Excursus II

The Cock

A contribution to the political-theological heraldry of the Bible and its re-writings

In Basel once the magistrate

Had thrown a cock to city prison,

The cock had done a deed which had

the smell of Beelzebub’s own kitchen.

Contrary to nature he had

Laid an egg—oh spiteful of the Lord!

The cock—a sacrilege on top of that—

Was as repentant as a wooden board.

So he was put on trial,

Questioned, tortured, and then damned,

And, rightly so, before all eyes,

A stack of wood beneath its feet inflamed.

The cock crowed pitifully: “Cock-a-doodle-dee!”

The Basel crowds broke into song,

But suddenly, someone’s shout: “Get on your knees!

By God! It just crowed: Kyrie eleison!”

This is Christian Morgenstern’s poem “The Cock,”402 as critical of religion as it is comical. This cockerel was, it seems, also proud, spiteful even, against the “Lord God” himself. But at the end—the bitter end though, since “pride goes before a fall”—it could only “pitifully” screech “cock-a-doodle-dee.” And bowing before the Cross, it even screeched “Kyrie eleison,” meaning “Lord, have mercy.” The poem would be hardly over-interpreted if “revenge liturgy” (which Friedrich Heer mentions in view of Barbarossa’s tribunal against the city of Milan as it insisted on its autonomy403) concerned the imperial city’s trial of the Basel magistrate against this cock. With his choice of words the left-Catholic historian Heer wants to raise awareness not least of the fatal representation of the Christus Iudex by Caesar Augustus, the point being that the worldly imperator had served as a model for the heavenly one, or—in the Greek Eastern Roman Empire—the Basileus, i.e., the Kyrios as a model for the Christos. Indeed, thinking in particular of the Kyrios, one might ask whether the glorification or “lord”-ification of Jesus of Nazareth had not in some ways already begun in the New Testament. At first of course its “Kyrios” Christos completely functions as a counter-ruler or counter-lord—the “Imperator” Christ of an early translation of St. John’s Revelation still has to be understood analogously. But then, at the latest, the Constantinian development made converge, or even had a tendency to identify, what had previously conflicted with each other to the point of mutual exclusion.

One of the many fascinating moments of Herman Melville’s short story “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! or, The Crowing of the Nobel Cock Beneventano”—an emphatic example of (literary) joke, (social) satire, (humane) irony and deeper (political-theological) significance—is that its “noble” titular cock is characterized as follows: “A cock, more like a golden eagle than a cock. A cock, more like a field marshal than a cock. A cock, more like Lord Nelson with all his glittering arms on, standing on the Vanguard’s quarter-deck going into battle, than a cock. A cock, more like the Emperor Charlemagne in his robes at Aix-la-Chapelle, than a cock.”

“Such a cock” was this archetypal cock-crow “Beneventano,” named so by the first-person narrator after an opera tenor. Not merely an “extraordinary cock” or even just poet “laureate,” who, like the “Great Bell of St. Paul’s,” was “more obstreperously exulting than before”; but rather, as a “cousin of great Jove” (as it is explicitly noted), he was “a golden eagle.” In that very way he is reminiscent of a “field marshal . . . like Lord Nelson,” even “Charlemagne in his robes at Aix-la-Chapelle.” He, according to his own court theologians, was the “New Constantine.” Melville probably has Albrecht Dürer’s imaginary portrait of this first occidental Emperor in mind, which portrays him with all the wealth of the “Imperial Regalia” still extant today. But the Euro-American poet (who was everything but “laureate”) also has his first-person narrator frightened at the “cock Beneventano” as an “overpowering angel in the Apocalypse. He seemed crowing over the fall of wicked Babylon, or crowing over the triumph of righteous Joshua in the vale of Askelon.”

It is important that, in the Apocalypse invoked here, Rome is Babylon, and that Melville sets “John” within the tradition of the Old Israel (though the tradition which takes the land of others, rather than the one leaving the Egyptian house of slavery). Nonetheless, Melville’s systematic or rather contemporary intention is unambiguous: right in the first sentence he deplores that “in all parts of the world many high-spirited revolts from rascally despotisms had of late been knocked on the head.” Melville, who adores the “tribune . . . Rienzi,” sympathizes with the revolt as a principle.

