Looking for God in Moby-Dick

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

In his last book, God and the American Writer, the great American critic Alfred Kazin explored the sometimes uneasy but always implicit relationship of American writers to religion. Indeed, even Kazin’s most magisterial books, such as On Native Grounds and Contemporaries, and even in his stunning autobiography, A Walker in the City, brim with insight into American literature’s peculiar roots in religion. 

Of course, even a casual reader might say that religion abounds in American literature. William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation compares the new colony to Jerusalem by declaring Plymouth a “City set upon a hill” and a light unto the nations. Puritan poet Edward Taylor meditates on ways that the sacred imbues nature in poems on wasps and spiders, and he reflects more formally on the liturgy in his poems on the Eucharist. Anne Bradstreet’s poetry finds the spiritual in the everyday, especially in her dedication to her book of poems.

Who can forget the opening of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter with those dour Puritans gathered around a prison-house awaiting the prisoner on whose body is emblazoned a symbol of illicit love? (Although the scarlet “A” has a broader range of meanings, it is most often understood to mean “adultery” and to name Hester Prynne’s crime.) Who does not recall the opening lines of Melville’s whale of a tale, Moby-Dick, surely the great spiritual epic of America, akin to Milton, Blake and Joyce? The conflict between good and evil—even in The Confidence Man, his satirical and somewhat cynical tale, the forerunner of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts—and the struggle between innocence and experience run deeply in all of Melville’s writings.

Emily Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Henry James, Marjorie Kinan Rawlings, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, and Reynolds Price surely belong on any short list of authors whose writings at once embrace the religious nature of the American identity and struggle with the strangely religious character of the American character. Of this list, perhaps Updike more than any other symbolizes the modern conflict with the sacred and the profane, especially in novels such as Roger’s Version, A Month of Sundays, and the Rabbit novels.

Although critics like R.W.B. Lewis (The American Adam), Kazin, and even contemporary novelists and essayists like Marilyn Robinson (The Death of Adam) and Wendell Berry (The Way of Ignorance) have explored the role of religion in American literature, there have been few recent books that have attended to this relationship.

Lundin, who teaches at English at Wheaton College and is the author of a fine study of Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief), and his contributors provide a splendid collection—There Before Use: Religion, Literature, and Culture From Emerson to Wendell Berry (Eerdmans; $18)—that ranges widely through the canons of American literature.

Lundin introduces the study by observing the late Jenny Franchot’s note that, in the late twentieth century, religion is the “invisible domain” in the study of American literature. “We are rich is studies that foreground gender, race, and to a lesser extent, ethnicity and class. But where is religion? Why so invisible?” Lundin and his fellow essayists seek to remedy this situation by revealing the depths of religion and its influences in American literature and culture.

The starting point for the volume is Emerson’s famous Harvard Divinity School address, “The American Scholar” (1837) in which he argues for the creation of a distinctly American culture free of “the learning of other lands” and “other men’s readings of their transcripts” of the divine. As Lundin points out, “Emerson had sought to establish a new foundation for American literature and made its relationship to religion suddenly and significantly more complex.” The collection of essays traces Emerson’s ideas through Melville, Thoreau, and Henry James up through the Modernists T.S. Eliot, Pound, and H.D. who struggled with religion in their own day much as Emerson struggled with it in his day.

John Gatta’s essay on Thoreau, for example, examines the ways that nature is Thoreau’s cathedral. Walden Pond, according to Gatta, was more than “just an attractive place to live cheaply and freely. As the focal point of Thoreau’s romantic naturalism, it was also the locus of his worship.” Relying on naturalistic science rather than the Bible or other sacred texts, Thoreau could argue that “the visible facts of creation became his chief source of revelation and spiritual authority beyond the human soul.”

In his splendid essay on Melville, Michael Colacurcio examines the problem of evil in Melville’s fiction. He focuses on the places in Melville’s writings where “the problem of universal defect comes face to face with the question of human obligation.” In some really stunning critical readings of Melville’s stories, especially “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo,” and “The Piazza,” Colacurcio demonstrates that Melville is an enigmatic religious thinker. Melville trusted, as Colacurcio points out, God would not destroy him for “pursuing without cynicism the moral evidences that call into question our best metaphysical proofs.” Melville’s stance “left ample room for faith, should it ever be given.”

Other essays deal with writers as diverse as Mark Twain, Frances E. W. Harper, Henry James and Ezra Pound.

The missing piece here is an essay or set of essays that bring these concerns into contemporary American literature. So, where, for example, is an essay on Philip Roth? Or an essay that deals with Bobbie Ann Mason, Harry Crews or Doris Betts? The book would have benefited from some attention to these or other important contemporary American writers who still struggle with these issues.

This is a small quibble, however, with such a splendid collection of essays on religion and American literature by some world-class literary scholars. There Before Us provides a nice starting point for discussions about the peculiar relationship between religion and literature in America.


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Henry can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it