The Depravity of Esau Illumined by Billy Budd
“Is Envy then such a monster?”
In the last two years of his life, Herman Melville wrote his greatest work; unseen by the world for thirty-five years it is filled with references to “Holy Writ” and the wisdom of the Hebrew prophets as the only path to understanding human motive, particularly irrational malice; it also is a paradigm for all the contradictions of Western civilization and not only in its abundant references to the Hebrew Scriptures, forefathers, stories and themes but in the quenchless hatred of a “master of arms” for a wholesome, naïve, and good young man. Billy Budd (1890-1) is a piercing analysis of Esau’s homicidal envy of Jacob, a “subterranean fire” given more ferocity by aspects of jealously mixed with “soft yearning” for Claggart wants to be Billy and in his “mania” and “subtler depravity”[i] can become him only by destroying him and dying ‘with him.’
Here in brief is the essence, the seed, fantastically twisted, mighty tree and self-girdling malignancy of “the West” embedded in a supremely piercing text; and this in the heart of the era, the late 19th century when the West was proliferating metaphors of apocalypse, of love and death, of the Quest and its eroticized violence, all were, and are climaxing in a range of convulsions in ideologies and inventions from the fine arts to socio-economic revolution: new codes of life, mad substitutes for Torah were and are being churned out wholesale. Melville’s tale captures the enduring obsession of the West, the “monomania,” the maniacal envy-based rage of Esau gathering the entire world against Jacob.
I do not say that Melville set out to write or was aware that he was writing a parable of the West’s tormented and ambiguous identity when he constructed the tale of Billy and Claggart but that he, and the greatest and most piercing authors of this culture could not help but keep elaborating images of the conflict at their core, in their hearts and minds. Melville with his keen sense of “fate,” destiny and providence, of “innate depravity” would appreciate this fact just as he knew that his frequent, explicit recourse to Holy Writ “will little commend these pages to many readers of today”[ii]. This is true of the greatest artists of the West; they must reflect the self-contradictions and guilty pride at its core, the impossible yearnings that grew with its primal theft of Israel’s identity.
Esau he is Edom, we are told three times in recounting his descendants (Genesis 36); and Edom is Rome, “the wicked kingdom” that “lives by the sword” just as in its pagan overtly imperial age of blood, pillage, rape and perverted glory. Just as Claggart acts out, as if fated by his “depravity according to nature,” thus the conflicted Calvinist Melville describes it so he embodies the blessing of Isaac, “by his sword he shall live” which was prophetic because it understood, finally the bloody nature that had made him blind with the incense and idolatrous gross practices of Esau and his Canaanite wives[iii].
Melville understood that “notable depravity” is distinguished by “intellectuality” as is the culture of “the West” with its Greek (and secondarily, Egyptian) root strangling the ethic and reason of Israel, its profound wisdom and non-imperial stance in the world. As the Pope prepares to again descend upon Israel, wearing the ‘new-improved’ version of the Aaron’s breastplate of judgment on his vestments, proclaiming himself holder of the keys to the kingdoms of heaven and hell, the latter being an obsession of Edomite theology and ontology (the substance or nature of reality), he expresses the enormous spiritual pride and imposture, as well as the envy and mixed feelings of Claggart toward Billy.
Melville suggests from the first that Claggart is an alien, an imposter, a criminal in the fleet of the King, just as he suggests that Billy is the natural man, the “perfect man” as Jacob is known in Jewish teachings (that is the explicit meaning of the adjective, tam, first used to describe him, Genesis 25:27; the word’s main overtones are of eternity and perfection, secondarily of completeness, wholeness, simplicity in these senses and in that of uprightness and fairness, all qualities associated with Billy)[iv].
