RMMLA: Conference Abstract Display

Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Pluralism in Herman Melville's Later Poetry
In the prose supplement to Battlepieces, Herman Melville’s collection of Civil War poems, Melville calls for a sense of “sacred uncertainty” to be the guiding principle used to settle disputes “among men and nations.” The felicitous phrase “sacred uncertainty” provides an apt summary of the emphasis on religious pluralism that runs through Melville’s poetic works, from the agonized interreligious debates among various manifestations of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Clarel, Melville’s 18,000 line poem about pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to the reflections on Gnosticism, Christianity, and Buddhism, in Timoleon, Melville’s last collection of poetry. I suggest that Melville’s later poetry, with its insistent attention to the epistemological questions raised by religious difference, can serve as a touchstone for understanding how the presence of numerous contending religious identities in the nineteenth-century United States contributed to both the construction and the critique of a U.S. national identity.
Melville’s poetry offers literary scholars an outstanding opportunity to view one of the most vigorous and original intellects of the nineteenth century grappling with the problems raised by both secularization and the nascent fundamentalist reaction against secularization, the relation of personal religious identity to national self-fashioning, and the tension between the revolutionary and reactionary possibilities inherent in any system of belief. Melville’s embrace of “sacred uncertainty” in the face of religious and epistemological quandaries provides both a model for understanding the intersection of U.S. literary and religious cultures in the nineteenth century and an exemplum of rigorous wrestling with ultimate questions that is still relevant in the twenty-first century.

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