Three Philosophies Of Life

by Peter Kreeft

  Hail nothing, full of nothing, nothing is with thee. . .

  Nada, Spanish for “nothing”, is the word Saint John of the Cross, greatest of mystics, used to describe God, the sheer abyss of pure Being, beyond all finite beings, beyond somethings. He called God todo y nada, “everything and nothing”. For the great mystics, God is so full of Being that he is no-thing; for the modern nihilist, being is so empty of God that it is Nothing. For the theistic mystic, nothingness is only a name for Being; for the nihilist, being is a only a name for Nothingness.

  The point is simply this: without God—no, not just without God, for the author of Ecclesiastes speaks frequently of God—without faith in God—no, not even that, for the author has faith in God, in facptyn unquestioning faith: never does he doubt God’s existence—rather, without the kind of faith in God that is larger than life and therefore worth dying for and therefore worth living for, without a faith that means trust and hope and love, without a lived love affair with God, life is vanity of vanities, the shadow of a shadow, a dream within a dream.

  Let me put the point in a single word. It is a word that I guarantee will shock and offend you, though it comes from Saint Paul. Paul used this word to describe his life without Christ, his life full of worldly successes, education, wealth, power, prestige, and privilege. Paul was “a Pharisee of the Pharisees”, a Roman citizen, educated by Gamaliel, “the light of Israel”. But before Christ put him into the post-Ecclesiastes relationship with God, what was his life? Shit. “Dung”—that was his word for it, not mine. Look up Philippians 3:8 in the bold old King James version. Compared with the all-excelling knowledge of God in Christ Jesus, all of the greatest things in this world, according to Paul, arc skubala—shit. Dung. Job’s dung heap.

  That is the message of Ecclesiastes, for a Christian.

  The world’s purest gold is only dung without Christ. But with Christ, the basest metal is transformed into the purest gold. The hopes of alchemy can come true, but on a spiritual level, not a chemical one. There is a “philosopher’s stone” that transmutes all things into gold. Its name is Christ. With him, poverty is riches, weakness is power, suffering is joy, to be despised is glory. Without him, riches arc poverty, power is impotence, happiness is misery, glory is despised.

  This is life’s greatest paradox. Solomon does not know its positive half, but he knows its negative half better than anyone.

  Surprisingly, this is also the message of the most famous and adamant atheist in twentieth-century literature, especially in his first and greatest work. The writer is Sartre, and the work is Nausea (La Nausée), and the title tells it all. We cannot be too thankful to the great atheists; they show us the shape of God by his absence more clearly and starkly than believers do by his presence—like a silhouette. They show us what difference God makes as death shows us what difference life makes. You never fully appreciate a thing until it is taken away from you.

  Sartre says, in “Existentialism and Humanism”,

  God does not exist and. . . . we have to face all the consequences of this. The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain kind of secular ethics which would like to abolish God with the least possible expense. . . . The existentialist, on the contrary, thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears with Him; there can be no a priori Good since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not He; because the fact is, we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoyevski said, “If God didn’t exist, everything would be permissible.” That is the very starting point of existentialism. . . and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find any tiling to cling to. . . if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct.

  Short-Range Meanings—Enough?

  Of course not all of life is in vain in the short run. Solomon knows that as well as anyone. It is not in vain to eat: it keeps you alive. It is not in vain to copulate: it keeps the human race alive and gives pleasure. It is not in vain to scratch a mosquito bite: it relieves the itching for a moment. But only for a moment. Aye, there’s the rub. Short-run purpose is no compensation for long-range purposelessness.

  Many think it is. “Live for the moment.” Who needs a summum bonum except philosophers?

  But we are all philosophers, unless we are animals. Men live not just in the present but also in the future. We live by hope. Our hearts are a beat ahead of our feet. Half of us is already in the future; we meet ourselves coming at us from up ahead. Our lives arc like an arc stretching out to us from the future into the present. Our hopes and ideals move our present lives. Animals’ lives are like an arc coming to them out of their past; they are determined by their past. They are pushed; we are pulled. They are forced; we are free. They are only instinct, heredity, and environment; we are more; we are persons.

