Inscrutable Malice

Theodicy, Eschatology, and the Biblical Sources of "Moby-Dick"

Jonathan A. Cook

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781609090784
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

In Inscrutable Malice, Jonathan A. Cook expertly illuminates Melville's abiding preoccupation with the problem of evil and the dominant role of the Bible in shaping his best-known novel. Drawing on recent research in the fields of biblical studies, the history of religion, and comparative mythology, Cook provides a new interpretation of Moby-Dick that places Melville's creative adaptation of the Bible at the center of the work.

Cook identifies two ongoing concerns in the narrative in relation to their key biblical sources: the attempt to reconcile the goodness of God with the existence of evil, as dramatized in the book of Job; and the discourse of the Christian end-times involving the final destruction of evil, as found in the apocalyptic books and eschatological passages of the Old and New Testaments.

With his detailed reading of Moby-Dick in relation to its most important source text, Cook greatly expands the reader's understanding of the moral, religious, and mythical dimensions of the novel. Both accessible and erudite, Inscrutable Malice will appeal to scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Melville's classic whaling narrative.

1

Joban Theodicy and Apocalyptic Eschatology

A little over a century ago, in a discussion of “The Sick Soul” in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), the philosopher and psychologist William James examined a human personality type that, in contrast to what he had earlier called a proponent of the “religion of healthy-mindedness,” or a type that minimized the existence of evil in the world, instead tended to maximize it “based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world’s meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart.” Such individuals were typically subject to pathological melancholy, or what today would be termed clinical or manic depression (bipolar disorder). Surveying some of the philosophical, cultural, and psychological dimensions to this morbid-minded personality type, which included such famous victims of religious despair as Bunyan and Tolstoy, James proposed that the existential experience of evil tended to make the healthy-minded view seem “inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.” Evoking a state of mind that he himself (and his father, for that matter) knew well, James noted the inescapable evidence that various forms of evil have pervaded both the past and present forms of life on earth—enough to confirm even an insane person’s presumably delusional experience of horror.1

James recognized the unavoidable fact that human life was premised on predation, pain, and death: “Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.” The dinosaurs may seem remote from modern civilization, but various forms of horror “just as dreadful to their victims, if on a small spatial scale, fill the world about us to-day.” Such reptilian predators as crocodiles and snakes remain, and “whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.” James concluded his discussion with the argument that some extreme forms of evil cannot be justified within systems of good; they must simply be suffered through or put out of mind. In the meantime, we should acknowledge that “systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope.”2

Although James does not mention Melville’s Ahab in his pioneering study, he might have adduced this literary figure as a prime example in his portrait of the “sick soul” whose preoccupation with evil, although produced by a morbid and melancholy temperament, is a potentially legitimate vision of the moral universe inhabited by humanity. Indeed, this morbid-minded whaling captain may arguably represent a more truthful and complete image of a predatory universe than that adduced by the healthy-minded. We might even say that James’s discussion here constitutes an uncanny commentary on Melville’s hero-villain, especially in such chapters as “The Quarter-Deck,” “Moby-Dick,” or “The Sphynx,” in which Ahab justifies (or Ishmael explains) his ostensibly mad hunt for the White Whale, the imaginative equivalent of James’s dinosaurs and reptiles. We should also note the fact that much of James’s argument could apply to the narrator Ishmael, whose sensitivity to—if not experience of—evil is nearly equal to Ahab’s but whose agile temperament is more evenly balanced than the captain’s and so ultimately proves less self-destructive. James’s concluding points in this section of his study concerning the incontrovertible evidence for radical evil might easily fit into one of Ishmael’s philosophical disquisitions such as “The Whiteness of the Whale,” “Brit,” “The Try-Works,” or “The Gilder.” One can only speculate on the shock of recognition James might have experienced if he had read Melville’s whaling epic.

