The Catnip and the Amaranth: Melville's Struggle with the "Ever-Encroaching Appetite for God"

The rose leaves, see, disbanded be-- Blowing, about me blowing, But on the deathbed of the rose My amaranths are growing. --Herman Melville, Clarel In Pierre, Herman Melville describes a vision that comes to his eponymous hero. Pierre sees the Delectable Mountain with its hillside pastures "thickly sewn with a small white amaranthine flower" that "multipli[es] on every hand," the "immortal amaranth." "Here and there" the narrator tells us, "you still might smell from far the sweet aromaticness of clumps of catnip, that dear farm-house herb." Every year, however, the amaranth "gained on the mortal household herb; for every autumn the catnip died, but never an autumn made the amaranth to wane." Characteristically, Melville turns these physical plants to his metaphysical purpose: "The catnip and the amaranth!--man's earthly household peace, and the ever-encroaching appetite for God" (343-45). (1) The amaranth, symbolic of eternal life in Paradise Lost, here represents the insatiable yearning for certainty about God. This hunger grows until it overwhelms everything else in Melville's life, choking out all hope of attaining happiness from anything earthly, represented by the domestic herb. Melville apparently struggled throughout his life with an "ever-encroaching appetite for God," planted in childhood by his Dutch Reformed mother's Calvinism and his father's Unitarianism, and this amaranthine hunger constantly threatened to choke out any merely human happiness for which he might hope. His unappeasable hunger caused him much misery. Had he been able to satisfy the hunger, it would have ceased to torment him, but he could not, as far as we are able to tell. Many critics have chased the hooded phantoms of Melville's religious concerns over the broad seas of his writings, and the interpretations they offer are widely varied. As Roland Sherrill notes, "Melville has been labeled a mystic, a savvy kind of Calvinist, a Christian existentialist, a primitive pagan, a Romantic theologian, a Protestant prophet, an atheist, and a nihilist" (481). What is still lacking is an examination of the various cycles of Melville's "dance" with Christianity without pinning him down to any particular "orthodoxy" beyond some of the basic tenets of Calvinism to which he returns over and over through the years. As revealed in his letters and traceable in his fiction and poetry, his opinions about Christian doctrine are protean, always changing in a manner that is circular or cyclic rather than a straight line of evolution. A passage in Moby-Dick identifies certain attitudes toward religion with particular stages of life, most of them immature and thus by nature unsettled. Faith, it appears, is linked with "thoughtless" childhood, when the child accepts without question the creed of his parents, and as he grows older he begins to doubt his parents' teachings and assumptions. Those doubts are followed by a confirmed skepticism, and eventually by outright rejection of religion. The adult then backs off from that position and settles into agnosticism, the "pondering repose of If." In the passage Ishmael thus muses: "There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause." Instead, he says, we pass "through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence's doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If." However, we do not stop here: "But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally" (492). "If," then, would appear to be the proper stance of manhood, but the passage offers a more complex vision than that. Melville goes on to say that this is more than simply a chronological sequence because, once one attains man's estate, one does not rest in the repose of "If" for long. …