Advent Programme I: Ethics & Ecclesiastes
Advent Programme at Christ Church 2025
Ethics & Ecclesiastes (Dec 2nd) and Wisdom (O Sapientia – Dec. 16th)
Fr. David Curry
Why Ecclesiastes and why The Book of Wisdom, you may ask? And why Ethics? Let me attempt an explanation. In the Providence of God this Fall, the weekly readings for the Week of the 22nd Sunday after Trinity brought us to the Sunday Next Before Advent. In the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer we read through the whole of Ecclesiastes and at Mattins on the Sunday Next Before Advent, we read the last two chapters of Ecclesiastes, which are always read at Mattins on that Sunday regardless of the length of the Trinity Season and whatever office readings followed from the last Sunday after Trinity in any given year. Yet this year we had the whole of Ecclesiastes to read and to lead us into the end and beginning of the Church Year. And why Ethics? Because The Book of Ecclesiastes raises the important question about Ethics, namely, about the highest or greatest good for our humanity and thus belongs to the purpose of Revelation. I am drawing upon lectures on Ethics which I have delivered over many years in The Theory of Knowledge course in the IB programme, though minus the wonderful cartoons of Calvin and Hobbes on matters of ethical thinking.
The American philosopher, Peter Kreeft, in his book Three Philosophies of Life: Ecclesiastes, Life as Vanity, Job, Life as Suffering, and the Song of Songs, Life as Love makes a nice analogy to Dante’s threefold division of his spiritual classic, the Divine Comedy – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso by suggesting that Ecclesiastes in its remarkable treatment of boredom and vanity relates to the Inferno, the Book of Job to the Purgatorio in the positive and redemptive forms of suffering, and the Song of Songs to the Paradiso in the movement of love that perfects and restores all things to their unity in God. Dante himself suggests that the purpose of the Commedia is to lead us “from misery to felicity” or blessedness. All three biblical books belong to Wisdom literature and, especially, it seems to me, to the examination of the ethical.
And Wisdom? You may have noticed that the week following the Sunday Next Before Advent the Office readings at Morning and Evening Prayer are entirely from the Book of Wisdom as if leading us into the radical and deeper meaning of Advent. In the Calendar you will note that the 16th of December commemorates one of the ‘O’ Antiphons, specifically, ‘O Sapientia’, O Wisdom, deliberately recalling the Book of Wisdom and the image of Wisdom that it presents to us. It seemed appropriate to connect these two works for our Advent Programme at Christ Church this year.
Advent Reflections on Ethics & Ecclesiastes (2025)
Austin Farrer in his classic ‘The Glass of Vision’, the Bampton Lectures of 1948, recalls an intriguing observation that in Scripture “there is not a line of theology, and of philosophy not so much as an echo” (Lecture III). Peter Kreeft, on the other hand, states that Ecclesiastes is the only book of philosophy, pure philosophy, mere philosophy, in the Bible” and indeed is “the greatest of all books of philosophy” (‘Three Philosophies of Life’, 1989). I think both are right.