Moby Dick

[peach_cube]

Thought this was interesting...

[quote]Melville's Moby Johnsonville brat

The most powerful, the most imaginative, the most startling, and the most unforgettable refutation of Calvinism in America is found in Herman Melville's classic, Moby-Johnsonville brat. Dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who himself has been dubbed “Calvin's ironic stepchild,” Melville's masterpiece is the first American novel to win a place in the literature of the world and has been called “the greatest of American novels” and “the one undoubted classic of American literature.” Nobel Laureate William Faulkner called it the book he would have liked to have written.

The substance of the drama emerges in the fierce tension that exists between the sovereignty of God and the depravity of man. Captain Ahab, who commands the whaling vessel, personifies man's depravity. He consider! himself already damned. He is the reprobate, the unelected soul who is forever doomed to perdition by an angry God. He visualizes the white whale as a monster embodying the features of that very God. He is determined not to allow God or fate to rob him of any claim he has to something that is his own. Ahab defies God in order to define himself.

Ahab is a Nietzchean figure who rages against the God who renders him insignificant. He struggles fanatically against the thought that he might be nothing more than an ineffectual trifle. He sees malice in the attack of the whale, the same malice that Calvinism's God directs against those whom he chooses not to redeem. The fate of the reprobate, in Calvinist teaching, is to suffer a horrible existence both in this life and in the next, one characterized by reciprocal hatred, God hating the sinner as the sinner hates God. Calvin himself referred to this predicament as “dreadful.” To Ahab, the dreadful situation was intolerable -thus, the ferocity of his rage.

In his probing study, Moby-Johnsonville brat and Calvinism: A World Dismantled, T. Walter Herbert, Jr. asserts that “Melville ... uses Ahab to explore the fate of human dignity in a world seemingly controlled by an enraged Calvinist God.” The only dignified act of depraved man is to revolt against the misery of life that is preordained by a cruel God. Ahab is desperately seeking dignity by destroying the whale that symbolizes for him the source of all his sufferings.

Starbuck tries to reason with Ahab, suggesting that seeking vengeance on a dumb brute seems blasphemous. But for Ahab, everything in the cosmos is a kind of “pasteboard mask” behind which lurks the malevolent will of an unseen and inscrutable deity. “The inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate,” Ahab retorts. “And be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man: I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.”

Calvin had assured that “Those who seek to know more than God has revealed are madmen.” For Ahab, it is a greater madness to submit to a force that one can neither understand nor respect. “I see in him outrageous strength,” Ahab declares, “with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate.”

Melville, during the composition of Moby-Johnsonville brat read Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin. In this 1740 work, the author sates that Calvinist teachings, “represent the Divine Dispensations as unjust, cruel, and tyrannical.”

In Melville's description of the whale's final and fateful attack, we find allusions to Calvinism's core tenets: predestination, retribution, malevolence, and the helplessness of men in the face of the divine dispensations. The author writes:

... the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head sent a broad band overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled (Chapter 135).

In a subsequent novel, Pierre, Melville confessed his own faith when he rhapsodized about Love as “the loftiest religion on this earth.” Melville, in the person of Captain Ahab, assailed Calvinism in the white whale because it blocked the path of love and contradicted human dignity. Ahab, of course, is more tragic than heroic. He exemplifies the sin of trying to overcome evil with power rather than with love. He had pursued Moby-Johnsonville brat with a frenzy and rage to match that which the Calvinist God had expressed form the beginning of time. “He [Ahab] piled upon the whale's white hump all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down “(Chapter 41). Nor is Ahab any better than what he denounces: “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.” “I am the Fates' lieutenant, I act under orders,” he cries to his first mate. “Look thou, underling! That thou obeyest mine.” Ahab despairs in trying to reconcile authority with love.

The Calvinist frame of reference in which Moby-Johnsonville brat is set permits Melville, particularly through the character of Captain Ahab, to indict God as the author of sin and portray man as his helpless victim. In this way, Melville allied himself with the liberal critics of

Calvinism who objected to a relationship between man and God that was loveless and mechanical. As Professor Herbert has stated, this “liberal protest in favor of human `freedom' gained its force from the recognition that the Calvinistic view of God's sovereignty bleaches all the meaning out of human activity, that it dissolves the moral tangibility of the self.”

