Introduction
Graduate students in America are often warned about the tendency of American scholars to be provincial, that is, to stay complacently within the questions, answers, and assumptions of their own country. We must learn to be aware of our colleagues in Europe, especially those in the German- and French-speaking countries. There is however another kind of provincialism not often mentioned: the tendency we all share to stay complacently within the issues and assumptions of our own time in history. C.S. Lewis wrote in this regard that nothing struck him more when he read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. Camps that thought they were as completely opposed as two sides could be were all the time secretly united by a great mass of common assumptions. And we are only kidding ourselves if we think that ours is the age free of such blind spots.
What is to be done about it? Lewis writes:
None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
It is not that past authors were necessarily wiser than present ones, or more learned (although some were). It is that by learning to think with the authors of several ages, we form a frame within which to judge both our age and theirs, rather than letting our own age be our frame of judgment. As Roland Murphy says,
“How many far-fetched theories have been hazarded by modern writers who are locked up in their own crippling presuppositions? Even the vagaries and extravagances of ancient exegesis can have a sobering effect on current scholarship. . . .As David Steinmetz. . .has remarked, ‘The principal value of precritical exegesis is that it is not modern exegesis. . . .”
That temporal provincialism is indeed a problem in the biblical guild can be seen by looking at how contemporary scholars treat the history of interpretation. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (for example) has a fourteen-page article devoted to the history of interpretation of the Old Testament, which begins:
The modern era of biblical interpretation may be said to have begun ca. 1650. Until that date most Christian exegesis viewed the Bible as a heaven-sent collection of writings, a report of events that were independent of their cultural and historical milieux. A narrow view of inspiration neglected the role of the sacred writer in the composition of the books and ignored the possibility of development in OT revelation. The criticism of that era was dogmatic and theological. There were, of course, individuals who questioned one or the other traditional viewpoint, but these isolated scholars failed to capture the attention of their contemporaries.
By 1650, however, fresh intellectual currents had gathered sufficient impetus to alter the biblical sciences.
This finishes the authors description of sixteen hundred and fifty years of interpretation, all the many centuries before the exegetes who walked in darkness saw a great light.
To do justice to the NJBC, there is in fact another fifteen-page article, this one on the history of interpretation of the New Testament, in which the first sixteen hundred and fifty years of exegesis gets a little over a quarter of a page. But there again we find signs of provincialism: after listing exegetes up to Augustine who contributed to NT criticism, the period from 430 A.D. to 1483 A.D. is leapt over by the following comment: “Although the Middle Ages, especially the great scholastic period, contributed to the better understanding of Scripture, the contributions to real NT criticism were not major.” This author is undoubtedly repeating what he has been told, but were he to read commentaries from the time, or a chapter from a history of biblical studies in the Middle Ages, his impression would probably change.
The purpose of this paper therefore is to offer token resistance to “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about,” as Chesterton called it. In the first half, I will attempt an overview of and reflection on an influential commentary from the Middle Ages;I will complete my reflections in the second half by looking at medieval and modern commentary side by side. My purpose is not to rank them but to contrast them, not to have a “duel of the commentaries” but rather a dialogue of the commentators-- to crack open a window so that the “clean sea breezes of the centuries” can clear the air a bit.
The first mind that needs clearing is my own. When I read older commentaries, they seem to miss obvious difficulties; when I read newer commentaries, they seem to create obscure ones. There is obviously an enormous difference in presuppositions between old and new exegetes, and I know each of them by smell, so to speak, but exactly how and why they differ is not clear to me. Nor is it clear to me with whom and in what respects I agree. This paper will help me gather my thoughts before me and see what they all come to.
Part I: Bonaventure on Ecclesiastes
For this purpose, I have chosen a commentary on Ecclesiastes by St. Bonaventure, who is regarded as one of the twin pillars of the scholastic period, along with Thomas Aquinas; he was the second non-Church Father to receive recognition as a “doctor of the Church.” His commentary on Ecclesiastes was a “classic,” according to Beryl Smalley, who writes, “I have seen a large number of postills on Ecclesiastes of the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: all quote Bonaventure and all quote him anonymously.”
Historical Background
The thirteenth century was an exciting time to be an exegete. Biblical studies were moving from the monasteries to the schools, the works of Aristotle were being introduced into Europe, and the new mendicant religious orders were leading the way in a gospel-driven intellectual revolution;these converging forces were accompanied by an explosion of theoretical and technical innovations, including concordances, Bible dictionaries, renewed interest in and knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, and interlinear and facing-page Hebrew-Latin Bibles, and the chapter and verse divisions we use today.
