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Moby-Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled
Bv T. Walter Herbert, Jr.
New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 1977. 186 pp. $12.50.

Calvin and Calvinism! Melville and Moby Dick! Just one of these subjects would present a formidable challenge to the most knowledgeable of theologians and critics. Herbert, currently chairman of the department of English at Southwestern University, attempts to unravel and resolve the problems of the teachings of the great Genevan Reformer and his descendants and of the most enduring volume of America's great novelist. In an effort to do both ties the contribution and the shortcoming of this monograph.

Herbert argues that Herman Melville and Moby Dick, first published in 1851, must be read and studied within the historic situation in which the author found himself. Melville tried to deal with the "Conflict of the Ages," to use Edward Beecher's phrase, within Calvinism and the warfare between his own Unitarian-self and his Dutch-Reformed self. The former was a legacy bequeathed to him from his father, who died early in Melville's life and in financial difficulties; the latter, from his mother who raised the family on Dutch Calvinism after her husband's death. Melville's Moby Dick is about Melville's own "sane madness" in which he rejected Calvinism, a theocentric worldview, for a polytheistic or pantheistic approach to reality. The author puts his thesis in several ways. Melville, he writes, achieved "a sophisticated, acute, and prophetic attack on the scheme of theological ideas that was taken as an accurate description of ultimate reality in his time" (p.5). In another place he identifies the whale as "an embodiment of the divine," but "not as the manifestation of a supreme unitary Godhead." The whale's divine preeminence would be recognized, according to Melville, "only when man's spiritual awareness is no longer ordered by a single all-embracing principle, but is freed to develop a sophisticated polytheism" (p. 73). Finally, Ishmael is rescued by chance, "escaping alone to tell us of a catastrophe in which divine Truth is struck down as a moral standard" (p. 169), presumably the moral of the novel.

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Herbert's work is helpful because he takes seriously Melville's theological awareness and sensitivity. He explores the meaning of the book through Melville's dialogue with contemporary theologians, liberal and conservative, who were raising questions about the nineteenth century theocentric scheme of things. Some of the details of Melville's relations with and reactions to theologians and pastors are illuminating. Another helpful aspect of this work appears in notes in which Herbert deals perceptively with Melville scholarship. He questions, for example, Nathalia Wright's thesis in Melville's Use of the Bible (1949) that Melville accepted the Christian scheme of things and that Ahab got what he deserved for his monomania. He questions Lawrence Thompson's thesis in Melville's Quarrel With God (1952) that the novelist accepted the conceptual framework of Christian theology, yet embodied an indictment of it in Ahab's heroic rebellion. Herbert argues that Melville was far more iconoclastic in his exposure of the spiritual contradictions of his age and with his own affirmation of what the critic calls a "polytheistic moralism" (p.176).

The reader may gain much useful knowledge and insight from this study without agreeing with Herbert's final verdict on what he calls Melville's masterpiece or on what he considers Calvinism. Melville's own turmoil finds expression in his "wicked book"-his own words-and in his own identification with Captain Ahab, and other characters in his narrative, including Ishmael. He wrote the book to articulate, if not to settle completely, some of his own personal problems. But what does it all mean? First of all, the reader should note that Herbert's knowledge of the literary work about Melville is far wider than is his knowledge of Calvin studies and Calvinism. This leads to some lack of clarity on just what Calvin taught and what his descendants carried over in their own polemics. Moreover, we should know more about Melville than Herbert tells us. Before we accept the conclusion that Melville favored a polytheism or a pantheism instead of a theocentric worldview of Calvinism, we should know more about how he felt toward his Transcendentalist friends who may have also moved in this direction. While Hawthorne is mentioned often in this study, Emerson is referred to once, only in passing. Before we conclude that Melville discredited the theological standards on which he believed moral judgments were based in his day, we need to know more about the moral concerns Melville aired in Moby Dick, the sometimes direct, sometimes cryptic manner in which he plucked sin from "under the robes of Senators and Judges," as Father Mapple put it in his famous sermon on the prophet Jonah.

In support of his own resolution of the mystery of Moby Dick, Herbert makes much of the final catastrophe of the book in which the whale takes Pequod, Ahab, and his crew to a swirling watery grave. Ishmael alone is saved to tell the tale. Melville, Herbert concludes, used the inconclusive verse from the beginning of Job's trial to introduce the Epilogue: "And I only am escaped to tell thee." He used

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this verse rather than Job's affirmation about God's triumph over evil, because of his own rejection of that ultimate theological vision. Herbert protests too much over this verse from Job in support of his own radical interpretation to Moby Dick. What he does not mention at all is that Ishmael, the religious orphan, is picked up by a ship christened Rachel, who in "her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan." Rachel was the spiritual mother of all Israel. Melville allowed Rachel to rescue Ishmael, the one not favored of God. How does that symbolism fit Herbert's thesis? It may fit. It may not fit. And that brings me to the final point I wish to make about this book. Herbert has set out to unravel and resolve the enigma of Melville's life and masterpiece, Moby Dick. The enigma is what has made the novel a masterpiece. Despite the value of his insights into contemporary theological quarrels and into Melville's own spiritual turmoil, Herbert has not proved his thesis. Given the greatness of his subject, we should not, of course, expect him to do so. His book is a stimulating monograph on a complex life and an inscrutable tale. Moby Dick lives and still roams the seas of our imagination. The book remains a masterpiece written by a troubled genius.

James H. Smylie
Union Theological Seminary
Richmond, Virginia