"I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head!" wrote Herman Melville in his June 1851 letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne (Davis and Gilman 3). Yet, by the time he began writing Billy Budd, Sailor in 1888, Melville must have tempered this view, for Billy Budd depicts the inevitable destruction of a man who is all heart but who utterly lacks insight. Melville no doubt intends for his reader to connect this tale with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Billy Budd endures a persecution similar to Christ's; he is executed for like reasons, and he eventually ascends, taking "the full rose of the dawn" (BB 376). Yet, in creating Billy Budd, Melville forms a character who is but a half-Christ, more like the Child than the Man. Indeed, a number of characteristics and circumstances sharply distinguish Billy Budd from the complete Christ. These differences ultimately work to support Melville's (now refined) philosophy that innocence, unaccompanied by wisdom, must inevitably meet with destruction and that only when a man balances the "spontaneous impulses of [his] 'heart'" against the experiential "wisdom of [his] 'head'" (Howard 328) can he prevail in a fallen world.

Critics often connect Billy Budd with the Christ Child. Richard Chase, for instance, writes that Billy Budd is the realization of Melville's "fresh commitment to the infantile Christ" (267), and Milton Stern claims that Billy's behavior represents an "ideal Christliness" because he accepts "everything with animal insightlessness and the childlike faith of innocence" (216). Christ taught that to enter heaven, one must become like a little child (Matt. 18:2-3). Many have inferred from this that, from a Christian perspective, childlike ignorance must be good while experience and wisdom must be bad. Yet, in so doing, they apparently forget that not only did Christ evaluate things with insight, but He also insisted that His disciples be "wise as serpents" as well as "harmless as doves" (Matt. 10:16).

Billy Budd is neither. He may possess the heart of Christ in that he usually unconditionally loves others, but he lacks "any trace of the wisdom of the serpent." Nor is he "yet quite a dove" (BB 300). If a peacemaker, he is a "fighting peacemaker" (BB 296). He does not, as Christ taught men to do, turn the other cheek to insults. (Unless, of course, he fails to recognize them.) When "the Red Whiskers . . . insultingly [gives] him a dig under the ribs," he hits the man (BB 295). Yet the "Red Whiskers" grows to love Billy nonetheless, probably because the sailor has a harmless heart, if not a harmless arm. Billy is like the Christ Child--loving, innocent, and never maliciously harmful--but he little resembles the mature Man.

Melville, as can be discerned from reading his novels, was clearly no orthodox Christian. However, he had a more complete view of Christ than that with which most critics credit him, a more complete view, perhaps, than is possessed by such critics themselves. Melville appears to have been at least as concerned with the mature Christ as with the Christ Child. It was the experienced Christ, the "Man of Sorrows," whom Melville referred to as "the truest of all men" (Moby Dick 392). No allegory is complete; Melville himself wrote in his November 1851 letter to Hawthorne that "we pygmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended" (Davis and Gilman 7). Yet the differences between Billy Budd and Christ are so many and so great, that they could not have been unintentional byproducts of an imperfect allegory. Certainly Melville intends to allude to Jesus Christ when he describes Billy Budd, but this is partly because it is only when the reader first considers connecting the two that he can then begin to distinguish between them.

Billy has no concept of his own origin. He does not know where he was born, and when asked who his father is, he responds: "God knows, sir" (300). At the age of twenty-one, he is still unsure of his identity. In contrast, Christ is aware of both His birthplace and His lineage. At the young age of twelve, He is already "about [His] Father's business" (Luke 2:49). Christ is no ideal of "animal insightlessness." In fact, even when He is but twelve years old, experienced and educated teachers are "astonished at His understanding" (Luke 2:47). Billy Budd is "illiterate" (BB 301); Christ, however, is so learned that the people marvel "at His teaching" (Mark 1:22). Billy Budd suffers from an intrusive "vocal infirmity" (BB 332); Christ's words are so memorable that they "will by no means pass away" (Mark 13:31). Christ speaks in parables, but to "deal in double meanings and insinuations of any sort [is] quite foreign to [Billy's] nature" (BB 298).