The University of Paris took a particular descendent of Jerome’s Vulgate as their standard text, due to its unavoidable interconnection with the glosses, and it was (as they acknowledged) in a sad state, full of corruptions and interpolations. Even the original Vulgate translation was based a limited number of manuscripts. However, an enormous co-operative labor by Dominican exegetes produced the correctoria, long lists of variant readings and amendments to the text gathered from older Latin Bibles, the comments of the Church Fathers, and from the original Greek and Hebrew languages with the assistance of contemporary Jews; and as the thirteenth century progresses we see Scriptural references become much more precise than before. It was only the beginnings of textual criticism as we have it today, but it was a significant advance over the previous centuries.
A university education in theology at the time was heavily biblical, much more so than a typical theology degree today. The first two years of study were spent studying the entire Bible “cursorily,” i.e., going quickly through the text of every book to grasp the basic literal meaning of the text. The next two years were spent studying the Sentences of Peter Lombard, on which every student had eventually to write a commentary as a step towards his degree, somewhat like the doctoral dissertation today. Then came two years of careful study through one selected book of the Bible with a master. When these first six years were completed, the student was considered a “Biblical Bachelor,” and was assigned to guide beginning students through the initial “cursory” study of the entire Bible. When the student of theology passed all courses and requirements, he received the title Magister in Sacra Pagina, “Master of the Sacred Page”.
Some have thought that Bonaventure’s Commentarius in Ecclesiasticam dates from the point in his studies when he was giving cursory commentary for beginning students. However, as Ms. Smalley has noticed, his commentary does not quite meet the usual description of these cursory commentaries: as a rule they are unoriginal, staying close to the accepted glosses and commentators, and necessarily sketchy, while Bonaventure’s postill on Ecclesiastes is in many respects original, even trend-setting, and thorough to the point of being exhaustive. For whatever reason, it seems that he singled out Ecclesiastes for special attention,leading others to conclude that the commentary dates from his later years as a master.
While I have said that his commentary showed originality, Bonaventure’s readers should be aware that originality was not seen as a goal in medieval scholarship: as a rule, when the scholastics found a giant in the tradition they preferred standing on his shoulders to whacking at his knees. Hence Bonaventure shows close dependence on St. Jerome, Hugh of St. Cher, and the traditional anonymous glosses, in addition to his original achievements. I will not take up space in this short paper with identifying which aspects are original to Bonaventure and which are part of the tradition, both because Bonaventure himself did not care that much and because it would not really further the purpose of this paper.
We turn now to the commentary.
The Prologue
The prologue begins with a quotation from Ps. 39:5 (40:5), Blessed the man whose hope is the name of the Lord, and has not had regard for vanities, and lying follies. (It was customary to begin the prologue to a commentary with a quotation, meant to bring out the chief themes of the book at hand, from elsewhere in Scripture.) There follows a long, stirring, and heavily theological discourse on why the man who hopes in the Lord has beatitude or blessedness, while the man who sets his heart on the vanities of the world is himself rendered vain, in the sense of empty or futile. This section lays the remote intellectual foundations for understanding the theology of Ecclesiastes, introducing the ideas of beatitude and vanity, eternal and temporal, God and the world; the book of Ecclesiastes itself is not mentioned.
Bonaventure moves into Ecclesiastes by noting that the wise mans chief concern is to teach people the way to beatitude. And since he has just argued at length that to arrive at beatitude one must love eternal things, despise temporal things, and lead a good life in interaction with a corrupt world--but before I get to his conclusion, an explanatory note is in order.
Shortly before the composition of this commentary, it had become the custom to use Aristotle’s “four causes” to analyze and introduce a book of Scripture. To get a quick and crude idea of the four causes, think of a sculptor carving a statue. The sculptor himself, along with his chisel, would be called the “efficient cause” of the statue, because the motion which produces the statue originates in him. The stone out of which he carves the statue would be called the “material cause” of the statue, because it causes the statue’s production just by being the stuff it is made of. The shape that the sculptor gives the statue, the shape that makes it a statue instead of a hunk of rock, would be called the “formal cause” of the statue, because this shape also causes the existence of the statue as statue. Lastly, there is the “final cause” of the statue, and this would be the purpose for which the statue was made--aesthetic enjoyment, memorialization, or what-have-you. Since these four causes can be found anytime something comes into being, and since all causes of coming to be can be grouped under these four headings, the medievals learned to use them as a tool for organizing thoughts and writings. They used the four causes to analyze grammar, the sacraments, mathematics, the angels--everything. It was only a matter of time before they began to analyze books in the same way. Hence Bonaventure begins his proximate treatment of the book of Ecclesiastes by walking through its four causes.
Final Cause.
The final cause of any book is the authors purpose in writing, which gets me back to what I was about to say a moment ago. The wise mans chief concern is to teach people the way to beatitude. And since--as Bonaventure has just argued at length--to arrive at beatitude one must love eternal things, despise temporal things, and lead a good life in interaction with a corrupt world, the wise Solomon produced three books: Proverbs, which teaches one to interact wisely with the world; Ecclesiastes, which teaches one to hold temporal things in contempt; and the Song of Songs, which teaches one to love heavenly things. It is true that modern scholars have abandoned the notion that Solomon could have written Ecclesiastes, but there is still some profit in reflecting on Bonaventures approach to the problem of how the Wisdom books relate.
There is a sense in which the mind only sees what it already knows. In a dark room, the brain uses previous memory together with imagination to organize and flesh out a few glints of light here and there into an amazingly accurate picture; in a similar way, the mind uses its pool of previously held ideas to organize and flesh out incoming data. Living in an age shaped by Darwin, Hegel, and Co., we look at the books of Solomon and see evolution and history. Proverbs must have been one stage, and then disillusionment with the optimistic viewpoint presented there led to the darker and more realistic views of Ecclesiastes. Bonaventure, however, living in a world shaped by Augustine, Francis, and Co., looks at these same books and sees mystical theology. Everyone who is serious about the spiritual life experiences the tension of being in the world but not of it.
A very rough analogy would be to compare Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae with the Imitation of Christ. The first is all about knowledge and how to get it; the second says repeatedly that the pursuit of knowledge is a snare and a pitfall. Both are true, both have been received into the stream of Catholic tradition, and one individual can even read them both and eventually hold them together in a single view (although it is very difficult to imagine one individual writing them both). This does not supplant the historical approach to the problem, but it does supplement it. It can be helpful to read an author whose mental interpretive filters are not the same as our own.
Material Cause.
At a crude level, of course, the material cause of a book is the parchment and ink (or equivalents thereof) it is made of. But Bonaventure is thinking of the book as an intellectual product in the mind of its author and its readers rather than as a physical product, so the stuff the book is made of is its subject matter. The material cause of the book is what it is about.
Ecclesiastes is about the vanity of things. Bonaventure spends a fair amount of time unpacking the idea of “vanity,” or emptiness, futility, falsehood, which is opposed to fullness of being, to “truth” in the metaphysical sense. He distinguishes three kinds of vanity: the vanity of mutability, the vanity of guilt, and the vanity of punishment. The first vanity arises from the changeableness of created things, and means nothing more than that created things don’t have the absolute fullness of being that God does; in itself this is a good thing, because the world isn’t supposed to be God anyway. The second vanity comes into play when a person clings to the changeable world and so is drawn into sin, which is both “empty” in the sense that it is lacking in being and “futile” in the sense that it can come to no good; this vanity is an evil, definitely not the way things are supposed to be. The third vanity consists in the punishments due to sin (by which Bonaventure seems to mean original sin rather than a particular personal sin), such as death and concupiscence. This kind of vanity leads to futility in actions, and is also an evil, at least for the person suffering it. Each vanity flows from the one before it: the vanity of mutability leads to the vanity of sin, and this in turn leads to the vanity of punishment.
Formal Cause.
The formal cause is what gives a thing its particular nature, what puts it in a species. What makes a book to be a particular kind of book is not what it is about but rather the way in which it is written, whether as a play or as a poem, as a treatise or a tragedy. When we ask about the formal cause of a book, we are asking about the way in which it is written: the genre, in modern terms.
According to Bonaventure, Ecclesiastes speaks in a manner “unique among the other books”: he speaks as one who solemnly proclaims serious truths,setting forth different opinions, speaking here in the manner of a wise man, and there in the manner of a fool, so that out of the clash of different opinions a single truth may become clear in the minds of the audience.
