Volume 47 Number 4 Article 4 June 2019 Pursuing the White Whale: Why Christians Should Read Moby- Dick Raymond Ide Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege Part of the Christianity Commons, and the Higher Education Commons Recommended Citation Ide, Raymond (2019) "Pursuing the White Whale: Why Christians Should Read Moby-Dick," Pro Rege: Vol. 47: No. 4, 9 - 13. Available at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege/vol47/iss4/4 This Feature Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University Publications at Digital Collections @ Dordt. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pro Rege by an authorized administrator of Digital Collections @ Dordt. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Pursuing the White Whale: Why Christians Should Read Moby-Dick he was the head of the church, Pastor Melville had the audacity to tell the king to his face that he was only “God’s silly vassal” while Christ was really head of the church.4 Melville was eventu- ally imprisoned for his disagreements with the king.5 At age twenty-one Herman Melville showed some of the same audacity as his Scottish ancestor by signing aboard a whaling ship, The Acushnet, which sailed out of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, in 1841. But before he departed, he visited The Seamen’s Chapel in nearby New Bedford.6 Visitors to that church on Johnny Cake Hill can by Raymond Ide still see this small church, which used to have a plaque outside the door, saying that Melville, in This year marks the 200th anniversary of his great novel, made the greatest journey of all— Herman Melville’s birth—August 1, 1819. the journey into the human mind. I would add Unfortunately, his novel Moby-Dick1 probably re- that the author sailed even further—into the hu- mains the least read American classic. This is es- man heart and soul. For in the quest described in pecially unfortunate for Christians who have not Moby-Dick, where Captain Ahab seeks revenge read this literary and religious masterpiece. on the whale that took off his leg—“dismasted” The author’s life is interesting in itself. As a him (174)—Melville the creative genius puts be- young man, Melville was baptized in the South fore his readers questions of free-will and predes- Reformed Dutch Church in Manhattan2 and tination, the problem of evil, and the character later attended the Reformed Dutch Church in of God. Albany, New York.3 His family’s Scottish ancestry Nathalia Wright, in Melville’s Use of the Bible, included Pastor Andrew Melville, who succeeded says that Melville knew the Bible so well that ”he John Knox as a leader of the Scottish Reformed could smell the burning of Gomorrah and the pit; Church. When King James VI of Scotland, who hear the trumpet in the Valley of Jehoshaphat,… later became James I of England, proclaimed that taste Belshazzar’s feast, feel the heat of the fiery furnace.” 7 She adds that Melville’s “mind seems to have been saturated with its [the Bible’s] sto- Dr. Raymond Ide is Professor Emeritus of English at 8 Lancaster Bible College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. ries, its ideas, and its language.” Melville’s per- Pro Rege—June 2019 9 sonal Bibles are heavily marked by the author, parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall who has numerous underlinings devoted to the not be seen” (380-81). This biblical comparison book of Job and Ecclesiastes. In a letter to his of the whale to Moses’ vision of God 12 is one of friend Nathaniel Hawthorne around the time he Melville’s most audacious hints at what he is get- was writing his whaling novel, Melville wrote, “I ting at in the book. read Solomon more and more, and every time see Among whale men, Moby Dick is identifi- deeper and deeper meaning in him.”9 able in that he is not just a formidable creature Biblical names flavor this wild whaling sto- with “a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, ry, where we meet not only Captain Ahab but and a high, pyramidical white hump” (193); what also a man named Elijah, who warns sailors to is especially puzzling to these sailors is that this beware of Ahab; a bartender named Jonah; and particular whale seems not only all-powerful but the narrator of the story, who famously begins also “ubiquitous [in] that he had actually been his tale by saying, “Call me Ishmael.” Of all the encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the names Melville could have chosen, why Ishmael? same instant of time” (192). And not only does Perhaps the narrator resembles his famous name- this whale seem omnipresent, but he has been sake in Genesis in that he too is a wanderer and cited over the course of centuries as if he is im- an outcast on the sea. Just like Ishmael in the mortal. Hints of the white whale’s supernatural Bible, his name means “God hears,” and by the qualities abound in the story. end of the novel, that will prove to be the case. At one point in the novel, Moby Dick However, the titular character of the story will be alluded to as Job’s whale, which for stays under the surface until the last few chapters Melville means the leviathan described in the of the book. This is the mysterious whale who 41st chapter of Job. Here God in the Voice readers realize after a while is more than just “a out of the Whirlwind proclaims, “Can you fill spouting fish with a horizontal tail” (147). In his hide with harpoons or his head with fish- the first chapter of the novel the white whale is ing spears? No one is fierce enough to rouse alluded to as “one grand hooded phantom, like him. Who then is able to stand against me?”13 a snow-hill in the air” (26). Later Ishmael says, Note how God first speaks of the leviathan “Gazing on…[the sperm whale’s head] you feel as “him,” which morphs into “me” where God the deity and the dread powers more forcibly speaks of himself. Carol Newsom, in her com- than in beholding any other object in living na- mentary on Job, states that “there is a curious lev- ture” (350). The chapters devoted to whales, the el of identification between God and leviathan. cetological chapters that comprise a quarter of God represents himself as being in the image the book, might seem tedious at first, but they of leviathan, only more so. Indeed, as has often are central to the author’s intention to contem- been pointed out, the physical description of le- plate leviathan. J. A. Ward argues that Melville, viathan is uncannily evocative of the theophanic in passages devoted to describing the whale, is descriptions of God.”14 “showing the insufficiencies of empirical knowl- The Voice out of the Whirlwind gives a pic- edge and establishing Moby Dick as a creature of ture of both God and leviathan: both are power- spiritual and physical dimensions”10 and reveal- ful, fierce, and awe-inspiring. Like C. S. Lewis’s ing “science’s inability to describe the whale ad- Aslan, the whale is not tame and certainly not equately.”11 safe. For example, at one point the narrator Captain Ahab will make this same identifica- Ishmael expresses his bafflement at trying to -un tion between the leviathan Moby Dick and the derstand the different movements of the whale’s Deity. The revengeful captain at one point tells magnificent tail as he exclaims, “But if I know his first mate Starbuck why he hates this ferocious not even the tail of the whale, how understand albino whale: “He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in his head? Much more, how comprehend his face, him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable mal- when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back ice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly 10 Pro Rege—June 2019 what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be peeping forth even beneath February’s snow” (56). the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate This pleasant description stands in stark contrast upon him” (176). to Ahab, who in his first appearance before his In other words, in Ahab’s imagination the crew is described as “moody stricken Ahab [who] whale that took off his leg is either an agent of stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in the Deity or the Deity himself, and the monoma- all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some niacal captain sees himself in nothing less than a mighty woe” (137). cosmic struggle. Interestingly, inscrutable is one of Ahab stands in further contrast to Father John Calvin’s favorite words to describe God, and Mapple when he first addresses his crew by in- it is at the center of why Captain Ahab hates the citing them to seek revenge on the white whale. albino whale. How different from Father Mapple, who first -ad This deity represented by or corresponding to dresses his congregation after he enters his pul- the white whale in Ahab’s pit and kneels in prayer: mind is only evil, inspiring Hints of the white whale’s he “folded his large brown him to convince his crew to supernatural qualities abound. hands across his chest, up- swear to kill Moby Dick. lifted his closed eyes, and The revenge-obsessed cap- offered a prayer so deeply tain sees himself as the master of his fate, and at devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at one point, Ahab will even exclaim, “I’d strike the the bottom of the sea” (58).