I changed my mind about Billy Budd

Evolving perspectives, rule of law, and impossible standards

“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.”

— Herman Melville

¹I’m currently on the coast of the Atlantic with my wife’s family, so it seemed fitting to sit with a copy of Herman Melville’s short novels Mama recently gave me. Bartleby, the Scrivener, and Benito Cereno were new to me, and after reading them I think they make an appearance here someday—but it was Billy Budd, Sailor that I was most excited to read. I last read Billy Budd as a teenager, and I vaguely remember some school-related essay in which I agreed with Captain Vere and the majority of readers² that Billy must be executed for the sake of the law; even unjust laws must sometimes be followed for the sake of law and order. Rereading it offered a rare window directly into the mind of my past self. The occasional sentence would spark some memories otherwise lost in the recesses, and I was both pleased and flabbergasted at how they evoked a meaning for me now entirely opposed to my past interpretations of the text.

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

Let’s back up for a synopsis: Billy Budd was a handsome, jovial young sailor hired on to an English warship in 1797, immediately loved by most of the crew for his unusual combination of innocence and charisma. Recent mutinies elsewhere in the Royal Navy and subsequent changes to maritime law simmered in the background as Billy was falsely accused of conspiracy to mutiny by the Master-at-arms, Claggart. Billy, afflicted with a stutter in moments of stress (relatable, bro!), was unable to defend himself and struck out at Claggart, inadvertently killing him. Although Captain Vere and the impromptu court all realized the accusation was false and Billy meant no harm, Vere decided the law must be upheld for the sake of stability in the fleet—after all, softness could cause actual mutiny to brew—and reluctantly ordered Billy be executed by hanging.

That morning, as the ship rolled, Billy was lifted by a rope around his neck and “ascended; and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.”³ Onward and upward to heaven, or hell, or nowhere, Billy went.

Billy’s death is undeniably a tragedy, but believers in the greater good may deem it necessary. Unlike my past self, I think Melville understood the inevitability but denied the value of the execution. It was necessary to uphold law and order, to maintain the fleet, to protect progress—but for Melville, the prosperity brought by a military and the society that requires it is something to be questioned.

The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.

— Melville, Typee⁴

Billy of Billy Budd was a conundrum in the modern era, a Christ-figure thus destined to die in a world which prefers to have no room for him. Melville makes it clear Billy’s loving and friendly qualities are not the product of civilized society, impressed upon the illegitimate boy by the most developed nation in the world which raised him. Quite the opposite:

And here it be submitted that apparently going to corroborate the doctrine of man’s Fall, a doctrine now popularly ignored, it is observable that where certain virtues pristine and unadulterate peculiarly characterize anybody in the external uniform of civilization, they will upon scrutiny seem not to be derived from custom or convention, but rather to be out of keeping with these, as if indeed exceptionally transmitted from a period prior to Cain’s city and citified man.

— Melville, Billy Budd⁵

Captain Vere, far from the story’s hero, represents the pinnacle of erudite civilization and justice, the then-peak of progress. He is well-read, with “a marked leaning toward everything intellectual…never going to sea without a newly replenished library.” His library is biased “toward those books to which every serious mind of serious order occupying any active post of authority in the world naturally inclines.”⁶ He understands what must be done to protect the order maintained by his role as captain, and he is just the man to do it as fairly and justly as possible.

The sailors occupy a role in this world too, one they may not understand but have had impressed on them by civilization and they do not question: “as a class, sailors are in character a juvenile race…accustomed to obey orders without debating them; his life afloat is externally ruled for him; he is not brought into that promiscuous commerce with mankind where unobstructed free agency on equal terms—equal superficially, at least—soon teaches one that unless upon occasion he exercise a distrust keen in proportion to the fairness of the appearance, some foul turn may be served him.”⁷ Melville speaks of sailors, but what class of man is not equally juvenile in equal terms?

Unable to question the underlying axiom of civilized life, we put the wrong question to Captain Vere and the novella: it is not did Vere do right or wrong? but rather for what did he do it? Melville puts something deeper on trial than Billy Budd or Captain Vere, but a fish has to realize water is wet on its own.

