By Ehud Would

“The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” 

~George Orwell

Narrative is central to cultural identity. The story of a nation as told by its members, and handed down to posterity, is determinative of its character, purpose, and continued existence. A folk without memory or love of their own history will not identify with their own saga. And if not, neither will they feel any particular onus to perpetuate their civilization.

The Frankfurt school and its Culture of Critique are, of course, infamous for having struck at this very thing. Conscious of the fact that Christendom could not be overthrown by frontal assault by arms nor theology, our enemies resolved to strike at the narrative of our civilization — the historic conception and expression of our Faith.

But they were not the first. Albeit one of the more destructive phases in that civilizational assault, they were a latter wave. As Flynn has documented in his A Conservative History of the American Left there were many forerunners: Progressives, Modernists, Transcendentalists, Unitarians, Freethinkers, Radical 48ers, Jacobins, et. al. Granted, all of these were expressions of the same ideological cankerworm, but that’s another article.

Suffice it to say, as literature is a people’s faith put to narrative, it has long been a central arena of combat.

As a people of the Word, Europeans — those of the British isles especially — had long since become a people of words. And from colonial times a distinctly American canon began to take shape. Though most colonial writing was theological, historical, or hagiographic, the storybook/novel found fertile soil too. All but forgotten today, Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, Foster’s The Coquette, and Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (all of which were cautionary tales contra fornication and liberal morals in general) establish a theme in early America — a central concern for the safeguard of American maidenhood. The chastity and honor of America’s daughters was such a visceral concern to our Reformation era fathers that there sprang up around it a genre of its own, howsoever misnamed — the Seduction Genre.

And this was bookended by works of Cristian heroism for young men as seen in Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (the story of an American knight errant). Such works, alongside Shakespeare, Homer, and the wildly popular The Pilgrim’s Progress by Bunyan made up the pulse of colonial American literature.

Oddly enough, and despite many novels having been published a century prior to those of Hawthorne and Melville, the former are all but forgotten while the latter (published in the mid-1800s under circumstance of the Unitarian-Abolitionist inversion of ethics) are now lauded as the founders of American literary tradition.

Later still, the 20th century works of Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and even Salinger and Harper Lee, were anachronistically inducted into the select club of “foundational” literature. Thus pushing the genuine canon further into the cultural closet.

Someone will no doubt suggest these are questions of quality and relevance more than chronology or popular sentiment of a given era. The genius of certain writers overriding all other considerations has a natural weight to it, but it begs certain questions:

1) Precisely who makes that determination?

2) And by what standard?

Compelling as the argument might at first seem, the likes of Thomas Dixon devastate it. His well written and wildly popular 1905 trilogy on The Birth of a Nation was harmonious with the early American narrative, but was excised from the canon after the fact. This in itself should make plain that our latter day literati have laid their imprimatur on certain minority texts from our past at the expense of the majority; thus declaring the aberrations normative, and the normative aberrant. And that for the obvious reason that they are deeply hostile to early American sensibilities and narrative.

Foremost, the accolades for Hawthorne and Melville stem from The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick, respectively.

Don’t get me wrong. Both are ably written but their prominence is ultimately artificial. Their ascendance was secured by liberal monopolies in publishing, literary reviews, academia, and library associations; not to mention insidious financiers back of them all.

But worldlings aside, our primary concern is for the “conservative” and “classic” curricula embraced in private, charter, and homeschool co-ops. Read them, yes, but Christians must recognize and teach them for what they are — subversive apologetics contra Christendom. Else we fall helpless before the enemy.

The Scarlet Letter presents us with an Adulteress in Hester Prynne. But unlike its predecessors in the ‘Seduction Genre’, she is portrayed as a heroine. Not a sinner restored. Not a tragic penitent. A heroine defiant.

And not just any heroine — she is typically compared to the Virgin Mary, and even pagan goddesses such as Libera, Diana, Minerva, or Gaia rising up against the patriarchy of Jehovah.

Hence her vengeful husband is depicted as the penultimate villain. For being justly angered at Hester’s infidelity.

Beyond him, Christian community itself is depicted as an army of villains besieging poor Hester. This in spite of the fact that her Puritan neighbors demurred from the full punishment due the Adulteress. Rather than execution (as God’s law demands), or the various means of corporal punishment, they sentence Hester to bear the mark of her crime. Not by branding, either, but merely on her clothing.

And she received this creatively lenient sentence in spite of her self-righteous impenitence!

Arguably worse, her lover, Reverend Dimmesdale, makes a mockery of his calling as well as his own manhood in allowing Hester to bear the shame of them both. But scripture addresses their conspiracy quite directly:

“For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts; Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith.” (2 Tim. 3:6-8)

Nonetheless, Hawthorne portrays the false minister hiding behind Hester’s skirts as a thoroughly sympathetic character trapped by oppressive Christian norms.

Even the scrutiny under which Hester comes for her illegitimate daughter’s waywardness and lack of catechization is somehow laid at the feet of their faithful neighbors! As if the only moral wrong is in noticing Hester’s moral wrong.

Later paired with Arthur Miller’s philo-Communist parable, The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter gained a recombinant force to further recast America’s attitude toward her pilgrim fathers as ultimate villains. According to this perspective, the Adulterers, Bastards, Apostates, and even Witches were the moral lights of colonial America besieged by Christian darkness.

Melville, of course, was deeply enamored of Hawthorne. So much so that when Moby Dick was published he wrote to Hawthorne saying that if it flopped with the public, he’d still be happy so long as Hawthorne understood it.

I’m far from the first to acknowledge the autobiographical undercurrent of Moby Dick, but in brief, Melville had been a seaman, himself; and having spent time overseas amongst dusky heathen peoples, he expressed contempt of White missionaries, and the whole colonial enterprise bringing Christianity to other races.

