Moby Dick Chapter 7 The Chapel

[Robert Tulip]

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/270 ... m#2HCH0007

A rather sombre chapter, reminding us of the many men killed in whaling, including the whale boat of the Essex, dragged down to Davy Jones' Locker, and part of the inspiration for Moby Dick.

The line about those lost at sea - "What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave" - made me think of Osama Bin Laden, denied a grave that would become a shrine.

People have strange views about death. Melville observes "we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss"

And Adam, dead sixty centuries, is "in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance."

"Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs." The jackal Anubis is Egyptian God of embalmment. And yet, the jackal reminds us of the vulture, a disgusting animal scavenging among corpses.

Whaling is dangerous and deadly. "Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine."

"looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot."

[DWill]

The chapter and your comments sent me back to our long recent debate about certainty and faith. One point we missed was that faith does not at all give believers an easy composure about the afterlife. It's a struggle and strain to keep up the belief, and it threatens to desert them when someone close dies. Loss is too powerful to be covered by a myth of everlasting life that should supposedly overjoy us on behalf on the dead one. Deep down, I suspect there's a part that never believes, even in the most faithful.

Ishmael reveals himself as quite a spiritual sort at the end of the chapter. This is prelude to the sermon that Mapple will deliver in the next chapter. Will this be fire and brimstone or a Calvinist harangue, or something different?

[Damifino]

I'm having a heck of a time trying to figure out what Melville is trying to say in this chapter. Our shadow is our true self?

"Methinks we have hugely mistaken his matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance.

[DWill]

I haven't sorted out this business with the 'stoves' and 'staves' or the perspective of the oysters. I just get the message that Ishmael is saying that the non-corporeal part of himself is the real part. Maybe it's true that Ishmael roughly voices Melville's own feelings. Melville is supposed by some to be something of a mystic.

[Robert Tulip]

There are obscure chapters in Moby Dick, such as this one where Melville engages with the theology of his day. It is okay to skip through these sort of discussions if that is not your interest, as there are enough big themes in the main plot of Moby Dick without worrying about theology and philosophy. I think the point about the shadow is that religion says we will live eternally with Christ, so our mortal coil is just a short preparation for the blissful reality of heaven.

As DWill pointed out, the discussion on faith picks up on some points about philosophy. People say someone has 'gone to a better place' as a way of dealing with the emotional pain of grief and loss. In reality they don't mean it, they just use such statements as a comforting form of language. This is a good example of how faith language uses poetry that gradually solidifies in the minds of believers. Melville is pointing out that people really know this life is the only real one, and are just engaging in imaginative fantasy when they talk about life after death.

Death was far closer to people in the 1800s. There were no antibiotics or anaesthetics, and many problems that are now curable were deadly. So language about heaven and afterlife was far more present. (Two centuries ago the average life expectancy was less than forrty, largely due to high infant mortality.)

Whalers and soldires took risks that people would not dream of today. A stove boat, rammed by a whale, meant death by drowning. Many sailors could not swim.

The oyster line is another reference to Paul's line 'through a glass darkly. An oyster sees the sun through the ocean water. We imagine we see the sun clearly, but our vision is not necessarily much clearer than an oysters'.

[DWill]

Off topic a bit, but today we're also likely not to see any heroism in the whaling profession, not to be affected by the bravery of men going up against the mighty whale. They could have just let the whales alone and saved their skins at the same time. But this of course is revisionist. In the context of the history of commerce and technology, whaling had to happen, I suppose.

I once saw a segment of 60 Minutes about brave Spanish matadors. I wanted to puke because they clearly deserved every injury they received, and none are heroes.

[Robert Tulip]

Using these chapter threads as prompts for associated questions is fine. In this case the question of heroism in whaling is something that I think is there as an ambiguous point in Moby Dick, with the sense that the dignity of the whale and the tawdriness of boiling down such a magnificent animal for candles illustrates an industrial utility which is far from heroic. Melville is suggesting an environmental awareness, that even animals have rights and do not deserve to be treated as soulless brutes.