Melville, this direct descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Founding Fathers, was at first enthusiastic about the promulgation of the Virginia Bill of Rights and the American Constitution, which had become a reality without the regicide of the French Revolution, without its descending into terror and ending in restoration. The young Melville was really almost the incarnation of the American sense of mission. In a famous passage from chapter 36 of White-Jacket, which gained him great popularity, it says: “But in many things we Americans are driven to a rejection of the maxims of the Past”—just like the old Israel. “Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not follow after the ways of the Egyptians. To her was given an express dispensation; to her were given new things under the sun. And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”

For Melville, America carried the promise of an earthly paradise, and he considered himself called to contribute to its realization. This promise meant for him the liberation from all slavery and despotism, the realization of the individual, “royal” human being. He was particularly keen to speak of America according to his utopian expectations: “We are all kings here.” Melville’s expectations were first and foremost formed in reaction against the old, mostly Catholic-aristocratic world of Europe. But increasingly he denounced the bondage of the North-American industry, and above all he recognized that—in the New World—the conflict between aristocracy and bourgeoisie had transformed.

The critique of industry, as it can be found mainly in “Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids,” is articulated as a critique of slavery: “Machinery—that vaunted slave of humanity—here stood menially served by human beings, who served mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan.” At the same time Melville’s critique makes use of religious, mainly Gnostic metaphors, as the title “Tartarus of Maids” already indicates. In White-Jacket a ship’s chaplain is criticised as follows:

He was particularly hard upon the Gnostics and Marcionites of the second century of the Christian era; but he never, in the remotest manner, attacked the everyday vices of the nineteenth century, as eminently illustrated in our man-of-war world. Concerning drunkenness, fighting, flogging, and oppression—things expressly or impliedly prohibited by Christianity—he never said aught. But the most mighty Commodore and Captain sat before him; and in general, if, in a monarchy, the state forms the audience of the church, little evangelical piety will be preached.

Melville himself recurs to the Gnostics in order to apply their critique of the world to state and society; and especially so in “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” (a story closely related to “Tartarus of Maids”): the object of this satire is the “wonderful world” concept of the “poet Blandmour,” who claims “that the blessed almoner, Nature, is in all things beneficent; and not only so, but considerate in her charities, as any discreet human philanthropist might be.” It is immediately obvious that Melville acerbically mocks the philanthropy of the rich, especially since Blandmour—just as others presuppose the “self-healing powers” of the market—believes in the self-healing powers of nature; that “through kind Nature, the poor, out of their very poverty, extract comfort.”

“Kind Nature” and the good “Lord” invoked previously: they are the declared enemy of Gnosis, and equally of Melville, who makes metaphorical use of their topoi. Of course it presupposes that historical reality increasingly looks like the Gnostic world prison; “Israel Potter,” who was “well-named—bondsman in the English Egypt,” and as such, without glossing it over, “a prisoner” for “the best part of his life.”

One can also think of Melville’s doppelganger Redburn, to whom the world became strange when he had to leave his own world of home: “. . . I felt thrust out of the world.” It was merely a matter of consistency, also in a Gnostic sense and wholly in the tradition of the rebellious arch-Yankee Israel Potter, that in Redburn “the devil . . . then mounted up from my soul, and spread over my frame”—to the point of “insanity.” Melville’s own “spiteful” motto could also be: “Let the world and all aboard of it go to pot. Do you be jolly, and never say die! What’s the world compared to you? What is it, anyhow, but a lump of loam? Do you be jolly!”404

Nonetheless, this maxim and the “far, deep, intense longings for release” must never become fundamentalist or occult. The biblical reference must retain a political connotation, as it says elsewhere in Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! or, The Crowing of the Nobel Cock Beneventano, which I just apostrophized again. There, as we know, the cock is compared to an “overpowering angel in the Apocalypse”: “He seemed crowing over the fall of wicked Babylon, or crowing over the triumph of righteous Joshua in the vale of Askelon.” In this case what holds is Benjamin Franklin’s maxim in Israel Potter: “God helps them that help themselves.” Indeed, in some circumstances the question not only (rhetorical) is: “What’s the world compared to you?,” but it is also the question of Ahab, the rebel against the world and God: “What is God compared to you, devil?”

