Ecclesiastes – One Book or Two?

We do not expect our philosophers to be right, but we do wish they’d at least try to be consistent. Unfortunately, that’s a wish often unfulfilled IRL…nowhere more so than in the Old Testament book of wisdom known as Ecclesiastes.

A friend of mine decided it was time for him to undertake the Christian equivalent of the Haj. One summer, he committed to reading the Bible from cover to cover. When he was done, I asked him, somewhat foolishly, which book was his ‘favorite’. To my surprise, he said, “Ecclesiastes, of course.”

Ecclesiastes? Maybe. Of course? No way! But I shouldn’t have been surprised. Like me, my friend was a child of the ‘60s and even in that anti-clerical era, Ecclesiastes had its fans (The Byrds). 

Plus, Ecclesiastes is crammed full of jaw-dropping insights into the human predicament. So, what’s not to love? These realizations might have originated in virtually any corner of the world at virtually any time in its cultural history. Some of the ideas sound like they come from the Vedas or even the Tao Te Ching. Some look like they were lifted off of a 20^th century hand-out for a survey course on Existentialism.

Still, the book sometimes reads as though it was an amalgamation of two texts culled from two very different traditions. On the one hand, Ecclesiastes offers a searing indictment of the human condition - vintage existentialism, full of angst and anxiety. In the spirit of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Camus, the emphasis is on the futility and absurdity of life. The mood is dark, the language strident!

But on the other hand, there is a quietist thread running perpendicular throughout the text; it’s a blend of Epicurus, Voltaire, and Norman Vincent Peale. 

There is little doubt that Ecclesiastes is the work of more than one hand. Verses have almost certainly been added to the original text. That said, it would be a bridge too far to suggest that Ecclesiastes is really two books edited into a single text. We will need to find another way to resolve this dilemma. So, let’s consult the text:

“Emptiness, emptiness…all is empty.  (‘Emptiness’ is one translation of an Aramaic word that also denotes ‘absurdity, futility, vanity’.)

“All things are wearisome… There is nothing new under the sun… I have seen all the deeds that are done here under the sun; they are all emptiness and a chase after wind… 

“The wise man is remembered no longer than the fool…all will be forgotten. Alas, wise men and fools die the same death!... Everything is the same for everybody; the same lot for the just and for the wicked…there is one lot for all… Men have no advantage over beasts, for everything is emptiness…all came from the dust and to the dust all return… 

“Better the end of anything than its beginning…The day of death is better than the day of birth. Better to visit the house of mourning than the house of feasting.

“Time (entropy, mortality) and chance (quantum uncertainty) govern all.”

Cheery stuff! Koheleth (the Speaker), once thought to be King Solomon himself, has taken us down an ontological path from which there is no logical escape. At this point, who could imagine that the book would end with everyone singing ‘Kumbya’ and dancing around a May Pole? And yet…Ecclesiastes has the temerity to suggest just that: 

“I know that there is nothing good for man except to be happy and live the best life he can while he is alive. Moreover, that a man should eat and drink and enjoy himself in return for all his labors is a gift of God… 

“Go to it then, eat your food and enjoy it, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart; for already God has accepted what you have done… Whatever task lies to your hand, do it with all your might.”

Here Ecclesiastes dips into a Biblical thread suggesting that God has pre-ordained a specific set of tasks for each of us to complete. We see it in Jeremiah and the prophets, but it is most clearly summarized in Ephesians 2:10: “For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance that we should live in them.” 

In this view, we do not create our lives, we step into them (or not). We are invited to do the Will of God, to participate in universal salvation. Of course, God marches on, with or without our cooperation. We can jump on the bandwagon and play our scripted role in salvation history, or we can stand off to one side. We can let life pass us by…literally.

“It is good and proper for a man to eat and drink and enjoy himself… He will not dwell overmuch on the passing years because God has filled his time with joy of heart.”

Et voila - a full-throated endorsement of bad faith? Joie de vivre is intended by God to distract us from our existential predicament? Faith really is the opiate of the people after all! It seems that we are not only permitted to dance in the face of death, but that God expects us to do so. “Living well is the best revenge!” (The Great Gatsby, BCE edition)

Such an interpretation is rooted in what, I believe, is a misreading of Judeo-Christian theology. Contrary to popular opinion, salvation does not require us to thread a needle: “Every breath you take and every move you make…I’ll be watching you” (The Police) …not! 

As stated in Ephesians (above), God does not dictate a plan; rather, he lays out a smorgasbord of options: “Pick a path, any path; they all lead home. Just stay out of the brambles.” To whatever extent we do not directly oppose God’s values (Beauty, Truth, Justice), we participate in eternity.  

God is infinitely merciful and he created the cosmos so that everything in it might be saved. It is his intent that events in the spatiotemporal, entropic world should participate in eternity…and God will out. Only that which explicitly rejects salvation will be expunged at the end of time. 

Everything we do, whether we realize it or not, is motivated by our appetite for God as he is manifest to us, i.e. as the Good, as Beauty, Truth, Justice, et al. To whatever extent our actions resonate with those values, they are eternal. Only the destruction of God’s ‘goods’ (above) cannot, by definition, be saved.    

Clear? Well, when all else fails… I turn to symbolic logic to compound my confusion: B є A for all B, provided B ≠ -A. In other words, everything (B, events) is part of A (eternity) except -A. -A, the negation of A, cannot be an element of A. And how do we know -A when we meet him? Fortunately, we can turn to the Bible, or better yet Dante (Inferno) & Milton (Paradise Lost), for a paradigm: Satan!

Imagine Robert Frost (The Road Less Traveled) and Hugh Everett (Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics) had babies: We’d be they!

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