Christ Church

Behold, 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.

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A Still More Excellent Way

In the bleak cold of the mid-winter, we all need a touch of love. Such is the purpose of spirit week at the School. Thus in Chapel, we always read in this week St. Paul’s great hymn to love, 1 Corinthians 13. It is not specifically about Valentine’s Day, if by that one means a focus on the romantic or the erotic, not to mention the commercial. The love which Paul celebrates, however, includes and informs all and every form of love for it speaks about the true nature of love which seeks the good and the perfection of our humanity.

The power of this passage of Scripture in our world and day is intriguing. Often times a couple will want it read at a wedding, even though it is by no means specific to marriage. Yet it seems to speak to a deep sense of the power of the transcendent, of a love which is not simply of us but speaks to the deeper yearnings of the soul. Love, literally and properly, moves us towards one another. Years and years ago, I was particularly struck by how moved a very bright and outstanding student from China was by this passage which he read in Chapel. It moved him to tears and made him see things in an entirely new way.

The word for ‘love’ in the King James’ Version derived from Tyndale is charity which comes from the Latin caritas. The word, charity, has been somewhat cheapened in our own culture by limiting it to the forms of our outreach and care for the poor and the destitute. While such things are most important and belong to charity, they are only a part of its meaning and range. Paul is actually talking about grace, about what comes from God to us precisely in the realization of our own incompleteness and failings, including our failures to love one another as ourselves. He is opening us out to the transcendent power of the divine love which moves in us, if we will be open to it.

The three theological virtues of “faith, hope and charity” are the forms of grace that complement and perfect the four cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice. Those ancient qualities of excellence speak to the nature of human character and form a critical part of the ethical understanding of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as becoming part of the moral discourse of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic worlds. But without love, such virtues are radically incomplete. Augustine captures that sensibility in saying that without love, divine love, the virtues are splendida vitia, splendid vices.

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