True, Billy Budd is persecuted, like Christ, for jealousy's sake. Indeed, Claggart is even compared to Christ's persecutors: "The Pharisee is the Guy Fawkes prowling in the hid chambers underlying some natures like Claggart's" (BB 330). Claggart, like the Pharisees who seek to trap Christ, is jealous of his victim's popularity and feels justified by "a sort of retributive righteousness" (BB 330). But whereas Christ repeatedly and knowingly escapes the Pharisees who are "lying in wait for Him" (Luke 11:54), Billy Budd can not fathom the possibility that Claggart is really "down on" him (BB 320). Christ notes the true motives of the Pharisees, but Billy does not note "the involuntary smile, or rather grimace, that accompanie[s] Claggart's equivocal words" (BB 322). Christ recognizes that the world is full of "wolves" and warns His disciples to "beware of men" (Matt. 10:16-17). Yet, when Billy is approached by just such a wolf, a man suggesting mutiny, he does not know "exactly what to make of" it (BB 332).

When Christ is faced with a similar trap in Matthew 22:15-22, He cleverly escapes. The disciples of the Pharisees ask Him whether or not the Jews should pay tribute to Caesar. If Christ answers yes, He offends the Jews who consider God, and not Caesar, their King. But if He answers no, His response could be interpreted as an act of rebellion (i.e. mutiny) against the Roman government (Richards 624). But He "perceive[s] their wickedness" and turns their question against them. "Whose image and inscription is this?" He asks, and they reply: "Caesar's." "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's," Christ reasons, "and to God the things that are God's." His response effectively leaves His questioners with no grounds upon which to accuse Him. Billy Budd, when prodded to make a mutinous assertion, can only escape by threatening violence (BB 332). He "instinctively [understands that the overture] must involve evil of some sort," but he "ill comprehend[s] it" (BB 333). Because "it never enter[s] his mind that here was a matter which, from its extreme questionableness, it was his duty . . . to report" (BB 335), Billy only serves to make himself vulnerable to further ensnarement.

It is this unawareness, this innocence, that leads to Billy Budd's death. Stern argues,

Melville repeatedly suggests that innocence, in the need for a knowledge of the history of the only world there is, is not a saving virtue, but a fatal flaw. The very goodness of Billy's ignorance of the world, while in accord with Christian teaching, becomes the sin of nonunderstanding, noncommunicating mindlessness marked by the stutter . . . Leaving no doubt at all about the nature of his rejection of ideal, Christly behavior, Melville sums up his statement about Billy by saying, "As it was, innocence was his blinder." (215)

Stern is not accurate when he states that ignorance of the world is in accord with Christian teaching and that Melville, by rejecting Billy's innocence, must necessarily be rejecting the Christian ideal. Christ's own knowledge of the world and His insistence that His followers be as wise as serpents discredit such an assertion. Even Stern himself appears to undermine his own pronouncement when he writes that the "problem of Billy's mindlessness is not merely one of the Christlike purity which is an absolute and predetermining absence of evil" (215). The critic is correct, however, to insist that Billy's innocence is his fatal flaw, "his blinder" (BB 338). This innocence, in so far as it implies ignorance rather than mere moral purity, actually distinguishes Billy Budd from the experienced and aware Christ.

Even before Judas kisses Him, Christ knows He is about to be betrayed (Mark 14:41-42). Billy Budd, on the other hand, is shocked by Claggart's accusation. Captain Vere is certainly predisposed to believe Billy, yet the sailor "is unable to answer the charge, even though the captain benevolently puts his hand on Billy's shoulder and tells him to take his time" (Chase 260). Christ prevents Peter from issuing a possible death blow to the high priest's servant because He believes His crucifixion is necessary (John 18:10-11). Billy, however, necessitates his own death by killing Claggart with a blow. Had he been wiser, more articulate, and more experienced, like Christ, he could have spoken a few words in his own defense and easily escaped. "Could I have used my tongue," he says, "I would not have struck him. But . . . I had to say something, and I could only say it with a blow" (BB 357).

