Day: November 21, 2021

“The end of the matter; all has been heard”

“The end of the matter” is this, it seems, “all has been heard”. There is, after all, “nothing new under the sun”. Everything comes to nothing, to a sense of emptiness, of futility and meaninglessness, captured in the arresting phrase from Ecclesiastes. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”, says the Preacher. “What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?” It challenges all the forms of human presumption.

What kind of an ending is this? A strange and fearful ending, an ending that is despair? Why do anything if everything is nothing? Our lives are nothing. All our struggle, our labour, our desires and ambitions, our hopes and dreams, are they all an empty nothingness? Yes, at least in and of themselves. That is the stern message of this challenging and remarkable book, The Book of Ecclesiastes. Everything that we are, everything that we do, everything that we seek, all comes to nothing, to the nothing that is vanity. “All is vanity”, says the Preacher, empty of meaning. This recurring refrain phrase frames the entire book.

Yet this is actually the great wisdom of ancient Israel at the height of its philosophical understanding. But it challenges us as well. In fact, it speaks to our modernity like no other book of the Bible, for it raises the question without which the Bible and philosophical theology make little if any sense. What are we here for?

In the grey of late November, what does the Church give us to read when nature herself seems most desolate? The Book of the Preacher, Ecclesiastes, a church book, as it were, at least in its Greek and Latin title, which proclaims the barren emptiness of all human endeavour, the vanity of every enterprise of men and women upon the earth; in short, the barren emptiness of everything. “Vanity of vanities … All is vanity and a striving after wind”, or,  as the King James Version puts it, a “vexation of spirit”, that speaks to our modern day angst, our anxieties. All is nothing.

This is the preacher’s constant refrain as he explores all the avenues of human existence. What is the vanity of humanity’s social, political, material, and philosophical aspirations, which Ecclesiastes uncovers and proclaims? Namely this, that everything under the sun has limits and cannot explain its purpose or ours and therefore cannot satisfy the deep and true desire of our humanity. Instead, we confront the boring sameness to all things finite. Everything under the sun is nothing in and of itself and cannot explain what anything is for. Everything is nothing, it seems.

Yet, to know this is wisdom and the beginnings of the possibilities of grace. “God has put eternity into the mind of man”, as Ecclesiastes also reminds us, and though human wisdom is unable to find out the reason for anything in the things that are “under the sun”, at least it stands open to the one who is the answer. “Ecclesiastes is the question to which Christ is the answer” as the philosopher and theologian Peter Kreeft aptly puts it. Christ is the eternal one who has entered time. In him, time has its meaning. He turns to us and bids us “come and see”. Such is revelation which in turn engages our minds.

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