This issue’s Last Word comes from the Torrey Honors Institute’s Scriptorium Daily blog (scriptoriumdaily.com), where it was originally published on June 23, 2014.

“Vanity, all is vanity” is the theme of the Teacher in Ecclesiastes, the fruit of wide experience and deep reflection. Pleasure, folly, great projects, householding, riches, opulence, art, sex, honor, public works, all fall under the same verdict: There is nothing to be gained under the sun. By all means, take what joy in your toil and relationships that you can, but don’t expect anything lasting. Even wisdom is subject to wisdom’s critique.

Pursuing wisdom is good, says the Teacher, but don’t expect it to give you any real profit. But here, I think, wisdom teaches us that we want too much, not from life, but from “life under the sun.” Over and over again in the first few chapters, the Teacher adds the phrase, “under the sun,” and the phrase offers a limiting factor to the vision presented here. All that is under the sun is meaningless, but not all is under the sun.

What is so curious about this, though, is that we should want so much from life under the sun at all in the first place. This last year, part of what Nietzsche had to teach me as I studied him alongside Ecclesiastes was wonder at humans’ need for meaning. Why do we alone chafe at meaninglessness, even more than at suffering? The Teacher says:

“I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (3:10–11).

We live under the sun with eternity set in our hearts, with desires for a kind of life that eludes by nature creatures subject to change and decay. We have been made to long after a kind of life that we ourselves do not have, and trying to get that life from things under the sun is severely rebuked by the Teacher, who yet urges us to retain the smaller joys, the limited but real good of small things.

“I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil — this is God’s gift to man” (3:12–13).

In fact, “find enjoyment in your toil” is a major refrain of the Teacher.