In the midst of contradictions, who are we?

In the 1960s, Joni Mitchell penned a thoughtful song entitled Both Sides Now, which contains the lines:

I’ve looked at life from both sides now,
From win and lose and still somehow,
It’s life’s illusions I recall;
I really don’t know life at all.

The song evokes something of the same mood and ethos of the book of Ecclesiastes. Life is investigated from both sides, yet still remains strangely elusive and unsatisfying. Life promises more than it can deliver, and seems to look beyond itself.

How are we to understand ourselves and this life in which we find ourselves? We are indeed strange beings. Ecclesiastes says that we have eternity in our hearts (Eccles.3:11), but it also says that we have madness in our hearts (Eccles.9:3). How can these two, apparently contradictory, things be true?

We seem to have something in common with the angels and something in common with the cockroach. Blaise Pascal, pondered this truth, and recorded in his Pensées: ‘What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!’

The stark alternatives

The book of Ecclesiastes seeks to confront us with reality in order that we should ponder the things that really matter. It looks at life from two viewpoints— with God and without God. A key word is ‘vanity’: ‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the Preacher, ‘vanity of vanities! All is vanity’ (Eccles.1:2). The word for ‘vanity’ might also be rendered ‘futility’ or even ‘meaninglessness’, as we find in the New International Version. Tremper Longman III translates it as ‘completely meaningless’. O. Palmer Robertson’s suggestion is ‘Frustration of frustrations, frustration of frustrations, all is frustration.’

This word ‘vanity’ or ‘meaninglessness’ is found throughout the book—about 36 times, in fact. The Preacher looks at life from various angles. To know the truth, we have to face up to error. What point is there is getting up of a morning, eating our cornflakes, going to work, coming home, and watching television, day after day until finally it all comes to an end? There is a profound sense of alienation in the human soul. The Negro spiritual laments the human condition:

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child —
A long way from home.

The truth is that we feel homesick even at home.

The Preacher in Ecclesiastes —known as Qoholeth— looks at life through melancholy eyes: ‘What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after’ (Eccles.1:9-11). It is the perspective of the hymn-writer, Henry Francis Lyte: ‘Change and decay in all around I see’. Lyte, however, also provides the answer: ‘O Thou who changest not, abide with me’.

Qoholeth looked at the world, and saw much vanity, but then lifted his eyes to another world. He applied his heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven, but he found the whole exercise to be ‘an unhappy business’ (1:12-13). Indeed, he found failure even in success: ‘I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow’ (Eccles. 1:17-18). The next best idea seemed to be to simply enjoy oneself: ‘I said in my heart, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure” (2:1). He also took to work, and to the accumulation of wealth, and even a touch of religion.

Answers which do not satisfy

What is the answer to life? Major-General Charles Gordon in the nineteenth century once sneered that human glory is 99% twaddle. Douglas Adams, before his death in 2001, wrote that the answer is 42. That is less than helpful. Nor does the combination of philosophy and pleasure-seeking yield any better results. Michael Foucault was one of the leading proponents of Postmodernism. He asserted that every assertion of knowledge is only an act of power. But, as the old Arab proverb says, to defy reality is to spit into the wind. Foucault lived what he thought was a liberated homosexual lifestyle and experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, before dying of AIDS.

Examples could be multiplied. Woody Allen spends his life trying to be funny but has confessed that he thinks of suicide every day of his life. Sir J. Paul Getty II, whose father was supposed to be the richest man in the world, became addicted to watching soap operas, particularly Neighbours. Ted Turner emerged from all his millions to label Christianity ‘a religion for losers’. But it looks suspiciously like we are all losers. What if even the winners are losers? Sir Bob Geldof, in the midst of all his musical, charitable, and public relations successes, keeps asking himself again and again: ‘Is that it?’

A disordered world

The world is out of kilter: ‘There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, as it were an error proceeding from the ruler: folly is set in many high places, and the rich sit in a low place. I have seen slaves on horses, and princes on the ground like slaves’ (Eccles.10:5-7). Some of the greatest buffoons on the planet have ended out in high places. King George III lost his mind, would talk incessantly, and once greeted an oak tree in Windsor Park as the King of Prussia. In Australia in the 1950s Dr H. V. Evatt led the Federal Labor Party. When he lost his mind, he was promoted to the High Court where presumably that defect was not regarded as particularly serious. In the West, elections have descended into publicity stunts and image production. Democracy has increasingly become a mirage put together by media-inspired conjuring tricks.

Essential ingredients for a stable society

To survive, democracy requires two things: moral goodness and moral realism. Those two things are not found in vast quantities in the Western world at the moment. There is a need to be realistic about what good can be achieved in a fallen world. Hugh Kingsmill is equally as perceptive: ‘Utopianism is the transference to society of the individual’s disappointed expectation of personal happiness.’ This is a recipe for tragedy and tyranny. All human achievements undermine themselves.

Failed visions

Whether it be Plato’s dream of rule by philosopher-kings, Rousseau’s extolling of the noble savage who is uncorrupted by civilisation, Karl Marx’s vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat leading to the withering away of the state, Margaret Mead’s delusions about the happy Samoans free of all sexual taboos, or Adolf Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich with all Aryans and no Jews, the result has always been the same— falsehood, coercion, tyranny, and corruption. Instead of the Workers’ State, it is the Gulag; instead of the Thousand Year Reich, it is Auschwitz. Seeking designer babies and the eradication of imperfection and suffering, we end out debasing human life and producing a race akin to Jonathan Swift’s Yahoos. Looking for Utopia, we fall into the Inferno.