The more this “phenomenal pride” needs to exalt itself and destroy and absorb its object of envious desire, the more it subordinates its powerful intellect into designs that serve its corrupt will and appetites, “till it is an ambidexter implement for effecting the irrational.” Melville’s coined word, “ambidexter” brilliantly captures the duality as well as the perverse quality at the core of the West’s designs on Israel, designs that “riot in complete exemption from reason’s law,” that is, they are compulsive as if they had drunk, to use the vivid Jewish metaphor, “the cup of stupefaction…only to its dregs will they drain and drink,” and so with Claggart. “Toward the accomplishment of an end which in its wanton atrocity would seem to partake of the insane,” and how else can one accurately denote the long history of the West’s genocidal slander, pillage and genocide against the Jews, he will direct a cool judgment sagacious and sound” decade after decade, the Road Map to the end of time and the world of terrors sown by Amalek’s envious doubt and defiance of the Creator striving to bury the simple joy or simchah of Israel in its presence witnessing to the miracle of creation and the truths in the Book of Books. But those who say no, we will take it and improve it, take it from you because our pagan predecessor conquered and tortured you and despoiled the land the Creator gave you in an eternal covenant, “these men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort.” So it is to this day.
A fighter for the freedom of Israel commented keenly on this core fact of Western history that what all Europe wanted, Hitler did; “finally their generations-old desire was fulfilled when he came who dared” and was enabled by all the major powers, and assisted by the petty, too. Perhaps it is because they (Europeans) all are pagans, killers of messiah and “we [the Jews] remain the last religious nation on earth. Even among those of us who are not religious, their very Jewishness is a religion”[v] as is shown by the world’s association of Israel with Jews, everywhere, to this day.
If Billy in his naïve but strong purity has an implicit allusion to Jacob, along with the explicit comparison to “Adam before the fall,” he also is compared to Isaac, in Jewish exegesis, “the perfect lamb” brought as a sacrifice but only as a test of faith. “Captain Vere may at the end have caught Billy to his heart even as Abraham caught young Isaac on the verge of resolutely offering him up in obedience to the exacting behest”.[vi] Melville adds, as if in reference to Rome’s deforming appropriation of this moment that “there is no telling [explaining without being misunderstood] the sacrament when two of great nature’s nobler order embrace.”
As in his “healing” influence on the war ship, aptly named in Latin, the Bellipotent (“Power of War”) so in his hanging Billy is associated with Edom’s redeemer, murdered by the Romans; but both he and Claggart, his accuser, as Edom is of Israel to this day are associated with “the man of sorrows” when his envious love and “touch of soft yearning” to be Billy briefly overpowered “the quick fierce and strange red light, like a spark from a smithy” that expresses the alien desire to become, in raptures of death, the original man.
There is a strange, exhibitionist quality in the imperial intellectual pride of “the West” a type of which is the blatant aping of Israel’s symbols and theft of its holiest objects by Rome, when those who lead it feel compelled to expose their theft, power and designs to those targeted for their implementation. This “monomania” to expose and reveal, which runs the gamut from erotic spectaculars of rock concerts to geopolitical previews like Maurice Strong’s 1990 narrative at Davos about collapsing the world’s major economies to ‘save nature’ by globalizing power defines Claggart’s approach to Captain Vere. Claggart’s manner had “a most immodest presumption…something supersensible and strained…it reminded Vere of the ostentatious manner of a perjurious witness in a capital case”[vii]; the suggestive phrase that Billy is “a mantrap under the daisies” with its erotic undertones epitomizes the erotic aspect of the machinations and lies in the West’s imperial cult from inception and bears the stamp of the Empire from which it arose with its booty clutched in its jaws. “Gotcha” the wolf cries, again and again, stunning people like the gorgons with its mad, erotic violence and the self-worship of its elites, glorying with their lie.
The descent upon Rome of the German tribes, a response to centuries of imperial advance also was the response of a predator to the whiff of decay; central to Rome’s decadence was its imposture, its cunning attempt to perpetuate itself by donning the vestments and title of “the new Israel.” The transvestite Empire flaunted its identity theft and crisis, and the rot which ensued, drawing the Germans upon it, Constantine first and shrewdest among them. Rome then spent centuries fabricating “Europe” and teaching it to continue and conclude what it had begun but no longer could do: slaughter the Jews.[viii]. It is noteworthy that the term “European” to refer to christian civilization was first used in 1624 (OED, volume 1, 924).
