enormously. It is a further wonder that he managed to live roughly fifteen more years despite the crushing blow of its spectacular failure. Ah, but a part of the poem's message centers on endurance.

Authors Website: http://www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell

Authors Bio:

Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book WALTER ONG'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL STUDIES: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WORD AND I-THOU COMMUNICATION (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2009, forthcoming). The first edition won the 2001 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology conferred by the Media Ecology Association. For further information about his education and his publications, see his UMD homepage: Click here to visit Dr. Farrell's homepage.

On September 10 and 22, 2009, he discussed Walter Ong's work on the blog radio talk show "Ethics Talk" that is hosted by Hope May in philosophy at Central Michigan University. Each hour-long show has been archived and is available for people who missed the live broadcast to listen to. Here are the website addresses for the two archived shows:

Click here to listen the Technologizing of the Word Interview

Click here to listen the Ramus, Method & The Decay of Dialogue Interview