Reading Ecclesiastes today I am struck by the following verse:

 

"And I set my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly; I realized that this also is striving after the wind. Because in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain." – Ecclesiastes 1:17-18

 

It is an enigmatic couple of verses and it sets the tone of the text balanced only by the author’s admonitions to "remember your Creator". The text mourns the state of humanity, most especially thinking humanity and finds hope and meaning only in God.

 

Ecclesiastes is a funny text because if you were to remove the references to God it would be a powerful existential work speaking of the condition of humanity. Existentialism, a movement literature and philosphy anchored in 19th/early 20th century writing, sought to show how we must define ourselves and our condtion (reality). That meaning can only come from within and not from outside (see the writings of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus and others). Without this self-definition one exists in a constant and increasing state of anxiety and hopelessness. There are echoes of existentialism in postmodernism (see The Matrix series, Ghost in the Shell, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep etc.).

 

What prevents Ecclesiastes from tipping into existentialism is the assertion that meaning comes only to the life pointed at God. Reading it feels like reading an antidote to a sickness that was still to come.