James’s classic study of the underlying psychology of a diverse array of religious experiences provides a window on a pervasive theme in Moby-Dick—the problem of evil—that stands at the center of its imaginative universe. Yet surprisingly few contemporary critics have focused on the issue. For despite widespread appreciation of its many excellencies of narration and exposition, contemporary readers often come to the novel without the conceptual vocabulary to grasp some of its most profound moral concerns. And despite the novel’s canonical status in academia and its pervasive presence in modern American and even global culture, Moby-Dick has become increasingly distanced from the theological and mythical underpinnings of its vision.

For roughly half a century following the Melville revival in the 1920s, the religious and mythical dimensions of his writings and of his most famous novel began gradually to emerge under the critical scrutiny of such works as William Braswell, Melville’s Religious Thought (1943); Nathalia Wright, Melville’s Use of the Bible (1949); Lawrance Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel with God (1952); H. Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology (1963); William H. Shurr, The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857–1891 (1972); and T. Walter Herbert, Moby-Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled (1977).3 Since then, scholarly examination of Moby-Dick has yielded to a growing variety of approaches, in keeping with the novel’s encyclopedic scope. Yet religion and myth are often conspicuous by their absence here.

So today we have a number of articles and books that investigate Moby-Dick’s language, style, and narrative and allegorical techniques, its appropriation of European literary and philosophical heritages, and its incorporation of American democratic ideals and national ideologies.4 Other studies have explored the novel’s relation to varied forms of humor, popular culture, and the literary marketplace, its assimilation of epic and dramatic principles and prototypes, and its use of the visual arts and aesthetic theory.5 Still others have examined Moby-Dick’s focus on the body, gender, and sexuality; its explorations of the psychology of mourning, trauma, and disaster; and its exemplification of various sciences (marine biology, oceanography, natural history), pseudo-sciences (mesmerism, phrenology, astrology), and environmentalism.6 Finally, a number of studies have explored Moby-Dick’s relation to Melville’s life as well as the novel’s composition, recognition, and varied cultural influence.7

While many of these works have deepened our understanding of Melville’s iconic novel, over the last few decades there has been less attention paid to the overarching religious and moral concerns that shaped Melville as a writer, such as the problem of evil, the decline of Christianity, the disappearance of God, the historicizing of the Bible. This may well be the result of the defamiliarization of the Bible and Judeo-Christian religious traditions within contemporary academia, despite the work of such influential literary critics as Northrop Frye, Frank Kermode, Robert Alter, and Harold Bloom, and despite recent advances in our understanding of the biblical text as a literary and mythological construct. There are, of course, exceptions to this loss of critical focus; indeed, the last few years have seen a limited revival of interest in Moby-Dick and religion. So in Melville’s Bibles, Ilana Pardes has explored Melville’s use in Moby-Dick of nineteenth-century exegetical traditions concerning the Old Testament figures of Job, Jonah, Ishmael, Ahab, and Rachel. In Pen of Iron, Robert Alter has explicated some of the Old Testament stylistic devices—poetic parallelism, narrative parataxis, homiletic discourse—that contributed to the novel’s polyphonic prose. In Sober Cannibals, Drunken Christians, Jamie Lorentzen sheds light on some of Moby-Dick’s moral and religious thematics, as part of a larger study of Melville and Kierkegaard as critics of contemporary Christianity. Finally, in All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly have explored the contrast between Ahab’s enraged monotheism and Ishmael’s resigned polytheism in a reading of Moby-Dick’s quasi-modernist religious vision.8

The danger of overlooking Moby-Dick’s overarching religious and moral concerns is nowhere more clear than in the vexed question of race and slavery in the narrative. Over the last half century, one common approach to the novel has been through the medium of antebellum political history and the mid-nineteenth-century crisis over slavery.9 Yet critics who examine the novel from this perspective generally ignore the fact that it was set in 1840–1841, a decade earlier than it was written and a time when the slavery issue had not reached a state of crisis. And they regularly overlook the universalizing import of the novel’s complex allegorical vision, which is largely moral and religious in nature. Whether postulating the White Whale as a symbol of racial ideology, or the Pequod as a ship of state driven by its captain’s Calhoun-like fanaticism, the transformation of Moby-Dick into a political allegory is unavoidably reductive. Lost in such an approach is an adequate appreciation of the theological and mythical origins of Ahab’s quest and the epic grandeur of his character, which was designed to be comparable to the heroes of Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton.10

