Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil

94            Public Lectures

that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle de-
monisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visi-
bly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-
Dick. He piled upon the whale’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. ¹⁴

The whale shades imperceptibly from a vividly terrible
real animal into a personification of all evil.

By a still more subtle process, too complex to describe here,
Melville contrives to identify the whale with God himself.
Ahab, like Melville, continues to ask why. He traces the evil
back to its only possible source in the Christian tradition.
Orthodoxy in Western theology had always branded as
heresy the notion that Evil was a force outside of God. If
God is omnipotent, Evil can exist only by his permission,
could be banished instantly if God wished. Thus, God is
responsible for the presence of Evil in the world. Ahab, in his
monomania, is impelled to strike back at Evil, not merely a
particular individual evil like the loss of a leg, but at Evil
with a capital E, the very source of evil. The captain explains
to his first mate:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in
each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there,
some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth its features
from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike
through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except
by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is
that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s
naught beyond. But ^,tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I
see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice
sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and
be the White Whale agent, or be the White Whale principal, I
will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy,
man; Γd strike the sun if it insulted me. ¹⁵

Here is the very crux of the problem of evil, and here, at
last, is real tragedy.

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