Ahab the paranoiac, however (in line with his Old Testament name in 1 Kings 16:29–33), is conceptualized as such an ambivalent figure that, in the struggle against the “malignity which has been from the beginning,” embodied by the white whale, the “God incarnated”—the godless world or its divine “tyrant,” he himself uses “devils” and becomes a cannibalistic shark; he dies with the feeling that “my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.” Ahab’s idiosyncrasy, having bid farewell to everything social, by no means draws Melville’s sympathies, but the rebel who asks whom he would obey does. Equally the arch-Yankee Israel Potter has “no king,” saying that as a Republican of course, and hence a social utopian: “I was not born a serf, and will not live a slave!”405

Israel, imprisoned in England, believes he can locate his island Utopia as a “far Canaan beyond the sea” in the United States. The young Melville still believed that freedom had already been victorious in his county. Later he understood that the presumption of a salus praesens is the worst possible ideology—though without betraying the utopia. Like Israel Potter he continues to await the day that is yet “to come.” Already White-Jacket closed with the words: “. . . and though long ages should elapse, and leave our wrongs unredressed, yet, shipmates and world-mates! let us never forget, that, ‘Whoever afflict us, whatever surround, Life is a voyage that’s homeward-bound!’”

No doubt this is a temporally distant, if not altogether alien, but in every case “Gnostic” home. Most importantly, this implies that Melville—in contrast to Ahab, for example—was pessimistic only about the status quo, but as for himself, as a champion of the principle of rebellion, he was also a representative of the principle of hope. It is impossible to elaborate this any further here. But at least the question of all questions should be asked: What is the relationship of Melville’s modern-Marcionite cock to the one that crowed after Peter had denied Jesus three times (Matt 26:74)? In light of the mandated shortness I refer to Part I above, “Humilitas qua Sublimitas: Erich Auerbach’s sociology of literary religion in the context of modern Marcionism.”

The most relevant is the section “Auerbach, Bloch (Harnack) and Taubes.” This present essay is an homage (hardly to “Doctor Martinus,” but) to my friend Martin Leutzsch. In previous times one would have said “brother,” and later “comrade”: from the 1960s to the 1980s of the twentieth century this “Red Cock” of the Evangelical Student Communities tried to be not a flag in the wind (on church bell towers such as Cleversulzbach), but the connection of the Confessing Church’s cock-crow with the young Karl Marx’s “Gallic” rooster. Already Melville in the “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo” story had said that the crows of the “cock of all cocks” had risen “like a full orchestra of the cocks of all nations”: as a global, or indeed “apocalyptic” crowing. And what did it say, “Christmas-like” only in appearance? I quote Melville: “Don’t be afraid.” Or then even the New Testament, and there also Luke 2:10: “Have no fear.”

402. In e.g., Christian Morgenstern, Alle Galgenlieder (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1975), originally published in 1905.

403. Cf. Richard Faber, “‘Geschichte ist Gegenwart’: Die Tragödie des Heiligen Römischen Reiches, die politische Religiosität des Dritten Reiches und der Aufgang Europas, Mutter der Revolution, in der Sicht eines Offenen Humanismus.” In Offener Humanismus zwischen den Fronten des Kalten Krieges: Über den Universalhistoriker, politischen Publizisten und religiösen Essayisten Friedrich Heer, edited by Richard Faber (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005) 127–150, 143.

404. *Translators’ note: collage from: Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! or, The Crowing of the Nobel Cock Beneventano.

405. *Translators’ note: collage from: Melville, White-Jacket.