{"id":3015,"date":"2018-08-10T05:36:55","date_gmt":"2018-08-10T11:36:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/watchinggod\/?p=3015"},"modified":"2018-08-09T14:37:47","modified_gmt":"2018-08-09T20:37:47","slug":"leviathan-the-meg-moby-dick-and-power-from-the-deep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/watchinggod\/2018\/08\/leviathan-the-meg-moby-dick-and-power-from-the-deep\/","title":{"rendered":"Leviathan: The Meg, Moby Dick and Power from the Deep"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>
Promotional art from The Meg, courtesy Warner Bros.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The Meg<\/em> paddles into theaters this weekend, and the makers of this Jason Statham action vehicle surely hopes it gobbles up dollars like the prehistoric shark does swimmers. I haven\u2019t seen The Meg<\/em>, and I doubt it has deep spiritual undertones. But its very presence gives us an opportunity to consider the enduring fascination and fear we have for these and similar creatures.<\/p>\n

Let me tell you a little secret: I\u2019m kinda scared of big fish. I\u2019m not particularly phobic about them, \u00a0and oddly, it doesn\u2019t extend to sharks. Sharks are familiar<\/em>. They\u2019re supposed<\/em> to be big, toothy and scary. Big, traditional fish, on the other hand, feel surreal to me. I\u2019m fascinated and freaked out by them. I sometimes have nightmares about being in some sort of body of water and sensing something mostly unseen but obviously massive<\/em> swimming near me. And then it brushes against my leg \u2026<\/p>\n

That\u2019s part of what makes these undersea monsters so scary for us. The ocean is a big place, and it hides lots of secrets, and secrets we might never see coming from the watery gloom. From the time of Jaws<\/em> and probably before, shark movies have made hay (and money) from that sense of unseen terror\u2014the lurking, underwater other<\/em>. Stephen Spielberg famously kept the shark in Jaws out of sight, revealed only by the tip of a dorsal fin and a telltale musical \u201cdu-dun, du-dun.\u201d Though Spielberg\u2019s hand was forced by a cantankerous mechanical shark (three of them, actually, collectively nicknamed \u201cBruce<\/a>\u201c), he knew that the animal\u2019s power and terror came from its inherent mystery\u2014how sneaky it was, and how alien it felt.<\/p>\n

From the very beginning, it seems, we\u2019ve been left in awe and terror of the big, bad, curiously beautiful beasties of the deep. The creation story in Genesis refers to the tanninim <\/em>created on the fifth day (translated in the King James Bible to \u201cgreat whales\u201d), and the leviathan<\/em> is namechecked no less than six times in the Good Book\u2014sometimes as a beautiful creation, sometimes as a terrible demon, but always something in which we look on with awe. \u201cCan you pull in the leviathan with a fishhook or tie down his tongue with a rope?\u201d Job 41 says. \u201d \u2026 Any hope of subduing him is false; the mere sight of him is overpowering. No one is fierce enough to rouse him. Who then is able to stand against me?\u201d<\/p>\n

But culture\u2019s most enduring leviathan (using the term loosely) isn\u2019t the shark in Jaws<\/em> and almost certainly won\u2019t be the megalodon in The Meg. It\u2019d be Herman Melville\u2019s great white whale, Moby Dick.<\/p>\n

Moby Dick<\/em>, the book, just might be the greatest American novel ever. It\u2019s filled with depth and mystery, much like the subject sea itself, and it reveals itself in layers. Many have seen reflections of faith within Melville\u2019s most famous work\u2014with Moby Dick either a deep-dwelling demon or, more popularly, a manifestation of God Himself\u2014an avatar of the awesome, incomprehensible Almighty.<\/p>\n

Theologian R.C. Sproul unpacked those religious undertones in a brief, sparkling essay<\/a>, that the whale was a symbol of God, and that \u201cAhab\u2019s pursuit of the whale is not a righteous pursuit of God but natural man\u2019s futile attempt in his hatred of God to destroy the omnipotent deity.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his essay, Sproul dwells, as Melville did, on the creature\u2019s whiteness\u2014an absence of color and a blending of all colors, of which Melville wrote \u201cat times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sproul writes:<\/p>\n

If the whale embodies everything that is symbolized by whiteness\u2014that which is terrifying; that which is pure; that which is excellent; that which is horrible and ghastly; that which is mysterious and incomprehensible\u2014does he not embody those traits that are found in the fullness of the perfections in the being of God Himself?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sproul gives us a view of God often lost today, I think\u2014not just one that concentrates on His grace and goodness, as we like to concentrate on, but on His power and mystery and blinding majesty. We think of God as someone we could walk up to and slap on the back. But when we read about folks who truly encountered Him, more often they would fall to their knees and shake in holy terror and awe.<\/p>\n

Only one other book I\u2019ve read has touched this sense of a God so huge, so terrible, so wholly incomprehensible: G.K. Chesterton\u2019s The Man Who Was Thursday<\/em>. It just might be the oddest book I\u2019ve ever read\u2014in part it\u2019s because of the incredibly strange twists the book takes as our hero and his surprising cadre of helpmates pursue the book\u2019s own Great White Whale, the apparent anarchist President Sunday.<\/p>\n

One man, Syme, describes his first impressions of Sunday\u2014how when he saw him from the back, he looked \u201capish\u201d and had the \u201cstoop of an ox.\u201d \u201cI had at once the revolting fancy that this was not a man at all, but a beast dressed up in men\u2019s clothes.\u201d But then, when Syme saw him from the front, \u201cHis face frightened me, as it did everyone; but not because it was brutal, not because it was evil. On the contrary, it frightened me because it was so beautiful, because it was so good.<\/p>\n

It was like the face of some ancient archangel, judging justly after heroic wars. There was laughter in the eyes, and in the mouth honour and sorrow. There was the same white hair, the same great, grey-clad shoulders that I had seen from behind. But when I saw him from behind I was certain he was an animal, and when I saw him in front I knew he was a god.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sounds a lot like Moby Dick, really: The beast that Ahab saw (and inherently, almost always its back), the godlike beauty and power and mystery glimpsed at times by the narrator.<\/p>\n

I doubt moviegoers will see much of any sort of god in The Meg<\/em>. But the movie is a nice excuse to reflect on what makes such creatures so tantalizing and terrifying, how we\u2019re entranced and repulsed by their power and mystery\u2014and how these leviathans may, in their own strange ways, point to the most unfathomable and holy mystery of all.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Meg paddles into theaters this weekend, and the makers of this Jason Statham action vehicle surely hopes it gobbles up dollars like the prehistoric shark does swimmers. I haven\u2019t seen The Meg, and I doubt it has deep spiritual undertones. But its very presence gives us an opportunity to consider the enduring fascination and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2036,"featured_media":3021,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[365,3],"tags":[80,65,51,636,95],"class_list":["post-3015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editors-choice","category-movies","tag-god","tag-horror","tag-literature","tag-meg","tag-mystery"],"yoast_head":"\nLeviathan: The Meg, Moby Dick and Power from the Deep<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Meg paddles into theaters this weekend, and the makers of this Jason Statham action vehicle surely hopes it gobbles up dollars like the prehistoric\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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