Chasing the White Whale: “Moby Dick” as Spiritual Formation by Richard Lehan

I

To my surprise, I came across a collector’s edition of Moby Dick at a local bookshop about a decade ago. My town’s store had a modest-sized section reserved for “Used Classics,” and I perused the inventory occasionally on the off chance there was a book of interest to me. One day I zeroed in on a rarity: a slab-sized volume muscling out the worn paperbacks on the bottom shelf. My eyes widened once the book was in my hands. It was a leather-bound edition of Moby Dick in pristine condition, published by the Easton Press in 1977 as part of its collection of “The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written.” The title, Moby Dick; or, The Whale, was embossed on the black cover in gold lettering, with a gold etching of a spouting whale riding stylized waves below. Opposite the title page was a frontispiece color portrait of Herman Melville as an older man, with more illustrations sprinkled throughout the volume. A price of $10 was handwritten on a yellow sticker; I bought it on the spot.

Moby Dick gathered dust on my bookshelf until the onset of the pandemic in 2020 finally motivated me to crack it open. After getting less than a quarter of the way through its 615 pages, I put it aside for less taxing diversions. To state the obvious, Moby Dick is not a casual read. Its dense, eclectic prose demands one’s full attention, patience, and sustained commitment. And that was more than I was willing to give at the time. Four years later, I made up my mind to take on Moby Dick again, starting from the beginning as though I were opening the book for the first time.

Why was I making the effort? I already knew the story of Captain Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who tore off his leg, though my familiarity was due mostly to the 1956 movie starring Gregory Peck. Since then, Moby Dick has been thoroughly absorbed into in our pop-culture universe, its iconic characters cannibalized into jokey memes. The sad truth is that Moby Dick has become unmoored from the fathoms-deep source that has made it arguably the greatest novel in American literature. And that source is what I wanted to discover anew.

I am usually reading two or three books at any given time, so adding Moby Dick to the mix meant reserving time for it on the weekends. At first, my progress through the novel was steady but incremental, finishing one or two of its short chapters at a time, aided by a compact study guide from 1966 that I bought at another used bookstore. But once Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod made contact with Moby Dick, the propulsive narrative carried me along in its wake. I ended up devouring the final chapters on an almost daily basis as the novel’s fated conclusion played out in a frenzy. The epilogue, with a dazed Ishmael clinging to Queegueg’s coffin as it bobs above the sunken Pequod, struck a somber but satisfying note. It took me eight months to finish Moby Dick, but what a ride it was.

II

I was still reflecting on the experience of reading the novel when I came across Pope Francis’s letter on the role of literature in formation as part of Today’s American Catholic’s “Fall Book Week” last year. I hadn’t heard about this apostolic letter and was interested as a reader, writer, and believer in what the pope had to say on the subject.

Francis opens his letter by noting that its original intended audience was priests in training, but on further reflection decided its message applies to all Christians. A book, he observes, demands greater personal engagement than scrolling through one’s smartphone or social media; indeed, the reader of a book in some sense rewrites the text, sometimes in ways that are different from what the author intended. Francis calls reading “an act of discernment” that involves the reader as both the subject who reads and as the object of what is being read. The reader “actually experiences ‘being read’ by the words that he or she is reading,” he states. Francis also believes that literature is best experienced through “contemplative reading,” which helps us “to reflect on the meaning of our presence in this world, to ‘digest’ and assimilate it, and to grasp what lies beneath the surface of our experience.” Novels and poems let us rediscover “the reality of individuals and situations as a mystery charged with a surplus of meaning.”

Francis cites Jorge Luis Borges, the celebrated writer from his native Argentina, who told his students that the most important thing is simply to read. Even if you understand very little of what you are reading, Borges reminded them, you are hearing “another person’s voice.” For C. S. Lewis, reading literature places us in the position of “seeing through the eyes of others.” Both modes of perception, Francis argues, foster “an imaginative empathy” without which “there can be no solidarity, sharing, compassion, mercy.”

