The Opacity of History

Every 2nd of May is, rather predictably, followed by a 3rd of May—but how the events of these or any two days unfold is more uncertain. ‘Unfold’, however, is not really the right word, certainly not as the writer of Ecclesiastes sees it, since unfolding suggests a certain sort of pattern, order, or even progress, which he does not discern.

Francisco de Goya’s two pictures referring to these dates may suggest a similar agnosticism, albeit they do so in two different ways. The painting of the terrible events of the 3rd of May 1808 seems to offer nothing by way of hope for the future. While for the early Christians the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church (Tertullian Apology 50), the blood of those executed on the 3rd of May in retribution for the events of the previous day seems simply to flow away into the ground. And in Goya’s Allegory of Madrid, it seems little more than happenstance that the words ‘Dos de Mayo’ are what ended up in the medallion held and trumpeted by the party of angels. Different royal portraits had come and gone in that medallion, as had the word ‘Constitución’, before ‘Dos de Mayo’ took its hallowed place. Thus the angelic party is left, somewhat unfortunately, to support whatever history throws at them, and are certainly not its determinants.

Taking this philosophy (or perhaps anti-philosophy) of history, the writer of Ecclesiastes recommends the moderation of one’s expectations, such that one can take pleasure in the rather modest but most easily attainable goods of existence—food, drink, and work. Rembrandt van Rijn, as represented before his canvas, seems a practitioner of this existential stance. He holds fast to the task he has in hand, and perhaps to the only thing to which he can himself endeavour to hold fast (namely his work). He seems resigned to what had been—and what else may yet be—taken from him. But for all that, he gives himself resolutely and devotedly to the work he has undertaken.

The patient acceptance of the way the world goes, no matter that as it goes it seems indifferent to human hopes, dreams and loves, represents a rather unusual attitude from the perspective of either Testament. It is markedly different from the indignation at wrong doing found in the Psalms or Job, for example, and from the impatient protests and demands for social justice made by such prophets as Amos, Micah, Hosea, and Isaiah. And if the New Testament epistles counsel patience, they do so while holding to rather deeper and clearer hopes for redemption than are voiced by the preacher of Ecclesiastes.

Ecclesiastes is closer to the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius (ruled 121–80 CE) or the humanism of Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) than it is to the thought of any other biblical writer—its hopes are distinctly this-worldly, modest, and unassuming, and tempered by an expectation that suffering is the common human lot. And at times it sounds notes of almost unrivalled gloominess:

And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun. (4:2–3)

Ecclesiastes’s sense of the opacity of history to purely human understanding (as distinct from the limited horizons of its hopes), is not, however, an otherwise unbiblical theme. Biblically speaking, God may make himself known in human history, but not through it. Or to put it another way, history may be the occasion for God’s revelation, but that revelation is not a matter of the unfolding of some pattern of progress readable from the face of human history itself. The secret of history is just that, and is revealed in God’s deeds and words, which serve to claim human history, rather than simply confirm it in the way it goes.

References

Tertullian. Apology. 2008. Tertullian Apologetical Works and Minucius Felix Octavius, Fathers of the Church, vol. 10, trans. by Emily Joseph Daly, Rodolph Arbesmann, and Edwin A. Quain (Washington: Catholic University of American Press), pp. 7–126