Billy Budd, although he suffers some brief agony "mainly proceeding from a generous young heart's virgin experience of the diabolical incarnate and effective in some men" (BB 371), feels no fear, intimate betrayal, or physical pain. He "is hanged after sleeping the night out with the serene happy light of babyhood playing over his features" (Chase 266). Christ, the reader should recall, walks knowingly into His death trap only after spending a sleepless night in Gethsemane, where He "began to be troubled and deeply distressed" (Mark 14:33), where He begged his Father "if it were possible" to spare Him from death (Mark 14:35-36), and where He sweated "great drops of blood falling down to the ground" (Luke 22:44). Billy Budd is "wholly without" fear of death (BB 372), and he never asks Captain Vere to alter his punishment. If Billy Budd envisions Vere as an "authoritative but kindly father" (Chase 269), he certainly reacts very differently to his father than does Christ. Billy Budd, upon his hanging, exclaims: "God bless Captain Vere" (375). Stern writes that this "is the 'I forgive you Father, for you know what you must do'" (234-235), but Stern's words bear no likeness to what Christ actually says to His Father on the cross. However mentally resigned Christ may be to His death, He feels intimately betrayed at the moment of His crucifixion, and He cries: "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Mark 15:33). Billy Budd experiences no such betrayal; nor is he struck or mocked like Christ (John 19:1-4). Toward the beginning of the story, the sailor witnesses "the naked back under the scourge" (BB 318), but he himself is never flogged. Had Melville desired it, the novelette's setting would have been ideal for drawing an analogy to the scourged Christ, but he makes no such comparison.

While Christ dies for the sins of others, Billy Budd ultimately dies for his own crime, however unintentionally it may have been committed. Christ is cautious to avoid premature entrapment and surrenders Himself only when His appointed "hour has come" (Mark 14:41); Billy Budd's action, on the other hand, "could not have happened at a worse juncture" (BB 353). A situation requiring Christ's death exists even before His birth. Billy never has to die until he himself creates the appearance of mutiny; he then has to die to preserve the peaceful status quo. Christ, although apparently persecuted by the Jews in order to preserve the status quo, actually dies to uproot it, affecting an eventual overthrow of the standing religious order and the gathering "together in one the children of God" (John 11:52). Billy Budd, unlike Christ, does not sacrifice himself; rather, he merely makes his sacrifice necessary.

Captain Vere is the one who must make the actual sacrifice. It is fitting, then, that he should more nearly resemble Christ. His "unobtrusiveness of demeanor" and his "unaffected modesty" (BB 310) are perhaps not far from the meekness of Christ. Even his name, "Vere," signifies at once both "truth" and "man" (Chase 276). Just as Christ was part man and part divine Truth, Vere, although a man, resembles God. He is like the Father who must offer up the Son He loves. Billy Budd's suffering is not as great as Christ's, but "Melville tells us that the ordeal of the sentence and the hanging [is] worse for Vere than it [is] for Billy" (Chase 262). Indeed, Vere is twice compared to suffering biblical fathers. He is by implication like Jacob, "the troubled patriarch," who has "the blood-dyed coat of young Joseph" thrust upon him (BB 346). He also resembles Abraham who does not wish to sacrifice his son Isaac but who yet sets out to obey God's command (BB 367).

Aside from his greater suffering and his dual (man-God) nature, Vere also more nearly resembles Christ on a mental level. He has "a marked leaning toward everything intellectual" (BB 311), and he is considerably perceptive. As Christ saw through the plots of the Pharisees, so too does Vere soon realize that there is something amiss in Claggart's testimony and that the man is even intentionally "attempt[ing] to alarm him" (BB 343). Claggart reminds Vere of a "perjurous witness" (BB 344). And "though at the time Captain Vere [is] quite ignorant of Billy's liability to vocal impediment, he immediately divine[s] it" (BB 349; emphasis added).

