Ahab was the seventh king of Israel. The Bible describes him as a wicked ruler. He was married to Jezebel who persuaded him to abandon Yahweh and establish the religion of Baal. So defiant was Ahab in his apostasy that he had inscribed on all the doors in the city of Samaria the words: “Ahab has abjured the living God of Israel.” Defiance of this nature, a rejection of what is good on the basis of one’s pride, inevitably leads to despair and death. Ahab was mortally wounded in a battle by an unaimed arrow. The Hebrew Bible records that dogs licked his blood, in accordance with the prophecy of Elijah.

The name Ahab was perfectly suited for the defiant captain in Herman Melville’s classic, Moby Dick. In the novel, Ahab is sailing towards the equator where he hopes to find the great white whale. He is taking the ship’s position by means of a quadrant. As he holds the instrument and looks up at the sun, he is reminded of the fact that the sun can see both him and the whale, whereas he can see only his own position. In a fit of anger, he throws down the quadrant and smashes it to pieces. Henceforth, he will sail the Pequod without any guide or instrument. His ship will now set on a new, but unknown course.

The crushing of the quadrant symbolizes Ahab’s defiance toward the sun, a symbol of the eternal God. A violent storm ensues, followed by lightning that causes a fire under the three main masts. The crew is gripped with fear and pleads with Ahab to return home. Ahab does not see these events as warnings and continues his desperate journey. He is defiant of everything that is not a mirror of himself. The quadrant represents his limitations, his dependence on something other than himself. And so, he moves blindly toward his inevitable fate, ultimately being destroyed by his nemesis.

Defiance, ironically, is the rejection of the very things we need in order to be ourselves. This is a subject to which the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard gave a great deal of attention.  Defiance, which is like pulling the rug from under oneself and thereby having no place to stand, leads to despair, and despair leads to death. “No despair,” he writes, “is entirely without defiance; indeed, defiance is implicit in the very formulation ‘not wanting to.’” Philosophers have drawn attention to how Ahab epitomizes Kierkegaard’s formulation of how defiance leads to despair, and finally death.

Why, Kierkegaard asks, do Christians despair of Christianity? He provides the answer to his own question: “The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly.”

When we scan the world about us, we find abundant evidence that defiance plays an essential role in the lives of many people. We find that they are acting in accordance with the defiance of Ahab. They are “children” in the sense that they lack the wisdom to see that they have taken Ahab as their role model.

Abortion is the defiance of being a mother. It also represents a defiance of the life of her unborn child. It opens the gate to additional forms of defiance, that of marriage itself. Same-sex marriage defies marriage as it is stated in Genesis, involving one man and one woman. Once people have a taste for defiance and once it is approved by the elite, there is little to stop it. We now read of rebelling against marriage for two by reducing it to marriage for one, or, as it is called, “sologamy.”

It is now fashionable and legally acceptable for those who are born male or female to defy their biological status and change sexes or, to intensify their defiance, to become a new sex. Thus, like Ahab, they blindly embark on a journey without direction. What terrible fate awaits them?

Defiance does not enlarge our freedom. It distracts us from understanding what our God-given freedom is “for.” If we defy one thing, what is the other thing that we accept? At the heart of the spirit of defiance, is pride, the super-inflation of the sense of our own importance. Pride does precede a fall, but not before it passes through despair.

St. Thomas Aquinas wisely reasoned that despair ensues when something is judged to exceed our capacity of achieving it. We despair when we attempt to acquire something that we cannot acquire. Despair, then, represents a loss of hope. That is the core sense of hope, derived from the Latin desperatio (with its root in spes) and from the French désespoir. When we defy accepting what we need, we lose hope in finding it.

God sent Elijah to Ahab. But when Ahab saw Elijah, he said to him, “Is it you, you troublemaker of Israel?” Elijah answered, meekly, “I have not troubled Israel but you have, and your father’s house, because you have abandoned the commandments of the Lord and followed the Baals.”

Ahab, in defying God, made defiance a habit. Therefore, he saw fit to defy Elijah. How long, we may ask, will the current wave of defiers continue their defiance before despair sets in? And will they persist in branding their helpers as troublemakers?