Three Philosophies Of Life

by Peter Kreeft

  Ancient ethics always dealt with three questions. Modern ethics usually deals with only one, or at the most two. The three questions are like the three things a fleet of ships is told by its sailing orders. (The metaphor is from C. S. Lewis.) First, the ships must know how to avoid bumping into each other. This is social ethics, and modern as well as ancient ethicists deal with it. Second, they must know how to stay shipshape and avoid sinking. This is individual ethics, virtues and vices, character building, and we hear very little about this from our modern ethical philosophers. Third, and most important of all, they must know why the fleet is at sea in the first place. What is their mission, their destination? This is the question of the summum bonum, and no modern philosophers except the existentialists seem even to be interested in this, the greatest of all questions. Perhaps that is why most modern philosophy seems so weak and wimpy, so specialized and elitist, and above all so boring, to ordinary people.

  I think I know why modern philosophers dare not raise this greatest of questions; because they have no answer to it. It is a hole so big that only the courage of an existentialist or the faith of a theist can fill it.

  Ecclesiastes the Existentialist

  The first existentialist was not Sartre, though he coined the term. Nor was it Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, though most of the textbooks say so. Nor was it even Pascal, though he foreshadowed half of Kierkegaard and was the first to write about the fundamental existential experience of cosmic anxiety and meaninglessness. It was not even Saint Augustine, whose Confessions stands out as the profoundest example of depth psychology and existential autobiography ever written. It was not even Socrates, who alone among the philosophers totally existed his philosophy.

  Rather, the first existentialist was Solomon, or whoever wrote Ecclesiastes. Here, some twenty-five hundred years before Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’ The Stranger, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, or Kafka’s The Castle, we have the fundamental experience and intuition of each of these modern classics, expressed more candidly, directly, and artlessly than ever before or ever again.

  If you are familiar with existentialist writings such as the four just mentioned, you will see the truth of this claim as we lift the curtain on Ecclesiastes. There is no need to stretch Ecclesiastes to fit the existentialist clothing.

  The Modernity of Ecclesiastes

  There is a book called A Time to Live and a Time to Die, by Robert Short, author of The Gospel According to Peanuts. It is a book of photographs, one for each verse of Ecclesiastes. The photographs are all contemporary. They are photos of things we see every day without noticing them. (Photography helps us to do just that: to notice instead of just to see.) These photographs are startlingly apt. They show the utter contemporaneity, the utter modernity, of Ecclesiastes, the perennially up-to-date book.

  It is fitting that Ecclesiastes, of all books, should be illustrated by photographs, because Ecclesiastes is a series of word photographs. The word photograph literally means “light writing”, a picture taken with light, “under the sun”. That is the method of Ecclesiastes: simple observation. Unlike all the other books in the Bible, it has no faith flashbulb attached to its camera to reveal the inner depths or hidden meanings of life. It uses only the available light “under the sun”: sense observation and human reason. The surface of life appears in this book with total clarity, brutal honesty, and spiritual poverty. Ecclesiastes is the truest picture of the surface that has ever been written.

  Whatever rabbis first decided to include Ecclesiastes in the canon of sacred Scripture were both wise and courageous—wise because we appreciate a thing only by contrast, and Ecclesiastes is the contrast, the alternative, to the rest of the Bible, the question to which the rest of the Bible is the answer. There is nothing more meaningless than an answer without its question. That is why we need Ecclesiastes.

  The rabbis were also courageous, because the question Ecclesiastes raises is so deep that only an answer that is deeper still can satisfy the mind and heart that dare to ask it, and if such an answer is not forthcoming, we must either run from the question in a dishonest cover-up or run from life in despair. These are the two running sores that plague the modern world.

  Ecclesiastes is the one book in the Bible that modern man needs most to read, for it is Lesson One, and the rest of the Bible is Lesson Two, and modernity does not heed Lesson Two because it does not heed Lesson One. Whenever I teach the Bible as a whole, I always begin with Ecclesiastes. In another age, we could begin with God’s beginning, Genesis. But in this age, the Age of Man, we must begin where our patient is; we must begin with Ecclesiastes.

  Ecclesiastes is modern in at least seven ways.

  First, it is an existential book, a book about human existence. It asks the great question of modern man: Does my existence here have any meaning at all? Previous ages disputed about what the meaning of human existence was. Ecclesiastes, alone, among premodern books, dares to ask the question: Suppose it has none at all? Its question is not the essence but the existence of the meaning of life.

  Second, it shows modernity’s greatest fear, which is not so much the fear of death (that was ancient man’s deepest fear), or the fear of sin or guilt or Hell (that was medieval man’s deepest fear), but the fear of meaninglessness, of “vanity”, of “the existential vacuum”, the fear of Nothingness.

  Third, it shares the best feature of the modern mind as well as the worst. Although it is a deeply despairing book, it is also a deeply honest book. Despair itself can be hopeful if it is honest. (We see a striking case of this in Job.)