  The determinists, from Marx and Freud to Skinner, who deny this fact, insult us infinitely more than any preacher who shouts sin and damnation at us. It is a great compliment to call a man a sinner. Only a free man can be a sinner. The determinists mean to steal from us the great treasure of sin. They deny us our freedom, and therefore our hope, our ability to live not just from our determined past but also from our undetermined future.

  Short-range meanings, long-range meaninglessness; present purposes, future purposelessness; hope about things, hopelessness about Everything—such is Ecclesiastes’ picture of our lives. We are like the little black boxes you buy in joke shops. Their purpose is simply to light up, blink, make funny little noises, and shake until the batteries wear out (death). Another version has a lid; when you turn the “off / on” lever on, the box shakes, whines, blinks, and opens its lid; a little green hand comes out, shuts the box off, and falls back inside. (Same thing.) Each part of the box is meaningful; each rivet, cog, and wire is there for a purpose. But the whole thing is utterly meaningless. That is an exact image of human life according to the wisest man in the world.

  No wonder we dare not read his book honestly and open-mindedly. No wonder we shake our heads, tch our tchs, and turn away. But a little black worry has been planted in our unconscious, like a bug. Might it be true? It cannot be! But is it?

  Here is another image for the same point. (A picture is worth a thousand words. Jesus hardly ever spoke without using them.) It is an old Mutt and Jeff cartoon. Jeff is standing next to a pile of stones with a lit lantern on top, in the middle of a road, at night. Mutt comes along, sizes up the situation, and asks, “Jeff, did you put that lantern there?” “Yes, Mutt.” “Why?” “To warn the cars away, so they wouldn’t crack up on the stones.” “Oh. And did you put the stones there, too?” “Yes, Mutt.” “Why?” “To hold the lantern up, of course.”

  Sit next to a bridge in a city for a while, until the traffic over the bridge drums itself into your soul and it seems as if the bridge is inevitable and was always there. Then suddenly ask the philosophical question: Why is it there? Answer: to get people from the suburbs into the city in the morning and back out to their homes in the evening. All right, why do they go into the city? To work. At what? All sorts of meaningful jobs. For instance? Policeman, nurse, financier, construction worker, engineer, politician, shoemaker, math teacher. . . And what do these people do? Policemen police bridge traffic. Nurses heal people injured in bridge traffic. Financiers finance bridge building. Construction workers build bridges. Engineers design bridges. Politicians authorize the building of bridges. Shoemakers make shoes for crossing bridges. Math teachers educate future engineers. . . You see? The stones arc there for the lantern; the lantern is there for the stones. It is the little black box, only with many more gears.

  But we do not notice this enormous absence. Our headphones keep us so filled with artificial noise that we do not hear the deafening silence at the heart of it all. Our heads are filled, but our hearts arc empty. If w
e dared to listen to “the sounds of silence”, like the existentialists, we would be terrified like them. Where the ancients heard cosmic music, “the music of the spheres”, we hear Pascal’s “eternal silence of those infinite spaces [that] fills me with dread”.

  But we need to hear that silence. We need it more than anything else in the world. Kierkegaard wrote, “If I could prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence. For even if the word of God were proclaimed in the modern world, no one would hear it; there is too much noise. Therefore create silence.”

  Ecclesiastes creates silence.

  Ecclesiastes is the first and necessary step toward salvation for the modern world. The world will not go to the Great Physician (except on its own, patronizing terms) until it admits that it is desperately sick. “They that are sick need a physician, not those that are well. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”

  Ecclesiastes is the book we moderns fear more than any other. For it is a mirror that shows us a great hole, a black spot, where our heart ought to be. The microcosm of the self has a Black Hole just like the macrocosm of the universe. What could be more terrifying than this?—to find there at our heart, where the source of life ought to be, instead the source of death?