Was whaling inevitable? There seems to be a tendency in history that if people can do something they will try it, until it produces a reaction that makes them stop. Christianity had not provided any sense of the sanctity of nature, quite the reverse in fact, and this alienated morality allowed the rampant destruction of the new world, extending to the far oceans, as part of European colonization of the world.

There is no more heroism in the genocide of the whale than in the genocide of the Plains Indians. Both arise from the same twisted ethical vision of racial superiority. Here in the chapel the widows mourn the murderers who died in the course of following orders. If this chapel was dedicated to Nazis who were hanged after the Nuremberg trials we would experience much stronger disassociation, but that sense of uncertainty if dead whalers should be mourned is there in the background.

[DWill]

Using these chapter threads as prompts for associated questions is fine. In this case the question of heroism in whaling is something that I think is there as an ambiguous point in Moby Dick, with the sense that the dignity of the whale and the tawdriness of boiling down such a magnificent animal for candles illustrates an industrial utility which is far from heroic. Melville is suggesting an environmental awareness, that even animals have rights and do not deserve to be treated as soulless brutes.

Was whaling inevitable? There seems to be a tendency in history that if people can do something they will try it, until it produces a reaction that makes them stop. Christianity had not provided any sense of the sanctity of nature, quite the reverse in fact, and this alienated morality allowed the rampant destruction of the new world, extending to the far oceans, as part of European colonization of the world.

There is no more heroism in the genocide of the whale than in the genocide of the Plains Indians. Both arise from the same twisted ethical vision of racial superiority. Here in the chapel the widows mourn the murderers who died in the course of following orders. If this chapel was dedicated to Nazis who were hanged after the Nuremberg trials we would experience much stronger disassociation, but that sense of uncertainty if dead whalers should be mourned is there in the background.

I'll have to hold back my opinion on Melville's environmental awareness or sympathy for his fellow mammals, the whales. I recall in the chapters on whaling that Melville is spectacularly wrong on the question of whether men can seriously deplete the whale population (he says we can't). That would seem to indicate his sanguineness about the whole enterprise of whaling.

I just wonder, in stacking Christianity against other religions or ideologies, whether Christianity can be said to have caused either more destruction of the environment or more destruction of indigenous peoples. If the record of the others is piss-poor, too--a case that could be made--how is Christianity the bad guy?

[Robert Tulip]

Using the nineteenth century methods of sail and wooden boats, whaling was probably sustainable. It was only when modern technology in the twentieth century brought diesel engines, metal factory ships and exploding harpoons that whaling turned into an unsustainable industrial monster.

Christianity is the religion of industrial civilization. Together with its much smaller sibling Judaism, Christianity is the only religion that has aggressively promoted doctrines such as dominion, young earth creation and rapture that together justify the destruction of the earth. Other religions have a deep sense of reverence for nature, whereas Christianity introduced the alienated theory of supernaturalism, grounded in the idea that man has fallen from grace into corruption, and the weird idea that we are saved by spouting orthodoxy, that has been used to justify the wholesale destruction of the earth.

Franciscan ecology and the surprising comment in Revelation 11 that the wrath of God is directed against those who destroy the earth provide a countervailing element within Christianity, but one that is ignored by the rampant evil of dominionism. Christian destruction of nature is orders of magnitude greater than that of any other religion, because Christianity is based on flicking the depraved moral switch of regarding nature as having no moral status. Indigenous spirituality regards the Christian redskins from Europe as morally degenerate.

The two great threats to our planet, global warming and nuclear bombs, are primarily promoted by Christian civilizations. Just look at the Republican Party in the USA.

[DWill]

Good point about the sustainability of whaling. Melville probably couldn't have predicted the increases in efficiency.

About the anti-nature part of Christianity, just saying--the proof is in the pudding. Whatever reverence for nature we might detect in other religious traditions or political ideologies, how has that caused them to take a different path? Can we point to Russia or China as counter-examples? No. But we can point to certain small nations in northern Europe with Christian heritage. So I think this sin of Christianity's might be more "on paper" than a reality.