“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.
I have been thinking about the different ways in which we come to know things, particularly, how do we know that God exists? It is an important theological question that does not simply default to ‘faith’ exactly. Anselm in the late 11th/early 12th century undertook to find reasons for what we believe. His famous saying, fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, derives from Plato and others who seek to move from opinion to knowledge and understanding. Anselm looked for an argument about God’s existence that would be worthy of the idea of God. In struggling with this, he says that the argument came to him; an insight, we might say. “God”, he says, “is that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” arguing “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” cannot not exist otherwise it would not be “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”. Known as the ontological argument, a reasoning upon being in the abstract, it has both delighted and dismayed many a thinker over the centuries because of the modal force of its logic. But it is a way of thinking from within the activity of our minds about what is greater than ourselves.
Later in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas begins his Summa Theologica not with the question about God’s existence but about whether any other knowledge or science is needed beyond what human reason knows such as in the natural philosophy or theology of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. While allowing that the same thing can be known by different sciences; for instance, both physics and astronomy can know that the earth is a sphere, he argues for a divine science as sacred doctrine because of the limitations and failings of human reason. With respect to Anselm’s argument, he notes that something can be self-evident in itself but not self-evident to us and points out from that standpoint that rather than begin with our minds as turned within ourselves, we must begin with the natural world around us. He contrasts two standard forms of reasoning, a priori and a posteriori; arguing from cause to effect or from effect to cause. Only then does he turn to the question of God’s existence.
Each article in the Summa follows a certain structure. There is a question, followed first by objections to the question, then there is the sed contra – a simple counter to the objections which provides the basis for the respondeo, the developed argument about the question, and, then, there are replies to the objections in the light of the respondeo. It is, in short, a complete form of reasoning, a going forth and a return of thought. In case of Question 2, Art. 3 about whether God exists, the two objections seem rather modern. First, how can a good God exist in a world where there is so much evil? A commonplace argument, and second, since nature and human reason are able to explain everything then there is no need for God, another commonplace and one which Ecclesiastes challenges in its own way about the vanity of our knowing. But it is the sed contra which is most striking.
It is simply the words of God to Moses out of the burning bush. “In the person of God, it is said, I AM WHO I AM”. This is the classical scriptural image of Revelation. God makes himself known to us. He gets Moses’ attention with a bush that burns but is not consumed. That is not natural. Precisely. That is the whole point. God speaks first to Moses by way of cultural, tribal or ethnic identities, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but then he gives his name, I AM WHO I AM, as something universal. It is the holy name of God given by God.
It is not arrived at through human reasoning in terms of the various forms of demonstration. Rather we are given to know God from God himself. But does this mean that Revelation cancels out all of the forms of human reason whether it is in terms of the mind in its own activity or by reflection upon the natural order seeking its cause? No. Because the respondeowhich follows is entirely about arguments largely drawn from Aristotle about motion and causality, and from an 11th century Islamic theologian, Avicenna, about contingency and necessity. What is striking is the complementary nature of what is made known through Revelation with what is known through the forms of human reasoning. The point is that what is revealed is made known to our minds and is to be engaged by our minds. Rather than countering the forms of our human knowing, they are engaged and perfected, raised up as it were.
There is a twofold turning. Our turning to God and God’s turning to us. There can be no Revelation without the engagement of our minds in one way or another.
At this time of endings we are being turned to our beginning anew; in short, to Christ, “the Lord our righteousness,” as Jeremiah prophesies, to “the Lamb of God,” as John the Baptist proclaims, to the One who turns to us. Everything is gathered to him who comes and enters into the barren emptiness of human life. The times of endings signal new beginnings. Something is made out of nothing, not by us, but by the grace of God who engages our nothingness and gathers us to his Word and Son.
On this day, we end and begin again. We are returned to him. For in ourselves we are nothing. There is nothing new “under the sun”, but with the Son of God, who comes to us “with healing in his wings”, as the prophet, Malachi, wonderfully puts it, we find the grace that renews and redeems, the grace that bestows salvation, the grace that is hope and glory, the grace that is not only something but everything. “Grace is everywhere”, as George Bernanos poignantly and profoundly puts it in The Diary of a Country Priest.
We begin again, not with ourselves in the empty nothingness of human presumption and pretension in our finite claims and assertions but with Christ, the Alpha and Omega of all things created and uncreated. “Fear God and keep his commandments”, says Ecclesiastes, precisely in the face of the awareness of our own emptiness. “For this is the whole duty of man”. The wonder that stirs us to something more and something greater is the grace that has entered into the dark and empty nothingness of our human aloneness in our self-willed alienation from God. In Christ, we find hope and grace and a renewed sense of duty that is pleasure and delight, the duty that is love, the whole duty of man, itself the title of a late 17th century devotional treatise that influenced the practical divinity of 18th century Anglicanism. In him we find our new beginning, in him who is all our ending. “The end of the matter” is that we have our beginning with Christ and that is everything. “For this is the whole duty of man”.
“The end of the matter; all has been heard”
Fr. David Curry
Sunday Next Before Advent, 2021