It used to be said that there are 8 million cities in the Naked City (New York).  That was when New York had 8 million people living there.  They could just as well have said, there are 8 million religious quests in the Naked City and each of them is different. Most of us were brought up to think there was only one. In the small city in which I was raised and still live, this view is still pretty common, but I think many of us now realize that is too narrow a view. There are many religious quests and many of them are worth looking at. But some of them are maniacal, like that of Captain Ahab’s mad pursuit around the world for vengeance on a white whale.

In this blog I want to share some of the more interesting ones that I have found. I am not trying to convert anyone, or persuade them to abandon the one they are on.

This idea of mine, as I have mentioned was inspired by a Religious Studies Professor in the 1970s at the University of Winnipeg. Some of my friends were lucky enough to take that course. I had to be satisfied with hearing a lecture or two on television without an opportunity to ask questions. Now I have decided to go on this quest on my own.  I hope to learn a thing or two. And I hope to share of my thoughts along the way.

Moby Dick, the second book, I have considered on this voyage, actually considered a few different quests.  The one that stuck out was of course the one by its Captain. It was not only his quest, but he actually persuaded the members of his crew to join him, even though it was pretty clear that his quest turned mad.  What makes people follow such a leader like Ahab?  That is a puzzle. Many of us think we have seen such blind allegiance in the United States recently, where people were led to the Capitol in Washington to participate in a rampage, solely because their leader, I would say their spiritual leader, called them to do so.  What makes people heed the call? I think Herman Melville has some important things to say on the subject, and even though the book was written more than 150 years ago, those thoughts can help us understand this phenomenon better. For example, It can help us to understand what happened in Washington on January 6, 2021.

Some of you may think I am seeing things when I say the whale being pursued by Ahab and his crew in the novel Moby Dick is God.  Perhaps you think I have been on the deck of the ship in the hot sun for too long. Perhaps. But perhaps not.

Here is what the narrator of the novel, Ishmael had to say. The men on the voyage are pursuing the white whale, but he  described this as “on the road to heaven.” In fact, if there was any doubt about this, the whale is described as “thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness.”  ?

Ishmael describes the whale in clearly religious terms. He says the head of the whale is “sublime.” He says, in the brow of the whale “this high and mighty and god-like dignity inherent in the brow so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature.” Ishmael also says the people of the Orient would have recognized a god in the whale. “Had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts.” In other words just as in the Magi’s account of meeting Jesus,  they fell down and worshipped him, Ishmael says the people of the orient would have worshipped the white whale. They “were now in valiant chase of this unnearable brute.” He says the whale is “both ponderous and profound.”

Yet,  the pursuit of God, at times  becomes a Satanic . How is that possible?  This is to me is the most interesting question  in the novel. What brings about this transformation

It is not clear whether what is being faithfully pursued by the 30 men in the boat is God or the devil.  Ishmael describes the whale rising from the deep and breaching above the surface of the sea this way:

“…this peaking of the whale’s flukes is perhaps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his colossal claw from the flame of Baltic Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the masthead of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence.”

Therefore, it is up to the pursuer whether he or she is pursuing God or Satan. The seekers determine whether they are on a voyage of the damned or a voyage of the saved. I think that is profoundly true. Melville expands upon that in the novel.

Eventually after months at sea Ahab tells the crew the real intent of the voyage. Whaling is incidental. The real purpose is a quest, nominally to find and kill a great white whale. Or perhaps, more accurately to pursue and kill God. It is hardly a holy quest. It was in fact a quest for vengeance because the whale on a previous voyage attacked Ahab who was pursuing him, and chewed off his leg in self-defence. Now Ahab had one ivory leg.

Captain Ahab said he would pursue the whale, Moby Dick, round the world and

“round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, me! To chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fins out.”

Some of the crew see that Ahab must be mad. This is literally a mad quest. Starbuck, one of the mates, says, “I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance.” He realizes this is “blasphemous.” This is not your ordinary religious quest, this in fact a blasphemous religious quest.

But Ahab denies that his quest for revenge is blasphemous: Ahab was delirious with a desire for revenge against the whale. This riled Ahab to no limit of fury. Ahab saw in the whale “outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate, and be the white whale agent, or be he principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk to me not of blasphemy man: I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

The classic quest was of course the quest for the Holy Grail—the Chalice of God from the Last Supper. There is a perverse version of that in the novel. This was the ceremony in which Ahab enlisted his ship-mates in his unholy quest. Ahab gathered the men around him and passing the “bringing pewter” around, with drink “hot as Satan’s hoof.” The men standing around the captain had “wild eyes,” like “bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves” looking at their leader. Ahab appointed the three mates “cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen,” the harpooneers, calling them “my sweet cardinals.” They were cardinals in a diabolical religion.  Ahab acknowledged that these are “murderous chalices,” as the “the long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale.” “The spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss.” No matter what Ahab tells his men, clearly this quest was more Satanic than divine sent forth with malediction rather than benediction.

