Posted by Dave Kelly on September 27, 2000 at 21:49:07:
In Reply to: Melville's Moby Dick - the megalomanic character of Captain Ahab posted by Jan den Breejen on September 27, 2000 at 03:34:30:
I don't think it's typologically correct to project a particular type onto God/Yahweh, or any other monotheistic god. These figures are usually thought of as comprising all the types.
The analogy of Satan and Captain Ahab seems right, and I've seen it before. But the God figure in the story is actually Moby-Dick. Ahab, like Satan, is God's enemy. He could be said to be projecting his own evil onto the Whale. Here's some interesting commentary from Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic (pp. 272-3) by Stephen A. Diamond:
Moby-Dick--the great white whale--is the daimonic. Indeed, he is life itself, that ambiguous, archetypal Being that can never be killed, but only given expression in some creative or destructive form: "Whales are the primitive, undifferentiated energies of nature," writes Edinger. Melville calls Moby-Dick "a 'Job's whale' (Chapter 41), referring to Leviathan in the book of Job, one of the manifestations of Yahweh. The whale is remarked to be one of the incarnations of Vishnu in the Matse Avatar (Chapter 55). The mad sailor, Gabriel, pronounces the white whale to be the Shaker God incarnated....[Moby-Dick] is associated with Jupiter...[and] is called a 'grand god' (Chapter 133)." But most convincing is Melville's description (via Ahab) of Moby-Dick as "representing the transcendental reality behind the appearance of things. And such transcendental reality is another name for God."Moby-Dick is undeniably the reigning god of the great seas, the unconscious. But this inhuman monster is no beneficent, loving, or even neutral deity: it is daimonic--both divine and diabollic. It is nature, in all its beautiful and abhorrent reality. And it is eternal, indefatigable, and indestructible. It is a brute force to be both feared and revered; but never to be turned against, rejected, or repudiated. The daimonic melds both the positive and negative qualities of life, without making them mutually exclusive.
Melville expresses the numinous psychological meaning Moby-Dick held for Ahab in the following lucid passage:
Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in there statute devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred White Whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, are visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He piled upon the whales's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. (128)Hence, for hateful Ahab, the daimonic had become the demonic, in the spectral image not of the devil, but of Moby-Dick. Similar projections of the daimonic may be found in the mythological motif of fire-breathing dragons, and many other monstrous imaginings of the human mind. As Edinger comments, Captain Ahab "thinks he had discovered the nature of the deity--thinks it to be no more than destructive malice toward man. In fact, however, he is only seeing the reflected image of himself." Moby-Dick was Ahab's own personal Satan; and Ahab sought to disgorge his gall by destroying this ungodly white devil--a deluded course of action destined to lead to his own demise. For the daimonic can never be done away with, extirpated or eradicated. At best, we can merely try to redeem and reclaim our devils and demons, and coexist with them as peaceably as possible.
: Melville's Moby Dick - the character of Captain Ahab
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: Case text:
: Ahab and Eddy
: In Moby Dick, Melville recounts a whaling journey on which the MONOMANICAL Captain Ahab chases Moby Dick, the gigantic white whale who once dismembered him and thereafter became his representation of everything EVIL in the world. Ahab brings along 30 sailors of many different origins who unknowingly enlist to pursue his solitary CAUSE. In the end, however, the whale defeats Ahab and takes the entire crew (save the narrator of course) and ship to the depths of the ocean. The key to reading this novel in relation to my comparison is Ahab's character and how his SINGLE MINDED PURSUIT OF JUSTICE RESULTS IN FAILURE AND LOSS OF LIVES.
: Ahab barks to his mate, "Damn the devil, Flask; do you suppose I'm afraid of the devil? Who's afraid of him, except the old governor who daresn't catch him and put him in double-darbies, as he deserves. . . (Moby Dick, 373). Ahab's intrepid approach is somewhat courageous, but still incredibly deranged. Even after he is confronted about very personal matters, Ahab REFUSES TO STEER OFF HIS ONE WAY COURSE. HIS DETERMINATION IS ultimately AHAB's DOWNFALL.
: Just as Captain Ahab relentlessly hunts Moby Dick, so also Mary Baker Eddy pursued the evils of human kind. Both characters, although the first fictional and the second actual, took it upon themselves to rid the world of evil and indulged their personal solutions in doing so. Ahab set sail on the Pequod and searched the oceans, Eddy sought evil through thought and provoked her followers through writing. Ahab brought 30 with him, Eddy has brought millions. It is my goal in investigating the ethics of the Church of Christ Scientist, to prove that like Ahab, Eddy was on an EGOMANICAL PURSUIT OF A PROMETHEAN CAUSE..
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: Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) grew up in New England with Puritan values, but spent most of her childhood and early adult life ill. In 1866, she "was healed of a serious injury as she read the account of one of Jesus' healings in the New Testament." (http://www.tfccs.com) Then in 1875, she published her masterpiece, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Following this work, she established the Church of Christ Scientist in 1879, along with six major tenets (visit the link to read the Tenets as published by the Mother Church). Science and Health became successful in many countries and the membership of the Church began to grow rapidly.
