Qoheleth: The Ironic Wink

Appendix: Intellectual Kinship

Appendix Intellectual Kinship This imaginary letter was inspired by Stephen Greenblatt’s account of the discovery of Lucretius’s De rerum natura. I am struck by the similarities between Qoheleth and this first-century B.C.E. Roman poet. Like the letter, Octavia is fictional. You may be surprised to receive another letter from me, Octavia, for it has been only a few days since I last wrote to you. The reason for this letter is my excitement over discovering a remarkable meditation on death that is in some ways akin to my own De rerum natura, which you know so well. I came across the work quite by accident. During a leisurely dinner with a Jewish merchant from Alexandria, we fell into talking about the nature of the universe. At one point he mentioned a scroll that had recently been translated into Greek from its original Hebrew. He said it was about death and that it recommends pleasure as the highest good. My curiosity thoroughly aroused, I had to see the manuscript for myself. Although it was not easy to obtain a copy, I did so at considerable expense. I must say that the silver was well spent. My initial impression was that the work was neither poetry nor prose but a combination of the two. In this respect it is different from the hexameters of my meditation . The author claims to be a king, but certain things suggest that this assertion is fiction. The treatise resembles a diatribe with opposing views juxtaposed so as to make it difficult to tell which one represents the author’s thinking. A single thesis runs through the entire work: everything is ephemeral, futile, a mere breath. A secondary thesis is the denial of any profit in life. The author has drunk deeply at the fountain of Greek philosophy. He accepts Thales’s explanation for the basic elements of the universe—earth, air, fire, and water . He agrees with Monimus that everything is mist, like a puff of wind, and he relies on Epicurus and Stoic understanding of the universe as a balance of opposites that are perfectly structured in the most elegant manner possible. And yet he thinks everything is in motion. The wind goes this way and that. The sun pursues its rounds. Rivers rush toward the sea, and people talk incessantly. Has he not come close to my view that the particles making up the universe are in 118 | Appendix constant flux? To be sure I argue that a single element, an atom, is the fundamental building block of the universe. These invisible particles move endlessly, and the overall structure is always changing as particles realign themselves in a limited number of shapes. Above all a swerve made the universe possible. In this regard I disagree with him and his mentors, who attribute the origin of things to the gods. To me gods are a delusion, no different from angels, ghosts, and demons. The author may not think of gods as a delusion, but they seem to serve little if any purpose for him other than to instill fear by their thoroughly irrational behavior. The idea of providence is thus a pipe dream. In that view he is surely right. What is the place of human beings in this world? This Jewish philosopher understands that we are no different from beasts. Why? Because we all die and then decompose. He rightly challenges those who think humans are immortal and animals are not. While he and I may differ about the impetus for action—envy of others as opposed to the struggle to survive—we agree that the highest goal of life is the pursuit of pleasure and reduction of pain. As I see it, he appears to be caught in a paradox. While insisting on a deterministic fate, he encourages people to observe the golden mean and thus to act in a prudent manner, being neither too virtuous nor too evil. What about death? Must it be feared? The learned author puts together an exquisite collage of images that evokes wonder at the mystery of death. Wonder, not fear at the prospect of dying, is a healthy attitude to the event that permits the invisible particles to form themselves into additional shapes. This brilliant thinker faces death without fear because he realizes that all is mere breath, every striving futile, empty, and meaningless. To think otherwise is to fall victim to the greatest illusion of all, that the intellect can...