  For meaninglessness (“vanity”) is the source of death. There is a death worse than death: the death of the soul; and “dead souls” (Gogol’s terrifying title) can be seen on any city street. “Vanity” is death indeed; eternalized, it is Hell. Mystics and resuscitated patients who claim to catch a glimpse of Hell do not say they saw physical fire or demons with pitchforks but rather lost souls wandering nowhere in the darkness, with no direction, hope, or purpose. It is a far more terrifying picture of Hell than fire and brimstone. And, most horrible of all, it is true. It is here. We can smell those fires even now and gag on their ashes that drift into our lives.

  Walker Percy suggests that the root of violence, especially rape and murder, is this sense of inner emptiness, the perception of ourselves as wraiths, ghosts. The desperate need to assure ourselves of our own reality explodes in two obvious ways: no ghost can create or destroy life by force. No ghost can rape or murder.

  Children “act out” their emptiness by destructive behavior. And today’s warring gangs become tomorrow’s warring nations. What happens when you give adolescent gangs nuclear weapons?

  The media is our drug pusher. It exploits our souls, at our command. (It is our servant; we can no more blame it than the murderer can blame his gun.) It makes its money off our addictions to death: violence, rape, murder, promiscuity, crime, drugs, and alcohol. For example, a study found that only two out of twenty recent movies took a critical rather than a positive or humorous ttitude toward drugs or alcohol.

  Is all this moralizing off target, a tangent from Ecclesiastes? No, it is the presence of Ecclesiastes in our lives, our own “vanity of vanities”, our “Vanity Fair”, a fair of fair vanities, a circus of dressed-up clowns (“Laugh, clown, laugh!”), an unmerry merry-go-round. Ecclesiastes is a terror to modern man because when he looks into its mirror he sees the ultimate nightmare: The Man With No Face.

  The Great Cover-Up

  All toll, all that we do, all human pursuits here “under the sun”, all civilization, all arts and sciences, come down in the end for most people most of the time to a forgetting, a diversion, a cover-up: a series of complex masks over this one simple terrifying truth. Ecclesiastes rips off the cover and plunges our squeamish and reluctant eyes into this blinding abyss. It is a revelation in the literal sense: a revealing, an unveiling, an uncovering. Ecclesiastes blows our cover.

  The world is wise to cover up this truth by a million diversions and pretenses, for it is the most terrible truth there is. That is because once you admit it, you are at a crossroads, and only two roads lead anywhere from that crossroads. One leads to the kind of religion the world can never be comfortable with and never understand: the kind that is big enough to fill the infinite hole in the human heart, the kind bigger than life itself. The other road leads to a bullet hole through the head, the mirror image of the hole through the heart.

  Five Ways to Hide an Elephant

  This is not only Solomon’s view of our lives; it is also the modern world’s. For the modern world has no answer to the biggest and most obvious question of all: What is it all there for? What are we here for?

  The question is as big as an elephant. How can you hide an elephant? The modern world has invented five ways.

  1. Diversion is the first and most effective way to hide the elephant. An elephant can be hidden by mice, if there are enough of them. So our world is full of thousands of little things, which keep us diverted from the one big thing. We are kept so busy that we have no time to think.

  2. Propaganda is the next. Since the modern world has no answer to the greatest of all questions, it calls it nasty names, like “abstract” and “metaphysical” and even “religious”, and above all “a matter of private opinion” (and do not impose yours on me, please. That would be propaganda! No. That is propaganda.)—as if the nature of the real world and of our efforts to find the truth about the life we all share in this world were only a dream or a private fantasy in our own minds.

  3. Indifference is a third way to hide an elephant. Someone says, “There’s an elephant!” and we simply yawn. There is God, or there is Nothingness; in either case, there is Death. These are three elephants, and we care more about mice. We are passionate about money and sex and ambition and indifferent to what it all means. We are specialists—nose to the switch or gear or specialized part of our little black box, indifferent to the whole and the why.

