Ecclesiastes in Sickness and in Health
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 8:28AM | by Otter The Jews don't get enough credit for pluralism in their sacred texts, at least not amongst the pillaging Christians who took their texts for their own.
It's one of the great tragedies of a simplistic doctrine of "God's word" that one cannot see clearly any longer the humanity of the text. The sanctified sin of Abraham in saying "Yes" to Yahweh's demand that he kill his son; the hilarity of Jacob's story and its rowdy ethics and double meanings; the lie of Jesus to his brothers in John 7. How anxious people become to keep God from resembling them too much, and it's one of the betrayals that piety executes on the Bible.
Anyway, I'm thinking this morning of life and its passions, and the Book of Ecclesiastes.
The Jews, crushed by Babylon, resurrected by their Persian messiah Cyrus, writing their hearts out, generating the imagination that would preserve them for millennia, really had two responses to their suffering.
One was the prophetic strand of their writing, a linear view of history that proclaimed in text after text that a "Day of Yahweh" would come that would draw history to a close and vindicate the Jews against their enemies. (Jesus seized on this view in the synagogue when he announced that this Day of Yahweh was fulfilled in their hearing.)
The other strand of their thinking, encapsulated in Ecclesiastes, watches the human endeavor with a thorny realism. "Emptiness," says the poet (who was almost certainly not Solomon, though it improves us mightily to imagine him speaking in Solomon's voice). "Everything is emptiness."
He reminds us all that one day our friends will lower us eight feet into the ground and then go to somebody's house to eat potato salad, not in so many words, but in images of circles that go round and meaninglessly round. The wind circles from east to west and north to south, water flows to an unfillable sea. I might as well, Donovan reminds us, chase the wind. It's what we all do anyway, says the poet of Ecclesiastes, for we labor until we die, and then we die and are no more.
This strange little book... what nonsense it has urged from interpreters afraid of its message, which is just that your life counts for nothing in the scheme of the enormous universe.
Three of the psalmists ask, having confronted this question, "What is humankind that you should care for him?" The author of Job has Job parody this question twice. The psalmists turn away from the question with a careful "Yet..." that throws its faith in God's interest in humanity. Job concludes... well, Job makes no such conclusion.
When wrinkles come, says Ecclesiastes, and impotence (can we please stop talking about sex?), it will be too late to remember your creator.But here in Ecclesiastes, there is a strange answer in Ecclesiastes 12:1-8, perhaps my favorite poetry in the entire Bible, rendered haltingly in English but with imagery that sears the imagination:
Remember your Creator
in the days of your youth,
before the days of trouble come
and the years approach when you will say,
"I find no pleasure in them"-before the sun and the light
and the moon and the stars grow dark,
and the clouds return after the rain;when the keepers of the house tremble,
and the strong men stoop,
when the grinders cease because they are few,
and those looking through the windows grow dim;when the doors to the street are closed
and the sound of grinding fades;
when men rise up at the sound of birds,
but all their songs grow faint;when men are afraid of heights
and of dangers in the streets;
when the almond tree blossoms
and the grasshopper drags himself along
and desire no longer is stirred.
Then man goes to his eternal home
and mourners go about the streets.Remember —before the silver cord is severed,
or the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
or the wheel broken at the well,and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it."Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher.
"Everything is meaningless!"
The golden bowl, the lifegiving womb and the seat of the feminine energy of procreation. (Can we please stop talking about sex?) Yes, Virginia: your golden bowl will be shattered.Remember your creator, says the poet, not because he is the creator, as Job demands, or in spite of your fate, as the psalmists demand, but because of... well, because you feel god in sex.
The Jungian imagery of the broken golden bowl, the womb of life; and the silver cord, the shimmering sensual energy of life; and the life-giving springs fouled by drought and aridity wrap this passage in a funeral shroud, and demand that one remember that life is the heart of god. Remember your creator: your impotence, your barrenness, your infertile decay, is coming on you.
Some pious soul afraid of what he had just read and its manifest truth perhaps added the "conclusion" of the book: "Fear God... For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil." This is a sanctifying tag, but nothing in the text of Ecclesiastes supports it. Nothing hints at it. To the book itself, the "judgment" of god falls on the righteous and unrighteous alike.
But there is a heartening truth in these words. The body knows when it is full of life. It knows when life is ebbing away. Did Ecclesiastes mean to use sex as a metaphor for some "spiritual" life? I doubt it. Or if it did, it was because sex is (biologically speaking) coextensive with continuing life for apes like us, and we are only spiritual insofar as we have a belief in our connectedness to things beyond ourselves, a connectedness that comes with all the energy and creativity and lifegiving power of sex.
Remember God: one day you'll need your Viagra.
Reader Comments (3)
I've always been fond of Ecclesiastes, perhaps because when I am in the depths of depression it resounds so deeply within my soul. I suppose the idea that while this life is meaningless, at least we get to return to God when we die holds some comfort for me. It's like adding to the popular phrase, Life's a B1itch and then you die.... but then you get to be joined eternally with God. And perhaps that's why the sex symbolism is so poignant: one is joined with one's lover only briefly in life (and/through sex), but will be joined eternally with God. IDK. It works for me.
I can see your point Otter. I get a sense of Taoist philosophy embedded, especially with the concluding verse:
"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher.
"Everything is meaningless!"
Taoist seek spiritual energy, but warn against the depletion of vital forces (especially through ejaculation or orgasm). The use of nature ( the almond tree and the grasshopper), point me in this direction also. Could this poem have been influenced by a Taoist?
At least not formally. Obviously Taoist philosophy might well have roots farther back in history or even prehistory, but I'm not confident that any evidence exists for such a claim for any formal indebtedness.
Then too, evidence suggests that Taoism generated in a China that was not terribly engaged in trading philosophies with others.
So all things taken together, I'd say, Taoism and Ecclesiastes might have latched on to some common truths, but I seriously doubt any formal indebtedness one way or the other.
Finally, I'm not sure that the Taoist suspicion of sexual pleasure really jibes with Ecclesiastes. Note that in Ecclesiastes it's not the sexual energy itself that is disturbing but its eventual collapse.