Vanity or emptiness, a favorite expression of Solomon, is that feeling of stark hollowness which results when one has trusted in things
which vanish. It is that ineffable sense of futility one experiences as he stands back helplessly
and watches his home and possessions being consumed by angry flames. It is the emptiness in the pit of one's stomach when the enemy
pours into his city and confiscates in a day what has taken a century to erect. It is any loneliness and disappointment which causes one to
ask, What is the use?
In his more skeptical moments, Solomon sensed a cosmic vanity. He felt as if the weary routine of life paid no dividends. There is a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to kill, and a time to heal. Yet, in doing these things, how is one edified? "What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboreth?" (Ecclesiastes 3:9) If one immediacy brings boredom, will an
endless series bring forth anything different?
There is a collective profitlessness to a
this-worldly philosophy. When the whole world is gained, the soul is lost; for there is nothing in the material world that can finally satisfy
freedom. The free spirit simply holds the world it has gained, weeping, like Alexander the
Great, that there are no other worlds to conquer.
B. The Valley of Defeat
It was no mild feeling of emptiness that
marked the low-point in Solomon's grief. The registration of sorrow and recoil was incisive.
And the reason for this is that he gave himself wholeheartedly to the experiment, deliberately throwing himself into the project. And the recoil was in direct proportion to the
investment-experiment. Frustration is that feeling of defeat which comes at the end of a hopeful, but
ill-fated, venture. This was Solomon's portion.
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It is an extremely skilled man who can so evaluate life that he is able to anticipate
frustrations which lie ahead. The masses of the
people tend to take their grief, like their
happiness, a day at a time. The advantage of this latter method is that there is a certain bliss in
ignorance. As long as old Scrooge (in
Dickens' A Christmas Carol) did not examine the epitaph on the gravestone, he was quite able to sustain the illusion that the dead man on the couch was other than himself. But investigation of the fine details in the wind-swept cemetery exploded his optimism and sent him scurrying to the spirit for comfort and solace. Desiderius Erasmus delightfully eulogized folly in his
classic, Encomium Moriae, pointing out (much to the consolation of the indolent masses) that the fool or the buffoon is the happiest of
individuals; for such a one is protected from the poisoned arrows of frustration by the layers and layers of ignorance which encase his mind. The fool may burn to death in the same circus tent with the wise men who watch, but he is never troubled about the possibility of fires. He is too ignorant to worry about the future.
The way of the fool may seem to be pleasant, but who wants to be a fool? We are men and
men let us be. And part of our endowment is the power of freedom by which we can understand, evaluate, and anticipate. Wisdom brings a
steady peace. There is a risk in wisdom, to be sure, for one never knows when staking all but what the light of future knowledge will reveal a blind alley of despair ahead. But there is a
greater risk in ignorance. If there is a way which leads unto life and satisfaction, one is pursuing a most unworthy course deliberately to remain in ignorance. Will a man know the doctrine before he wills to know it? Our predicament in this
modern hour may be parallel to that of the individual whose body is host to a malignant cancer: If the disease is detected soon enough, there is hope for a cure. But if through willful ignorance and neglect no overtures are taken to learn one's condition, death may result. The
praise of folly easily converts to the despair of folly.
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Solomon himself clearly illustrates the risk which attends the individual who dares to know himself. He concluded (with Erasmian insight) that if one evaluates the meaning of life by a one-dimensional, this-worldly criterion, it is the wise man — the man who has made a concerted effort to come to himself — and not the fool, who is to be pitied. The reason is that, though both will come to grief through the frustrations of immediacy, the wise man comes sooner, for he anticipates that grief through his accelerated freedom. Like the condemned felon who dies a thousand times before he walks the last mile to the gas chamber, so the man who can find
nothing to vindicate life dies before his time. He dies in spirit. The hungry child blithely runs into the house, ignorant that there is no food left;
while the parent, knowing the situation, has despaired already. Solomon felt enraged when he compared the final end of the wise man with that of the fool who remained in ignorance.
"Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so will it happen even to me; and why was I then more wise?" (Ecclesiasties 2:15).
Solomon said he hated life when he learned that man was endowed with more longings and
aspirations than the universe itself could ever placate. Sections of the book of Ecclesiastes read like Russell's A Free Man's Worship — minus the confident despair. If this world is all there is, Solomon felt certain that there was
nothing to be confident of, not even of confident despair itself. If the end of living cannot justify the effort that one invests in living, just plain despair is all that one may justifiably entertain.
