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.

The book Moby Dick starts off with a famous puzzling line. “Call me Ishmael.” Why does the narrator say that? Is that his real name? Or does he just ask us to call him that even though it is not his real name? It is a biblical name. It is a mysterious beginning. In the first sentence of the book, the truth of the tale is put in doubt. For good reason, in many ways it is fantastic.

Ishmael says, “I thought I would sail about a little and the see the watery part of the world.” “A little”, he said when he was starting a journey that would lead nearly around the world, and take 3 or 4 years, reaching the South Seas by way of The Atlantic Ocean, then Africa, then the Indian Ocean and finally the Pacific Ocean. The serene Pacific that was not always serene. As Ishmael said,

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul: whenever I find myself  involuntarily pausing, before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos  get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword: I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.’

Ishmael is saying, at some time in their lives, pretty well everyone will have a strong desire to go on a religious quest. I think the sea voyage is a metaphor for that. As I will show later, the quest need not be religious, but this one definitely was religious.

The religious quest began on a damp and drizzly November of his soul.  Ishmael says, “there is magic in it,” and if you are lucky and are supplied with “a metaphysical professor…mediation and water are wedded forever.” This journey was surely a mediation wedded to water. It was a religious quest. And you know it in the first pages.

Water has always been a religious symbol and it certainly is in this book. That is what is wrong, Ishmael says, with a journey in the prairies, even though there is a huge field of Tiger-lilies, there is no water. So it lacks spiritual sustenance Ishmael suggests.

Why else, Ishmael asks,

“Why is almost every robust boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some or other crazy to go to the sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the first Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove?

Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it, and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

 

The stage is set for an epic spiritual journey. And as Ishmael says, grandly. “how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!” On third  page it is suggested this voyage is a misguided religious quest as it will end up in a very hot place. Not just the warm south seas either.

Moby Dick is a true classic. What is a classic? The best definition of a classic I ever heard came from Italo Calvino who said, “A classic is a book that is never finished saying what it has to say.”

Last year I said I would read at least one classic every year. The first classic I read was The Plague. This was a perfect start, particularly since we were in the midst of a plague.  It gave the book an existential edge. It was not merely academic. It was particular and immediate. I call that existential.

The second book I decided to read in this meandering series, almost a year later, was Moby Dick. That is a legendary book. I returned to it after about 40 years of experience. It was a sensational experience. In fact, I would say, it was the best reading experience of my life. I loved the book 40 years ago, but this year I found so much more in it. That is what a classic is all about.

I read with extreme care and attention. I have never paid such care and attention to a book before. Even when I studied Honours English and Philosophy and then law at the University of Manitoba from 1968 to 1974, I have never paid such careful intense attention to any book. It was the most amazing reading experience of my life.

Part of the pleasure in reading this classic story about 30 men on a boat that sails around the world in search of a White Whale is really about more than that. In my opinion, it is a book about a religious quest. Actually more than one quest. Carl Ridd, as far as I know, may not have taught this book as part of his course, “The Religious Quest in the Modern Age,” which I am trying to revive, but he should have.  I think the book is richly filled with thoughts about the religious quest in the modern world. Some of those thoughts are very uncomfortable. This is not religion for the faint of heart.

Of course, part of what makes the book so interesting is the fact that it is in many respects about the search for a false god. How could a white whale be god? Or how could the mad obsessive search for it be a religious quest at all? Was it a false quest? Can a religious quest be mad?

The book is not an easy read. I often had to go back thinking I had missed something. I often had missed something. That was why it was so difficult. The book is complicated with some old English that makes interpretation difficult, but the time spent was amply rewarded.  With this book, I had started my religious quest in the modern age and I had re-read an old classic. More than 40 years after I got the idea, I was doing it.

After 40 years of wandering in the desert I was on my quest. And this first book was an astounding experience. It dynamited a lot of my cherished certainties.  It kept telling me it had more to say.

In future posts I will try to show you what I mean.