All that must be done to uphold order in a fallen world is incompatible with acts of love and forgiveness, and we all admit it when pressed. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr put it succinctly: the “ethic of Jesus was not applicable to the task of securing justice in a sinful world.”⁸ Melville is under no illusions about this reality, and neither are other members of his ilk, the great American authors—McCarthy, for example.

Faced with this simple understanding and gifted, or cursed, as he was with a drive “to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken,” his companion and fellow writer Nathanial Hawthorne relates Melville’s disposition: “he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still he does not rest in that anticipation, and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to and fro…He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature and is better worth immortality than most of us.”⁹

As a believer, I return to Billy Budd for a conclusion. If we live for the world Vere lived for, the greater good and prosperity and safety and order, we must respond as he did. If we live for something else, we must not be surprised when we are not welcome and can only wipe the dust off our feet¹⁰ or accept the second death. The execution of Anabaptist “heretic” Dirk Willems in 1569 offers a real-life example that equally serves as parable: if we believe in law and order and the status quo as mechanisms serving the greater good, we must burn Dirk at the stake though he would give his life for us in a heartbeat.

The logic used to sentence Billy to death is the sound logic of a dead world. The court renders its judgement on Billy: “At the Last Assizes¹¹ it shall acquit. But how here?”¹²

I know now what I did not as a teenager: the logic of everlasting life is incompatible with the world humans have built for ourselves. It cannot be received by a nation, or by an institution, or by any large mass of people if they wish to retain any shared identity external to their new identity as “saved by grace.”¹³ To whatever extent the obedience of faith is exhibited in response to that identity, exactly to that extent the world cannot accept us.¹⁴

Perhaps, if that obedience brings us to its terminal destination, we will have the courage to respond as Billy did on the gallows: “God bless Captain Vere!”¹⁵ Or better yet, as the real Christ did: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”¹⁶ Whatever Melville’s intended meanings in Billy Budd, I know this: if, when unjustly condemned, we allow the Wellspring of Life¹⁷ to respond, we transcend whatever suffering thus comes and heap burning coals on our enemies. Like Billy, “the condemned one suffered less than he who mainly had effected the condemnation.”¹⁸ It is not a civilized response to repay evil with good, but a response possible only for those who have no fear of death. Let us learn from Billy one last time:

Not that like children Billy was incapable of conceiving what death really is. No, but he was wholly without irrational fear of it, a fear more prevalent in highly civilized communities than those so-called barbarous ones which in all respects stand nearer to unadulterate Nature.¹⁹

May our “virtues pristine and unadulterate”²⁰ spring from the only civilization that matters.²¹

Heaven knows who will have the running of me up!
No pipe to these halyards.—But aren’t it all sham?
A blur’s in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am.

1. Opening quote from Billy Budd, Sailor in Dan McCall (ed.), Melville’s Short Novels: A Norton Critical Edition (W.W. Norton & Co, 2002), pg 147.

2. Robert K. Martin Jr., Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville, in Melville’s Short Novels, pg 361.

3. Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, pg 163 in Melville’s Short Novels.

4. Excerpt also in pg 229 of Melville’s Short Novels.

5. Pg 111.

6. Pg 118.

7. Pg 136.

8. Reinhold Niebuhr, Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist, pg 102 (possibly?) in an edition I do not currently have access to—sorry!

9. From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journals for 1856. Excerpt in pg 232 of Melville’s Short Novels.

10. Matt 10:14, Luke 10:11

11. The Last Judgement, or Day of the Lord.

12. Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, pg 154 in Melville’s Short Novels.

13. Eph 2:8-10.

14. To those who would respond that Christendom provides evidence to the contrary, I can only repeat the words of Kierkegaard in The Instant: “The Christianity of Christendom…takes away from Christianity the offense, the paradox, etc., and instead of that introduces probability, plainly comprehensible. That is, it transforms Christianity into something entirely different from what it is in the New Testament, yea, into exactly the opposite; and this is the Christianity of Christendom, of us men.”

15. Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, pg 163 in Melville’s Short Novels.

16. Luke 22:34, KJV.

17. Cf. John 7:38.

18. Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, pg 157.

19. Pg 161.

20. Pg 111.

21. Psa 87. Final quote from Billy Budd, Sailor, pg 170.