This essay appears in the Mercy Issue of our print magazine.

Moby Dick (1851) is the supreme fiction, Delphic oracle, and apocalyptic parable of the American Republic. It forecasts the inevitable demise of a society built on greed, ecocide, demagoguery, and fundamentalist zeal. Herman Melville, a literary stylist of remarkable genius, endows the profession of whaling with the sort of rumination the ancient Greeks reserved for the symposiums and Mount Olympus. To divine America’s ultimate spiritual destiny, he casts his eye on the “lowly things of this world and the despised things” (1 Cor 1:28). Namely, the crew of the Pequod.

A central tension of the novel is whether or not these thirty men (symbolic of the Union’s thirty states in 1851) can survive the leadership of Captain Ahab, a man “ready to strike the sun if it insulted me.” With Miltonic flourish, Ahab recasts the harvesting of oil-rich whale blubber (a literal quest for light) into a vengeful hunt. His distorted Romanticism becomes an orthodoxy of one. “May I forgive myself,” he declares as lord and sovereign. Ahab perceives the transcendental within the created order, but rather than revel in it, he endeavors to subdue it. Thus he ascribes to Moby Dick, a white whale that took his leg during a previous expedition, a fearful writ, a dark gospel of volition and demonism. The whiteness of this leviathan becomes the nihilistic blank slate of Ahab’s desire and madness. This makes him impervious to the “great cloud of witnesses” (both theological and nautical) who have gone before him. This makes him willing to endanger the safety of his crew in service of his own vanity, renown, and magical thinking. This makes him thoroughly American.

It is Starbuck, Ahab’s first mate, who apprehends the grim fate of the Pequod and the autocratic designs of its captain. In Chapter 123, “The Musket,” Starbuck, a Quaker in Nantucket dress, is confronted with a moral choice that challenges his earnest pacifism. The ship endures a fearsome typhoon in the deep Pacific. With chilling detail, Melville describes how the needles of the ship’s compass spin with “whirling velocity” in the midst of the gale: “It is a sight that hardly anyone can behold without some sort of unwonted emotion.” Like the compass, the Pequod is unmoored from the natural world and the laws that govern it. Like the compass, Ahab has abandoned the constellations that guide his rank and station. If Starbuck doesn’t act decisively, no one will.

The storm abates, and Starbuck descends to the state-room to “appraise Captain Ahab of the circumstance.” Melville takes a beat to describe the “isolated subterraneousness” of the cabin — a critique of how divorced Ahab has become from the plight of his crew. It is in this Jonahic cell, this hovel, that Starbuck finds the captain fast asleep. In a sardonic inversion of Mark 4, Ahab has slept through the perilous night. Whereas in the Gospel, Jesus sleeps as Lord of creation, and is able to calm the sea with a word, in Moby Dick Ahab sleeps amid a tempest that cannot match the turbulent clime of his own heart. The contrast could not be more acute. Captain Jesus awakes, discerns, and cares for his crew. Even his rebuke, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?” becomes a corrective for fear run amok. Captain Ahab dreams, obsesses, and declares in his sleep, “Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!” Jesus abides. Ahab abandons. One preserves. The other destroys.

Mounted against the forward bulkhead of Ahab’s cell is a rack of loaded muskets. “He would have shot me once,” Starbuck says, observing the very musket Ahab once pointed at his face. In a rare moment of clarity, Ahab’s supremacist creed (“There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord of the Pequod”) faces a legitimate coup. “Starbuck was an honest man,” Melville writes, “but out of Starbuck’s heart, at that instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for itself.” Murder is indeed an “evil thought,” especially when it is “so blent” with the good intentions of the Pequod’s first mate. Starbuck removes the musket, “the very musket that he pointed at me,” from the rack. A single shot would bedevil Starbuck’s religious conviction. A single shot could deliver the crew to the safety of Nantucket. Is mercy what stays his hand or pulls the trigger?

Starbuck assumes the posture of David before a sleeping Saul: he appraises his tyrant leader, and does not destroy him (1 Sam 26:7-9). Ahab’s dereliction aboard the Pequod is worthy of judgment, but Paul’s mandate in Romans 13 that “every person be subject to the governing authorities” remains an inconvenient thorn in the conscience of rebel and revolutionary alike. Starbuck quests for an alternative:

But is there no other way? No lawful way? — Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man’s living power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor, he would be more hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the sight; could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage.