Now my reaction to this, as a modern, is to request a color-coded text in which the wise man speaks in red letters or something of that sort; but Bonaventure means something more subtle than that. He doesn’t mean that Ecclesiastes is a patchwork of different people speaking with no indication as to who they are, but that there is one wise man speaking who sometimes speaks as though he were a fool. Roland Murphy has recourse to a similar interpretation when he argues that Eccl. 8:12b should remain as a part of the original work: “But one can allow it to remain as part of the work if one recognizes that he is repeating, even quoting, the traditional doctrine that he does not adhere to.” Usually Bonaventure avoids leaning on this method, preferring instead to interpret everything (including 8:12b) as spoken in the author’s own voice.
A good example of Bonaventures preference is his commentary on Eccl 5:17. After presenting the traditional view that the author speaks here in the voice of an Epicurean, he goes on to suggest that the author may be speaking in his own voice:
But nonetheless to understand the things he says, two things should be noted, namely the his reason and manner of speaking. . . .Some things he says truly, but other things ironically . . . some things he says approvingly, but in others he is merely recounting what he himself has done. . . . Likewise, some things he says, recounting what he has thought. And he uses this manner of speech often in this book, like a man telling the story of his temptations. Hence this book was, as it were, a kind of meditation of Solomon. And just as a man changes from one meditation to a different opinion in accord with different considerations, as when he thinks something is good, and afterwards thinks differently about it, so Solomon tells the story of his thoughts in this book.
Efficient Cause.
As was said above, the efficient cause of a book is the author, and for Bonaventure, as for all pre-modern commentators, the author of Ecclesiastes is Solomon. Despite this sharp disagreement with modernity, however, it is interesting to see how he approaches the question of authorship.
In favor of Solomonic authorship, he argues that Solomon was the most suitable person to write the book. After all, Ecclesiastes contains severe condemnations of riches, and honor, and the pursuit of knowledge, so the person condemning should be someone who has experience of these things. If a poor man condemned riches, who would believe him? So our author needs to be someone who was powerful, rich, pleasure-seeking, and a pursuer of knowledge. But we know of no one more powerful, rich, pleasure-seeking, and wise than Solomon, so he is the best candidate.
Against Solomonic authorship, Bonaventure points out that its not helpful for a sinner to condemn sin: its more a source of scandal than of edification. Furthermore, it would seem to be a sin for Solomon to write the book, the sin of hypocrisy.
He defends Solomon first by pointing to the traditional idea that Solomon repented at the end of his life, and wrote Ecclesiastes as a result. But even if he didn’t, Bonaventure argues, the Holy Spirit can speak true things through both good men and bad, as Christ implies when he instructs the people to do what the Pharisees say but not what they do. Knowing that the book was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, we don’t need to bother ourselves about the moral quality of the man who wrote it. As for the problem of hypocrisy, he points out that Solomon was given the gift of wisdom in a rather impressive manner, and so he had a duty to use it for the people: it would have been a sin not to use his wisdom.
The Commentary
Up to this point I have been speaking about the prologue. To describe the commentary itself in detail would require many, many pages, so I will limit my remarks to Bonaventures division of the text of Ecclesiastes, which actually gives a good sketch of the commentary as a whole.
The three main parts of Ecclesiastes are of course the title (1:1), the body of the text (1:2-12:8), and the epilogue (12:9-14). The only thing to note here is that Bonaventure does not consider the possibility that someone besides Solomon added these parts.
More interesting is the body of the text. First, the author sets out his thesis (1:2), namely that “all things are vanity.” Then he spends almost all of the body proving his thesis. Lastly, he concludes by restating the thesis (12:8). This way of viewing the text is consonant with the view that the author writes as a concionator, trying to persuade his audience by various arguments.
The proofs of the thesis fall into three parts. Bringing his analysis of vanity into play, Bonaventure says that the first part is about the vanity of mutability (1:3-3:15), the second part about the vanity of guilt (3:16-7:23), and the third part about the vanity of punishment (7:24-12:7). Although it is not clear to me that 7:24 is the right division point, the division of the text into these three categories is surprisingly convincing. The first part of Ecclesiastes does speak about things which are neither good nor bad in themselves, like the unceasing change of the sea, and the passing of times and seasons. Then the author begins in 3:16 to speak about the evil things that men do. At some point--its not clear exactly where--he transitions to speaking about the evils that men suffer, concluding with death in chapter 12.
The section about the vanity of guilt is rather long, because unlike the vanity of mutability, this vanity is not the way things are supposed to be. So after the author sets out the vanity itself (3:16-4:16) he then spends a lot of time setting out a remedy against it (4:17-7:23). Bonaventure sees him as setting out three kinds of guilt, namely malice (3:16ff.), avarice (4:1ff.), and imprudence (4:13ff), and then setting out remedies in the same order, namely against malice (4:17ff), avarice (5:9ff), and imprudence (6:8ff).
