Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil

Melville and the Problem of Evil 85
aware of the problem of evil in its philosophical sense at this
time would be an exaggeration, but his experience had plainly
led him to ask some questions, and his subsequent conduct
shows that he was unwilling to rest until he had found some
answers.

One implication of the paradox especially concerned him,
with his orthodox religious background; he discovered that
the missionaries in the South Seas, who should, according to
all of his previous teaching, have represented the best that
Christian civilization had to offer, were the source of almost
as much evil as the other representatives of the outside world.
He concludes:

The term ‘savage’ is, I conceive, often misapplied, and in-
deed when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of
every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a
feverish civilisation, I am inclined to think that so far as
the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or
five Marquesan islanders sent to the United States as mission-
aries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Amer-
icans dispatched to the islands in a similar capacity.⁴

Thus, his attention was focussed on an aspect of the para-
dox that was to lead to the heart of the problem of evil—
What was the relation of the organized church to evil? He
was not far from the search for a theodicy that was to come
soon—Why does God himself allow evil to exist?

Omoo, his next book, a continuation of the adventures
described in Typee, reflects the same general position and
need not concern us here. Mardi, however, published in 1849,
is quite a different book. The germinative forces were work-
ing furiously, and the plant was luxuriant and formless.
Mardi begins as a straight-forward romance of adventure,
then turns suddenly into a bewildering historical, political,
religious, and philosophical allegory. It is a fascinating puz-
zle of a book, but for our purposes this afternoon we can
examine only one or two points.

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