The narrator, Ishmael realizes Ahab’s quest is for an “impious end” but he, like the other men, can’t resist helping him. Ishmael sees “my miserable office— to obey.” Even though Ahab has a “heaven insulting purpose” and he is sailing “with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them. Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon (murderous demon beast).”

Ishmael is pointing out how a religious quest can turn Satanic. Not exactly something most of us would seek out. But something that would be worth understanding. How does this happen?

The crew of the Pequod had to be alert on such a voyage. This was particularly true of the men who each had to man one of the 3 masts. From their lonely fearful posts at the top they had to keep at all time their lookout for whales. They had to be vigilant. Of course that really meant, they were to keep out their lookout for God. They had to be spiritually vigilant. After all, this was a true religious quest. Ishmael admitted he did a poor job of it:

“Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude—how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships’ standing orders,” Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”

Those at the watch were expected to be keenly aware of approaching whales (or gods) and sing out when spotted. The worst thing for a whaling ship was to have someone on the watch like this:

“any lad with lean brow and hollow eye, given to unseasonable meditativeness…Beware of such an one, I say your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer.”

The young Platonists dreaming of metaphysics instead of whales were a dangerous extravagance on a whaling ship:

“…lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some indiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment  of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, they sprint ebbs away who whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheist ashes, forming at last a part of every shore round the globe over.

The young “sunken-eyed Platonist” has no life left in him “except that rocking life imparted by a gentle rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.”

In other words, on a religious quest, philosophers were not needed. They were a hindrance. Darn.

The religious quest is not easy. Like John F. Kennedy who said about the quest to land a man on the moon, America pursued tasks not because they are easy, but because they are hard.  Only the hard tasks are worth doing. Of course, the most intense terrors are the spiritual ones. As Ishmael said, “For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God.” The religious quest is indeed not for the faint of heart.

The question arises in Moby Dick whether Ahab, the captain of the voyage, the leader of the spiritual quest, was a Christian or not. Ishmael described the Captain this way in his quarters:

“Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab’s soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!’

This is hardly the comforting description of a Christian leader. If Ahab was a Christian leader on this religious quest, he was a very strange one.

Captain Ahab was not the only madman on the irrational quest in Moby Dick. There was Bulkington for example, another member of the crew. He arrived at home in winter after a four-year voyage in search of whales and then immediately set off again for still another tempestuous term. As Ishmael said, “The land seemed scorching to his feet.” To stay in port to be safe was pitiful he thought. Ahab would have agreed. In Ahab’s case the day after he got married, he left on a voyage and for 40 years of voyaging he never spent more than 3 years with his wife and child.

Ishmael speaking perhaps for Melville then makes the crucial point that this bravery  applies not just to sailors. It is just as important for thinkers. They too must be brave. Ishmael asks Bulkington:

“Glimpses do we happen so see of mortally intolerable truth; that all deep earnest thinking; that all deep earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of the sea; while wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety. For worm-like, then, on who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! Is all this agony to vain?  Take heart, take heart.  O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of the ocean perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis.”

 

Thinkers too must be independent and not afraid of the open ocean. There is treachery for them on shore where things are safe.

Such voyagers were not afraid to help the Pequod “to thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves.” They were scornful of the safety of port:

“The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in doing so fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landless again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend and her bitterest foe.”

This quest is not for the faint of heart. None but the brave are welcome. Those who go on this quest do not flee danger, they embrace it. And that applies to thinkers as well as doers!

This reminds me of what my great Uncle Peter Vogt told me after he asked me where I was going that evening. When I told him I was going to Labroquerie to the bar, he said, “If you had been in the Russian Revolution, like me, you wouldn’t bother going to Labroquerie with friends for a beer.” That would be too shallow. That’s not what thinkers should do with their time.

They should  be prepared to think dangerously!

Although there are many quests in the novel Moby Dick, none is more powerful and interesting than that of Captain Ahab. He was possessed. Ishmael memorably described the Captain this way: “Captain Ahab…He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man.” How is that possible? It is as unlikely as saying the God-head is a trinity of Gods who are really only one God. The chase for the whale is clearly described as a chase for God, except when it is a chase for the devil. It can be both. It can be a grand tour. In this case, it was a tour almost around the world in search of particular white whale over whom Captain Ahab wanted to exact revenge, no matter what the cost.  So he travels for over 3 years to find one particular white whale. What could be crazier than that?

Ishmael was well aware of the futility of going around the world to find one white whale amid all those whales. It made no sense. That did not matter to Ahab. Sense had nothing to do with his quest. Obsession had everything to do with it. Ishmael, the narrator, frequently referred to Ahab’s quest as monomaniac. It was truly mad.

As a result, the novel is really about many different kinds of obsessive quests. As we all know when we think of it, many quests are mad, because everything else is set aside in favor of the one big quest.  So what Melville has to say about Ahab’s quest might apply to yours. Or mine.

