The Ecology of Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes isn't a verdict on the world's worth, but a phenomenology of breath.
You can stand on the bank at Lawson’s Fork here in Spartanburg and watch water become air, the vapor lifting where the current slows over rocks, thinning as the light strengthens, and then gone quickly in a hot July morning. The ancient Hebrew has a term for what the eye is doing there. It’s the word the book we have mistranslated for four centuries sets at its own head, הֶבֶל, hevel, meaning something like “breath” or “vapor.” The mist that stands off the warm water on a cool morning and then is nowhere at all.
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil
at which they toil under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains for ever.
Lots of us hear it in sermons, slogans, or rhetoric as “vanity.” הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים, havel havalim, “vanity of vanities” is the superlative that the King James built into a commentary itself on the worth of our world. The whole book of Ecclesiastes has come down to us under that supposition, as though its author, קֹהֶלֶת, Qoheleth, had surveyed the creation and pronounced it worthless.
However, hevel isn’t a moral judgment but more of a perceptual term. Before it can be made to mean emptiness, it means the fog you saw over the water on a cool July morning before the heat of the day sets in, the visible brevity of a form that holds its shape for a span and then disperses. Qoheleth here isn’t condemning the world as vain or worthless, but is describing what it is to be a creature inside time (which sounds like a Bob Dylan album title).
This is why the book belongs to ecology and has been left, mostly, on the devotional shelf of the rarely used church library or used sparingly by a pastor in a funeral sermon when they really weren’t familiar with the recently deceased. Its opening chapter is a phenomenology of return so interesting that I don’t know a better one outside of Henri Bergson’s work.
The sun rises and the sun goes down,
and hurries to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south,
and goes round to the north;
round and round goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
The sun rises, and the sun goes to its place and rises there again (also one of my favorite books is The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway… I know we’re not supposed to like him these days, but I’m a massive Hemingway fan still). The wind turns to the south, then to the north, and comes back around on its circuits.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they continue to flow.
And then the line that any of us who have stood in a river already know in the body: כָּל־הַנְּחָלִים הֹלְכִים אֶל־הַיָּם, all the streams run to the sea, and the sea is not full; to the place where they flow, they flow again. Sounds a good bit like Heraclitus’ (maybe... probably wasn’t him despite what Plato says) famous quip. Qoheleth is watching the water cycle (or “watching the wheels go round and round” to invoke Lennon in his prosaic phenomenology). They are watching the same water pass a fixed point and understanding that it is both the same and never the same, that the water I stood beside this morning is already in motion toward the Pacolet, a body of water (funny how we term that), the Fork will never carry past me again.
The philosophical name for what he sees is duration, and the ecological consequence of it sits one verse above the cycles, at the hinge of the whole passage: דּוֹר הֹלֵךְ וְדוֹר בָּא וְהָאָרֶץ לְעוֹלָם עֹמָדֶת. A generation goes, and a generation comes, and the Earth stands forever. Read often as a complaint, this is the futility of human labor against an indifferent world. However, read as observation, which is how I think Qoheleth means it here, it’s the exact structure of ecological perception.
The question Ecclesiastes is asking (and the question I have been reading toward all summer in Deleuze, Ruyer, Bergson, Stein, and Aristotle) is whether the return is the same thing coming back to mock us, or the world coming back in fidelity. Qoheleth answers with the ground. The generations that perceive the Earth are hevel, breath-brief, each one lifting off the surface and thinning into the light. The Earth, as well as The Dude, abides. What looks from inside a single lifespan like futility is, from the standpoint of the ground itself, faithfulness. The return is the world keeping faith, while those who watch it pass through do so.
And here the book touches the argument I have been pursuing this hot summer. A creature is hevel because its form is held in act only for a span. The black walnut in our backyard isn’t vapor because it’s worthless. It’s vapor because the shape it holds, the leafing, the fruiting, the whole standing fact of it against the July sky, is an act, ἐνέργεια, a being-at-work that the tree performs and cannot suspend, and every act of that kind is spent in the performing.
