by Peter Kreeft
Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent [that’s for sure!], nor favor to men of skill, but time and chance happen to them all (Eccl 9:11).
The universe seems exactly like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. This is the face it turns on us: “Frankly, my dear, I just don’t give a damn.”
2. Death
Death is the most inconvenient thing in life, but also the most obvious—like an elephant in your kitchen. It is also the strongest reason why life seems vain. What profit is there in an investment in any of a country’s businesses if the country is about to be destroyed?
But death is now. As soon as we are born, we begin to die. We are all equally bankrupt, some of us not yet declared: the small and arrogant oligarchy of the living, surrounded by the far more populous democracy of the dead.
What is the meaning of death? Here is all that human reason based on observation of life here under the sun can answer:
The fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. . . . All go to one place; all are from the dust and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth? (Eccl 3:19-21).
Who knows, indeed? Here under the sun, no one. Unless there should appear here under the sun a man who came from beyond the sun, beyond the horizon of death’s night—unless we saw the Rising Son. But Solomon had not yet seen that man, only the man of dust, “from the earth, earthly”, not the man from heaven; and what he says about the man of dust, the first Adam and all his descendants, is simply true. As Pascal put it in the Pensées, “the ending is dreary, however fine the rest of the play. They put a little dirt over your head, and that is the end, forever. That is the end awaiting the world’s most illustrious life.”
Alexander the Great is said to have directed that he be buried with his naked arm hanging out of his coffin, with his hand empty, to show the world that the man who conquered the world left it as he entered it: naked. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb; naked I return.” Underneath our temporary life-clothing, we are all death-naked.
As an argument takes its point from its conclusion, so a story takes its point from its ending. If death is, as it seems to be, the final end, then life’s story is vanity with a vengeance. The cosmos has been groaning in evolutionary travail with us, and we are only the cosmic abortion.
3. Time
Time is vanity because “time is just another word for death”. Time is a river that takes from us everything it gives us. Nothing remains; time ravages the very stars.
Is there progress? Does time go anywhere? Are we in a story? Not if observation under the sun tells us the truth about time. For such observation sees only cycles, “a time to be born and a time to die. . . a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted. . . . What gain has the worker from his toil?” (Eccl 3:2, 9). There is “nothing new under the sun”. There is no good news, no Gospel. Progress is a myth, and evolution, it not another myth, is only a temporary segment of a vaster cosmic process, the “up” side of the cycle. Entropy is the “down” side. The myth of progress is like believing you are climng a mountain just because you arc going up an anthill on the way down.
If time is vain, life is vain, for all of life is temporal. Time is the fundamental and ineradicable feature of all our experience under the sun, spiritual as well as physical, for it takes time to think as well as to act; our souls are in time just as our bodies are, though not in space. Yet despite this ubiquitous and inescapable vanity of time there is one light of hope, one chink in the forbidding wall, one verse where Solomon opens a window out onto another world, like the poet’s “casements opening on perilous foam” of “faerie lands forlorn”. After bemoaning time’s meaningless cycles, he says, about God, “he has made everything beautiful [that is, fitting] for its time, but he has also put eternity into man’s mind [or heart, or spirit].” We experience only time, yet we desire eternity, timelessness. Why, for Heaven’s sake? Where did we ever learn of this thing called eternity, to desire it? Why, if our existence is totally environed by time, do we not feel at home in it? “Do fish complain of the sea for being wet?” Yet we complain of time. There is never enough time for anything. Time, our natural environment, is our enemy.
Perhaps there is land. Perhaps we were not always fish or will not always be. Perhaps—more than perhaps. Innate desires bespeak real objects. If there is hunger, there is food. And there is an innate hunger for eternity.
But this food is not found under the sun. Solomon shows us, by contrast, what and where the meaning of life is by showing what and where it is not. It is Yonder. There is More. There are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in all our philosophies. That is the announcement of hope. Hope’s messenger has infiltrated even into the castle of doom. Our desire for eternity, our divine discontent with time, is hope’s messenger.
4. Evil
The problem of evil, of injustice, of the sufferings of the innocent, of bad things happening to good people, is the oldest of all puzzles and the strongest of all arguments against belief in the goodness of God and the goodness of life.
There is a vanity which takes place on earth, that there are righteous men to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked men to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous. . . (Eccl 8:14).
Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness (Eccl 3:16).
Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them. On the side of their oppressors was power, and there was no one to comfort them! (Eccl 4:1).
The poor and oppressed you will always have with you, Jesus said. Twenty centuries have not solved the problem, nor will twenty more. Time does not solve evil. Nothing under the sun does.
