Melville and the Problem of Evil 91
An account of a voyage in a ship of the United States Navy,
it concentrates on a matter then being agitated, flogging as
an official punishment in the Navy. But this leads afield
from the problem of evil.
After publishing three books in eleven months, Herman
Melville apparently found himself with enough sea room to
pile on full sail, if I may borrow his sea symbol for a moment.
During the next twenty-two months the problems of moral
navigation involved in Moby Dick seem to have occupied his
attention. He was reading voraciously, testing his own ob-
servations of evil and his own speculations concerning its
origin against the opinions of others.
How could one determined to find the truth account for the
fact that man’s affairs so often go wrong? Melville’s Calvin-
istic background gave him one answer in the doctrine of
original sin; as every New England Puritan child learned
with his letter A in the New England Primer, “In Adam’s fall
we sinned all.” In a book review written in the summer of
1850 Melville referred to “that Calvinistic sense of Innate
Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some
shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly
free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world
without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to
strike the uneven balance.”10 Yet it must have been difficult
for Melville, with his strong democratic bias (demonstrated
all through his work) to accept Adam’s fall as a final decree.
How could he honor a God who would damn the whole
human race for eternity because of Adam’s one act of dis-
obedience? For this was the same Melville who wrote jest-
ingly to his friend Hawthorne in June of 1851, “You perceive
I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the
Deity; don’t you think there is a slight dash of Aunkeyism in
that usage i”11 Melville was determined to get at the whole