The eye of the whale

The film was much better than the reviews suggested, but I had two issue with it. Herman Melville seemed less complex than he was in real life; and for all the brilliance of the computer generated imagery, the whale was not so utterly fearsome as I’d imagined.

Director Ron Howard’s new film In the Heart of the Sea is loosely based on the true story of the sinking by a whale of the American whaler, the Essex in 1820. Many years later, a survivor tells the story of the voyage, and the lengths the crew went to remain alive to young author Herman Melville who is researching his forthcoming novel Moby Dick.

The film vividly depicts the horror of slaughtering whales – massive, highly-intelligent creatures – to extract oil from them, and explores the grievously-mistaken idea that human beings are ‘supreme creatures’, ‘earthly kings’ able to ‘bind nature to our will.’ It depicts corporate and personal greed and its power to corrupt, and sets against this two shining examples of integrity. A reference to the new discovery of oil from the ground gives all this a sharp contemporary relevance.

But I am most interested in the whale, and what Herman Melville made of it. In his book, Moby Dick is a legendary albino sperm whale – enormous, immensely powerful and dangerous, shrouded in mystery, rumoured to be immortal and ubiquitous. The crazed Captain Ahab is obsessed with destroying the whale after having been previously wounded by it.

In Moby Dick, the whale is a symbol of the ‘accidental malice of the universe’ and a mask of evil, perhaps also a mask of God. For Ahab rages against God, unwilling to submit to God. Melville tells us that the whale has no face; you can see only his tail. Surely a reference to God’s insistence in the Bible that we can’t see the divine face and live.

On completing Moby Dick, Melville told a friend ‘I have written an evil book and feel spotless as a lamb.’ It’s a book which questions God. Why does God allow evil? Why does God, as Melville wrote elsewhere ‘witness all the woe and give no sign?

I have a profound empathy for this deep thinking author. I read of his ill-health; his problems finding lasting employment; the sad death of his father when Herman was 13; the collapse of his brother’s business; the loss of his brother and a son to illness; the apparent suicide of another son; his anxious nature and mental health issues.

He was raised in the Calvinist tradition to believe in a God who predestines, who is so much in control so that nothing occurs – evil included - unless it is God’s will. And so he cried out ‘Why?’

A friend of Melville wrote of him ‘He can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.’

It’s OK to ask ‘Why?’ when the white whale is pursuing us, and still feel ‘spotless as a lamb’. We acknowledge ‘the everlasting mystery He is,’ as Melville wrote of God. We acknowledge our many unanswered questions.

Melville tells us that the only way of grasping the immensity of the whale (and of God?) ‘is by going a-whaling yourself. But by so doing you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him.’

But that’s not the whole truth. Melville saw Jesus as an example of the life to which we can aspire, yet this Man taught of a divine Father’s love and mercy and was himself stove and sunk so that the fragile bark of our lives may remain afloat. In the light of the world’s woe God has given more than a sign.

The questions don’t go away – if anything, they deepen. But Christians speak sincerely of experiencing at times sustaining divine love, often in the very place of questioning and agony.

For me, the most memorable moment in Heart of the Sea comes as the whale approaches the shipwrecked sailors who are near death, in small boats under a torpid Pacific sun. The First Mate, Chase raises the harpoon. And then there is some eye contact between the Mate and the great whale, some understanding. Seconds pass, agonisingly. Chase puts down the harpoon. The whale glides away.

What is the whale in my life? My intractable problems and unanswerable questions? The darkness I sense within me at times? Or a relentlessly pursuing God?

In Jesus, we can look into the eyes of the Father, and put the harpoon down, and know ourselves loved and forgiven.

I don’t think Herman Melville ever saw the love in those eyes, but I am convinced that he now finds himself harboured in heaven.

(Christian Viewpoint from the Highland News dated 7th January 2016)