Absurd, absurd!
Camus holding your head to stare into the void
If I were translating Ecclesiastes, that's what I would go with.
That's what I was thinking when recently listening my way through the book. On my slow read through James K.A. Smith's On the Road with St. Augustine, he explores the ways that Augustine underlies so much modern philosophy, the way that impacted smith's own academic career in philosophy. He looks at Augustine and Hegel, and Camus and Augustine. All atheists, I dare say, have a vision of the God they don't believe in, and Camus' God is an Augustinian one.
Ecclesiastes is the closest the Bible gets to existential dread. To staring into the void of meaninglessness and the crisis that life is absurd. Camus helps us, because he insists on staring. You're not meant to look away. Only embracing the meaningless of life means that you can create your own meaning, even if that too is meaningless
I don't think most commentators actually know what to do with Ecclesiastes. There's too much "yes, but" commentary. Yes, but actually here's the answer. Yes, but meaning . Yes, but Jesus. Yes, but we knew the answer all along. It's a smug reading from someone who cheated and got all the answers.
Maybe it's also because a lot of stereotypical ministers are more Proverbs type of people. They enjoy an orderly moral universe where things and people play by the rules, and moral faults lead to consequences.
Ecclesiastes and Job both blow this up, but in different ways. Job explores what happens when bad consequences follow no moral fault. That shatters all the nice, neat categories. Ecclesiastes says, what if it is all pointless. What if being rich and poor have no significance. What if no one cares whether you have 1 wife or 1000? What if you are the World's most successful person? How is that different from being a nobody?
And most commentators end up with something that solves the conundrum too quickly. "Oh, yes, life without God is meaningless. Get God and get meaning!"
What I think they miss is this: they're in such a rush to numb the pain of existential despair, that they won't stare into the abyss of the absurd. And that's exactly what I think Ecclesiastes helps us do .and it's why Camus is great. He holds your head and forces you to look.
“But Seumas,” you said, “I don't want to stare at the meaningless void and reflect on how utterly insignificant my life is.”
Of course you don't. Which is why you keep filling up your life with existential numbing agents.
Here's my advice. Stay with it. Don't skip to the end, don't go for the easy answers, "oh, of course life with Jesus is meaningful". Ride the train the whole line, to the last stop. And there you'll find a more profound freedom, and a more profound answer. There you'll find the beauty of a God who fills and fulfils our deepest existential desires with more than hebel, more than the insubstantial mist that lasts but a moment.