Is one better off in knowing, or being ignorant of, his end? This is a good, but irrelevant,
question. One does not dare remain in ignorance. Whoever spurns the light of
knowledge risks losing the meaning of life itself. His loss is serious. When once self-transcendence has been aroused, one cannot return to ignorance and again live with himself
in peace. This is one plow which a man cannot turn back from without inviting a worse grief.
We happen to be fearfully and wonderfully made. When freedom is aroused and man
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comes to himself, it is impossible (without self-destruction) to erase from the mind what has been gained. It is a case of trying to diminish one's stature a cubit by taking thought. Opened eyes will not be shut. We play little tricks on ourselves and quite against our own will. What we set ourselves deliberately to forget, that very thing we remember with greatest vividness.
Knowledge is a dangerous thing, for it joins itself with our own souls. Socrates knew this well.
Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or
hurtful: neither do their customers know, with the exception of any trainer or physician who may happen to buy of them . . . For
there is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink: the one you purchase of the wholesale or retail dealer, and carry them away in other vessels, and before you receive them into the body as food, you may deposit them at home and call in any experienced friend who knows what is good to be eaten or drunken, and what is not . . . But you cannot buy the wares of knowledge and carry them away in another vessel; when you have paid for them you must receive them into the soul and go your way, either greatly harmed or greatly
benefited.4
The frustration which comes from persistence in immediacy is sometimes dodged by the
deceiving option of overindulgence. There seems to be nothing objectionable to the lofty and exhilarating feeling of release which comes with taking dope into the blood stream —
nothing, that is, save that we cannot do it with our whole person. The curse of the dope den is the after-experience, not the pleasure itself; for in the gaining of an intense pleasure we have left ourselves with a regret and insecurity which cancels out whatever value we may have passed through. If the pleasure of dope were
everlasting, it might commend itself to the heart.
This same terminal
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frustration echoes through all efforts to convert a partial immediacy into a final satisfaction. The boredom may vanish, but a rotting sets in. An ambivalence results which leaves the individual suspended perilously between a fear to return to selfhood and fear to continue in self-indulgence.
Reinhold Niebuhr has penetrated rather deeply into this problem of ambivalence, especially as the issue relates to the place of the prides of life in human conduct. His analysis of the dread of drunkenness is typical:
The drunkard sometimes seeks the abnormal stimulus of
intoxicating drink in order to experience a sense of power and importance which normal life denies him. This type of
intoxication represents a pathetic effort to make the self the centre of the world to a degree which normal reason with its consciousness of the ego's insignificance makes impossible. But drunkenness may have a quite different purpose. It may be
desired not in order to enhance the ego but to escape from it. It would not be inaccurate to define the first purpose of
intoxication as the sinful ego-assertion which is rooted in
anxiety and unduly compensates for the sense of inferiority and insecurity; while the second purpose of intoxication springs from the sense of guilt, or a state of perplexity in which a sense
of guilt has been compounded with the previous sense of insecurity.5
The speed with which men come to
self-despair in life is directly proportioned to their own industry. Those who are simply bored with life, calmly taking their winnings and losings as part of the game itself, will continue in their
inchoate optimism as long as the facts of their predicament remain hidden. But the blithe type of person can only postpone, not avoid, despair.
He sustains his bold skepticism because he has Page 64
decided in advance that he will not rise to self-transcendence; he will not learn to know
himself. This type of mind ought to capitulate to grief at once, for there is no element in his
philosophy which can support optimism.
Others, however, confidently expecting that value gains will be forthcoming — people
whose eyes have been opened, but opened to the wrong thing — take their losses very seriously.
They do not cavalierly pretend that it does not matter whether life has any final meaning or
not. They believe it has meaning; they trust their investments. And for this very reason they are more quickly catapulted into grief than those who praise folly. The crash of the stock market in 1929 illustrates this. Hopeful people by the score had put their trust in this form of
immediacy. But after seeing their entire savings vanish in a few hours, they suddenly realized that in the game of life it is the soul which is up for auction. Devotion to money brings vanity and emptiness to the heart the moment the
wealth is lost. The bored mind may wait for the next round of pleasure, hoping (though quite without foundation) that in the forthcoming experience there will emerge a satisfaction
which will vindicate its course of action. But to whom shall the despairing turn? There is no next. All has been ventured. The ace has been thrown to the table, and all is lost.
Some recover from their grief, only to fall into the delusion of a new engagement. They
approach the matter from a different angle and with greater caution, supposing that there is no essential cause for their previous despair.
Whatever frustrations the accidental may previously have introduced, they resolve to
eliminate them during the next engagement. But despair is only postponed, for the
incompatibility of spiritual freedom and
immediacy prevents flirtation from becoming a lasting romance.