Even a little evil seems to destroy a lot of good: “Dead flies make the perfumer’s ointment give off an evil odor; so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor.” One bull in a china shop, one madman’s finger on a machine gun or a nuclear button, one ill-chosen word, one infidelity, can ruin a whole life. Good is hostage to evil. This too is vanity.
5. God
Is meaning in God, then?
Yes, but not in Solomon’s God. Not in the God known by unaided reason. Not in “nature and nature’s God”. That is simply an it, not a who, a piece of celestial machinery called the First Cause or Great Architect or unknown Designer behind nature’s known design. If all we know about God is what we read from nature, we shall conclude five things:
1. that God exists;
2. that God is powerful enough to make the world;
3. that God is intelligent enough to design the world;
4. perhaps also that God is aesthetic enough to create the beauty of the world, a great work of art;
5. but not that God is good, loving, or even just or that he cares about us and our lives. There is no evidence under the sun for that, the thing we really care about, the thing that would make God not just “the Force” but the Father. We are terrified little children, “lost in a haunted wood”, and we need Abba, Daddy, not a Force or First Cause. We need a God whose name is not x but I.
This Solomon is not a fool. Therefore he has not said in his heart, “There is no God.” But this Solomon is also not a child of God. God is not his Father but his blank, his Unknown:
“Consider the work of God: Who can make straight what he has made crooked?”
The God of nature lets brain tumors appear in little babies’ heads. The most pious possible reactions to that fact are agnosticism and intellectual humility:
Then I saw all the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. However much man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out; even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out. . . (Eccl
8:17).
As you do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything (Eccl 11:5).
Is it possible to believe in God and still despair, still not know why you are living? Certainly. Solomon does. For his God is like the moon: there, but not here, controlling the tides of his life but not entering into any personal relationship with him, no face-to-face encounter as with Job. Solomon’s God has no face; he is only Being, only Am, not I Am. For Solomon’s epistemology is purely naturalistic, and nature is only God’s back. But Scripture is God’s mouth, and Jesus is God’s face. Ecclesiastes is a perfect silhouette of Jesus, the stark outline of the darkness that the face of Jesus fills.
The Need for an Answer: Three Demonic Doors
It is essential that we escape Ecclesiastes’ conclusion somehow. It is essential, in an absolute and unqualified way, that vanity be refuted, that the most horrible of all demons be exorcised.
There are three doors by which this demon can enter our lives. There is an emotional, psychological door, connected with depression. There is also a centralsunr, a spiritual door, which has no name but is the opposite of faith. Its name is not doubt, for great faith can coexist with great doubt, as in Job. Nor is it simply unfaith, not-yet-faith, for that can be seeking, and “all who seek, find”. Rather, it is a kind of antifaith such as we see in great atheists like Sartre and Nietzsche, who care as much about God’s unreality as the great saints care about God’s reality. There is also a third door, a rational, intellectual, philosophical, argumentative, reason-giving door. And that is the door Ecclesiastes opens.
It is equally necessary to bar all three doors. Psychology has its bar for the first door. Religion has its far greater bar for the second, far greater door, the central door. But philosophy too must have its bar for its door, the third door. Each bar is different. Psychology cannot use philosophy’s bar, rational arguments, to fight depression. Religion cannot use mere psychological techniques to heal souls, though our age is full of fools who try. Psychologists can remove guilt feelings, but only God can remove real guilt. And philosophy cannot bar its door with nonrational, nonphilosophical bars, whether those bars arc subrational, superrational, or simply nonrational. Even if religious faith is far greater than reason, it is not a substitute for reason. And wc are commanded by our faith itself to “be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you”.
No one wants to admit Solomon’s conclusion that “all is vanity”. But we cannot simply assert that we disbelieve it. Solomon has given us some very good reasons for believing it. He has built a strong case, a strong building. We must undermine it. We must refute his argument.
I think God providentially arranged for this book to be in the Bible for that express purpose. God is practicing “Socratic method” on us, giving us a question, a challenge, and demanding that we give the answer, the response. Life does that to us. We keep asking life, “What is your meaning?” and life responds by throwing challenges at us that demand that we respond to them. Life asks us, “What is your meaning?” Adam, after the Fall, wondered where God was, and God, instead of answering, asked him, “Adam, where are you?” Job looked for God as his Answer Man, but when God showed up, he asked Job for his answers: “Now it is my turn to ask the questions and yours to answer.” The mystics and resuscitated patients say that the “Being of Light” they see asks them a question, though not usually in words: something like: “Give an account of yourself. I am the Light. Stand in the light.”
There is nothing more boring than an answer to a question you never asked or cared about. Most religious education is like that—most secular education, too. Unlike our human teachers, God did not make that mistake. Ecclesiastes is the question. The Bible is a diptych, a two-paneled picture. Ecclesiastes is the first panel, the question. The rest of the Bible is the second panel, the answer. The Bible is like life, like history according to Toynbee: “Challenge and response”. Ecclesiastes is the challenge. The rest is the response.