  Fourth, its answer to the question of the summum bonum, the greatest good, final end, or meaning of life, is the modern answer, namely, no answer. Of the twenty-one great civilizations that have existed on our planet, according to Toynbee’s reckoning, ours, the modern West, is the first that does not have or teach its citizens any answer to the question why they exist. A euphemistic way of saying this is that our society is pluralistic and leaves us free to choose or create our own ultimate values. A more candid way of saying the same thing is that our society has nothing but its own ignorance to give us on this, the most important of all questions. As society grows, it knows more and more about less and less. It knows more about the little things and less about the big things. It knows more about every thing and less about Everything.

  Fifth, the practical result of this vacuum in values is hedonism. When you do not know why you do anything else, you can still “grab the gusto”, “seize the day”. When ultimate ends disappear, toys remain. Ecclesiastes’ only positive advice is to follow Freud’s “pleasure principle” but to be honest enough to remember that “this too is vanity” and that it ends only in death, that you cannot take any of your toys with you. There arc flowers, but there is always a grinning skull behind the flowers. There are many pleasant recreations on the deck of the Titanic.

  Even so, to “stop and smell the roses” is better advice than to pretend that our little hectic diversions are ultimately meaningful and satisfying. Honest hedonism is spiritually superior to dishonest self-delusion. Jesus had harsher words for the man who built greater barns to store his grain and said to his soul, “Soul, take your case”, than for the convicted prostitute or the thief on the cross. Infinitely superior to self-satisfied yuppiedom, Ecclesiastes has the heroism of honesty. Infinitely superior to pop psychology, it rises to the dignity of despair.

  Sixth, its context, the world in which it carries on its research, is a secularized world. In that world, religion is reduced to one of many small departments of life, between “Press” and “Science” in the index of Time magazine. It is then further reduced to what can be empirically observed of this department of life.

  In a secular world, religion is somewhere in life, not vice versa. God is an ingredient in my life rather than I an ingredient in his. Secularism is anthropocentric, not theocentric. The sacred may be allowed to exist, but it is defined by the secular rather than the secular being defined by the sacred, as in the res
t of the Bible and in the rest of the premodern world.

  A seventh way in which Ecclesiastes is modern is the most important one of all. Not only its observational context but also its method, its epistemology, its answer to the question: How do you know the truth? is wholly secular. The author is a reporter for earth’s universal newspaper. He has not been privy to any special divine revelation or supernatural intervention. His God is simply “nature and nature’s God”, the God of our modern establishmentarian religion. He is an empiricist.

  God’s Silence in Ecclesiastes

  The difference between philosophy and religion is the difference between speaking and listening, between man’s speaking about God and God’s speaking about man with man listening. This is the difference between reason and faith. Philosophy is man’s search for God; the Bible is the story of God’s search for man. Philosophy is words flying up; the Bible is the Word sent down. Ecclesiastes is the only bookhe Bible in which God is totally silent. The author appeals to no divine revelation, only to natural human reason and sense observation. God is only the object of his quest, not the subject; the questee, not the quester, the Hound of Heaven.

  In Job, God is also silent, except for the beginning and the ending. But these two passages make the difference between Job and Ecclesiastes. Because God speaks, Job has everything even though he-has nothing. Because God is silent, Ecclesiastes has nothing even though he has everything.

  God speaks twice in Job. In the first two chapters, we sec him questioning Job, testing Job. In light of this beginning, we the readers understand the long middle section, Job’s quest for God, as really God’s quest for Job. But Job did not have those first two chapters. God seems silent to him, just as he did to Ecclesiastes.

  In the last five chapters of Job, God speaks out of the storm. Nothing in all the world’s literature is more profound than this speech. It is enough to satisfy Job, the hardest man on earth to satisfy. For Job is not patient. Job is impatient. Job is from Missouri: “Show me.” Whatever is hidden in these chapters is great enough to satisfy the hardest man in the world to satisfy concerning the hardest question in the world, the mystery of evil. It would also be great enough to satisfy Ecclesiastes if God had spoken it to him, but he did not.

  Perhaps Ecclesiastes just was not listening. In Job God showed up only when Job shut up. Job’s best words are: “The words of Job are ended.” As Elihu says to Job, “God is speaking all the time, first in one way, then in another, but we don’t hear.” Or perhaps Job got his answer and Ecclesiastes did not because Job was a suffering servant while Ecclesiastes was a mere philosopher. Ecclesiastes was like Socrates; Job was like Christ.

  All of the Bible is divine revelation, divine speech. But God never speaks directly in Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is all monologue, not dialogue. How is it divine revelation?

