KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 20 February
admin | 21 February 2019Behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind
Ecclesiastes is the most philosophical of the books of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures in terms of form and content. It offers a profound reflection upon the whole range of human activities in terms of what we might call the Summum Bonum, the highest or greatest good for our humanity. Is it pleasure? Is it wealth? Is it power? Is it knowledge? Is it religion (understood naturally)? All of these are examined and found wanting. “There is nothing new under the sun.”
This seems pessimistic and bleak but really the Preacher – to use an approximate English term equivalent to the Hebrew word Qoheleth, rendered in Greek and Latin as Ecclesiastes – is pointing out something important about our humanity. We seek something beyond what the world can provide. “God,” he says “has put eternity into our minds.” That we can reflect on the whole range of human activity and see its emptiness allows for the possibility, like Plato, to look to what is above this world rather than simply be constrained by all that is “under the sun,” or, like Descartes, to look into ourselves and discover ourselves as thinking selves (the cogito) and to discover God. There is at the very least the possibility of an openness to what is transcendent at the same time as an honest and critical view of the finite world in which we find ourselves. A remarkable book with a remarkable outlook.
The recurring refrain is “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Vanity here doesn’t simply mean our endless narcissisms about ourselves, the constant attention to our selfies, endlessly gazing into our vanity mirrors. It is about the sense of emptiness and futility, the sense of incompleteness to all that we invest ourselves in only to discover that it does not satisfy the human spirit. The Hebrew image is fairly concrete and is captured nicely in the Revised Standard version translation, a “striving after wind.” Who has seen the wind, let alone caught the wind? To try to catch the wind is an exercise in futility. The King James version offers an early modern take on that sense of futility, providing an essential insight into one of the features of the so-called modern turn, a turn to subjectivity. “All is vanity, and vexation of spirit.” “Striving after wind” can only result in a “vexation of spirit,” a sense of frustration born out of futility.
This reflective work emphasizes two important things, a sense of the self and, at the very least, an openness to what is transcendent, and as such provides a quality of thoughtfulness and self-criticism about what we invest ourselves in only to find disenchantment. In other words, it is an honest look at human experience. To know our limitations and the limitations of the finite world is to have a hold of something profound that allows us to deal with the many and varied hardships of human experience. How we face things reflects in part on our expectations. There is a kind of reflective realism about this work.
Pete Seeger’s famous To Everything There is A Season draws almost completely upon eight verses in the Third Chapter of Ecclesiastes. A popular folk song, sung by almost everyone in the hippie culture, Seeger only added seven words: the recurring refrain, of “turn, turn, turn,” and the six words after “a time for war, a time for peace,” namely, “I swear it’s not too late.” The song became iconic for the second half of the twentieth century and, in a way, captures a kind of longing for something more that is still with us.
Such is an interesting feature of the post-Christian and post-secular world in which religion and philosophical reflection come more and more into play precisely out of a dissatisfaction with the quality of human life and our fears about the world. Weiwei Zhang in China Wave wants to celebrate the humanistic qualities of Confucianism, not noting, as Slavoj Zizek shows, that this is little more than a co-opting of Confucianism to the agendas of the Party. Yet the desire to reclaim a humanistic culture is itself revealing. Wonder Beyond Belief by the German-Iranian philosopher Navid Kermani, a Shiite Muslim living and writing in Cologne, Germany, is astounding in its celebration and engagement with Christianity from an Islamic viewpoint. All such things point to a growing spirit of reflection and self-reflection along with respectful cultural and spiritual interaction.
Few works speak so directly to the meaning and nature of intellectual inquiry than Ecclesiastes. He notes the labour and the commitment that belongs to the life of studies: “of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” It is not an argument for giving up on learning; precisely the opposite. The conclusion is to “fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” There is nothing new “under the sun,” and from God nothing can be hidden. “For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”
Certainly, we face difficult things. Ecclesiastes recalls us to a sense of ourselves and a sense of something more than just what is “under the sun.” We face hard and difficult things such as the sad, sad deaths of the seven Barho children lost in a house fire in Halifax this week. These things pull at our hearts and remind us of the tragic uncertainties of human life. To have fled the Syrian civil war and then to suffer such a devastating loss is more than heart-breaking. A time to mourn but we may wonder how there can ever be a time to dance. Only perhaps by our awareness of all our limitations and in the strength of faith. We have remembered the Barho family in our prayers in Chapel this week. It is at once the least and the most that we can do.
&(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy