by CCW | 3 December 2025 05:09
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.
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.
Farrer is calling attention to the primacy of the images as given in the witness of the Scriptures which are not presented in the systematic or logical style of either philosophy or theology technically speaking. “Theology”, as he says, “is the analysis and criticism of the revealed images” and seeks to unpack “the sense of the images”, but, as he wisely emphasises, “it does not create it but depends entirely upon the images which “of themselves, signify and reveal.” That, too, is what Peter Kreeft is doing, unpacking the sense or meaning of the images.
To put it in another way, the form of the Scriptures in metaphor and image is poetic but its content is philosophical and theological. By philosophy here I am referring to what we can know even about God through the exercise of our God-given natural capacities as rational creatures made in the image of God. By theology, I am referring to what is made known to us above and beyond the natural capacities of human reason through Revelation which perfects and makes known what we cannot know on our own.
Farrer is right in recognising the danger of thinking that the Scriptures are systematic theology in style and form. Theology is really our thinking upon the images in their poetic form to arrive at their philosophical or theological content. Kreeft focuses on an important philosophical and theological theme – the idea of ethics, the idea of the highest good for our humanity, something which other world religions and philosophies have in common in terms of what is sometimes called the Axial Age. This is to call attention to the turn towards ethical questions, roughly between 800BC and 300BC globally speaking, among cultures and peoples independent of one another whether in Confucianism and Daoism, the Upanishad traditions of Hinduism, Judaism, and Greek philosophy particularly with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, out of which arise subsequently post-axial religions and philosophies such as Christianity.
I offer a digest of Kreeft’s argument about Ecclesiastes from his book ‘Three Philosophies of Life’ which explores Ecclesiastes as ‘Life as Vanity’, Job as ‘Life as Suffering’ and the Song of Songs as ‘Life as Love’. He identifies Ecclesiastes as an ethical treatise but actually all three Scriptural texts – Ecclesiastes, Job, and the Song of Songs – are concerned with the ethical, namely, how to think what is good and right to do.
Ecclesiastes poses, he suggests, the most important of all ethical questions: the question about the Summum Bonum, meaning, the greatest good, the question about the ultimate end or meaning of life.
Ecclesiastes is an ancient book. It treats ethics from an ancient standpoint. Ancient ethics can be thought of in three ways: (1) social ethics; (2) individual ethics; (3) ethics of purpose. All three ways are considered or examined in Ecclesiastes.
1. Social ethics concerns how to live together in community;
2. Individual ethics concerns virtues and vices, issues of character;
3. Ethics of purpose concerns the Summum Bonum.
One way of thinking about these three categories of ethics is by way of a metaphor from C.S. Lewis. There are three things a fleet of ships must know in its sailing orders:
1. Ships must know how to avoid bumping into each other – social ethics;
2. Ships must know how to stay shipshape – to avoid sinking – individual ethics;
3. Ships must know why the fleet is at sea in the first place – its mission – ethics of purpose.
Modern ethics tends to deal with the first or the second, sometimes both but only recently does the third begin to receive some attention. For modernity, the third category is at least acknowledged by Existentialism in facing the abyss or the nothingness of life, for instance in the nada of Hemingway’s short story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, and by theists of various sorts who have faith in God, meaning that there is something more than the world; in short, a principle which gives meaning and purpose to our lives in the world, however conceived.
Ecclesiastes deals with all three. It looks at the world without any illusions. It has the ancient strength of soul not to demand of the world more than what it is and what it can provide. It argues, and this is an ancient view, that we must live with the limits, knowing our place within the order of the cosmos. It argues for moderation in all things including moderation. The great virtue of Ecclesiastes is in asking the question about the why and the wherefore of life. It does not provide an answer but neither does it deny the possibility of an answer as does Existentialism. It remains open to the possibilities of an answer but it is not to be found, in its famous and repeated phrase, “under the sun.”
The theme of Ecclesiastes is “Vanity of Vanities, All is Vanity.” This recurring refrain frames the work. Ecclesiastes explores all the forms of human enterprise understood as our “toils” or “labours”. These are the things in which we invest ourselves to find meaning. He examines them all and finds them all unsatisfactory. They ultimately do not satisfy; they disappoint, all the more so if we have over-invested ourselves in them; a form of attachment examined as well in other religions and philosophies, for instance in the Bhagavad Gita of Indian philosophy and religion.
