Dixon's Enthusiasm

[Terrance]

       "In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity
of
        feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of
        delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated
from
        the prison of everyday preoccupations. The Bacchic riual
produced
        what was called 'enthusiasm', which means etymologically having
the
        god enter the worshipper, who believed that he became one with
the
        god."
        Bertrand Russell : A History of Western Philosophy

Reason or prudence at war with the Bacchic spirit. And when the
opponents are both wearing white hats? And when the field of battle is
the human heart or Quaker Conscience? Oh, how terrible is the wrath and
love of the gods. Forget about the slave trader for a moment. Dixon has
to decide between two goods. He can be the Quaker of non-violence or the
Quaker Abolitionist. Both goods. If Dixon only represents the
anti-slavery position of the text, he's not very interesting. If he only
represents the pacifist position of the author he is become a
mouthpiece. Pynchon has not simply filled his characters with ideas in
this novel. We don't have a stage full of figures representing ideas,
theories, complexes, historical personages, literary figures, types, and
so on as we do in other P novels. We have very human characters here.
And this struggle of reason or prudence and (taking the phrase from
Russell above) "becoming one with the god" is a beautiful human drama. 

Dixon is not simple at all. He is violent by nature. And drink makes him
less so. 
He is a Quaker, but technically not a Quaker. And so he says he may kill
whomever he chooses. He thinks war is insane and he sports a military
outfit to ward off aggressors  (Man being violent by nature). He doesn't
act like a Quaker in public. He drinks, he smokes, does drugs, goes to
dances, to parties, likes music, and so on, but privately, particularly
during moments of crisis, he is deeply religious (although his religion
like Mason's and RC, is a-quaking) and follows the teachings of his
faith--Fox & Co. 
Fox was a great mystic and Dixon tells right from the start, during the
first crisis he and Mason face on the ship, that he will look to find
god in man and god in Mason.