Then what did Edom do: “he went to Ishmael and said, ‘come, let us join together I and you and we will rule the whole world…you will kill your brother Yitzhak and I also will kill my brother and afterwards we will inherit the entire world.”[ix]
Claggart’s malicious and homicidal erotic envy of Billy went deeper and was madder, Melville comments, than that of Saul’s fear and envy of David whom he knew would supplant him for there was no chance or intent that Billy would take Claggart’s place. Claggart wanted to be Billy; “apprehending the good but powerless to be it” “the elemental evil in him” would “like a scorpion recoil upon itself” and get Billy to destroy himself in the process. Perhaps there is an inner logic in Israel never striking first, though even when it absorbs assaults for years or centuries before belatedly rising up to reply it is “criticized and condemned for being alive,”[x] or as Melville put it, describing Claggart’s endless, Satanic efforts to vilify and accuse Billy: “Claggart’s conscience, being but the lawyer to his will made ogres of trifles”; this was “the monomania in the man”[xi] as it is of the Roman Church and of “the West” which grew out of it and still does its will, reflecting the cultural theft at its roots. As Claggart’s reason became the “ambidexter implement” of his corrupt will so the brilliant productivity and designs of the West express the “riot in its heart” from the time it decked itself out, like a transvestite in the robes, authority and some of the teachings of Israel, distorting them to its pagan cults of human sacrifice and homoerotic orgiastic rituals. The less surprise in this pattern since Aphrodite, the Greek form of the various triple Goddesses subsumed in the religion of Esau herself embodies a grotesquely violent sexual imposture and act of uprooting the father whose castrated members take form in her, the mediating goddess and love between humans and gods. Her offspring, Panic and Terror inhabit the cult and culture made in her image.[xii]
Just as Claggart’s passion corrupted his will and destroyed his reason, so too his design destroys the hope, balance and life of Captain Vere the rational and compassionate ‘best of the West’ and head of the ship, the ship that is sinking, the paradigmatic Titanic that never knows whether its main hero is Prometheus the Titan-rebel, Jupiter or Aphrodite. Is its real hero, its internal beau-ideal a warrior woman like Athena Tritogeneia who has so many pop-cultural icons in the gender wars spawned by the West out of its original trans-gender, generational coup, done, of course, to liberate “love” a goddess constituted of castrated male members and ocean foam, “the only solace for suffering man” as a Greek tragedian, one of their greats wrote.
As a fabricated composite culture whose claim to primacy rests on degrading, burying or destroying its own roots, “the West” is intrinsically self-destroying and enamored of glorious dramas of erotic death. This is the murderous and suicidal envy of the artificial for the genuine, of the composite borrowing for the integral and authentic: of Edom for Israel. The murder at stake, and its manner, is well described by an Eastern historian: “A country is an organic whole, just as the human body is an organic whole. It is not a machine that can be taken apart and put back together again. If you take it apart, it dies.”[xiii] The West is a clanking, monstrous machine that took the land and integrity of Israel and has spent its history grinding and chopping it. But Israel exceeds the scholar’s analogy and precept: with remembrance and Torah as its essence and teaching, its honor rooted in orientation toward providence and the Creator’s design, the dismembered body repeatedly re-constitutes itself to the astonishment of the world. It is the great machine of the West that in dismantling Israel disassembles itself with its fissionable history of schisms and great wars and its impending dissolution into a “global commonwealth” of terror and autocracy based on forgetting of what it was, has become and above all how it made itself. That theft wed it to denial, forgetting, and malicious envy from the first.
Envy is the great monster and the genocidal envy engrained in the West seems irrepressible as, like a pack of wolves, it pursues the Jews again into their land, carves it up, demands the expulsion of Jews from their holy places and homes, arms demonic enemies in its midst and artificial indefensible borders while strutting around praising itself for the strenuous, selfless efforts of its “peace process”; is it unconsciously that “the West,” the grand text of history replays its theft of one of Israel’s titles, and that of its human king, “prince of peace” as it inflicts war and terror on Israel and the world? It is the logic of history unfolding its flower in the twilight of the West’s apocalypse in global collapse, an orgy of the lust for power unleashed to usher in a brutal hi-tech feudalism.