Well, have we understood the response? Can we answer Ecclesiastes? Can we translate our faith into the language of reason? Can we “give a reason for the hope that is in us”?
Rules for Talking Back
When we talk back, we want to do more than just “share our feelings” or opinions. That is childish; that is just “getting it out”, “getting it off our chest”. We want not just to get something out but to get something in: the truth. We want ot just to “express our opinion” but to be impressed by the truth. We want not just to externalize what is inside but to internalize what is outside: to learn the truth, to find out whether Solomon speaks the truth. That is, if we are honest.
There are only three ways to refute any argument. This is not negotiable, conventional, or changeable, not the man-made rules of a man-made game. This situation is inherent in the structure of reason itself. Aristotle did not invent it; God did.
An argument—any argument—has three ingredients, and any one of these three ingredients can be defective. But there arc only these three. An argument is composed of propositions, statements, sentences. These in turn are composed of terms (words or phrases). An argument is built of these building blocks, just like a physical building. Its propositions are like storys, and its terms are like rooms. Each argument is a three-story building (if it is a syllogism, the natural and most usual form of argument and the form we find in Ecclesiastes). The storys are called two “premises” and one “conclusion”. The conclusion is like the top story; it is where the building goes. Each story has two rooms, called the “subject term” and the “predicate term”. Thus a syllogistic argument looks like this:
There are three things that must go right with any argument:
1. The terms must be unambiguous.
2. The premises must be true.
3. The argument must be logical.
Thus there are three things that can go wrong with any argument:
1. The terms may be ambiguous.
2. The premises may be false.
3. The argument may be illogical.
Ecclesiastes’ basic argument is as follows:
All “toil” is “under the sun”.
All “under the sun” is “vanity”.
Therefore, all “toil” is “vanity”.
If we are to refute this argument, we must find in it one of the following:
1. an ambiguous term
2. a false premise
3. a logical fallacy
But no term is used ambiguously, and there is no logical fallacy—the conclusion logically follows from the premises. We must therefore find a false premise.
There are only two premises: that all toil, all human work, is under the sun, and that all that is under the sun is vanity, for the five reasons given. Well, is there a toil that is not under the sun? Is there a human work that is not confined to this earth? What are we doing here? Are we not building an eternal Kingdom? Will nothing last? William Butler Yeats writes of a little girl watching the waves destroy sand castles on a Normandie beach, thinking of all the great civilizations that had come gone in that place, and lamenting, “Will nothing last?”
But we will last. We are constructing our very selves with every choice we make, like statues sculpting their own shape with the chisel of free will. And those selves, souls, characters, are destined for eterni. We are the Kingdom of Heaven. We are the answer to Solomon. But this answer does not come clear until hundreds of years after Solomon, through the most outrageous paradox, which Kierkegaard calls “the absolute paradox”, of the event of eternity entering time, God’s becoming a man, sharing the life of man so that man could share the life of God. Ecclesiastes is the question to which Christ is the answer.
And the second premise—he has tried the five most popularly practiced experiments with life, but is there nothing he has not tried? Is there anything else under the sun, anything that is not in vain? The next book in the Bible, also bearing the name
of Solomon, gives the answer. Solomon has tried pleasure, and nine hundred wives, but not love. In Song of Songs Solomon loves only one woman. The one can give what the many cannot give: a meaning larger than life’s vanity. Love, true love, agape, charity, total self-giving, is the one thing in this life under the sun that is “stronger than death”, that smells of eternity, that alone never gets boring, that is never exhausted, that becomes more fulfilling, not less, the more it is practiced. Love is infinite. For God is love. Love is also true wisdom. Fools say love is blind. But God is love; is God blind? One of those three propositions must go. In Ecclesiastes, God is not love. In Song of Songs, love is not blind.
One More Answer to Ecclesiastes; The Divine Interruption
The most ineradicable reason Solomon gives for vanity is the very nature of time itself as cyclic. And the four great divine deeds revealed in the Bible all break the cycle and introduce something radically new, something from without, outside time itself, something from eternity rather than from the past, therefore something radically new: Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection, and Last Judgment. Here is something new under the sun because it comes from beyond the sun. Here are meaning and hope, though terror too. Here is true transcendence.
The Postscript
The last six verses of Ecclesiastes, most scholars think, were added by a second author, the original book ending with verse 8 of chapter 12: exactly where it began, with “vanity of vanities, all is vanity”. The second author adds the orthodox answer to Solomon’s question, the answer the rest of the Old Testament gives, in the last two verses: “The end of the matter: all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments. For this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil” (Eccl 12:13).