Chapter II ‘Truth and Fiction’ in an Autobiography
Let us now take a general survey of this strange book, regarding it as a record of the conflicting moods and experiences of a thoughtful man of the world. The author is too modest to appear in his own person (at least in i. 1-ii. 12), but, like Cicero in his dialogues, selects a mouthpiece from the heroic past. His choice could not be doubtful. Who so fit as the wisest of his age, the founder and patron of gnomic poetry, king Solomon (1 Kings iv. 30-32)? After the preluding verses, from which a quotation has been given above, Ecclesiastes continues thus:—
I Koheleth have been300 king over Israel in Jerusalem; and I gave my mind to making search and exploration, by wisdom, concerning all that is done under heaven; that is a sore trouble which God hath given to the sons of men to trouble themselves therewith! I saw all the works which are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and pursuit of wind.
That which is crooked cannot be straightened,
and a deficiency cannot be reckoned (i. 12-15).
The name or title ‘Koheleth’ is obscure. According to the Epilogue ‘Koheleth was a wise man’ (xii. 9)—a statement which confirms the explanation of the name as meaning ‘one who calls an assembly.’301 The ‘wise men’ of Israel gathered their disciples together, and such an able teacher as Koheleth would fain gather all who have ears to hear around his seat. But Koheleth is also Solomon (though only for a short time—the author did not, I suppose, live long enough thoroughly to fuse the conceptions of king and philosopher302). The wise king is to be imagined standing on the brink of the grave, and casting the clear-sighted glance of a dying man on past life, somewhat as Moses in parts of Deuteronomy or David in 2 Sam. xxii., xxiii. 1-7. A subtle and poetic view of Solomon’s career is thus opened before us. He is not here represented in his political relation, but as a specimen of the highest type of human being, with a boundless appetite for pleasure and every means of gratifying it. But even such a man’s deliberate verdict on all forms of pleasure is that they are utterly unsubstantial, mere vanity (lit. a vapour—Aquila, ἀτμίς; comp. James iv. 14). Neither pure speculation (i. 13-18), nor riotous mirth (ii. 1, 2), nor even the refined voluptuousness consistent with the free play of the intellect303 (ii. 3), could satisfy his longing, or enable him, with Goethe’s Faust, to say to the flying moment, ‘Ah! linger yet, thou art so fair.’ It is true that wisdom is after all better than folly; Solomon from his ‘specular mount’ could ‘see’ this to be a truth (ii. 13); but in the end he found it as resultless as ‘the walking in darkness’ of the fool.
‘And I myself perceived that one fate befalleth them all. And I said in my heart, As the fate of the fool will be the fate which shall befall me, even me; and why have I then been exceeding wise? and I said in my heart that this also is vanity’ (ii. 14b, 15), i.e. that this undiscriminating fate is a fresh proof of the delusiveness of all things.
And in this strain Koheleth runs on to nearly the end of the chapter, with an added touch of bitterness at the thought of the doubtful character of his successor (ii. 18, 19). Then occurs one of those abrupt transitions which so often puzzle the student of Ecclesiastes. In ii. 1-11 Koheleth has rejected the life of sensuous pleasure, even when wisely regulated, as ‘vanity.’ He now returns to the subject, and declares this to be, not of course the ideally highest good, but the highest good open to man, if it were only in his power to secure it. But he has seen that both sensuous enjoyment and the wisdom which regulates it come from God, who grants these blessings to the man who is good in his sight, while profitless trouble is the portion of the sinner. He repeats therefore that even wisdom and knowledge and joy, the highest attainable goods, are, by reason of their uncertainty, ‘vanity and pursuit of wind’ (ii. 26).