“Behold, all is vanity and a vexation of spirit,” as the King James version translates it. The more literal translation is a “striving or chasing after wind” (see RSV) which expresses more concretely, as the Hebrew does, and more ‘objectively,’ what is captured somewhat more ‘subjectively’ in the King James Version’s “vexation of spirit.” Yet the connection is obvious. If you chase the wind, you will be frustrated. It is a futile quest and therefore you will be vexed, troubled or uneasy, in your spirit.
Kreeft identifies five categories of vanities of life that are referred to in Ecclesiastes. They are:
1. the sameness and indifference of all things – “there is no new thing under the sun”;
2. death as the certain and final end of life – “how dieth the wise man? as the fool”;
3. time as a cycle of endless repetition – “a time for [this], a time for [that]”, repeatedly;
4. evil as the perennial and unsolvable problem- “I saw that wickedness was there”;
5. God as an unknowable mystery – i.e., not under the sun, not known empirically.
The argument is not a counsel of despair. He is not saying that the world is chaos and that things are inescapably random and arbitrary. Rather, he is saying that everything “under the sun” does not satisfy the human spirit. Everything under the sun shows itself to be limited. The work may be seen to be suggesting, however, that in this awareness we are constituted for something more than what is “under the sun.” This is to make an allusion to the Sun, the image of the Good in Plato’s famous allegory of the divided line where the Good is beyond the being and knowing of things as that upon which they both radically depend. The question “why” in Ecclesiastes is not answered by everything (or anything) that is “under the sun.”
From the outset, the theme or argument of the book can be understood and presented as a syllogism, a form of logical argument or reasoning (though this is to impose a logical system or structure upon what is primarily a poetic work with a philosophical content, which is Farrer’s point).
All toil or labour is under the sun;
Everything under the sun is vanity;
Therefore all toil or labour is vanity.
Toils & Labours: “What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?”
There are five toils or labours, we may say, that are critically examined in Ecclesiastes. “Toil” or “Labour” means all of our efforts to find or make meaning. There are five categories of toil or labour, all of which are found wanting “under the sun.”
1. Wisdom
2. Pleasure
3. Wealth and Power
4. Duty, social service, altruism, honour
5. Piety, religion
As Kreeft explains, these can be expressed in the following way in terms of our efforts to be full or fulfilled in the face of the felt emptiness or vanity of life.
1. Philosophy to fill your mind;
2. Hedonism to fill your body;
3. Materialism to fill your pocket;
4. Ethics to fill your conscience;
5. Religion to fill your spirit.
These relate as well to the three categories of ethics: self, others, God – the individual, the social, and the ultimate purpose. As Peter Kreeft puts it, “I exist for myself in the first three (wisdom, pleasure, wealth and power); for others in the fourth (duty, etc.); and for God in the fifth.”
Ecclesiastes experiments with all five and finds all five wanting. By religion here we have in mind a this-world religion, the religion of the natural man.
The ‘Modernity’ of Ecclesiastes
Kreeft argues that Ecclesiastes can be seen as a modern work in seven ways; that is to say, that Ecclesiastes speaks to or relates to ‘modernity’ or modern culture in seven ways:
1. Ecclesiastes is an existential book, a book about human existence, and deals with the great question of modern man: “Does my existence have any meaning at all?” For moderns, the question is sharply focused on whether there is any meaning at all. Existentialism denies the possibility of meaning or truth objectively speaking. This is beyond the immediate scope of Ecclesiastes which as an ancient work remains within the world view of a cosmos and/or a created order. Yet Ecclesiastes has the courage to confront the insignificance of our humanity within that God-created and God-ordered whole. This is the dignity of our humanity in Ecclesiastes’ view – to live moderately within the conditions of the universe. But in raising the question, the work also, I suggest, speaks to the modern form of the question – the sense of the meaninglessness of life objectively considered and what that means for the individual.
2. Ecclesiastes illustrates modernity’s greatest fear – not so much the fear of death as for the ancients, nor the fear of hell as for the medieval world (Christians, Jews, & Moslems in the so-called Middle Ages), but the fear of meaninglessness. This is the vanity. It is the existential vacuum, the fear of nothingness. Something of that sense of nothingness and how it is faced in modernity is captured in Hemingway’s short story, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.
3. Ecclesiastes shares the best feature of the modern mind: honesty, honest openness. Ecclesiastes is a deeply honest book.
4. Its answer to the question of the Summum Bonum is the modern answer, that is to say, no answer. Contemporary culture has no answer to the question why we exist.
