CHAPTER IX.

ECCLESIASTES FROM A MORAL AND RELIGIOUS POINT OF VIEW.

We have seen how large a Christian element penetrates and glorifies the bold questionings of the Book of Job. Whatever be our view on obscure problems of criticism, the character-drama which the book in its present form presents is one which it almost requires a Christian to appreciate adequately. It is different with the Book of Ecclesiastes. ‘He who will allow that book to speak for itself, and does not read other meanings into almost every verse, must feel at every step that he is breathing a different atmosphere from that of the teaching of the Gospels.’[374] Still more is this the case if we claim the right of free criticism, and deny that the hints of a growing tendency to believe are due to the morbidly sceptical author of the book (if it may be called a book). Certainly the religious use of Koheleth is more directly affected by modern criticism and exegesis than that of any other Old Testament writing. The early theologians could dispense with criticism, because they so frequently allegorised or unconsciously gave a gentle twist to the literal meaning. But we, if for a religious purpose we use the book uncritically, must be well aware that we often misrepresent both the author of Koheleth himself and Christian faith. Let me only mention three texts in the use of which this misrepresentation very commonly takes place. The fixity of the spiritual state in which a man is at death may or may not be an essential Christian doctrine, but we have no right to quote either Koheleth’s despairing description of the inert life of the shades (ix. 10), or the proverbial saying on the unalterableness of the laws of nature (xi. 3), in support of this; nor is it well to adopt a phrase (descriptive of Sheól) from xii. 5, which favours the false idea expressed in the too common ‘Here lieth’ of the churchyard. Anticipations of really fundamental Christian doctrines are, I admit, rarely sought for in Ecclesiastes. It is well that this should be so. How completely the evangelical elements in Jewish religion had been obscured later on in this period, we have seen from the Wisdom of Sirach. It seemed in fact as if the only alternatives then for a thoughtful Jew were a more or less strict legal orthodoxy and a resigned acquiescence in things as they were, brightened only by gleams, eagerly hailed, of intellectual or sensuous pleasure. Sirach chose the former of these, Koheleth the latter. Koheleth’s was not in itself the better choice. But the worse alternative needed perhaps to be stated as forcibly as possible, that men might see the rock and avoid shipwreck. Ecclesiastes, like the first part of Goethe’s _Faust_, may, with the fullest justice, be called an apology for Christianity, not as containing anticipations of Christian truth—the error of Hengstenberg;[375] but inasmuch as it shows that neither wisdom, nor any other human good or human pleasure, brings permanent satisfaction to man’s natural longings. It is at any rate a contribution towards the negative criticism with which such an apology must begin, just as the Book of Job is a contribution, or a series of contributions, towards a more perfect and evangelical theodicy.

There is at least one point, then, which the moral and religious critic of Ecclesiastes can adopt out of all the strangely distorted views of patristic writers, so ably summed up by Dr. Ginsburg in his Introduction, viz. that the gloomy sentence, _Vanitas vanitatum_, is perfectly accurate when applied to the life of Koheleth, but only to a life like his. Thomas à Kempis could prelude with two verses from Koheleth (i. 2, 8), but he could only prelude. A life of true service—one whose centre is outside self or family or even nation—is not vanity nor vexation of spirit: Koheleth might have added this as the burden of a second part of his book. But did he not actually append it as his epilogue? Did he not ‘faintly trust’ the hope of immortality (xii. 7)? Did he not work his way back to a living faith, like ‘Asaph’ in Ps. lxxiii.? There is no question that the book was admitted into the Canon on the assumption that he did. As a great Jewish preacher says, the book [in its present form] opens with Nothingness, but closes with the fear of God.[376] It is parallel in this respect to many Jewish lives, like that of Heine, which may be described as the prodigal son’s quest of his long-lost father. Accepting this view, we may join with another Jewish writer in his admiration of the influences of Jewish theism, which were then at least so strong that a consistent Jewish sceptic was an impossibility. ‘It is this,’ he remarks, ‘that gives the peculiar charm to this little book.’[377] It is impossible to give a conclusive refutation of this view, which I should like to believe true, but which seems to me to labour under exegetical difficulties. To me, Koheleth is not a theist in any vital sense in his philosophic meditations, and his so-called ‘last word’ seems forced upon him by later scribes, just as Sirach’s orthodoxy was at any rate heightened in colour by subsequent editors. To me, Derenbourg’s view is a dream, though an edifying one. It may be that the author did return to the simple faith of his childhood. He certainly never lost his theism, though pale and cheerless it was indeed, and utterly unable to stand against the assaults of doubt and despondency. It may be that history, neglected history, taught him at last to believe in the divine guidance of the fortunes of Israel. I would fain imagine this retracing of the weary pilgrim’s steps; but other and less pleasing dreams to a Christian are equally possible and I do not venture to accept the return of the prodigal as a well-authenticated fact.