Vere is not all intellect--his suffering evidences his heartfelt emotions--but, like Christ, he must overcome his feelings in order to do what he knows is best for the nation. He is "no lover of authority for mere authority's sake" (BB 355); a bigger issue is at stake than an exhibition of prerogative. Vere must choose "either individual justice or communal justice; for in the fate of Billy Budd possibly rest[s] the fate of an entire nation, perhaps even of 'the Old World'" (Sten 192). He can not allow "warm hearts" to betray "heads that should be cool" (BB 362). Vere's allegiance, like Christ's, is not to "Nature," but to "the King" (BB 361). As Leon Howard writes,

A responsible man could not afford simply to trust his "heart." He had to . . . conquer his own best and most natural impulses, sometimes, in order to do that which was right. If Melville's long search for a philosophy came to an end in his representation of Captain Vere, it ended with a victory neither for the spontaneous impulses of the "heart" nor for the cold wisdom of the "head." Good will and good sense must modify each other in order to produce good action. (328)

If it is not remorse that causes Captain Vere to mumble "Billy Budd" on his death bed (BB 382), then perhaps it is the knowledge that his sacrifice of Billy successfully prevented the awakening of "any slumbering embers of the Nore among the crew" (BB 355) and therefore ensured that the Bellipotent would not be vulnerable to the French enemy. Vere understood that "the historical moment demands the sacrifice of self to the possible victory that the combined head and heart may achieve" (Stern 208).

Although Captain Vere is not a perfect allegory for the character of Christ, he is a nearer one, in many ways, than Billy Budd. Melville distinguishes Billy Budd from Christ because Billy's innocence is not, in fact, Melville's ideal. Although others might ignore "the doctrine of man's Fall" (BB 301), "Melville still knew that once a man had bitten of 'the questionable apple of knowledge' he could not return to Nature and the time before Cain. Billy Budd suggests that the Fall is a rite of passage as irreversible as it is perilous" (Sten 201). Christ came, in part, to teach men how to live a righteous life in an unrighteous world. "Everyone with an objective," writes Christopher Sten, " . . . must use the imperfect means of the world to achieve his end" (200). Had Billy Budd learned, like Christ and Vere, to balance the impulses of the heart against the wisdom of the head, he would have known to expose Claggart for the man he was. Instead, Billy's "animal insightlessness" and his heart's natural tendency to see only the good in people prevent him from saving himself and lead him to an otherwise unnecessary death.

The "ideal Christliness" is found not in the "animal insightlessness" of Stern, but in the perfect balance between feeling and thinking. "The reason that the mass of men fear God," wrote Melville to Hawthorne in June of 1851, "and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch" (Davis and Gilman 3). In Moby Dick, Melville rejects this extreme of the head: Ahab, who is mentally obsessed with a single idea, ignores his heart and thus meets with destruction. However, in Billy Budd, Melville also rejects the extreme of the heart. Billy Budd may represent the heart of Christ, but he bears no likeness to the mind; he is analogous to the Child but not to the Man.

Christ, in contrast to Billy Budd, is neither all brain nor all heart; His love is a mixture of the two, and His advice is that men should be both as harmless as doves and as wise as serpents. They should temper their hearts with wisdom when such restraint will lead to lasting good. Christ wisely tempers His heart when, against all its natural impulses, He submits to the Cross; thus, He prevails in bringing true peace and deliverance from the enemy Death. Vere, too, tempers his heart when he allows Billy to be executed; thus, he prevails in maintaining order among the crew so that the ship does not fall prey to the French enemy. Billy Budd's death, which would not have been necessary had he been wiser, issues the reader a sad warning against discounting the importance of the wisdom of the head, and it inspires him to reevaluate the often taught (and often labeled Christian) view that goodness and knowledge are somehow mutually exclusive.

Works Cited

Chase, Richard. Herman Melville: A Critical Study. New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1971.

Davis, M.R. and W.H. Gilman, eds. The Letters of Herman Melville. New Haven: Yale UP, 1960. Online. Internet. 29 July 1998. Available HTTP: www.melville.org

Howard, Leon. Herman Melville: A Biography. Berkley: U of California P, 1951.

Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. Ed. Frederick Busch. New York: Penguin, 1986.

- - -. Moby Dick. Ed. Charles Child Walcutt. New York: Bantam, 1981.

Richards, Lawrence O. The Bible Reader's Companion. Wheaton: SP Publications, Inc., 1991.

Sten, Christopher W. "Vere's Use of the 'Forms': Means and Ends in 'Billy Budd.'" On Melville: The Best from American Literature. Ed. Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady. Durham: Duke UP, 1988. 188-202.

Stern, Milton R. The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1968.

The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Dallas: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1979.

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