¹ Melville's Calvinist upbringing has been recognized as an important influence on his mature work, but mainly as the source of generalized intellectual tendencies. William Bras-well in Melville's Religious Thought (New York, 1959) stresses “the sturdy faith of Melville's family and some of his friends” (p. 8) as a source of characteristic habits of mind. But he does not offer a description of the Calvinism in which Melville was reared or bring it directly to bear on his writing. In Maule's Curse (Norfolk, Va., 1938) Yvor Winters discusses Melville's allegorical mentality as a legacy of Calvinism. But his interpretation of Moby-Dick does not recognize the extent to which Melville uses theological materials. Lawrance Thompson's Melville's Quarrel with God (Princeton, N. J., 1952) studies Melville's treatment of religious themes; but it is primarily concerned with allegorical technique and blurs the doctrinal background. Although William H. Gilman claims that the Unitarianism of Melville's father liberalized the religious atmosphere of the home, he makes it clear that young Herman received a thorough grounding in Calvinist theology and Biblical interpretation. See Melville's Early Life and Redburn (New York, 1951), pp. 22–27, 79–82. Gil-man's conclusion suggests, indeed, that Calvinist and anti-Calvinist elements were present together in the early religious influence on Melville.

² Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville's Reading: A Checklist of Books Owned and Borrowed (Madison, Wis., 1966), p. 98. This book, by the Englishman John Taylor of Norwich (1694–1761), was of considerable and durable importance in American religious thought. Jonathan Edwards attacked it extensively in The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (1758). See Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (Cleveland, Ohio, 1959), pp. 273–278. Its repute in Melville's time is indicated by the fact that Edward Beecher in 1853 cited Taylor's “celebrated work against original sin” as an important influence on the New England theology, and as a precursor of Unitarianism. See Edward Beecher, The Conflict of Ages (Boston, Mass., 1853), pp. 333–343.

³ Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York, 1950), pp. 179–180. He argues that the antithesis shows that “pride and disobedience, in at any rate some dimly Christian senses, are at the root of Ahab's wickedness.” Lawrance Thompson regards the antithesis as “the Mapple-sermon trap which encourages a certain kind of reader to make his ultimate interpretation in terms of Christian doctrine” (pp. 10, 428).

⁴ John Taylor, The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, proposed to a Free and Candid Examination (London, 1740), Supplement (London, 1741), p. 43. Hereafter cited as Taylor. We do not know what edition of this book Melville owned, but it is almost certain that his edition contained the supplement to the first edition from which this quotation is taken. The Union Catalogue Division of the Library of Congress reports five editions in addition to the first: 1741, 1746, 1750, 1767, and 1845. All of these editions carry the supplement. I would be very grateful to receive information concerning the whereabouts of Melville's copy.

⁵ Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York, 1967), p. 50. Subsequent references are to this edition.

⁶ John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. F. L. Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, Pa., 1960), ii, 920–932. Hereafter cited as Institutes.

⁷ Calvin's Calvinism, trans. Henry Cole (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1950), pp. 264–265. This volume contains Calvin's two polemical treatises, “The Eternal Predestination of God” and “The Secret Providence of God.” Subsequent references to this edition appear as Calvin's Calvinism.

⁸ R. S. Foster, Objections to Calvinism (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1849), pp. 53–54. Hereafter cited as Foster. I do not propose that Melville read Foster. I cite him as an important contemporary anti-Calvinist whose outcries help bring into focus Melville's depiction of cosmic evil. This work marked the beginning of Foster's rise to prominence. Within eight years he was president of Northwestern Univ. and later became president of Drew Theological Seminary. In 1872 he was elected Bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church. See James E. Lake, Bishop Foster's Heresy (Bordentown, N. J., 1889), p. 11.

⁹ Other writers have noticed that Moby Dick serves as a symbol for an evil God. See Braswell, pp. 57–73, and C. C. Walcutt, “The Fire Symbolism in Moby-Dick,” MLN, Ltx (1944), 304–310. These studies do not, however, recognize the importance of Melville's contact with Calvinist tradition (and its adversaries) in their interpretation of the meaning of the white whale. In his ascription of cosmic evil to Moby Dick, Melville also uses elements of Gnostic tradition, in which the origin of evil was explained through doctrines of an evil creator God, inferior to the supreme God. See Thomas Vargish, “Gnostic Mytkos in Moby-Dick,” PMLA, lxxxi (June 1966), 272–277. For yet another body of religious tradition employed by Melville here, see H. Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods, Melville's Mythology (Stanford, Calif., 1963), pp. 53–98. Franklin shows how the struggle of Osiris and Typhon, as found in Egyptian mythology, informs Melville's treatment of Ahab's conflict with the whale.

¹⁰ Jay Ley da, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 2 vols. (New York, 1951), i, 381.

¹¹ A view which competes with Ahab's sees the whale as the symbol of an amoral natural realm, not an evil supernatural. See Nathalia Wright, “Moby Dick: Jonah's or Job's Whale?” AL, xxxvii (1965), 190–195.

¹² See Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent, ed., Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, by Herman Melville (New York, 1952), p. 637–652, for an extensive discussion of other sources of Melville's characterization of Ahab.

¹³ Calvin's Calvinism, pp. 195, 240, 288, 321. Institutes, i, 176, 219, 230, 620; ii, 1170.