We must remember too that the troubled wanderer had not really so many steps to retrace. Much that both Christians and Jews now regard as essential to faith was not, in the time of Koheleth, commonly so regarded. I am well aware of the great intuitions of some of the psalmists at certain sublime moments, and admit that they seem to us to lead naturally on to our own orthodoxy. But these intuitions could not and did not possess the force of dogmas. The great doctrines of the Resurrection and of Immortality had long to wait for a moderate degree of acceptance (they were not held, for instance, by Sirach), and longer still before they coalesced in a new and greater doctrine of the future life. Koheleth’s dissatisfaction with the doctrine of present retribution (the central point both of his heterodoxy and of Job’s) might have helped him to accept the former of these. His acquaintance with non-Jewish philosophical literature, if we may venture to assume this as a fact, might have led him, as it led the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, to embrace the hope of immortality. But though there probably is an allusion to this hope as well-founded in xii. 7_b_, we have seen reason to doubt whether the words came from Koheleth himself; at any rate, they are isolated, and many do not admit the allusion. Either of these doctrines would have saved Koheleth from despondency had he accepted it. From our present point of view, we must blame him for not accepting one refuge or the other, or even that simpler belief in the imperishableness of the Jewish race which Sirach had, and which has preserved so many Israelitish hearts in trials as severe as Koheleth’s. There must have been a strange weakness in his moral fibre; how else can we account either for his want of Jewish feeling or, I would now add, using the word in its looser sense, for his pessimism? As Huber has well observed,[378] none of the ancient peoples was naturally less inclined to pessimism than the Jews, so that a work like Ecclesiastes is a portent in the Old Testament, and alien to the spirit of true Judaism. I cannot wonder that both Jews and Christians have now and again been repelled by this strange book[379] and denied its title to canonicity, partly for its pessimism, partly for its supposed Epicureanism, or that the author of the Book of Wisdom before them should have given Koheleth the most scathing of condemnations by putting almost its very language into the mouth of the ungodly.[380] The true student may no doubt be equally severe upon Koheleth for his despair of wisdom and depreciation of its delights (i. 17, 18, ii. 15, 16), which are hardly redeemed by the utilitarian sayings in vii. 11, 12.

I cannot justify Koheleth, but I can plead for a mitigation of these censures, and altogether defend the admission of the Book (not, of course, as Solomonic) into the sacred Canon. Whether Jewish or not, the pessimistic theory of life has a sound kernel. ‘Our sadness,’ as Thoreau says, ‘is not sad, but our cheap joys. Let us be sad about all we see and are, for so we demand and pray for better. It is the constant prayer [of the good] and whole Christian religion.’[381] This too is the burden of E. von Hartmann’s criticism of a crudely optimistic Christianity; and need we reject the truth for the extravagances of the teacher? Next, as to the preference of sensuous enjoyment to philosophic pursuits in Koheleth. I would not seek to weaken passages like ii. 24, viii. 15, by putting them down to the irony of a _sæva indignatio_. But as for the depreciation of intellectual pleasure, may it not be excused by the author’s want of a sure prospect of the ‘age to come’ such as we find in those lines of Davenant,[382]

Before by death you nearer knowledge gain (For to increase your knowledge you must die), Tell me if all that knowledge be not vain, On which we proudly in this life rely.