Which contextualizes the introduction of the main character:

“Call me Ishmael.”

He phrases it this way because Ishmael isn’t the character’s real name. But it is meaningful as the name of Abraham’s illegitimate son whom God declared to have no part in the Covenant; and whom Abraham drove out at God’s command, only to provide for him in exile. This is Melville as he saw himself.

As he further discloses in his introduction, he set out to sea because he felt neither attachment nor allegiance to anyone or anything in his homeland. And as respects authority and honor, he says:

“For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever.”

Addressing the morality of things like headhunting and cannibalism, he depicts Puritan merchants and innkeepers as caring more about the heathens’ coin than anyone’s soul. Which, to Melville’s mind, somehow removes all objection and stigma from heathenism.

The missiological character of Ishmael’s befriending of the cannibal Queequeg all runs entirely contra Christianity. Therein we see Ishmael’s Christian “prejudices” overthrown; and that in favor of all things abominable. Even sharing a bed with the heathen (hinting at Sodomy), Ishmael concludes it “better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” Which is to imply at once that cannibalism and heathenism are lesser matters than drunkenness, and that Christians are generally more profligate than the heathen. Libelous absurdities, both.

Enlisting in the crew of the Pequod (a ship named after a heathen tribe of New England) Ishmael is integrated into a multicult menagerie. All the races of the world bent to one heathen ambition.

Therein he learns that captain Ahab, described as “a grand, ungodly god-like man”, is hellbent for vengeance on a great White whale. And Melville waxes long on “the whiteness of the Whale”, saying:

“But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind. Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink?”

On this metaphysic of Whiteness, R.C. Sproul has well commented:

“If the whale embodies everything that is symbolized by whiteness—that which is terrifying; that which is pure; that which is excellent; that which is horrible and ghastly; that which is mysterious and incomprehensible—does he not embody those traits that are found in the fullness of the perfections in the being of God Himself?”

Add to this Melville’s own comparison of Moby Dick with Jonah’s fish, and we have another confirmation that the White Whale is emblematic of God’s governance; and in context, dispensed through the great White seafaring people, and their colonial Christendom: the very endeavor Melville decried in his personal letters and life.

Concerning Ahab’s infernal mission, Ishmael concludes, “Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.”

Unceremoniously quitting Christian shores on Christmas morning, the hunt for the White king of the seas was on. And it is the sole unifying factor for what would otherwise be an entirely irreconcilable mob of aliens. Drawn into common cause against the terror of God, Ahab takes on the tribal tattoos of his heathen comrades. Thus ritualistically purging himself of the White skin into which providence birthed him; and to the Christian mind, inducting him into the brotherhood of ‘the marked’, like Cain of old.

When Ahab finally gains the reckoning he seeks he is said to be “possessed of all the fallen angels”. And at the climax of the battle before the Pequod and her Babelite crew are sunk to the bottom of the sea, Ahab bellows into the face of the whale “To the last I grapple with thee: from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!”

No half-hearted Satanism, this. It is overt. Ahab and his crew stand for the Devil and his rebel army and the White whale is proxy for the Christian God and His dominion.

Though Ishmael is the sole survivor of the heathen compact, and his brush with the vengeance of God affords ready enough comparison to the prophet Jonah, we find scant evidence of penitence on his part; nor the author, through him. All we are given in his concluding statement is that he was at last rescued from the sea by “the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search for her lost children, only found another orphan.”

If, by wishful thinking, this rescue has been construed as repentance or sanctification, know that after concluding the work, Melville confessed to Hawthorne, “I have written an evil book.” He saw no redemption in it.

What we know of Melville is that, common to his time and place, he embraced the Pluralism common to Quakers, Unitarians, and Transcendentalists — a Humanist inversion of Christianity. So even the most generous interpretation possible still finds Melville’s literary association of the White Terror with the Christian God and His people confluent with his actual creed.

Despite being very different stories, there is a shared ethos underscored in Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter — Sympathy for the Devil.

And for all the symbolic proxies at which their pens stabbed, the arch villain in both men’s minds was Christ, Himself.

The loathing of Christ’s Lordship and White Christendom traced in Melville’s work would go to seed in the suicide of his son.

And to the extent that such literature continues to be endorsed and uncritically consumed as definitive of the American literary canon, or “Christian Classics”, we only concede to the enemy’s suicidal and blasphemous narrative.

Written in the first person to induce a presupposed identification with Ishmael, the reader is ushered through certain turnstiles of mind which are designed to break Christian faith. Copious biblical references, notwithstanding.

In fact, Melville understood that such citation, used against itself, can be an inoculate against Christian faith. By casting the high, beautiful, and holy as trite, empty, and cruel, Melville blurs truth and blasphemes the Holy Spirit. Just as Satan did in the garden and at his duel with Christ in the wilderness.

But what practical harm has it done Christendom to take this narrative uncritically, you may ask? One need only look to the state of the churches today. Melville’s Pluralist, Antinomian, Alienist, and yes, Satanic faith seems to be a common currency in pulpits now; to say nothing of the marketplace.

The fact that even the late R.C. Sproul endorsed Moby Dick with only the most superficial caveat says something significant: fish don’t know they’re wet and the American churches are swimming in the Pequod’s wake.

Let us dispense with naivete and read the heathen poets as St. Paul did, “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ; And having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled.” (2 Cor.10:5-6)

Until we thus grapple with the narratives thrust upon us by our enemies, we will never see these matters put to right. Only once we finally do train a faithful eye on these things will we be able to ‘revenge all disobedience’ of the culture vultures assailing Christendom. But on that day our enemies shall go down to hell with the crew of the Pequod.