In Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, the sailor Ishmael describes the many whale skeletons he has seen or heard about, located in museums around the world. Scientists made careful measurements of the bones of the whale in order to gain a thorough knowledge of the beast.

Ishmael also describes a whale skeleton which he had seen on an island in a far corner of the South Pacific. Islanders had hauled it into the jungle where it became overgrown with vines. Priests burned incense on an altar beneath its blow hole while proclaiming that the rising smoke was none other than the whale’s plume! Ishmael had wandered through this whale temple and taken measurements of its bleached bones, intertwined with vines, before finally admitting that very little could be gained by the exercise.

Ishmael notes wryly that neither the scientists nor the natives understood the true nature of the whale. Only those who have looked the whale in the eye and hurled their harpoon can say what it is.

Melville’s little parable illustrates several different approaches we may take to the subject of history.

Bones

Many of our modern history texts endeavor to explain human societies primarily with reference to physical factors, such as access to waterways, availability of resources, domesticability of plant and animal species, changes to the environment, and perhaps a lucky discovery or two. From these bare facts historians tell a story about how a society evolved and why it succeeded or failed. No allowance is given for a transcendent moral order or human volition. Goodness, beauty, morality, money, and God, are social constructs or “bones” in the whale’s skeleton for which it is the job of the social scientist to assiduously measure.

Smoke

Another approach to history acknowledges the existence of something mysterious and powerful that lies outside of human history and is responsible for the rich tapestry of myths and rituals found in every culture. Probably the most influential proponent of this view is George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, who identifies as a Christian Methodist Buddhist. Lucas once observed that, “All religions are true. They just see a different part of the elephant.”²Source He was referring, of course, to the poem written by John Saxe about the six blind men of Hindustan who each grasped a different part of an elephant. Based on what they felt—the trunk, the tail, the tusk, the ear—each arrived at a different idea about the nature of the elephant—a rope, a spear, a tree, etc. It is a fun poem and makes a sharp point:

Although Saxe’s poem lampoons dogmatic theologians, Lucas gives it a more positive spin. The blind men of Hindustan were each right in their own way; they just couldn’t see the whole.

Lucas credits Joseph Campbell with influencing his thinking on the subject of religion. Listed by The Times among the top 100 most influential books published since 1923, Campbell’s book A Hero with a Thousand Faces introduces the term “monomyth” to describe the underlying unity of all myth. “Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names,” writes Campbell, citing the Rigveda. Through the study of ancient mythology, Campbell sought to uncover, “the Mythos, the central insight that would release Mankind’s spiritual impulse from its fetters to a specific body of cultural norms. Mankind would then be able ‘to recognize the Energy behind all the forms of life, including one’s own character.’”³Smith 2010, 84 Although Campbell sought to join Christianity with eastern religion, what he presents is really a highly psychologized form of pantheism.⁴Panentheism is a technically more precise term for Campbell’s beliefs, but for sake of clarity I am sticking with the most common term used to express belief that God and Nature are One.

The Whale

The “bones” of materialism and the “smoke” of pantheism rely equally upon the precepts of natural religion laid down by the early modern philosopher, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677).

The ideas of Spinoza were taken up by influential scientists such as Carl Sagan whose 1970’s television show Cosmos opens with waves pounding against the shoreline while a god-like voice echoes over the waters,

The phrase is a riff off of the famous refrain uttered by the angels before the throne of God in the the Book of Revelation.⁶Its Biblical origins go back to the revelation of the name YHWH in Exodus. It also appears in various forms in the philosophical writings of the Greeks. By ascribing eternality to the Cosmos, Sagan shows an affinity for those religions which have as their ultimate reality an impersonal force which merges and emerges from the stuff of life, call it what you will: nature, energy, matter, the Tao, Ein Sof, Brahman, Mother Earth, singularity, primordial soup, fate, etc.⁷Lewis 1996(b), 44

But Christianity begins with God rather than an impersonal Force. Though for now “we only know partially” says the apostle Paul, someday “we will know fully, even as we are fully known” (1 Corin. 13:12). If Paul could respond to Saxe’s poem, he would likely point out that God is not like the elephant—a purely passive subject of human investigation—but the active subject of history “who knows us.”⁸Paul distinguishes between God and not-God, between God and the stoichia tou kosmou (“elements of the cosmos” The Greek term stoichia is used interchangeably with “atoma” to refer to the basic building blocks of matter. “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world (stoichia tou kosmou), whose slaves you want to be once more?” (Gal. 4:9 ESV)Like Alyosha Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s novel Brothers Karamazov, we must choose between God and the Atoms.

Rather than Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth,” we are faced with two distinct ideas about what is eternal. Furthermore, as Dostoyevsky discerned, these ideas are not merely academic. They have very different real-world outcomes, both for the person and for society as a whole. Historical events, social structures, and environmental factors are like waves on the surface of the sea. But what moves human beings and civilizations is ultimately moral, ethical, and religious in nature. Invisible, intangible, and oftentimes nearly inaccessible to the historian, these are the deep currents which shape a culture.