Literature is also “essential for believers who sincerely seek to enter into dialogue with the culture of their time.” T. S. Eliot diagnosed today’s religious crisis as due to a “widespread emotional incapacity.” Francis concurs, arguing that the problem of faith “is not primarily that of believing more or believing less with regard to particular doctrines. Rather, it is the inability of so many of our contemporaries to be profoundly moved in the face of God, his creation and other human beings.” When believers stop listening to the voices of people who challenge us, including in literary works “where the boundaries between salvation and perdition are not a priori obvious and distinct,” we experience a form of “spiritual deafness, which has a negative effect on our relationship with ourselves and with God.”

For Francis, “the spiritual power of literature brings us back to the primordial task entrusted by God to the human family: the task of ‘naming’ other beings and things.” Fittingly, his letter ends with the words of the Romanian-French poet Paul Celan: “Those who truly learn to see, draw close to what is unseen.”

The pope’s letter made me realize that Melville’s creation of Moby Dick and my reading of the novel were both exercises in spiritual formation. Perhaps the best way to unpack this theme is to start with the author.

III

By the time the 30-year-old Melville came to envision Moby Dick, he was already a full-time writer supporting his growing family at his home, Arrowhead, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, not far from where his new friend Nathaniel Hawthorne lived. He had already published five novels, and in conceiving the story for his epic sixth, he drew on all of his seafaring and life experiences to date. The name and plot of Moby Dick are derived from the tale of an actual white whale named “Mocha Dick,” so-called because it was usually encountered near Mocha Island off the coast of Chile. But the themes and philosophical depth of the novel have their origins in Melville’s childhood and unsettled transition into adulthood.

The failure of his father’s importing business and death shortly thereafter left young Herman and his family in straitened financial circumstances. Melville’s mother joined the First Reformed Dutch Church, inculcating a biblical Calvinism in him that became his spiritual inheritance. With his education and career prospects derailed by the family’s misfortunes, Melville cast about for a vocation and ended up going to sea. The almost four years that he spent as a sailor challenged his conventional religious, moral, and cultural beliefs but also gifted him with adventures that he was eager to share. Melville began writing Moby Dick from the standpoint of an established professional intent on furthering his chosen career, but also desirous of fulfilling his artistic ambitions.

It took Melville 18 months to finish his novel, published in Britain as The Whale in October 1851. The American version, which the author retitled Moby Dick; or, The Whale, came out a few weeks later. Perhaps savoring what he had accomplished, Melville wrote to Hawthorne: “I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as a lamb.” Then came the reality check. The reviews of Moby Dick in both Britain and America were decidedly mixed. Though Hawthorne applauded Melville’s achievement, most reviewers disliked Moby Dick due to its extravagant mix of language, characters, and themes. The American edition of Moby Dick was also considered overpriced and sold poorly. To top it off, most of those copies burned in a warehouse fire.

Folio from the Jami al-Tavarikh (“The Compendium of Chronicles”), c. 1400

Six years and two unsuccessful novels later, Melville had exhausted myself as a novelist. His father-in-law paid for him to go on a six-month tour of Europe and the Mediterranean, including the Holy Land. In 1863, Melville bought his brother’s house in New York City and worked as a customs inspector for the next 19 years. All the while, he continued to write on his own. The earlier trip to the Holy Land inspired his 1876 epic poem Clarel: A Poem and a Pilgrimage, which he had published privately. After his death in 1891, his wife found the manuscript of an unfinished novella titled Billy Budd. It was eventually published to critical acclaim in 1924, helping spark a critical reassessment of Melville’s work as a writer. Moby Dick, his magnum opus, was finally hailed as a classic of American literature.

IV

The conflict between Melville’s inherited Christian beliefs and the challenges his lived experience posed to them is personified by the main characters in Moby Dick. The narrator shares the same name as the son of Abraham and his Egyptian wife, Hagar, but this Ishmael has banished himself from his homeland. When the story begins, he is seeking to escape a mundane future by embarking on an exotic voyage of self-discovery. His first encounter is with Queequeg, a cannibal from the island of Kokovoko in the South Seas who originally stowed away on an American whaling ship for the express purpose of living among Christians. Queequeg, however, quickly becomes disillusioned by their conduct: “Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die a pagan.” In fact, Queequeg remains committed to his native religion, as evidenced by his worship of “Yojo,” an ebony idol. It is Yojo, after all, who “chooses” the Pequod as the most auspicious whaling ship for Queequeg and Ishmael to sign on to. Ishmael, who describes himself as a “good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church,” hesitates when his “bosom friend” Queequeg invites him to make a burnt offering to Yojo. Rather than reflexively reject Queequeg’s request, Ishmael asks himself: “But what is worship?” To which he answers: “to do the will of God—that is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me.” Becoming an idolater, Ishmael concludes, is a way of uniting himself with another fellow man’s act of worship. Afterwards, Ishmael reports that both he and Queequeg went to bed at peace with their consciences.