: Eddy claims to have experienced real healing, which led her to write her "divinely inspired" Science and Health, in which she claims many more things: "The physical healing of Christian Science results... from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation" (Science and Health, xi). Truth is questionable here, because you must take a grand leap of faith to accept that sin and disease a merely a creation of human consciousness. The self-written preface of Science and Health states "The question, What is Truth, is answered by demonstration, -- by healing both disease and sin; and this demonstration shows that Christian healing confers the most health and makes the best men" (Science and Health, viii) Eddy establishes her own definitions of truth and the good life, the healing of disease and sin, which becomes the foundation of her religion. Interestingly, Eddy outwardly denies wanting leadership to be a part of the practice: "Your dual and impersonal pastor, the Bible, and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, is with you; and the Life these give, the Truth they illustrate, the Love they demonstrate, is the great Shepherd that feedeth my flock, and leadeth them 'beside the still waters.'" However, notice how she places her book tantamount to the Bible. Also, she calls the people "my flock." This claim of possession is completely antithetical to the previous idea of equality under "the great Shepherd" of Life, Truth, and Love. These points illustrate Eddy's desire to become a revered prophetess.
: A second way to compare Ahab and Eddy and another way to distinguish reality and imagination is to look at what they pursued. Moby Dick, Ahab's prey, is a tangible entity. The whale does physically exist, although Ahab attacked it as the personification of evil. "Ahab had one only and all engrossing object of hunting the whale... He was intent on an audacious, IMMITIGABLE, and supernatural REVENGE" (Moby Dick, 221). His exclusive desire was to destroy the whale and in so doing CONQUER EVERYTING EVIL in human kind. Similarly, Eddy's TARGET WAS THE SIN OF THE WORLD, including suffering and disease. However, she professed that those ideas were imaginative, and that if one could conquer the thought of evil, it would no longer exist. Her reasoning was that because God is everything which is good and perfect, evil could not exist unless as a product of man's fearful mind. By suppressing the belief in sin, anyone who has faith can eventually be free of it, "but the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts" (Tenet 3) Eddy creates a state of mind, whereas Ahab personifies evil in a physical being. There is no great whale of Christian Science -- everything evil is imagined. Is Moby Dick any more true than what Eddy is saying because of the difference in tangibility? Yes, of course. There is no way to read the mind, but Ahab's crew, his broken ship, and his leg will attest to the physical reality of Moby Dick. These differences between reality and imagination will serve as tools to answer the central question, just as the foundation on which the ethics of Christian Science were created will also.
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: +++ Jan's analysis
: Ahab clearly is a powerful charismatic leader who, like Hitler, arrogates to themselves a mission and a right to pursue retribution against their enemies while imposing totalitarian methods of rule and expanding his power abroad
: We can see in Ahab (and Hitler): a kinda hubris-nemesis complex; i.e. primarily a paranoid vengeful character with strong narcissistic traits too:
: -- a destructive-constructive messianism; passionate, fanatical
: -- high, moralizing ideals that justify violence; air of contempt towards others
: -- a demand for absolute power, loyalty, and attention; image of self as demigod (of course a compensation for their collapse of self-esteem by their disappointing interactions with reality)
: -- a fierce sense of struggle that may turn self-sacrificial; their agression runs hard in reality
: Ahab believes himself to be--and presents himself as being--a virtual messiah or savior who is on a crusade and has a fate, destiny, or mission that is historic, both timeless and time-changing in its implications. All is politicized in the name of the mission and the high principles it engages. They present themselves as holy saint-leaders; with plans to purge the world from evil/sins (Hitler saw the Jews of course as the evil forces to be hunted down; strong parallel with Moby Dick!)
: Captain Ahab in Herman Melville's Moby Dick compares too with the archetype of Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Aboard ship, Ahab imposes an "irresistible dictatorship" to go after a superpowerful beast, Moby Dick, that had injured him physically, and in Ahab's view, intellectually and spiritually too. This "grand, ungodly, godlike man" fulminates like a vengeful match for any power in heaven, in hell, or on earth. His consuming PRIDE AND RAGE FOR REVENGE against the White Whale blaze in the great speech before his crew where he proclaims, "I will wreak that hate upon him. . . . I'd strike the sun if it insulted me." And while others think him mad, Ahab knows he is but "demoniac"--and that "for this hunt my malady becomes my most desired health." The Whale of course proves to be his nemesis.
: In another display of the complex, Milton's Satan becomes "the Adversary of God and Man." Once the highest of angels, his "pride and worse ambition" lead him to go to war against his Creator for the control of Heaven. Thus he falls from grace and is cast into Hell, feeling it is "better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." There, from a "sense of injured merit," and "with thoughts inflamed of highest designs," he recalls a rumor that God may have created something new called Man. So he escapes from Hell, and sets out to locate Man and take his revenge.
: Dark themes of pride, vanity, ambition, power, insolence, disdain, defiance, rage, and retribution pervade Moby Dick and Paradise Lost. Ahab and Satan have moments of regret and doubt about what they are doing--but these are fleeting moments of self-reflection, before they plunge ahead on their SWORN BITTER MISSIONS.
: So clearly Ahab, Hitler and Satan are paranoid personality archetypes. But what about God/Jahweh, isn't there a paranoid mind at work when the holy scriptures tell us that those who follow other belief systems will burn in hell forever for disobeying the Almighty? Aren't many overtly-serious religious commuities like cults 'pseudo-communities' build by independent paranoid minds, creating their own holy kingdom; their own grandiose realm? Food for thought….
: Jan