Forbidden Knowledge (2)

It’s always knowledge of the Otherworld, of the infernal regions as well as Heaven, that is forbidden us. Death separates seeker from that gnosis, or seems to; we sin to trespass the boundary, when we seek to know more than humans were meant to.

Dante in Purgatorio declares infernal knowledge damned:

Content yourself with quia, son of Eve,
For had you power to see the whole truth plain
No need had been for Mary to conceive.

“Quia” meaning finite knowledge of effects, not final knowledge of essences. To know the whole truth would be devastating to the entire scheme of salvation, which demands a Jesus as corrective for the error of our views and ways. We sin out of ignorance, but sin itself comes from knowledge, the apple delved by the serpent in the shade of the world tree.

The quest for secret knowledge is inside our mortal coil, in the voyage of our days. Clara Strijbosch writes in The Seafaring Saint, “According to The Voyage of St. Brendan, Brendan burned a book containing stories about the wonders of God’s creation out of disbelief. For this reason he is sent on a voyage so as to see with his own eyes certain divine manifestations which earlier he had refused to credit. In this way he is to recover the book by refilling it with the wonders which he witnesses on his voyage. The majority of the phenomena which he comes across are related to man’s actions and behaviour in this life and the circumstances consequent upon them in the Afterlife. Brendan encounters souls in hell, heaven and paradise. The astonishing and sometimes frightening experiences restore his belief.”

Ergo, we are meant to take the physical evidence as our proof of eternal truths. But something in us cries to see more than the surficials. Why settle for lucency of the god when there is His visage instead? We overstep our human boundaries attempting to peer back into the abyss, but peer we must, because we were made curious, and curiosity is the flint of all our making. The fire which Prometheus steals is in our noodles, a guilty desire to imagine more than we were meant to see in our routine lives; and the punishment of Zeus was not only to have Prometheus forever chained to a rock and pecked by eagles -- a labor of Hell -- but he gave us Pandora, “gift of all,” whose curiosity sprung the lids on the box which brought evil in to our lives.

We know we dare not look -- we know must.

And so when Ahab curses the heavens flashing over the Pequod on the eve of their doomed three-days hunt of the White Whale, he dares to look behind the Christian veil into the rawest visage imagined by a modern mind:

“There is some suffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou founding fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too has thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!”

Infernal knowledge indeed. Ahab is willing to crucify himself upon the whale in that defiant stare, and act which Faulkner once commented, “a sort of Golgotha of the heart become immutable in the sonority of its plunging ruin. There’s a death for a man, now.”

Ahab knows the cost of his madness and spends it willingly and thrillingly. Did Melville? He is content to let that story be fictional. Ishmael, the Horatio who survives to tell Ahab’s tale, finds words which harness the desire for secret knowledge with a counterbalancing will which prevents from drowning in it--an eagle of the mind, so to speak. This from “The Try-Works” chapter:

***

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp -- all others but liars!

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s dismal swam, nor Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of the earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, the mortal man who hat more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be ture -- not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the finest hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world has not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave-yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cooper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a carefree lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; -- not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomly wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, “The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain” (i.e., even while living) “in the congregation of the the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to the fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for a time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and be invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.