5. One practical result of this ‘vacuum of the understanding’ is hedonism – the philosophy of pleasure.
6. The context of Ecclesiastes bears some resemblance to our contemporary culture in the sense of a secularized world where religion is merely one department of life. In an anti-religious secular culture, religion is, if not sheer illusion, perhaps somewhere in life and not vice-versa. A secular viewpoint is radically anthropocentric and not theocentric, where the sacred is defined by the secular and not vice versa. Of course, as the twentieth century has shown us, the idea of the death of God has also resulted in the death of the self and a culture of moral nihilism.
7. Ecclesiastes is also “modern” in terms of epistemology – the theory or science of knowing. In relation to the question, how do you know the truth (or anything)? , the answer is in a secular way and empirically, in short, by sense experience. The Preacher or philosopher in Ecclesiastes experiments and tries out the various moral and philosophical positions on offer.
The “modernity” of Ecclesiastes means that it speaks to two of the forms of vanity in our contemporary culture – nihilism and narcissism.
There are other ‘schools of ethical thinking’ such as utilitarian ethics, also known as consequentialism or rule ethics, where all actions are judged by outcomes, deontology or duty ethics which considers the intention and motivation for our actions, and virtue ethics which focuses on the character of the person, the actor, which explains the action and outcome. There is also, I think, religious ethics that if acknowledged at all, relate to all three, especially deontology, the idea of duty, obligation, and responsibility, and even more to virtue ethics, the idea of character. Actions matter in terms of intention and result and character but also in principle – the principle of the Good, we might say. From this standpoint, religious ethics are grounded in matters of principle, principles that can and must be articulated and expressed rationally.
These ‘schools’ can be looked at or placed within three basic types of ethical theories, ways of reasoning about human actions more broadly and somewhat more abstractly considered: meta-ethical theories, normative ethical theories, and applied ethical theories. These are simply other ways of trying to understand the nature of ethical reasoning.
Meta-ethics considers where ethics comes from and what they mean. It focuses on the different explanations or theories (as in an hypothesis) that might be given to account for an ethical outlook or position or practice. First, in terms of the source of ethics, where ethics come from might be seen in terms of God’s Will and Word revealed as in the Ten Commandments, the Torah as a whole, or in the Beatitudes in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount or in the Parable of the Good Samaritan as the illustration of the Summary of the Law, or the Qur’an, etc. Ethics might also be viewed as arising from human emotions, from psychological or social forces, or from reason in one of its forms. In any event, Meta-ethics wants to examine the origins of our ethical thinking. Secondly, meta-ethics wants to inquire into whether ethics is universal or relative to our social environment, and, thirdly, what ethical language is like and how it works. Some typical meta-ethical questions are whether ethics is objective or subjective; universal or relativist; whether ethics is grounded in egoism or altruism, in emotions or reason; and whether ‘gender’ is important to the kind of ethics one has.
Normative ethical theories, on the other hand, try to answer questions about how to act. Its approach is more practical. In a way, it echoes certain aspects of Aristotelian virtue ethics which emphasizes the need to develop good habits that shape good character that, in turn, leads to doing the right thing in the circumstances required. From the normative ethical perspective, the emphasis is on what is needed in order to act ethically. In terms of the Kantian deontological approach (duty ethics), normative ethics would be about following the edicts of universal reason, thus doing our duty, following ‘the moral imperative’ as an edict of universal reason. The consequentialist/utilitarian approach focuses not on the act but the consequence of an act, its outcomes. In John Stuart Mill’s view the primary question or concern is whether actions lead to the consequences of maximum happiness, the so-called ‘greatest good for the greatest number’.
Applied ethical theories, as the name suggests, are more specific to cases and situations; a renaming of what used to be called ‘situational ethics.’ It deals with controversial moral issues such as abortion, animal rights, torture, euthanasia, etc., and examines such issues concretely in terms of the immediate circumstance, and often avoids matters of principle altogether. It is simply ‘issue-oriented’ and as such open to endless alteration in its essential indeterminacy.
There are in all of these theories a range of crossovers and overlaps. For instance, one could bring any number of meta-ethical principles about the origin of ethics to bear on any number of controversial questions. The simple point about these schools and/or theories is that they don’t exist in hermetically sealed boxes.
Ecclesiastes belongs to these kinds of reflection and consideration about the ethical by raising the question about what is the Good. Yet, at least, and wonderfully so, it remains open to more than our contemporary fatalism, despair, and vanity. Thus it ends with the direction to “fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” As Kreeft notes, quoting from G.K. Chesterton, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but it is not the end”, the fear, Chesterton says “that is rightly rooted in the beginnings of every religion, true or false.”
(Rev’d) David Curry,
December 2nd, 2025 (St. Andrew, transf)
Advent Programme I: 2025
(service cxl owing to stormy conditions)
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