  4. The pursuit of happiness, which our American Declaration of Independence calls one of our great, inalienable rights and which Malcolm Muggeridge calls one of the silliest ideas ever propagated, hides the elephant because the elephant does not seem to make us happy. The elephant is “negative”, and we should practice “the power of positive thinking”, “I’m OK, you’re OK”, and “self-acceptance”. We should cry “Peace! Peace!” when there is no peace, because it makes us happy. “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”, and no, Virginia, people do not die, they only “pass away”, and no, Virginia, all religious educators agree that the biblical “fear of the Lord” is not the beginning of wisdom but a dangerous superstition that must be eradicated from the minds of the young lest they become something other than well-adjusted citizens of the Kingdom of This World.

  5. Finally, the reigning philosophical orthodoxy of subjectivism blunts the pin that could prick the balloon of happiness, namely, the pin of truth, by turning its point back upon itself: truth is what you believe, “true for you” but not for me. The best way of all to hide an elephant is to hide your eyes instead, to play peek-a-boo and not to peek, to grow ingrown eyeballs. Thus we turn the question “What is the real summum bonum; what is the truth about the good?” into the question “What is my set of values, my order of priorities for my life?” We reduced “the Good” to “value”, “value” to “values”, and “values” to “my values”. And ethics is then reduced to “values clarification”. Then we dare to say to an honest scientist of life like Solomon (or Moses or Saint Paul) “What right do you have to impose your values on me?”

  Why do we say such nonsense? Why do we turn elephants into mice, cosmic truths into personal preferences? Because we are terrified of elephants. Perhaps we cannot ride them; perhaps they will trample us. So we reduce their size. We do the same thing to sex, and religion, and philosophy. (There are many elephants in our jungle; we have not yet succeeded in caging them all, in “demythologizing” our whole world; Brave New World is still a generation or two away.)

  The Obscene Syllogism

  What I shall now do is almost obscene. I shall put this horror— this thing that is so awful that we have to cover it up—into a nice, clean, perfect syllogism.

  Here it is:

  All “toil” is “
under the sun”.

  And all “under the sun” is “vanity”.

  Therefore, all “toil” is “vanity”.

  Like every syllogism, this one has three terms: (1) “toil”, (2) “under the sun”, and (3) “vanity”.

  We have already seen what “vanity” means: the Great Void, ultimate meaninglessness.

  “Toil” means not just “hard work” but any work, everything we do, all human pursuits here “under the sun”, all of human life’s efforts at meaning, every life-style, every value, every candidate for the summum bonum. Solomon will experiment with five candidates, five efforts, five “toils”, the five most universal and popular life-styles—wisdom, pleasure, power and riches, altruism, and conventional naturalistic religion—and he will show that each one is equally “vain”.

  Finally, “under the sun”. (How often modern translations of the Bible rob us of great and memorable images, of poetic grandeur! I hope your Bible has preserved this great phrase.) It means simply the observed nature of the world, the way things arc, “just the facts, ma’am”. Solomon’s mental camera takes many pictures onto his verbal photographic plate, and five recurrent features st out in all of them: sameness, death, time, evil, and mystery. Each of these features contributes to the total vanity. Each is another reason why every, “toil” is vain. Toiling under the sun is trying to find a straight road in a round world, trying to find an absolute in a relative world, trying to find an end in a “world without end”. Since (1) all “toil” is “under the sun” (that is, all life is surrounded by the context of this real world), and since (2) everything in this world “under the sun” is in vain, it follows that (3) all toil is in vain; all life is meaningless.

  Five “Toils”

  “Toil” means all our attempts to find or make meaning. “Toil” means all the square pegs we shove into the round hole of “the existential vacuum”; all the marbles that we throw into the Grand Canyon of meaninglessness in a necessary but doomed attempt to fill it up; all the candidates for the presidential position of the summum bonum, the greatest good, that we nominate. But no one of them is good enough for the job. All are failures. Each “toil” lacks the “gain” we seek from it—not a “gaining” of money but a “gaining” of meaning.