  It is inspired monologue. God in his providence has arranged for this one book of mere rational philosophy to be included in the canon of Scripture because this too is divine revelation. It is divine revelation precisely in being the absence of divine revelation. It is like the silhouette of the rest of the Bible. It is what Fulton Sheen calls “black grace” instead of “white grace”, revelation by darkness rather than by light. In this book God reveals to us exactly what life is when God docs not reveal to us what life is. Ecclesiastes frames the Bible as death frames life.

  The Summary of Ecclesiastes

  The structure of Ecclesiastes is much more tight, much more logical, than it seems at first sight. The book seems to ramble, to go nowhere, to have no tightly argued deductions, only bits of wisdom sprinkled over a desert landscape like a few raindrops, quickly absorbed by the dry soil, or like a collage of photos taken through the porthole of a sinking ship.

  Yet the book’s rambling is deliberate, for this form perfectly expresses its content, its message: that life rambles to nowhere. Ecclesiastes practices what it preaches. Its form is one with its content: the test of great poetry. Does life chase its own tail? Very well, this book will do the same. Its ending and its beginning are identical: “All is vanity.”

  Ecclesiastes is, nevertheless, a logical argument, not just scattered observations. And its argument is deductive and demonstrativt just inductive and observational. Though the author has never read Aristotle or any logic textbook and did not consciously intend his book to take the form of a syllogism, nevertheless it is a syllogism, simply because that is the form in which the human mind naturally and instinctively argues. My summary of Ecclesiastes in a syllogism (see page 35) is not a palimpsest but an X-ray; it does not impose a new or alien piture but reveals the structure already there, the bones beneath the flesh.

  The argument of Ecclesiastes is summarized in the first three verses, amplified for twelve chapters, and then summarized at the end. The first three verses are the whole book in miniature. The first verse gives the title and author; the second verse gives the point, the conclusion; and the third verse gives the essential argument for it.

  1. The words of the Preacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem.

  2. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

  3. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?

  The Author of Ecclesiastes

  The title of the original book is its first words. (Thus ancient authors outwit modern editors and publishers who obsessively change titles.) The title is not Ecclesiastes, “The Preacher”, but “The Words of the Preacher”. It is not an autobiography but a sermon. Who “the Preacher” really was does not even matter. What matters is not the singer but the song. Like Buddha, the Preacher says, “Look not to me, look to my dharma [my doctrine].”

  So we need not take sides in the scholarly controversy about authorship. The minority view, taken by conservative scholars, claims that the author was literally King Solomon, “the son of David, king in Jerusalem”. The majority view claims that the style and vocabulary of the book strongly indicate another author. (“Strongly indicate”, not “prove”; textual scholarship, like medicine, is not an exact science, though many of its practitioners act as if it were.) The majority view is that the book was written centuries after Solomon, during or after the Babylonian exile.

  Even if this latter view is true, there is, of course, no plagiarism or attempt to deceive. It was a literary device of ancient Jewish authors to call themselves “Solomon”, thus (1) humbly preserving their own anonymity and (2) declaring their indebtedness to their teacher and model, the ideal wise man. Where modern authors parade themselves and their newness even when they are small and their books are warmed-over unoriginalities, ancient authors had the opposite fashion: to make themselves small even when they were great and to declare their books traditional even when they were innovative. Fashions change; what remains is the need to be wary of all fashionable labels.

  Since we need to call the author something, let us use the name “Solomon”—an appropriate name, whether literal or symbolic.

  Solomon’s point, or conclusion, is so blatant that only the sleeping could miss it. It is stated five times in the first verse (Eccl 1:2), exemplified for twelve chapters, and then repeated three times more in the last verse (Eccl 12:8), like the simple-minded preacher’s “three-point sermon technique”: “First I tells ‘em what I’m gonna say. Then I says it. Then I tells ‘em what I said.” If you miss these three trumpets of doom, you are worse than asleep; you are dead.

  The point is “vanity”. What does “vanity” mean? Not, of course, the “vanity” of a “vanity mirror”, which is narcissism, but “in vain”, “useless”, “profitless”. The Hebrew word means literally “a chasing after wind”, a grasping after shadows, a wild-goose chase. And there is no wild goose. There is no end (telos, purpose), only an end. (finis, finish), namely, death. What we need more than anything else in the world, a reason to live and a reason to die—this simply does not exist.

  Archibald MacLeish dramatizes this haunting horror in his poem “The E
nd of the World”. The image of life as a silly circus frames the picture:

  Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot

  The armless ambidextrian was lighting

  A match between his great and second toe

  And Ralph the Lion was engaged in biting

  The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum

  Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough

  In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb—

  Quite unexpectedly the top blew off.

  And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over

  Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,

  There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,

  There with vast wings across the canceled skies,

  There in the sudden blackness, the black pall

  Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.

  Another terrifying portrait of Nothingness in the place of God is Ernest Hemingway’s classic little short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”:

  It was not fear or dread. It was a Nothing that he knew too well. It was all a Nothing and a man was Nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanliness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada, who are in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada.