Ahab, slave to the dread tyrant Sin: Melville's dramatic exegesis of Romans 7

Near the finale of Moby-Dick, in the closing moments of the last chapter before the great chase for the white whale begins, gloomy Ahab has one final heartfelt conversation with Starbuck, his earnest and home-loving first mate. At the very moment when the climactic encounter is nigh, Ahab looks to pull back. And Starbuck is eager to help him do so. They converse on the deck, Ahab unsure of himself and Starbuck pleading with him, wooing him, conjuring the decision against the fatal hunt that he so hopes Ahab is capable of making. And just when Starbuck thinks he has his quarry, something inexplicable and wholly mysterious changes in Ahab. Here is Melville:

But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is it Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!"

Melville is playing out for us here, in dramatic form, the similar soliloquy of St. Paul in chapter 7 of his epistle to the Romans:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.  So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. (vv. 15-21)

The "old man" weighed down by the flesh, Adam in his chains, lies in the squalor of bondage to sin—not just his own sins, but Sin, a sort of emergent personified power, a tyrant who reigns over the fallen children of Adam. Such a one is by definition unfree, and therefore utterly unfree even to choose the good, and therefore absolutely incapable of saving himself. Even with the wise route laid out before him, he cannot act. He needs a savior and more than a savior: a rival king to trample down Sin's false kingdom, and together with him to put to Death to death.

So argues Matthew Croasmun in his book The Emergence of Sin: The Cosmic Tyrant in Romans. (See further Wesley Hill's stimulating reflections on the book.) Ahab exemplifies Croasmun's thesis.

But because Melville is Melville, he's up to even more. Notice the brief, seemingly throwaway prefatory line of poetic simile: "But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil." Melville knows he's depicting the old man; he knows he writes of Adam. That is why he places us in a garden with a spoiled tree with its spoiled fruit "cast"—fallen—to the "soil"—adamah. And it is why, finally, he begins with the gaze: "Ahab's glance was averted." As St. Augustine writes in Book XIV of City of God, the sin of Adam was not per se the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; evil acts come from an evil will. (Augustine quotes Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount to note that evil fruit could only come—metaphorically—from an evil tree—the will of the first man.) Whence Adam's evil will, then? There is no trite answer, no easy explanation. In chapter 13 Augustine spells out the logic (italics all mine):

Our first parents fell into open disobedience because already they were secretly corrupted; for the evil act had never been done had not an evil will preceded it. And what is the origin of our evil will but pride? For "pride is the beginning of sin" (Sirach 10:13). And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation, when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself. This happens when it becomes its own satisfaction. And it does so when it falls away from that unchangeable good which ought to satisfy it more than itself. This falling away is spontaneous; for if the will had remained steadfast in the love of that higher and changeless good by which it was illumined to intelligence and kindled into love, it would not have turned away to find satisfaction in itself, and so become frigid and benighted; the woman would not have believed the serpent spoke the truth, nor would the man have preferred the request of his wife to the command of God, nor have supposed that it was a venial transgression to cleave to the partner of his life even in a partnership of sin. The wicked deed, then—that is to say, the transgression of eating the forbidden fruit—was committed by persons who were already wicked.

Evil acts have their source in an evil will, and a will becomes evil when it becomes uncoupled from its true end and finds its end in itself. To become one's own end is to fall away from the true and eternal Good that alone satisfies the longings of the soul. "This falling away is spontaneous": there is no narrative, no logic, no inner rationale much less necessity, that can account for it. It just happens. The image Augustine uses for this spontaneous falling is "turning away," depicted as a kind of anti-repentance. Adam turns his eyes from God, his final End and supreme Good, to lesser things. Doing so just is The Fall.

And that is just what Melville his his Adam, Ahab, do in response to Starbuck's eminently reasonable efforts to persuade: "But Ahab's glance was averted." By what? To what? Why? We aren't told. It's spontaneous; there is no explanation to be sought because there is no explanation to be had. Ahab's turn is a surd like all sin is a surd. It has no reason, for it is no-reason, not-reason incarnate. His desire has overwhelmed his sense; his craving has overtaken his will; he himself has become his own end, and answering the command of another, from without, he rushes to his fate "against all natural lovings and longings," no matter the cost, his own life and the life of his men be damned.

Damned, indeed. Ahab is Adam without a second Adam. There is no savior in his story, even if Starbuck stands in for one as a kind of messenger or angel. Ahab, that archetypal self-made American man, is finally not the captain of his own ship. The captain of the Pequod is rather that "cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor" in whose service Ahab places himself when he baptizes the barb meant for the white whale: "Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli."

The devil is Ahab's lord, as he is fallen Adam's master. He reigns in their death-bound lives through their bent and broken wills by the tyrannical power of Sin. Absent intervention, Adam's fate is Ahab's: to be drowned eternally in the depths of the sea, bound by the lines of his own consecrated weaponry to the impervious hide of Leviathan: the very object to which his gaze turned, the means of his helpless demise.

Must theologians be faithful? A question for Volf and Croasmun

In their new book, For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference (Brazos Press, 2019), Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun make the argument that the lives of theologians matter for the writing and evaluation of theological proposals. Reading through chapter 5, though, where they make the argument, I was left unsure about what exactly they were claiming. Let me offer a sample of quotations and then offer a range of interpretations of the claim or claims they are wanting to make.

(Full disclosure: Miroslav and Matthew are at Yale, and were there when I earned my doctorate; the former was a teacher, the latter a fellow student and friend. Take that for what it's worth. Here on out I'll call them V&C.)

Consider the following quotes (bolded emphases all mine):

• "execution of the central theological task requires a certain kind of affinity between the life the theologian seeks to articulate and the life the theologian seeks to lead." (118)
• "an affinity between theologians' lives and the basic vision of the true life that they seek to articulate is a condition of the adequacy of their thought." (119)
• "It would be incongruous for theologians to articulate and commend as true a life that they themselves had no aspiration of embracing. They would then be a bit like a nutritionist who won't eat her fruits and vegetables while urging her patients to do so." (120)
• "Misalignment between lives and visions ... is prone to undermine the veracity of [theologians'] work because it hinders their ability to adequately perceive and articulate these vision." (120)
• "living a certain kind of life doesn't determine the perception and articulation of visions, but only exerts significant pressure on them." (120)
• "Just as reasons, though important, don't suffice to embrace a vision of the good life, so reasons, though even more important, don't suffice to discern how to live it out. Our contention is that an abiding aspirational alignment of the self with the vision and its values is essential as well." (122)
• "[it is a requirement] that there be affinity between the kind of life theologians aspire to live and the primary vision they seek to articulate." (122)
• "Only those who are and continue to be 'spiritual' can ... perceive 'spiritual things.'" (125)
• "[An ideal but impossible claim would be] that only the saints can potentially be true theologians." (129)
• "Consequently, we argue for an affinity, rather than a strict homomorphy, of theologians' lives with the primary Christian vision of flourishing (always, of course, an affinity with the primary vision as they understand it)." (129)
• "Imperfect lives, imperfect articulations of the true life—yet lives that strive to align themselves with Christ's—and articulation that, rooted in this transformative striving, seek to serve Christ's mission to make the world God's home: this sort of affinity of life with the true life is what's needed for theologians to do their work well." (134)
• "Truth seeking is a constitutive dimension of living the true life; and living the true life—always proleptically and therefore aspirationally—is a condition of the search for its truthful articulation." (137)

It seems to me that there are a number of claims, actual or potential, interlaced and overlaid in these quotes. Consider the following, all of which are technically compatible but only some of which, I'm convinced, V&C want to affirm:

1. The best theologian will be a saint, i.e., a baptized believer whose life is maximally faithful to Christ.
2. All theologians ought to strive to be saints.
3. All theologians ought to strive to align their lives with their articulated vision of faithfulness to Christ.
4. Saints are likelier to be better theologians than those who are not.
5. A necessary but not sufficient condition of faithful theology is sainthood, that is, faithfulness to Christ.
6. A necessary but not sufficient condition of faithful theology is imperfect but real alignment between the life of a theologian and his or her articulation of faithfulness to Christ.
7. One of the criteria for evaluating a theologian's proposals and arguments is the lived faithfulness to Christ on the part of the theologian in question.
8. One of the criteria for evaluating a theologian's proposals and arguments is the alignment between that theologian's life with his or her articulation of faithfulness to Christ.

 It seems to me that the mainstream or majority Christian theological tradition would affirm claims 1 through 4. Some today would quibble with one or more of them, especially claim 4 (e.g., Paul Griffiths would say that, in via at least, those who are not yet sanctified may either have intellectual gifts greater than the saint—which is true—or have a perspective on the faith, say, as an outsider or a sinner, that the saint lacks—which, prima facie, seems more questionable). But the questions really come with claims 5 through 8.

Is it truly a condition of theology done well that the person making the theological proposals be herself (even somewhat) faithful either to Christ or to her understanding of Christ's will? Is such faithfulness, moreover, a legitimate criterion for evaluating said proposals—so that, if we knew of the theologian's utter unfaithfulness (even attempted), such knowledge would thereby falsify or disqualify her proposals outright?

I remain unpersuaded either that V&C really mean to make either of these claims or that either of them is a good idea.

It seems to me that V&C are making a materially prescriptive argument—"this is how theology ought to be done and how theologians ought to understand their work"—underwritten by a generically descriptive argument—"the sort of practice theology is and the sort of subject it is about means necessarily that it is self-involving in a manner different from algebra or astronomy"—but not anything more. We should not, I repeat not, include our judgments of the character of theologians' lives in our evaluation of their ideas, proposals, and arguments. If a serial adulterer were to write an essay against adultery, and meant it (i.e., it was not an exercise in deception), the thesis, the reasons offered in support, and the argument as a whole would not be correctly evaluated in connection with the author's sins. They would stand or fall on the merits. Such an author is precisely analogous to the comparison V&C make to the nutritionist: she is not wrong to recommend fruits and vegetables; she is merely a hypocrite.

And here's the kicker: All theologians are hypocrites. That's what makes them uniformly unsaintly, even those canonized after the fact. For saints are recognized postmortem, not in their lifetime. And that for good reason.

(I should add: It's even odder, in my view, to say that theologians' work should be judged in accordance with the affinity between their lives and their ideas, rather than their lives and the gospel as such. Barth and Tillich and Yoder, for example, all offered ample justification in their work for their misdeeds. Properly understood, however, their actions were wrong and unjustifiable regardless of the reasons they offered, precisely because they are and ought to be measured against that which is objective—the moral law, the will of God—not their own subjective understanding of it or their rationalization in the face of its challenge.)

So it is true that there should be an affinity between theologian's lives and ideas. Theologians of Christ should imitate Christ in their lives. And it is plausible to believe that their theology might improve as a result: that their vision into the things of God might prove clearer as a consequence.

But the unfaithful write good and true theology, too, and have done so since time immemorial. We ought to consider such theology in exactly the way we do all theology. For it is up to us to judge the theology only. God will judge the theologian.