The gods may have nailed Prometheus to the Scythian cliff, but no amount of ropes and hawsers can confine the promethean will of Ahab. The mere thought of a fettered captain, “with two oceans and a whole continent between me and law,” dissuades Starbuck from incarceration. Even if Ahab were safely delivered to a New England courtroom, the primordial evil of the captain’s heart speaks to a universal crisis of human nature, a crisis that does not end with a “crazed old man” in the dock. It may be fashionable to imagine that the death of today’s villain leads to “happily ever after” tomorrow, but this is a Hollywood fiction. The corpse of Hitler is buried as the heir of his depravity imbibes a mother’s milk. In such a world, our shared mortality becomes a grace disguised, a reliable end-stop to despotism run riot. Rather than become Nature’s ambassador and resident death dealer, Starbuck lets Nature run its course. He refuses to meet Ahab’s evil with a loaded musket of his own.

There are intimations of this conviction earlier in the novel. In Chapter 114, “The Gilder,” the Pequod finds itself “under an abated sun” in “the heart of the Japanese cruising ground.” Ishmael (the novel’s on-again off-again narrator) observes that under such “dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that beats beneath it.” Ahab responds to this paradox with melancholy. Stubb, the ship’s second mate, becomes a devout Epicurean, taking an oath to always be “jolly.” And Starbuck finds blessed assurance in the precepts of his Christian faith. He cannot reconcile a world where ethereal beauty comingles with predatory death, so he trusts the larger hope of God’s redemptive intent.

Loveliness unfathomable, as ever a lover saw in his young bride’s eye! — Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibalism ways. Let faith oust fact; let fact oust memory: I look deep down and do believe.

In a world teeming with sharks, including the shark-toothed disposition of his captain, Starbuck fixes his eyes on the transcendent. He would rather graft himself to the habits of heaven than to the cycles of death that inform (as Ahab describes it) the “mingling threads of life…woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.” Starbuck’s virtue simultaneously perceives the danger of Ahab’s madness and keeps him from violent retribution. For Starbuck, what separates humanity from the sharks is not our propensity for violence, but rather our capacity to refrain from the fisticuffs long enough to love our neighbor instead:

The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard’s arm against the panel; Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.

One reading of Starbuck’s mercy is that he perceives in Ahab the work of providence. Ahab becomes (like his Old Testament namesake) an instrument of God’s judgment on the Pequod: a cautionary tale for a perishing republic. In this economy, the judgment is less against the crew members of the Pequod than the nation they represent. The daughters of Sodom and the firstborn sons of Egypt offer precedent for such a reckoning. In the final act of the novel, as the doomed prow of the Pequod sinks into the doomed port of the sea, Ahab declares: “Its wood could only be American.” For Melville, this is the judgment that will befall his own nation. And is it not true that in today’s age of morbid wealth, political hubris, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch the impulses of our Pequod ancestry remain?

A second (and perhaps more convincing) reading is to assume Starbuck’s familiarity with the Parable of the Weeds. In Matthew 13, Jesus tells the story of “someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away.” Dismayed, the servants marshal an expedient remedy, but the owner commands them instead to ignore this agrarian sabotage and let the weeds grow up alongside the wheat. According to Fr. Robert Capon, in his major work Kingdom, Grace, Judgment, “The parable says that doing nothing is, for the time being, the preferred response to evil … it does not say that resistance to evil is morally wrong, only that it is salvifically ineffective.”

Ahab’s evil is a tyrannical “weed” among many, and Jesus’ parable chastens us from action: “for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” Too often, temporal attempts at justice are myopic and error-prone. The bullet strays to hit an innocent bystander. The ideological cure is administered only to kill the body politic. The Parable of the Weeds is terrible agricultural advice, but it reliably pacifies the Ahab outrage that resides in us all. Starbuck heeds Christ’s counsel to “let both of them grow together until the harvest,” and endeavors to be (in the words of the poet W. H. Auden) “the more loving one” with his appointed service aboard the Pequod.

Starbuck returns the musket to its rack, and a terrible mercy is born. It is a mercy that lets Ahab slumber as his crew contends with fear. It is a mercy that tells Peter to put his sword away as the Man of Innocence is sent to die. It is a mercy that participates in a beatitude economy made perfect: not in the will to power of finite beings, but in the infinite wisdom of a just God. And perhaps, despite the grave outcome for the Pequod and the lack of accountability for Ahab this side of eternity, the mercy of Starbuck apprehends a truth our nation often neglects — that the murder of Imago Dei in another is the murder of oneself.

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