NOTES for Ecc 7:27-29

What is Ecclesiastes seeking? God? In essence, yes. But he himself perceives his search differently. He is seeking true reality. One could say: Reality with a capital letter, if such Reality were not associated for us today with what we define for ourselves as "spiritual" or "divine." But what stands for us behind these words? Words, especially words like these, have long been devalued, not only because of dishonest Christians, but also because of quite honest theologians and philosophers, each time convinced that now they have finally found something truly spiritual and genuinely divine.

It appears that in the times when Ecclesiastes lived, the devaluation of words was already a sad reality. Ecclesiastes himself is religious; he knows something about God, but suddenly it has turned out that he does not really know God at all. Or almost not at all. But there are too many words, and Ecclesiastes prefers to avoid words. He does not even speak about reality; he prefers to speak of quite concrete, sufficiently tangible things. But what he is seeking is precisely reality.

And even Reality with a capital letter. But he seeks cautiously, as if feeling all that life consists of, his own life and other people's: what of this is authentic? What is truly real, and what only seems so? Death is more real than life; sorrow is closer to reality than joy and merriment. A strange conclusion, it would seem, but in the fallen world this really is so. If death is final, then life is either absurdity or a malicious joke of God on man.

With a God who can joke this way, one must be careful and circumspect. And wisdom... it would have meaning if it could give life. But it cannot; wisdom can deliver no one either from death or even from the evil in which the world lies. Evil can be minimized; for this one must allow everything that flows to flow freely. Nothing can be changed; one can only merge with the flow of life, not resisting it. An almost Daoist conclusion, but Ecclesiastes is seeking the authentic within this world.

And here only eternal movement is authentic, the flow of life, in which all forms and events dissolve and from which they are then born again; and here it no longer matters whether to call this flow "dao," as the Chinese philosophers did, or "logos," as the Greek philosophers did. Ecclesiastes does not call it anything at all, but he senses it quite clearly. He has found something real in the world, but it does not look as though living has become any easier or more joyful for him.