A couple of points for reflection occur here. First, Bonaventure sees the author of Ecclesiastes as being--at a certain level at least--very clear in his ideas and organized in his approach, rather than confused and wandering. These seem to be the two options: given so convoluted a text, the author is either very organized or very disorganized. However, this should not be taken too far: if you pursue Bonaventures division to a certain level of detail, the authors more human side emerges, with brief tangents, outbursts of emotion, etc., as in 8:15, where he says that the author speaks as a man who is disturbed.
Second, Bonaventure does not seem to have many literary techniques in his text-division arsenal. For example, he does not consider using repeated phrases as a clue to the division, and he obviously does not have the linguistic training to pursue a numerological argument of the sort proposed by Addison and Wright;he is forced to rely exclusively on a good grasp of the theme at hand and his tremendous ability to follow an argument. These limitations seem to be genuine limitations in training rather than results of pre-modern theological convictions about inspiration, because he seems quite ready to use the methods of text divisions he learned in the study of Aristotle’s corpus, which he certainly did not regard as inspired.
I hope the reader has gotten at least some kind of feel for Bonaventures commentary on Ecclesiastes. It is heavily theological: he is more concerned that Ecclesiastes be written under the inspiration of the Spirit than that it be written by a morally upright man; the subject of Ecclesiastes is one you can find in a book of devotions; the division of the text is according to a theological analysis of vanity. He obviously operates on the assumption that--to rephrase a common line--theology is the soul of Scripture.
Part II: Death and Afterlife in Ecclesiastes
Now that the reader has some impression of Bonaventures commentary as a whole, I would like to offer a more detailed account of a particular theme in the commentary, so you can see what the man looks like when he finally gets down to work on particular texts. The theme will be Ecclesiastes view of life after death.
But before we get there, I want to review how a contemporary scholar has treated the same theme in Ecclesiastes. By setting modern and medieval side by side, we can get a sharper picture of both, like professional coffee tasters cupping several coffees at a time. Our modern representative will be Roland Murphy, for several reasons: he is a Roman Catholic, and so he shares a certain background with both Bonaventure and myself; as says in the passage quoted above, he is more inclined than most contemporary scholars to take older commentary seriously;lastly, he is well respected by his colleagues as a top scholar in the field.
Murphy on Death and Afterlife in Ecclesiastes
In the introduction to his work, Murphy offers a quick overview of Qoheleth’s views on death. While ancient Israelites were remarkably resigned to death, overall, Qoheleth simply cannot reconcile himself to it. They found solace in the thought that they lived on in others’ memory (Prov 10:7) and in their own posterity, but he denied that there was any memory (Eccl 1:11; 2:16), and wondered whether his heir would be wise or disastrously foolish (2:18-19). Although he thought that death would be preferable to certain extreme situations (4:2-3; 6:1-6), otherwise it is entirely unwelcome, as the lugubrious tone of 12:1-7 shows. Death is the complete opposite of the only good Qoheleth can find, the life of pleasure; after death there is nothing (9:10).
Murphys commentary on particular passages fleshes out this summary. His comments on each passage are divided into three parts: first come the notes, a verse-by-verse analysis of textual-critical issues, grammatical questions, and other such things which would disrupt the flow of a commentary on the meaning; second is the comment, another verse-by-verse analysis, this time of the meaning and import of the text; lastly, there is the explanation, in which he takes a wide-angle view of the text, summarizing the main points and placing it within the flow of the book as a whole.
Ecclesiastes 3:16-21
Qoheleth bemoans the fact that human justice is corrupt, and in the worst of places--public justice. While he clearly affirms that God will judge both the good and the wicked, it is far from clear what form he thinks that judgment will take. He did not deny that God is just, Murphy says, but he saw no evidence for it. The divine judgment, so often affirmed in his biblical tradition, was something he could not deny, but it appeared useless in reality.
Its hard to see the connection between vv. 17 and 18. Perhaps Qoheleth means that human injustice shows that men are beasts despite the divine judgment.
The description of death in v. 19 is rooted in Gen 2:7 and Ps 104:29-30. The statement in v. 21, Who knows if the life-breath of humans goes upwards, and if the life-breath of animals goes down into the earth?, is equivalent to a denial: there is no distinction in fate between the life-breath of man and the life-breath of animals. Although Murphy is not sure what exactly position is being denied, he is sure that the proposition denied here is not the same as the proposition affirmed in 12:7, namely that the life-breath returns to God who gave it.
