I am going to torture you all with my meditations
on this subject forever – or until a fit
of whimsy which may be five minutes from
now. But in this NOW you are not forgiven.
There are many wise lessons in the OLD TESTAMENT
that, throughout history, have been repetitiously
proven practically effective. David keeps
Saul alive again and again when he can kill
him, instead of the other way around, so
that he demonstrates to all Israelites the
holiness and sanctity of one’s being
the rightful king of Israel, however much
of a fool he may be, or how blasphemous,
or vicious. Those are minor things, not at
all necessarily ‘bad’ or impractical. David
even played the fool once before King Ahimelech
[1 Samuel 21:14-15] to save his own life
while at the same time fleeing the ‘justice’
of King Saul. This, by the way, is a favorite
story to Erasmus in THE PRAISE OF FOLLY [MORIAS
ENCOMION or MORIAE ENCOMIUM]. Erasmus truly
praises folly almost as a perfect compliment
or foil to Qoheleth – I cannot decide which
is more appropriate. But then Qoheleth, at
the very best, seems to say wisdom is just
marginally better than folly
– and, over all actually, not even that!
Also, though, keeping one’s mind in reality,
the political lesson is, once the legitimate
king is dead, kill all of his living descendents
unless they cannot legitimately inherit the
throne because of a physical deformity. Also,
do not tolerate the continued living of those
around the king, whether relatives or not,
whose fame and power rival his. Follow these
rules and you will be blessed by God. However,
Qoheleth, in the fiction of being Solomon,
says not even this blessing is worthwhile.
Now, as a literary device to gain attention
and respect, the author of ECCLESIASTES claims
to be King Solomon or like Solomon as king
of Israel. When David died, Solomon immediately
slaughtered all of his brothers. It
is unclear which, and I do not think the
fiction was really meant to be taken seriously.
It is merely a setting of demonstrating even
one who possesses vast riches and power comes
to nothing, nothing at all. And it does not
matter in the slightest if a fool or a wise
man inherits it all. It does not even make
any difference if one is good or evil since
all are equal in the grave.
Now, ECCLESIASTES and JOB are my favorite
books of the BIBLE. In some ways they have
much the same message. ‘You can only trust
God to be God and you can never understand
anything about God whatsoever.’ Thereupon
God is useless and wholly a vanity also either
to denounce him or to praise him. This
is similar to saying of a strong king – something
Hume approved of considerably – ‘You can
only trust the king to act like a king –
and when he stops acting like a king he is
weak and needs to be overthrown.’ This is
the appropriate place for revolutionaries
and partisans. ‘I now am the king!’ I hope
the parallelism is clear. As the New International
Version has it, ‘Meaningless1 Meaningless!’
says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything
is meaningless!’ And Qoheleth stays
faithful to this statement throughout except
for the slight reprieve, ‘There is nothing
better for a person than to eat and drink
and provide pleasure
for himself in his toil – this also I saw
is from the hand of God. For who can eat
or rejoice if not I?’ 2:24-25. This is IMMEDIATELY
following after ‘All his days are painful,
and grievous, his task. Even at night his
mind is not at rest. This also is vanity.”
So both ‘gifts’ from God are meaningless.
There is no distinction between the good
and the bad. The one goes immediately with
the other and has absolutely nothing to do
with reward and punishment. But this also
means doing without God is as meaningless
as putting up with God. If the thought of
God is also utter vanity, it makes no difference
to condemn or condone the thought. Neither
one is better – more ‘good’ - than the other.
And then, foolishly, we are back to Erasmus’
praise of folly, necessary – if there is
to be ANY better or worse whatsoever – for
either atheist or theist – for BOTH are utterly
vain!
As Anthony Levi said in his introduction
to the Penguin translation of PRAISE OF FOLLY
by Betty Radice, ‘Even well before the thirteen
century the debate about universal ideas
had essentially been a dispute about the
immortality of the soul’ [xxi]. Language
is theological through its abstractions but
God does not count. Qoheleth recognizes this,
from a Jewish negative point of view at a
time when they regarded individual human
immortality as a silly idea, as the crux
of the whole issue. In his typically Quixotic
way, Qoheleth says, ‘I saw that wisdom has
an advantage over folly – the advantage of
light over darkness: The wise have eyes in
their head, but fools walk in darkness. But
I knew the same lot comes to them both. So
I said to myself: the lot of the fool also
comes to me, so why should I be so very wise?
Then I said to myself that this also is vanity.
For there is no remembrance ever of
the wise as well as the fools; in the days
to come
both will have been forgotten. How can the
wise die just like the fools? So I hated
life, for whatever happens under the sun
was evil for me. All is vanity and a chase
after wind.’ In other words, the only ‘advantage’
the wise man has is that he KNOWS he is in
deep shit [light] whereas the fool goes along
happy in his silly shallow life [darkness?
Really?]. Does Doctor Hannibal Lecter now
sound like a more appealing character? Thomas
Harris, at the very end of RED DRAGON, has
the barely surviving ‘hero’ Will Graham go
to Bloody Pond, part of the battlefield of
Shiloh, Tennessee, one of the most horrendous
battles of the American Civil War – an ‘indecisive’
battle in some historians’ books.
*Graham knew what happened here in April
1862. He sat down in the grass, felt the
damp ground through his trousers. A tourist’s
automobile went by and after it had passed,
Graham saw movement behind it in the road.
The car had broken a chicken snake’s back.
It slid in endless figure eights across itself
in the center of the asphalt road, sometimes
showing its black back, sometimes its pale
belly.
Shiloh’s awesome presence hooded him with
cold, though he was sweating in the mild
spring sun. Graham got up off the grass,
his trousers damp behind. He was light headed.
The snake looped on itself. He stood over
it, picked it up by the end of its smooth
dry tail, and with a long fluid motion cracked
it like a whip. Its brains zinged into the
pond. A bream rose to them.
He had thought Shiloh haunted, its beauty
sinister like flags. Now, drifting between
memory and narcotic sleep, he saw that Shiloh
was not sinister; it was indifferent. Beautiful
Shiloh could witness anything. Its unforgivable
beauty simply underscored the indifference
of nature, the Green machine. The loveliness
of Shiloh mocked our plight. He roused and
watched the mindless clock, but he couldn’t
stop thinking: In the Green Machine there
is no mercy; WE make mercy, manufacture it
in the parts that have overgrown our basic
reptile brain.
There is no murder. We make murder, and it
matters only to us. Graham knew too well
that he contained all the elements to make
murder, perhaps mercy too. He understood
murder uncomfortably well, though. He wondered
if, in the great body of humankind, in the
minds of men set on civilization, the vicious
urges we control in ourselves and the dark
instinctive knowledge of those urges function
like the crippled virus the body arms against.
He wondered if old, awful urges are
the virus that makes vaccine. Yes,
he had been wrong about Shiloh. Shiloh isn’t
haunted—men are haunted. Shiloh doesn’t care.
And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to
know madness and folly: I perceived that
this also is vexation of spirit.
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– ECCLESIASTES
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