Vanity of Vanities

Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before evil days come and the years approach when you say, ‘These give me no pleasure.’ Ecclesiastes 12, 1.


The short book of Ecclesiastes has often been a problem for the church. It sets out a view of life that is at least uncomfortable for believers, and which may even negate belief. It says, in essence, that everything in life comes to the same end, which is death. Wisdom and folly, wealth and poverty, effort and idleness, love and hate, all end in oblivion. True, it is God who has ordained things this way, and we should remember him, but his purposes are unknowable and death is final. All we can be sure of are the good things of life, eating, drinking, and the worldly rewards of effort and achievement. The best life is the one that maximises those pleasures, without pretending that there is enduring value in any of them.

Even though it was written two centuries before the birth of Christ, you might say that Ecclesiastes is the most modern book in the Bible, because its outlook is so close to that of the present day. Just take a look at the Sunday papers, particularly the ‘quality’ papers. For all their seriousness about the great issues of the day, there is in the background a view of life not very different from that of Ecclesiastes. The final news about human life is bad, both individually and collectively. We do the best we can, for ourselves and for each other; but the only sensible course is to maximise the good life, with a nice house and a good car, enough money, interesting holidays, and regular visits to the best restaurants. That is the creed of our age. It takes different forms according to class, but that is what most people base their lives on. And Ecclesiastes gives it Biblical support. It even gives backing to the cult of youth: enjoy yourself when you are young, while you can, because the days are coming that will give you no pleasure.

The word usually associated with the writer of Ecclesiastes—let’s use the Hebrew name for him and call him ‘Qoheleth’, the preacher—is ‘vanity.’ His first verse: ‘Vanity of vanities, says the preacher. Vanity of vanities. All is vanity!’ His point is that if you look hard at any aspect of human living, it doesn’t justify itself, it has no real substance, it dissolves into air. Act well or badly, your fate is the same. Gain wealth and reputation, and you still end up dead and forgotten. We never connect with anything that is enduring. We spend our lives chasing the wind.

Even in religious terms, there is something to be said for this view; because ‘the preacher’ is bringing out the incompleteness of the world as human beings experience it. The world makes sense up to a point, but there is something missing. We manage our lives toward certain purposes, but there are no ultimate ends, none that justify what we do by rising above the wash of time and chance. We have the values of love and of truth, but they have no final substance or validity; the world negates and obliterates them. In the most serious endeavours of our lives, we have no firm ground to stand on.

Many people, perhaps in our time the majority, have arrived at the same conclusion. There is something missing that human beings reach out for. But having arrived at a sense of the world’s incompleteness, there are various things that you can do about it.

The first is simply to deny it. You can say that the world makes perfect sense in its own terms, that there is no incompleteness. We are the creatures of this world and our being is adjusted to it. If the world doesn’t satisfy us at every point, that is because we are looking for the wrong things or living out the dissatisfaction that drives the evolutionary process. Satisfied animals don’t survive.

Or you can accept the analysis and choose to live with it. That is Qoheleth’s position and that of most people today. Our sense of an incomplete world is real and our dissatisfactions are real; but there is nothing to be done about it except to maximise the satisfactions that are available to us. The Sunday papers will tell you how.

Where does Christianity stand on this? The church would say that the analysis is correct as far as it goes, but that there is more to be said. Our sense of the world’s incompleteness, of its vanity in its own terms, is a correct one. The world does not offer any final firm standing for values and purposes. Death, in worldly terms, does indeed obliterate the effort and the good of humanity. So far Qoheleth has got it right. But that is not all.

Look at what Qoholeth knows about God. It is not very much. He knows that God is there and that God has ordained things the way they are. Therefore God is to be feared and respected. But he knows no more than that. He doesn’t know why God has made things this way or what his ultimate purposes may be, if he has any. God is simply an inscrutable reality that has willed this incomplete, vanity-ridden world.

Christianity claims to know more than that, and to place lving and effort in a larger and justifying framework. Christianity claims to know that God, through Christ, shares in all human living in every detail and gives that living ultimate significance. What seems to us incomplete or pointless gains completion and purpose insofar as it is done toward this loving God. In that relation, nothing, however trivial, is vanity.

If that is what the church has to say, how is it that after two thousand years of Christian history the mindset of our time is so close to that of the writer of Ecclesiastes? How is it that two millennia of teaching and preaching seem to have brought us back to the same point?
That is a huge question, perhaps the largest question hanging over Christian civilisation. I can offer one thought.
Most people, looking at the world as it is, will gravitate toward Qoheleth’s view because it seems to be the only sensible position. You make the world as pleasant as you can for yourself and those around you; and, notice, this is not necessarily a selfish position to adopt. Certainly Christianity shouldn’t go around trying to make life miserable for people by denouncing everything as vanity. That has been tried on occasions, and it produces wretched results. But Christianity shouldn’t settle into a too easy relationship with the Qoheleth view, as though there is nothing more to be said. It shouldn’t make itself the spiritual garnish to the nice life, so that along with the nice life you can have the aesthetic, moral and emotional goodies that the church has to offer. This, for many of our contemporaries, is where Christianity has finished up. It’s not true, but they love the St Matthew Passion as one of the good things of life.

But the church isn’t there to provide the aesthetic or emotional or moral trimmings to a life that, finally, understands itself as vanity. It is there to say that something more has been shown to us; that there is a truth, that in Christ’s incarnation the vanity of our being has been reclaimed and transformed into the ultimate and substantial and enduring meaning of God.