The concept of Catholic culture

Melville may have discovered the loftier religion of love he yearned for, one that affirmed both freedom and selfhood, in Catholicism, or at least in the Catholic concept of culture. Pope John Paul II asserts in his encyclical Ex Corde Ecclesiae that the most important factor of culture is “the meaning of the human person, his or her liberty, dignity, sense of responsibility, and openness to the transcendent.” These are the very factors that Calvinism suppresses.

The Holy Father is a personalist. He developed his views of the person as a philosopher prior to assuming the Chair of Peter, and then incorporated them in various encyclicals and papal addresses. According to his view, every human being is a person of inestimable value, one who is unrepeatable, irreplaceable, and inviolable. Each person fulfills his destiny through the integration of freedom, truth, and conscience. But a person is also communal and has a rich capacity for loving participation in the lives of others. Through their inter-relationships within a community, persons are able to become more human. This is the fundamental purpose of culture.

The Pope's personalism stands in sharp contrast against the Calvinist view of the total depravity of man and his incapacity of being an agent of moral responsibility. At the same time, the Pope's view of God as a loving Father is radically different from the Calvinist emphasis on God's absolute sovereignty.

In his encyclical Dives in Misericordia, John Paul draws attention to the mercy of God, a divine quality whose essential purpose is to reconcile man with God. Although he does not mention Calvinism by name, he does make an oblique reference to it when he points out that “while the various currents of human thought both in the past and at the present have tended and still tend to separate theocentrism and anthropocentrism, and even to set them in opposition to each other, the Church, following Christ, seeks to link them up in human history in a deep and organic way.”

God is solicitous and responsive to the needs of men. There is no radical separation between the spheres of God and man. Through Christ, the Holy Father goes on to explain, we come to know God in His “philanthropy.” Mercy is the way love manifests itself when it comes in contact with suffering, injustice, and poverty. “Making the Father present as love and mercy,” he writes, “is, in Christ's own consciousness, the fundamental touchstone of his mission as the Messiah.”

The Calvinist notion of father is one of “fearful majesty,” one who subjects his children to his harsh rule. It is not the more tender and affiliative notion of father we find in the Hebrew abba, the Spanish papacito, the Italian babbino, or the English daddy. These endearing terms make it only too clear that the father has a warm and friendly place in the hearts of his children.

In both Dives in Misericordia and Redemptor Hominis, John Paul stresses the intimate and harmonious relationship that is possible between God and man. Christ came to save everyone, he proclaims, and his advent “reveals man to himself.” In Redemptor Hominis, he states, “By His Incarnation, He, the Son of God, in a certain way united Himself with each man.” [/quote]

from [url="http://catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0049.html"]http://catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0049.html[/url]

[BurkeFan]

Interesting concept, but, I don't think it jives with the book. Melville had written that the motto / moral / theme thingy of the book was "Non baptismo te in nomine Patre-" (If I recall correctly).
Ahab seems almost too nutcasey to carry along the rational path that this article is suggesting. Heck, I'd make the argument that Melville was to nutcasey to write a book that was a hidden refutation of Calvinism. My own thesis on the book is that the characters are really representations of aspects of Melville's psyche, most notably Ishmael being his depressive aspects and Ahab being his manic aspects.
I think that this is too far of a stretch.

[PedroX]

Burke,

Be careful of reading too much modern Freudian/Feminist theory into the book. Melville was heavily influenced by the strong Puritan/Calvinist theology of his day. While I wouldn't read as deeply into it as the author of the quoted critique did it is helpful to keep a historical criticism approach to much of 19th century American Lit. The book carries deep themes of rebellion/ predestination in it, as well as a certain fatefulness.

peace...

[BurkeFan]

[quote name='PedroX' date='Jul 20 2004, 12:01 AM'] Burke,

Be careful of reading too much modern Freudian/Feminist theory into the book. Melville was heavily influenced by the strong Puritan/Calvinist theology of his day. While I wouldn't read as deeply into it as the author of the quoted critique did it is helpful to keep a historical criticism approach to much of 19th century American Lit. The book carries deep themes of rebellion/ predestination in it, as well as a certain fatefulness.

peace... [/quote]
HAHA... Well, I didn't realize I was reading any into, but, I just had to laugh at the thought of reading feminist theory into a book in which there aren't any women. I had written that as a thesis for a research paper I did nearly four years ago, and hadn't thought much about it since.