Wisdom has its place

Yet it would be wrong to say that Ecclesiastes paints a picture of total gloom. Wisdom, for example, is a worthy thing. It is better than power: ‘Wisdom gives strength to the wise man more than ten rulers who are in a city’ (7:19). There are real consolations in this life. The joy of friendship is too precious and useful to be despised (4:9-12). Paul Simon’s bibliophile who describes himself as a rock and an island hardly strikes the listener as one who has plumbed the depths of what life is all about.

The great leveller

Any consolations in this life, however, all come asunder when Qoholeth thinks about death. Death is the ultimate proof of our lack of control over life: ‘No man has power to retain the spirit, or power over the day of death’ (8:8). ‘It is the same for all, since the same event happens to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to him who sacrifices and him who does not sacrifice’ (see 9:2-6). Death is the key to understanding life.

Death hangs over everything:
Life has no reason,
A struggling through the gloom,
And the senseless end of it
Is the insult of the tomb.

If death has not been overcome, then life is largely meaningless. The biggest fool in the world and the wisest man both die, and for the most part are forgotten. Einstein dies and the court jester dies.

Facing this grim fact

The wisest thing to do is to face this: ‘So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom’ (Ps.90:12). Something like 95 million people die every year. Three die every second. In the time it has taken you to read this paragraph, perhaps 120 people have entered eternity. We will die. The beginning of wisdom is to know that we are mortal; we will all die. Those who refuse to face this run aground. Marian Evans (the real name of the novelist George Eliot) found the Christian faith inconceivable, and—a true Victorian in many ways—wrote in defence of unbelief and in favour of duty. She lived with George Henry Lewes until he died in 1878. She was so grief-stricken at his death that she could not bring herself to attend his funeral. Frank Sinatra was famous for singing ‘I did it my way’, but his last recorded words were: ‘I am losing’. A funeral home sent me a brochure that proclaimed: ‘To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.’ But sentimentality is no substitute for truth.

Avoiding the obvious

The unbeliever does not know what to do with death. Woody Allen resorts to melancholy humour: ‘Whoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine, shall fall by pestilence, so why bother shaving?’ Phillip Adams, Australia’s resident evangelist for atheism, tries to belittle death, so he tells us that it is nothing at all: ‘If you want to know what death’s like, just think back a few years to before you were born. Death’s exactly the same thing.’ Armed with such a view of death, Adams then tells us what is the meaning of life:

As you wander on through life brother
Whatever be your goal
Keep your eye upon the doughnut
And not upon the hole.

The reader is not immediately inclined to weep tears of gratitude.

A hollow society

It becomes understandable why Professor Manning Clark stated in 1986 that this generation is probably the first one in our history to believe in absolutely nothing. Previous generations for the most part believed in Christianity or the echo of Christianity. But now they often have not got the faintest idea of what it is about. George Orwell came to write wistfully: ‘One cannot have any worthwhile picture of the future unless one realizes how much we have lost by the decay of Christianity.’

The God of the Bible is the God of truth. Carl Jung declared that ‘Religion helps one to live … I care not about the existence debate.’ But better to face the truth rather than live a delusion. The apostle Paul said that if Christ did not rise from the dead, then Christians were the most pitiable people on earth (1 Cor.15:19). Believing in God or in Christ’s resurrection will only help you and me if God actually exists and if Christ has risen, never to die again. You might believe in a religion because it works. It is far better to believe in a religion because it is true. There are people who believe that flying saucers will transport them to paradise or that certain herbs will enable them to live forever in good health. But defying the law of gravity does not mean that you can step off tall buildings without disastrous consequences.

There is hope for all who love truth. As Simone Weil expressed it, in words that one can only hope are true: ‘Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go to the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.’ What gives life meaning? If there is no resurrection, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’ (1 Cor.15:32). But if there is a resurrection, we have every reason to be ‘steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labour is not in vain’ (1 Cor.15:58).

Wisdom, pleasure, and work cannot stand on their own two feet. They require a foundation, and that foundation is the God of eternity. There are real consolations in this life, for believer and unbeliever alike. There are children, there are the beauties and intricacies of nature, there is poetry and music, and the joy of human relationships. But these require a perspective, which comes from outside this world.

Michael Eaton says that Qoheleth is ‘slamming every door except the door of faith’. The alternative to faith in the God of the Bible is grim indeed—it is ultimate futility and meaninglessness, with only a few compensations to keep you going. You get to the top and there is nothing there. In fact, the alternative is so grim that the only way you can cope with it is not to think about it. Instead, we watch television, collect matchbox covers, go berserk over trivia, and play Lotto. Or, if we have the money of Walt Disney, we have our bodies frozen in the hope that somehow, somewhere science will be able to bring them back to life.

Bonhoeffer wrote that ‘Only life from God is the goal and the fulfilment, overcoming the contradiction between what is and what should be.’ We live in a society which ultimately says that nothing matters because death is the end, but God tells us that everything matters because death is not the end. After death comes resurrection and judgment. This life is about dealing with that truth.