In the present study of Moby-Dick, I will attempt to restore to the center of our reading experience one of the novel’s primary but often neglected subjects, the problem of natural and moral evil. Such a topic necessarily begins by acknowledging the pervasive presence of the Bible in Melville’s epic, for it hardly needs restating that this was the single most important literary influence on Moby-Dick.11 The thesis of the present study is that biblical themes of theodicy and eschatology give distinctive shape and meaning to Moby-Dick. Both theodicy (the attempt to reconcile the goodness and justice of God with the existence of evil) and eschatology (the study of theological “last things”) attempt to provide an answer to the problem of evil and human suffering in a universe allegedly governed by a just and righteous God. As the descendent on his father’s side of several generations of Scottish Presbyterian ministers, Melville was intensely preoccupied with both these subjects, and both are deeply embedded in Moby-Dick.

According to the philosopher David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (restating a logical crux first set forth by the Greek philosopher Epicurus), the problem of evil had a three-part structure: “Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” Beginning with the Fathers of the early church, Christian theologians sought to justify the existence of evil as an integral part of the divine plan—whether as punishment for original sin, a means of education and moral improvement, a necessary contrast to good in the scale of creation, a temporary defect in the universe, a metaphysical illusion, or ultimately a divine mystery. In God’s Problem, Bart D. Ehrman has demonstrated that the Christian Bible provides an inconclusive range of answers to the problem of evil and human suffering. The “classical” view as found in the Hebrew prophets, the Deuteronomistic historian, Saint Paul, and elsewhere is based on the premise that suffering is divine punishment for human sin. On the other hand, the book of Job—the locus classicus of the problem of evil in the Old Testament—is generically divided between a prose folklore frame story in which suffering is represented as a test of faith and an extended poetic dialogue in which suffering is depicted as a divine mystery. In the book of Ecclesiastes, by contrast, suffering is grounded in the physical laws of the universe. Finally, in the apocalyptic books of both testaments (Daniel, Revelation), righteous suffering will be justified by an eternal afterlife, while sin will result in spiritual damnation.12

Having been composed and compiled over more than a thousand years of ancient history, the Christian Bible patently reflects the varied historical and theological circumstances of its redactors. In the Old Testament, an all-powerful God was responsible for both good and evil, yet the doctrine of suffering resulting from human sin had emerged by the time of the prophets and Deuteronomistic history (eighth–sixth century BCE). In a conceptual shift, late Second Temple Judaism (fourth–first century BCE) began to view evil as a cosmic force that was differentiated from Yahweh, and this view is present in the markedly dualistic world of the New Testament. Continuing the tradition of the Old Testament prophets and Deuteronomistic historian, early Christian doctrine beginning with Saint Paul held that human original sin was the ultimate source of moral evil, while natural evil stemmed from the fall of nature that accompanied the divine curse in Eden.13

Christian theologians, philosophers, and poets subsequently grappled with the paradox of a benign creator allowing for the existence of evil without directly authorizing it. The most influential Christian theologian on the subject of evil was Saint Augustine, who began as a Manichean dualist but after his conversion developed four basic tenets on the nature of evil. First, in keeping with the doctrines of contemporary Neoplatonism, he asserted that evil had no metaphysical existence, being the mere absence of good (privatio boni). Second, evil was the free moral choice of human beings in a willful act of turning away from God—an act first seen in the fall of the rebel angels and then repeated in the fall of Adam and Eve and in the ongoing sinful disposition of humankind. Third, evil must exist because it is part of the larger plenitude of the creation—a Neoplatonic concept that gave rise to the influential idea of nature as a great chain of being. Finally, evil formed part of a larger aesthetic whole in a universe that was by its nature good. As in other theological matters, Augustine’s theories on the existence of evil had a determinative influence on later Christian thinkers including those of the Protestant Reformation. John Calvin emphasized the human responsibility for sin despite the predestined nature of human moral history. The classic literary embodiment of such Reformation dogma was dramatized in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which sought to “justify the ways of God to ma...