At the end of this long speech of Koheleth, we naturally ask how far it can be regarded as autobiographical. Only, I think, in a qualified sense. Its psychological depth points to similar experiences on the part of the author, but to experiences which have been deepened in their imaginative reproduction. It is truth mingled with fiction—Wahrheit und Dichtung—which we meet with in the first two chapters. A more strictly biographical narrative appears to begin in chap. iii., from which point the allusions to Solomon cease, and are replaced by scattered references to contemporary history. The confidences of the author are introduced by a passage (iii. 1-8) in the gnomic style, containing a catalogue of the various actions, emotions, and states of feeling which make up human life. Each of these, we are told, has its own allotted season in the fixed order of nature, but as this is beyond the ken and influence of man, the question arises, ‘What profit hath he that worketh in that wherewith he wearieth himself?’ (iii. 9.) Thus, the ‘wearisome trouble’ of the ‘sons of men’ has no permanent result. All that you can do is to accustom yourself to acquiesce in destiny: you will then see that every act and every state in your ever-shifting life is truly beautiful or seemly (iii. 11), even if not profitable to the individual (iii. 9). More than this, man has been endowed with the faculty of understanding this kaleidoscopic world, with the drawback that he cannot possibly embrace it all in one view:—304
Also he hath put the world into their heart (i.e. mind), except that man cannot find out from beginning to end the work which God hath made (iii. 11).
In fact, to quote Lord Bacon’s words in the Advancement of Learning, ‘God has framed the mind like a glass, capable of the image of the universe, and desirous to receive it, as the eye to receive the light.’ But here a dark mood interrupts the course of our author’s meditations; or perhaps it is the record of a later period which is but awkwardly attached to the previous passages. ‘To rejoice and to fare well’—sensual (or, let us say, sensuous) pleasure, in short—is now represented as the only good for man, and even that is not to be too absolutely reckoned upon, for ‘it is the gift of God’ (iii. 12, 13, 22; comp. ii. 24). Certainly our author at any rate did not succeed in drowning care in the wine-cup: he is no vulgar sensualist. His merriment is spoiled by the thought of the misery of others, and he can find nothing ‘under the sun’ (a passionate generalisation from life in Palestine) but violence and oppression. In utter despair he pronounces the dead happier than the living (iv. 1, 2). In fact, he says, neither in life nor in death has man any superiority over the other animals, which are under no providential order, and have no principle of continuance. Such is the cynical theory which tempts Koheleth; and yet he seems to have hesitated before accepting it, unless we may venture with Bickell to strike out iii. 17, as the work of a later editor who believed in retributions hereafter (like xi. 9b xii. 7, 13, 14). I confess that consistency seems to me to require this step; the verse is in fact well fitted to be an antidote to the following verse, which seems to have suggested the opening phrase. This is how the text runs at present:—
I said in my heart, The righteous and the wicked shall God judge; for there is a time for every purpose and for every work there (emphatically for ‘in the other world;’ or read, hath he appointed). I said in my heart, (It happens) on account of the sons of men, that God may test them, and that they may see that they are but beasts. For the sons of men are a chance (comp. Herod. i. 32), and beasts are a chance; yea, all have one chance: as the one dies, so dies the other; yea, they all have one spirit; and advantage of the one over the other there is none, for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward, and whether the spirit of the beast goes downward to the earth?305 (iii. 17-21.)
Our author’s abiding conviction is that ‘the spirit does but mean the breath’ (In Memoriam, lvi.), so that man and the lower animals have ‘one spirit’ and alike end in dust. ‘Pulvis et umbra sumus.’ It is true, some of his contemporaries hold the new doctrine of Immortality, but Koheleth, in his cool scepticism, hesitates to accept it. Which indeed of its enthusiastic advocates can claim to ‘know’ that which he asserts; or can prove to Koheleth’s satisfaction that God (as a psalmist in Ps. xlix. 15 puts it) will ‘receive’ the spirit of man, in spite of the fact that the vital principle of beasts loses itself in the dust of death? It is no doubt an awkward construction which Koheleth adopts: he seems to express an uncertainty as to the fate of the lower animals. To convey the meaning which I have given, the construction ought to have been disjunctive, as in this line from a noble modern poem,
Friend, who knows if death indeed have life, or life have death for goal?306
But there is, or rather there ought to be, no doubt as to Koheleth’s meaning. Dean Plumptre frankly admits that ‘it is not till nearly the close of the book, with all its many wanderings of thought, that the seeker rests in that measure of the hope of immortality which we find’ [but this is open to considerable doubt] ‘in xii. 7.’