The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response

Chapter 14: Wisdom of the Heart

14 Wisdom of the Heart The Human Encounter with God in Pensées and Moby-Dick K I M P A F F E N R O T H At first glance, the comparison proposed by this essay might appear counterintuitive at best, idiosyncratic and misleading at worst: there would seem to be an insurmountable number of differences and contrasts between the seventeenth-century French scientist, mathematician , and theologian, devoutly Catholic (though not necessarily orthodox), who set as his goal to write the ultimate defense of Christianity , and who lived the last years of his life as a sickly hermit; and the nineteenth-century American novelist, raised Calvinist, married to a Unitarian, who came up with his own brand of skeptical, confrontational theism, who penned perhaps the greatest and most strangely satisfying story of human beings challenging the Deity in the proudest, most outrageous, and most virile way imaginable, and The ideas in this essay come directly from my experience teaching in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame (where the students graciously tolerated my first time teaching Moby-Dick, and all my simplistic and repetitive interpretations ), and in the Core Humanities Program at Villanova University. It never would have occurred to me to compare these two thinkers if I had not assigned them in my class on Modern Thought, and if I had not been blessed by such insightful and perceptive students, from whom I have learned much more than they from me. Special thanks also go to Dan Morehead, Tom Bertonneau, Dave Schindler Jr., and Rick Bolles, for their comments on the essay, parts of which appear in my book In Praise of Wisdom: Literary and Theological Reflections on Faith and Reason (New York: Continuum, 2004). 192 who lived his life sailing all over the world, while fathering four children . But obviously, I must now say what general similarities led me to begin to compare the works of these two men, before I get to the specifics that constitute the purpose of this essay. It would be hard to find two men more characterized by melancholy, a quality of which Melville himself says, ‘‘All noble things are touched with that.’’1 And in one of the many breathtaking paragraphs scattered throughout his ponderous novel, as he is building to his comparison with the soaring mountain eagle, which, ‘‘even in his lowest swoop . . . is still higher than other birds,’’ Melville mentions Pascal as one of those ‘‘sick men,’’ whom one must read and understand if one is to ‘‘break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon,’’2 that is, if one is to conquer human mortality and limitation by confronting and defying them. But most important, what struck me as most similar between the two is that both men’s ruminations on God are profoundly anthropocentric and experiential. Pascal pointedly disparages the possibility or the utility of proving the existence of God, and instead focuses on proving what kind of human nature we possess that makes a certain kind of God necessary,3 if we are to be saved: ‘‘That is why I will not try to prove here by reasons from nature either the existence of God, or the Trinity, or the immortality of the soul, or anything of that sort . . . because such knowledge, without Jesus Christ, is useless and sterile.’’4 Likewise, although MobyDick constantly tantalizes us with divine images applied to both the sea and to Moby Dick the White Whale, ‘‘the grand god,’’5 it always anchors those images in a sea of human subjectivity and brings them back to the characters’ reactions and interpretations of them, as shown most vividly by the juxtaposition of the characters’ reactions to ‘‘The Doubloon’’: ‘‘And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.’’6 Nothing means just one thing, but neither is anything finally or merely subjective: instead, every object, person, and event in the novel is imbued with layers upon layers of meanings that different humans intuit in different ways and at different times, showing their own essence and purpose more than that of the object they analyze. So the book is not ultimately about the White Whale or God so much as it is about why men would want to hunt the White...