Religion comes in many packages -- architectural, musical, creedal and literary: poems, plays, short stories, novels. I've read Moby Dick many times, but never considered calling it a religious book until now.
It took In the Heart of the Sea, a decidedly non-religious film, to remind me that the American classic is overloaded with religious cargo. It isn't single-focused enough to entirely qualify as a work of religion. Nevertheless, its knotty patchwork of religious passions, perversions, and satires makes it among many other things episodically religious.
The new movie in town, In the Heart of the Sea, tracks the story of a giant whale that sinks a whaling ship in 1820 in the South Pacific. The Essex was stove in, with only a few starved and traumatized survivors.
There's not much religious impact to note other than the dominance of nature over human will or perhaps the taboo against eating human flesh. But the film succeeds in bringing Moby Dick to the fore.
The story-line of a whale chase and shipwreck comes from the well-advertised tragedy of the Essex. The film opens with a young Melville introducing himself at the door of a survivor. He hopes an interview will add authenticity to his budding story. But as he lets it grow the tale accumulates an unruly tangle of religion.
The published novel retains the dominance of a whaling disaster but it adds a plethora of religious and irreligious bits and pieces -- some bizarre, some sublime, some bland or utterly fanciful.
We have prophecy, demons, funerals and weird pagan rites. We have a man sleeping in a coffin and the coffin saving a friend from extinction - just for a start.
The abundance of embellishment reminds us that religion is not only churches and creeds, temples, mosques and scriptures, devotions and ceremonies, swearing allegiance to God.
It also appears in prophecy and saintly goodness, in cathedrals, Bach Passions, and Gospel choirs, in the impulses of deep ecology and in the best of nature writing. It's a crucial ingredient in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, T. S. Eliot, Melville, Thoreau, and countless others.
Moby Dick's legions of religious embellishment are overwhelming.
We have prophecy, demons, and pagan goodness - Queequeg is a cannibal ready to teach Christian charity to ignorant Christians.
We have Father Maple's boisterous sermon and a wicked satire: Nantucket's non-violent, pious Quakers are avidly funding the bloody slaughter of whales.
In a religious portrait worthy of Dostoevsky, Pip, the young African cabin boy and confidant of Ahab, is the marvel of a Holy Fool.
Ahab's deadly obsession with killing the whale is an upside down quest for God - driven by hate rather than love, a religion gone terribly wrong, vengeance replacing humility.
The book's narrator asks to be called "Ishmael," making him a reincarnation of the biblical child abandoned to wilderness, considered a prophet by Islam.
The whale ship's destruction strikes us as a visitation of God's wrath: we are all cast into wilderness.
The broad swath of religion in Moby Dick even includes impromptu interfaith dialogues. Demons, agnostics, would-be Christians, and South Sea pagans converse respectfully across barriers.
Whales have demonic-divine import for Melville and meteors do too. A luminous whale's dive mimics the quick dive of a brilliant meteor.
Melville has one appearance as a religious center in his poem "The Portent," published in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War in 1866. It stands in for the prophetic brilliance and fall of the insurrectionist John Brown.
The whale streams through the sea as the meteor streams through the sky. Both are omens, fascinating and frightening to behold, fraught with the religious, bound to awaken a routinized world stripped of things worthy of awe.
Melville was born in 1819, two years after Henry David Thoreau, who also figured John Brown as a meteor. The heavenly burst is insurrectionist interruption, a disruptive religious portent. In his stirring defense of John Brown, Thoreau, like Melville, dubs him an other-worldly meteor.
Brown led a raid on Harper's Ferry to secure arms for a slave revolt. Unfortunately, this was before the Civil War had officially begun. His moment ended in his capture and hanging in 1859. Thoreau and Melville gave him an afterlife.
Both writers knew of the mid-day meteor "as big as a house" that startled spectators all along the East Coast in 1850. It was widely reported and gave prophets and seers a field day. In today's papers, it's melting ice-caps, rising seas, and Middle Eastern wars and migrations that are portents of disaster, threatening human life as we know it.
Christmas commemorates wise men responding to a message-bearing star in the East. Those desert nomads, unlike Ishmael, became wise because they saw a light, read its prophecy, and acted.
Natural phenomena - whales, stars, meteors, ice caps -- convey news to those with eyes attuned -- news sometimes threatening, sometimes comforting, sometimes just baffling.
We know from our news the dark glow of demagogues and terrorists, prophets and agents of doom. With imagination, we should have no problem with Thoreau or Melville hearkening to a meteor's cleaving brilliance, and its news.
Religion can congeal in doctrines and jihads, but it has a broader, trembling, and multicolored reach. Whether it bears good or ill it's scattered all over, and like a whale or meteor, a marvel and terror to behold.
For more see http://zeteojournal.com/category/a-week-of-reading/ed-mooney/