Herman Melville in his book Moby Dick, describes a number of religious quests. One of them is the quest of the harpooneer, Queequeg. He is one of the more remarkable characters in the book. I remember the first time I read the book he scared the hell out of me, and I mean that literally. He is the son of a King from a distant island. He had an ambitious soul and inside him “lurked a strong desire to see more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two.” So, what did he do? He signed on for a voyage to search for whales and spent the next 4 years with nothing but 30 whalers! It was not the most rational decision, as quests often are. He wanted to learn from Christians how to make his people still happier, “But alas the practices of the whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be miserable and wicked, infinitely more so than his father’s heathens.” So his quest was a dud. He wanted to see the world but all he saw was the men on the boat. A pretty puny world when you think about it. His quest was as misguided as Ahab’s, which I will discuss later.

Queequeg  was repeatedly called a savage, and he looked the part, but it is questionable who were the real savages on this voyage. He also said grace like the Christians. However, unlike the Christians, who looked down when they prayed, “he glanced upwards to the great Giver of all feasts.”

The reason Queequeg was so scary was that he was a cannibal covered in fearsome tattoos. Yet Queequeg said, “It’s a joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.” Of course what are joint-stock companies but places for Christian cannibals to prosper?

Queequeg respected all religions. Like Pi. Same with Ishmael, the narrator,  who said,

“I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor landed merely on account of the inordinate possession yet owned and rented in his name.”

What could be more absurd than worshipping a man for the wealth and property he had accumulated, but in the United States that is a very common practice.

This was Ishmael’s conclusion about that, “Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we are all someone dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.”

Ishmael was asked by the owner of the ship why he wanted to go whaling.  A fair question. Ishmael answered, absurdly, “I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.” This made no sense, because the voyage entailed being on a boat for 3 years or more and seeing very little of the world except the ship called the Pequod and the 30 men onboard. Captain Peleg, one of the owners asked Ishmael. “are thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale’s throat, and then jump after it?” He might as well have asked, “Are you mad enough to go whaling?”  Are you crazy enough to go on such a quest? There were people on this trip who were that mad.

Peleg, along with Bildad, another one of the major owners was a Quaker. But not your ordinary Quaker. “They are fighting Quakers: they are Quakers with a vengeance.” That should have told Ishmael all he needed to know to avoid this voyage. This was a quest of heathens.

The heathen cannibal, Queequeg knew better and pitied Ishmael for his ignorance. This is how Ishmael described it:

“He no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion than I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.”

Who is the savage? Who is the heathen?

Early in the book Moby Dick,  in Nantucket, Ishmael attends an ominous church service in a church built to resemble a ship. The set is stunning.  In the movie version of the story, the sermon is delivered by Orson Wells who plays the part of Father Mapple. It really is an astonishing performance.

The sermon of course is on the subject of Jonah and the whale. What else could it be? The preacher points out,

“all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobedience, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.”

Ahab, like Job, is a rebel. He rebels against God. Jonah is wary but obeys.

Father Mapple, a bit of a cynic, eloquently says this line: “In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at the frontier.” Amen to that. He does not preach the prosperity gospel to the seamen. His religion is much harsher.  “Terrors run through his soul. In all his cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known.” These men know they must fear God.

Jonah sails right into the storm and sinks into the sea leaving smooth water behind. And he drops into “the opening maw of hell.” As the preacher says, “here shipmates, is true repentance, not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.” Jonah “being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of unwelcome truths.” After all, “God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom.” Like Ahab later is swallowed by the whale and dragged to his doom. As the preacher preached,

“Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet –out of the belly of hell—when the whale engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish: and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breaching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air earth; and vomited out Jonah upon the dry land… Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was that shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood!”

And then in a line that echoes the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I will get to when I consider that classic, “Woe to him who would be true, even though to be false were salvation.” How is that possible? You will have to wait on this meandering journey. This is the woe of the rebel. As the preacher concludes,

“But oh shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe there is a sure-delight, and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. …Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, and stands forth his own inexorable self…Delight, top—gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges, no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven…O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”

A powerful sermon indeed. And to follow God is hard. Too hard for some  on this voyage. Ishmael should have been warned.

In the book Moby Dick, Ishmael, the narrator,  seems convinced that “my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the programme of Providence, that was drawn up a long time ago.” Ishmael said, “when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor.”  That is true. Compared to Ahab he is a simple man on a simple voyage. Yet Ishmael has a choice. Like Ahab, Ishmael must go with fate or must challenge the fate. And that makes all the difference. And Ishmael is leading us on this quest. We see it through his eyes.

Ishmael may be tormented, but  not like Ahab, but as he says,

“I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail the forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me…the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill.

That great white phantom if of course a reference to the great white sperm whale that Captain Ahab is obsessed with catching. In time he pulls the crew into his mad obsession. And it is clearly a mad obsession. Are they pursuing God or are they pursuing the devil? The quest leads to horror and wonder. How could it lead to both? Truly an epic religious quest is at hand.