Having heard one Father Mapple preach on the story of Jonah and the whale before going to sea, Ishmael draws the proper spiritual lesson from the sermon: above all, one must remain obedient to God’s will. Yet he finds that the Christianity of his childhood is not up to the task of providing satisfying answers to questions of morality or the problem of evil. Even so, Ishmael is able to recognize his own complicity in Ahab’s mad quest. He is someone that contemporary readers can identify with: a conflicted, compromised man who is no longer certain of what he believes in.

Ahab, in turn, is defined by his unrepentant hubris and need for revenge. Fidelity to the dictates of fate governs his actions. Ahab has arrogantly ordained himself to be Moby Dick’s judge and executioner regardless of whether his ship and crew become collateral damage. Yet Melville knew from his deep familiarity with the Bible that only God, not Ahab, has the sovereign authority and power to decide the fate of the Leviathan. But, like Satan, a defiant Ahab refuses to submit.

The whiteness of the whale, which above all appalled Ishmael, symbolizes the crux of the metaphysical puzzle at the heart of Moby Dick. Ishmael muses on whether the color white, the symbol of goodness and purity, is “the very veil of the Christian’s Deity” or whether its blankness, evoking “the heartless voids and immensities of the universe,” stands for the “all-color of atheism from which we shrink”. Alas, Ishmael is unable to answer for himself definitively.

V

In Moby Dick, Melville lays bare own struggle to believe in God in the face of suffering and loss. Regarded as a failed novelist during his lifetime, he endured financial and marital strains as well as the untimely deaths of two of his sons. Years after they first met, Melville paid a brief visit to Hawthorne in England, where Hawthorne was serving as US consul. Afterwards, Hawthorne noted perceptively in his journal:

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated” . . . If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.

My experience of reading Moby Dick has proven it to be a strikingly modern literary work that has the power to shape believers in ways they need. The novel immerses the reader in an unbridled, at-sea world where whales are simultaneously held in awe and unthinkingly slaughtered—a poignant paradox in our time of climate crisis. The moral choices made by the human characters—or, more accurately, their acquiescence to their captain’s deformed motives—reflect their mercenary, earth-bound limitations. Still, I see in Ishmael’s grappling with his own religious doubts and shortcomings evidence of a pilgrim who has yet to give up his search for meaning. Even Ahab is saved from becoming a mere symbol of evil by his solicitous care of Pip, the cabin boy gone mad, and regret over how his life spent whaling has consigned his wife and child to the margins. To render fictional characters as embodied, recognizable persons in this way is a hallmark of great literature. Such an achievement, as Pope Francis says, “does not dispense from moral judgement but prevents us from blind or superficial condemnation.”

In his final book, Dark Light of Love, the theologian John Dunne wrote that to see the quest for faith as “a conflict, a wrestling with God, like Jacob wrestling with the angel (Gen 32:24-30) is to see the relation as one of facing God. To see it as a journey with God in time is to see it as one of being with God.” Moby Dick similarly illustrates two fundamentally different stances toward the divine. In their own fashion, Ishmael and Ahab each face off against their Christian God and suffer as a consequence. By comparison, Queegueg’s journey with Yojo is trusting and companionable, even when he stands atop the masthead as the Pequod sinks below the waves. ♦

Richard Lehan is an essayist and fiction writer living in Massachusetts. Several of his essays have previously appeared in Today’s American Catholic. His flash fiction “A Labyrinth for the Pandemic” will appear in Feed the Holy in May 2025.

Banner image: T. H. Thomas, illustration for The Natural History of the Sperm Whale by Thomas Beale, 19th c.