Others fall, never to rise again. Learning the essential contradiction involved in trying to unite a free spirit with immediacy, yet
perceiving no alternative devotion with which to be engaged, they may turn to the despair of
suicide. Suicide is
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preceded by a period in which a feeling of absolute emptiness floods the heart. But the
violent destruction of the body is always a consequence of the soul's antecedent despair.
When the spirit has nothing to draw it out (i.e., no values for which it can live and die) it is
already dead — dead, though living. Since there is nothing to live for, there is nothing left to
exist for. When consigned to live, men seek
death. Yet even in suicide man cries out that he is not a creature of a simple, one-dimensional world. As if in a final protest against such a suggestion, the free spirit reaches forth and asserts its vindictive authority against the involved self, unilaterally decreeing its
destruction. The would-be suicide ransacks the libraries of the world to find the easiest
passageway from life to death, thus screaming to the housetops, though quite unwittingly, that the nature of man contains a freedom able to reach to eternity.
Sandwiched in between the blithe and the
despairing are countless millions who writhe in the twilight zone of hopelessness, yet clinging to
the fond faith that through some yet unforeseen fortune the weary round of life may be broken.
Lingering between life and death, though
fearing both with a perfect ambivalence, they dare not face the essential meaning of life. Their hearts are storage depots of regret. The beggar envies the power and prestige of the president, while the president, weary of his office, envies the carefree way of the beggar. Rare indeed is the person who can conscientiously confess that he, like Paul, has learned to be content in what he has. Men would scramble for pen and paper if they were ever given an opportunity to draw up a list of the ways in which they think they could improve upon life. There would be
changes in the self, the universe, the eternal.
Many opportunities would be provided to rectify mistakes done in the past. But it would be
interesting to see if a solution
to present problems could be found, using ingredientsnow accessible.
Wish-thinking testifies to the power of self-transcendence in man, for if man were not free over necessity he would not understand the
refreshment of new alternatives. The felon Page 66
may employ freedom to dream of means of descending from his cell block to the distant streets below, but this protest against his
incarceration will not break the lock on the cell or hoist up the much-wanted ladder. Solutions must be forged with the material at hand.
If humor is incongruity, then it is a cause for laughter to watch men walk obediently down the well-trodden path to the bordels of
immediacy. Notice this: A spiritual being is trying to find heaven on earth! It is like
watching a very large snapping turtle trying to crawl into a very small pipe. The head is in, and so is one leg — ah! the haven is plausible. But laughter mounts, for the pipe is already full
when hardly a fraction of the creature is in. Yet,
as we watch the effort of man to gain
satisfaction through what by definition will bring grief and despair, our laughter subsides and the feeling of pathos enters. For the contest before our eyes is not a jest or a game of
chance; it is a bloody, life-and-death skirmish where winner takes all. The souls of men are at stake in this clash of values. If we pity the turtle, we grieve for men. For we ourselves are men likewise, and we happen to know the meaning of this awful engagement.
Frustration, like the first sign of a disease, is a blessing if it stirs us up to find a cure; but it is a bane if it is identified with the disease. The
despairing man may not be far from the
kingdom — assuming that there is a kingdom to be found — for at least he has come to the end of the trail of immediacy and he is now open to other suggestions. But if his despairingness is confused with the disease, a hardening of
interest may set in. Trust in riches, e.g., often hardens the spiritual arteries. When the riches
fail, hope vanishes. The deceitfulness of riches is exposed in one of the most ironic passages in the Bible.
They that trust in their wealth, and boast themselves in the
multitude of their riches none of them can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him (For the
redemption of their life is costly, and it faileth for ever) .... Their inward thought is, that their houses shall continue
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for ever, and their dwelling-places to all generations; they call their lands after their own names . . . This their way is their folly . . . They are appointed as a flock for Sheol; death shall be their shepherd: And the upright shall have dominion over them in the morning; and their beauty shall be for Sheol to consume.6
The more a man trusts in immediacy, the harder it is for him to come to himself when
despair sets in. Observe that it was the wretched, the harlot, and the publican, and not the rich,
who repented when Christ offered an alternative to the pleasures of the moment. The
rich had their god.
IV. Guilt
The distance between animal and man, contrary to the zoologist who worships the
anatomical key, is measured by free spirit. And as this distance becomes more apparent, there emerges what is doubtless the most significant reason why man has never been, nor ever will be, finally content within immediacy. This factor is guilt.
A. Setting
Man may suffer from a slow physical start in life (for the kitten at a day seems more
self-sufficient than man at three months), but when
self-sufficient than man at three months), but when