Aristotle’s word for the form fully realized, ἐντελέχεια, carries its own ending inside it, τέλος (telos or “end”), the completion toward which the walnut is always and only underway. To see the tree truly is to see it breathing out. Raymond Ruyer would say the tree is present to itself in that act, a self-survey with no observer standing over it, and that self-presence is real for exactly as long as the form lasts and not one morning longer. I think this is what Qoheleth saw and what later editors, scribes, and translators (later translators, some with theological or colonial agendas of their own) couldn’t forgive him for seeing. Creaturely form is breath. To be is to be spent.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
The translators who could forgive it were the legendary seventy who carried the book into Greek with the compilation of the Septuagint (from the term “seventy”... interesting story there for another time). When they came to hevel in the Hebrew, they went with ματαιότης, mataiotēs, ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων in Greek at the start of the book. A couple of centuries later, Paul, writing to an assembly of Christ followers in Rome about the whole groaning creation, uses that term once and pretty decisively: τῇ γὰρ ματαιότητι ἡ κτίσις ὑπετάγη, οὐχ ἑκοῦσα. For the creation was subjected to mataiotēs, to futility, to hevel, not willingly.
The “vaporousness” Qoheleth observes in Ecclesiastes from inside the water cycle is the same condition Paul says the entire κτίσις, the whole made order, has been placed under and groans to be delivered from. The two books use the same word across hundreds of years and a change of language. What Ecclesiastes sees, Romans delivers, I think.
Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ He said, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’ And the Lord said, ‘What have you done? Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.
There is one more incredibly interesting place that word hevel has been used. The second son born into the world is named הֶבֶל, Hevel, Abel, the breath, and he is the first of us to die, his life cut off in a field and his blood crying out from the אֲדָמָה, the ground, the very Earth that Qoheleth says stands forever. The first death/murder in scripture is named Vapor, and the Earth that abides is the Earth that received him. I can’t write the word hevel over a Piedmont morning without hearing that the brevity of every creature and the murder of the innocent are, in Hebrew, one syllable. This is the weight the Septuagint carried into Paul’s single word, and why the groan in Romans 8 isn’t meant as despair. Creation subjected to hevel is creation that holds Abel’s blood in the ground and the whole spent, breathing, dying order of things that the Cross gathers up.
Gathers is the right verb here, because it is Qoheleth’s own. The name means the one who assembles, from קהל, the gathering of the people, which the Greek made Ἐκκλησιαστής and the English Ecclesia (a favorite term of startup churches and themed Sunday schools), the speaker to the ἐκκλησία, the called-out assembly. The Preacher is the Gatherer, the one who collects the scattered breath of things into a single seeing. And the Cross is where that gathering is completed.
On the Cross, the form fully in act, Aristotle’s ἐντελέχεια, or completed work, of a human life, is spent completely and in the open, breath given out and taken up. My dissertation work, The Ecology of the Cross, has always meant, for me, that Christ enters hevel to its floor. He becomes the vapor over the water, the generation that goes, the brother in the field, and from inside that spending he makes the return faithfulness where it had been futility. The streams run to the sea, and the sea is not full, and they flow again. The Earth stands forever. And the breath that lifts off the Fork on a July morning, gone quickly, isn’t lost. Rather, it’s gathered.
Tomorrow, the vapor will still be lifting where the current slows. I’ve stood on that bank enough days to know it will do the same tomorrow and that I won’t. הֶבֶל, hevel. It is the truest thing Ecclesiastes, or perhaps the entire Bible, says about me, and standing there or under the black walnut, I don’t hear that as a verdict. I hear it as the sound the world makes, keeping faith.
I’m drawing on Ecclesiastes 1 (the hevel refrain and the cycles of sun, wind, and water), Genesis 4 (Abel, and the blood crying from the ground), and Romans 8:20–22 (the creation subjected to futility). The Greek terms come from the Septuagint of Ecclesiastes and Paul's letter to Rome. Passages cited are from Oremus (in the NRSV).