And as to the commendations of sensuous pleasure, have they not a relative justification?[383] The legalism of the ‘righteous overmuch’ threatened already perhaps to make life an intolerable burden. And though Koheleth erred in the form of his teaching, yet he did well to teach the ‘duty of delight’ (Ruskin) and to oppose an orthodoxy which sought, not merely to transform, but to kill nature. It is to his credit that he touches on the relations of the sexes with such studious reserve.[384] As a rule, the enjoyments which he recommends are those of the table, which in Sirach’s time (Ecclus. xxxii. 3-5) and perhaps also in Koheleth’s included music and singing,—in short, festive but refined society. His praise of festive mirth is at any rate more excusable morally than Omar Khayyâm’s impassioned commendations of the wine-cup.[385] As Jeremy Taylor says, ‘It was the best thing that was then commonly known that they should seize upon the present with a temperate use of permitted pleasures.’[386] Lastly, the admission of the book into the Canon is (perhaps we may say) not less providential than that of the Song of Songs. The latter shows us human nature in simple and healthy relations of life; the former, a human nature in a morbid state and in depressed and artificial circumstances. How to return at least to inward simplicity and health, the latter part (not the Epilogue) of the Book of Job beautifully shows us.

Our great idealist poet Shelley, who so admired Job, disliked Ecclesiastes for the same reason as the ancient heretics already mentioned. One greater than he, our ‘sage and serious’ Milton, justifies the sacred Scripture for the variety of its contents on the same ground that he advocates ‘unlicensed printing.’ Both are ‘for the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth.’ We need not, then, he says, be surprised if the Bible ‘brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus.’[387] The Bible, according to Milton, is perfect not in spite but because of its variety; it is like the rugged ‘mountains of God,’ not like the symmetrical works of human art. But Milton has also reminded us that a fool may misuse even sacred Scripture.

Footnote 374:

Dean Bradley, _Lectures on Ecclesiastes_ (1885), p. 7.

Footnote 375:

See _Der Prediger Salomo_ (1859). Hengstenberg misses, it is true, any direct reference to the Christian hope, but finds the idea of chastisement as a proof of divine love in iii. 18, vii. 2-4, an emphatic affirmation of eternal life in iii. 21, and the resignation of a faith like Job’s in iii. 11, vii. 24, viii. 17, xi. 5. Koheleth’s questionings are therefore according to him ‘eine heilige Philosophie.’

Footnote 376:

Preface to vol. iii. of S. Holdheim’s _Predigten_.

Footnote 377:

J. Derenbourg, _Revue des études juives_, No. 2, Oct. 1880.

Footnote 378:

_Der Pessimismus_, 1876, p. 8. Schopenhauer too calls the Jews the most optimistic race in history.

Footnote 379:

See Appendix.

Footnote 380:

Wisd. ii. 6; comp. Plumptre, _Ecclesiastes_, p. 71 &c., Wright, _Koheleth_, pp. 69, 70.

Footnote 381:

_Letters to Various Persons_, p. 25.

Footnote 382:

See the extracts in Trench’s _Household Book of English Poetry_, p. 405.

Footnote 383:

I do not of course assent to the form in which Grätz puts this, to serve his hypothesis as to the age of Koheleth. See Appendix.

Footnote 384:

Once Koheleth appears as a sharp critic of the female sex (vii. 26-29).

Footnote 385:

Lagarde describes Omar as ‘ein schlemmer, der die angst des irdischen daseins und die öde langeweile seiner noch in den anfängen stehenden wissenschaft hinwegzuschwelgen suchte’ (_Symmicta_, 1877, p. 9). Too hard a judgment perhaps on this changeful and impressionable nature. See Bodenstedt’s version as well as Fitzgerald’s.

Footnote 386:

_The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying_, chap. i., sect. 3. Parts of this chapter remind us strongly of Koheleth, and are strange indeed in a book of Christian devotion.

Footnote 387:

_Prose Works_, ed. Bohn, ii. 69.