This is the one time that the book of Ecclesiastes appears in the Sunday lectionary, so it’s worthy of special notice. Ecclesiastes—sometimes called Qoheleth, the Hebrew title for the principal voice, often translated as “Teacher”—is traditionally attributed to King Solomon, famed for his wisdom. This is one of four books in the Old Testament associated with him, the others bring Proverbs, Wisdom, and the Song of Songs (sometimes called Song of Solomon).
To understand Ecclesiastes, it’s helpful to consider it in light of the other books of Solomon. In particular, we can track a kind of intellectual trajectory between Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs. (Which is, helpfully, the order they usually appear in the Bible.)
Proverbs is a book of straightforward practical wisdom and advice. It’s the ancient version of “Do this, not that.” It is not, in the end, very theological. Here you can see Solomon the prudent monarch speaking to all the peoples in the domain of his influence, whether or not they are people of the covenant. It’s a classic moral approach that we can tie closely with concepts of natural law. Here, Solomon says, is how the universe works. Here is what natural justice looks like. Do good, not evil.
It seems pretty simple! And Proverbs remains one of the most quotable books of the Bible for those who have little to no knowledge or interest in the Christian faith.
In Ecclesiastes, though, Solomon runs up against some hard truths. What if all those self-apparent truths of the moral life don’t always work out? Why do bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people? That doesn’t seem like justice. The universe seems completely random, governed by chance and fortune. And then, in the end, everybody dies. So, you do all this hard work only to leave your reward to others; or worse, everything you accomplish gets unraveled the moment you go.
Again, what’s the point? Vanity of vanities, says the teacher. Meaningless. The Hebrew word evokes something like mist or vapor—smoke in the wind. You can see it, you can interpret it, but it dissipates and fades all the more quickly the more you try to grasp it.
Many a postmodern reader can appreciate Ecclesiastes. Here, right in the pages of Scripture, we see almost verbatim the kinds of complaints often leveled at the Catholic tradition. In the face of the seeming certainty and rigidity of the doctrine and discipline of the Church and the unattainability of the so-called “natural law,” not a few people point to the prevalence of injustice, the inconsistencies of history. The more intellectual version of this comes in the heirs of Nietzsche and the postmodern “genealogists,” whose task is the constant dismantling of truths to show that they are mere masks for the self-interested will to power and control.
For a certain kind of Catholic, this is all very uncomfortable. And so the reaction might be to dig in, to return to the simple certitude of Proverbs. But this would be no more helpful to the postmodern skeptic than it is to the author of Ecclesiastes.
Catholic biblical scholar John Bergsma writes, “In a sense, every human person must go through the experience of Ecclesiastes, either personally or vicariously, in order to grasp the significance of the gospel. … One needs first to despair of finding lasting happiness in temporal affairs before a life of self-denial in communion with Jesus Christ makes sense.”
Ecclesiastes is a kind of canonical thought experiment. It is not the final answer. Bergsma says that it articulates the questions—difficult questions—that cannot be entirely answered within its own framework. They are questions that can only finally be answered in the form of a person: the incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ.
Which brings us back to our Lord’s parable in Luke about the rich man hoarding his wealth. This is, of course, a condemnation of greed. But on another level, there’s a real hardness of the story that very much echoes the tone of Qoheleth: “You fool, this night your soul is required of you.” There’s an unpredictability and chaos in life that cannot be controlled. What’s the answer? To abandon all meaning? To live as if nothing matters?
No, the answer is beyond the natural confines of this life. The answer is to build up treasures in heaven. And if we pay any attention to the Gospels, we learn that this means building up a relationship with this person, Jesus, who is the gate and the source of those heavenly treasures. He is the only one capable of taking all the meaninglessness and chance and death and absurdity in this life and transforming it into life. He is the only one who can turn our sorrow into joy.
Even Solomon, in his limited way, anticipates this movement. I noted the trajectory between three books, not just two. For after Ecclesiastes we get not another wisdom book, properly speaking, but the Song of Songs. The rabbis describe the Song of Songs as the “holy of holies” of Scripture, because it is the book of divine union. It is a poem of nuptial bliss and communion. The solution to the problems of the world is not, in the first instance, understanding, but love—in particular the love of Christ for his Church, and the love of God for each individual soul.
This doesn’t stop the intellectual quest; it allows it to continue in the next phase. The tradition speaks often of “faith seeking understanding,” but we might also say “love seeking understanding,” for the lover longs to know and understand the beloved. And this is the only context in which the difficulties of the world can start to make sense, qualified and framed and reformed in light of the love of God.