Berkley Wendell Semple
ECCLESIASTES is the twenty-first book of the Old Testament, sandwiched between Proverbs and the Song of Solomon, a fitting location, given the impressive lyricism and wisdom it shares with both. It reads like a long poem, one in which, despite its metaphoric density, a clear philosophy still emerges. Yet its impulse is less instructional or didactic than illustrative: it is concerned with the actual. It is, after all, a seeking text rather than a telling one. We will not debate here the dead idea that the Bible, or any of its parts, is not literature.
In the language of research, what is narrated is the process of seeking and its “findings.” The inquiry begins with questions such as “What is wise and what is foolish?” and leads to the more fundamental question, “Where can wisdom be found?” Of course, many other questions arise, but these two are particularly salient. The inquisitive, self-seeking persona, the Preacher, is himself the guinea pig. Nothing he discovers, except where he extrapolates from what he has found, lies outside lived experience. The book has a quiet, immediate reflexivity: what is told is relayed first-hand by the primary source, suggesting a veracity that leaves little room for counterpoint or ambiguity.
Ecclesiastes presents a strange confluence between what a man wants to be and what he ought to be. These do not appear to be warring constellations of thought so much as an admission that a man must experience what it means to be a man: satisfying the whims of the mind and the appetites, to arrive at the kind of wisdom that triumphs over the vanities and reaches a more illuminating plane, a place “where wisdom can be found.”
Yet one does not arrive at this height, akin to Nirvana, without first braving the crucible of ordinary existence. The journey is from foolishness to wisdom, and ultimately to the kind of sagacity that can discern the difference between the two. The refrain that “all is vanity and vexation of spirit” does not necessarily declare wisdom itself to be vanity. Rather, the distinction is left partly to the reader’s wisdom to parse, to determine what is and what is not vanity. This distinction is crucial because wisdom itself seems to fall, at least partially, under the judgement of vanity.
This movement leads away from the self and the self-referential. The impulse to satisfy one’s curiosity, to answer every question simply because it has been asked, may lead only to self-satisfaction: a vanity produced by the narrow subjective view through which everything is encompassed and known. The text argues against this myopic vision. Its implication seems to be that wisdom is not merely the accumulation of experiences or the acquisition of answers. The explicit question is, “Where shall wisdom be found?” In this question we intuit the existence of some objective criterion, some method by which we might eventually arrive at an answer.
Little else is visible when the self becomes the object of vision, the image in the mirror. Within the scheme of Ecclesiastes, the self is something to see, to know, and ultimately to recognise as vanity. This experience of reality allows us to know it as such.
Ecclesiastes offers a terrible logic, and it is difficult precisely because it requires a suspension of the self to see beyond it, beyond the reflection in the mirror and the reflection in the mind. The entire book is rife with contradictions, and any discerning criticism seems inevitably to mirror those contradictions. Misreading, in this sense, becomes almost the soul of interpretation when applied to Ecclesiastes.
The book admits a kind of irony that does not so much comfort as assert a difficult truth: wisdom itself does not exempt one from the pain and suffering accorded to the foolish, nor does it defer the common end toward which both are moving. Fools die. The wise and the foolish alike end in the grave. All they accumulate along the journey—their vanity, their possessions, their achievements—is left behind. And because death is immutable, this grim relay is eternal. There is a time for everything. And the whole business of living and dying is not new. There is “nothing new under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes, like Job, is one of those questioning texts, not strictly didactic like so many others, but concerned with a particular kind of reality: the reality of living an actual life. It seeks to discern what is wise and what is foolish, to satisfy a philosophical interest in the purpose, or perhaps the reason, for our existence, and to consider how best we might endeavour to be in the world.
The writer does not learn vicariously, by osmosis, or through intuition. He involves himself in experience, like a laboratory rat of sorts, testing the actual. He tries the fullness of human appetite: the desires of the mind, the pleasures of the body, the accumulation of possessions, the pursuit of achievement, to eventually understand their limitations. Wisdom is not reached by avoiding experience but by passing through it.
The wisdom of Ecclesiastes is that the wise and the foolish come to the same end: death is always ahead, and everything we have earned or stolen is eventually left behind. But what sort of wisdom is this, when it appears self-evident even to a child? “Fools die” is an inference one gathers from reading the book, but the inevitability of this fact becomes less certain if there is no life after death. Fools die because they are not wise enough to know that there may be another life to win after this one; this knowledge lies strictly within the province of the wise, who, in dying like the fool, might live again after perishing.
The afterlife is a prickly matter, since neither the wise nor the foolish can guarantee its certainty. Perhaps it does not matter anyway: all is meaningless, futile, vanity. Ultimately, however, it may be wise enough to know that an afterlife is possible. Such circuitous logic tortures simplicity, but Ecclesiastes, as a philosophy of living, is not simple.
The wisdom of Ecclesiastes is not the kind that politely comes with time. It comes through seeking and experiencing. This motif, experience as a precursor to knowledge, is lifelong, and wisdom arrives in its own time.
The “vanities” of the text are not synonymous with “meaninglessness,” as some have claimed, but rather suggest an absence of purpose: here is this thing we know, but what is its value? What is its use? The vanities are a question rather than a conclusion, and, to some degree, they include wisdom itself, because wisdom in the end does not cure any of life’s vexations. To know more does not necessarily relieve the vexations of existence. Knowledge can increase sorrow because it makes the limits of our condition more obvious.
The Preacher discovers that information is not the same as purpose. One may know a great deal and still not know what that knowledge is for. Wisdom can tell us what is, but it cannot necessarily tell us what to do with what is. And so, the recurring refrain, “chasing after the wind,” adds new depth to the phrase “all is vanity and vexation of the spirit.” Ignorance is bliss, but not the sort that helps. After all, it is “better to be wise” than foolish. Ecclesiastes does not discuss wisdom as an easy remedy. It does not promise that the wise will escape suffering, disappointment, or death. Wisdom does not exempt one from humanity’s common fate.
The information is available, but how can we use it? To what purpose can we bend it beyond self-interest? That, perhaps, is why it becomes a vanity: it has no use beyond knowing and is therefore akin to “chasing after the wind,” a futile pursuit without discernible purpose.
There must be a million misreadings of Ecclesiastes (add mine to the long list if you must) and as many interpretations. Perhaps this is inevitable. The book seems to invite the very contradictions that make it so difficult to resolve. It asks questions whose answers continually lead to other questions, and its wisdom may reside less in the answers it provides than in its insistence that we continue seeking.