Ecclesiastes 9:4-10
The comparison in v. 4 of a living dog with a dead lion is heavily ironic, especially given the low value of dogs in the ancient middle east. Love, hatred, and jealousy are rhymed in the Hebrew of v. 6. Starting in v. 7, Qoheleth draws a "Carpe Diem" conclusion which is very closely parallel to a passage in the epic of Gilgamesh (ANET 90). These learned details are certainly not what one could find in Bonaventures commentary, since Bonaventure does not seem to have known Hebrew and was certainly not familiar with the epic of Gilgamesh, but it is difficult to see exactly what they say with respect to the meaning of the text.
Verse 10, says Murphy, "is motivated by a dour but realistic perspective: in Sheol there is no real activity or life, so act now! This description of Sheol is classic; it portrays a state of non-life."
Ecclesiastes 12:7
The process described in this verse is a reversal of Gen 2:7. “This is a picture of dissolution, not of immortality, as if there were a reditus animae ad Deum, “the return of the soul to God.” Qoheleth is not even talking about a “soul,” but about the “life-breath,” which Murphy says is “a totally different category of thought.” In a polemical context, Qoheleth denied that there is any distinction between the life-breath of men and that of animals (3:21), but he certainly shares with the rest of the OT the conviction that God is the owner and donor of life, i.e., the life-breath. (Cf. Ps 104:29-30; Job 33:4; 34:15; Sir 40:11b MT.)
From what we have seen of Murphys commentary, Qoheleth was a dour individual who had no use for the consolations faith was supposed to offer in the face of difficulties. Although he was confused about many things, he was quite clear in his opposition to an unknown philosophy which seems to have leaned in the direction of a special post-mortem fate for mankind. For Qoheleth, there is nothing after this life--at least, nothing to speak of--and death is simply a negative.
While I have not presented everything Murphy has to say about the theme of death and afterlife in Ecclesiastes, what I have presented is most of it, and certainly representative of the whole. We return now to Bonaventures commentary.
Bonaventure on Death and Afterlife in Ecclesiastes
Bonaventure does not have a summarizing section on the theme of death in Ecclesiastes, but I will pull together the main points after we have looked at his commentary on particular passages. His commentary on each passage is divided into two or sometimes three parts: first, he explains the literal sense as briefly and clearly as possible; next, he explains the spiritual sense of the text; lastly, he takes up doctrinal or exegetical questions which arise from the text, dealing with them in the classic scholastic question format.
This separation of the tasks to be accomplished was one of Bonaventure’s major innovations, and later commentators on Ecclesiastes followed his example.
Ecclesiastes 3:16-21
First, Solomon bemoans the perversion of justice by rulers. This leads him to look for Gods judgment; Bonaventure says that the judgment can be taken either to mean the time of judgment for each man, or the general time when all things will be revealed. It isnt clear what Bonaventure means by the general time; perhaps he is willing to attribute to Solomon (rather anachronistically) a clear view of the end-times.
Having described the evil, Solomon then discusses why things are the way they are now: God is testing men by making them very much like beasts. Evil men, seeing that their lives are like the beasts, will become like the beasts in behavior as well, while good men will persevere and live spiritually.
In the lines that follow, the author illustrates in detail the likeness between men and beasts. After showing the similarity, he says that the difference (the spiritual element in man) is very difficult to discern. Those who have faith know about the difference, and 12:7 is said in their person (the spirit returns to God); but those without faith have great difficulty discovering any difference, and 9:3 is said in their person (one fate comes to all).
In the “questions” on this section, Bonaventure raises the difficulty about the soul again: how can Solomon say, “Who knows?”, when there are abundant philosophical proofs of the immortality of the soul? To sharpen the point, Bonaventure runs quickly through a number of these proofs. In response to the objection, he says that, even though faith and philosophy are in agreement on this point, nevertheless without faith it is very, very difficult for philosophers to arrive at the truth. Even Plato, that stalwart defender of the soul’s immortality, erred by saying that animal souls are immortal--the other side of Solomon’s “who knows”!
Ecclesiastes 12:7
An important point arises in 9:4-10 which I would rather save for the last, so Ill turn now to 12:7.
The dust returns to the earth means simply that the body disintegrates into ashes, in accord with Gen 3:19 and Sir 40:11. The spirit returns to God who gave it (Ps 32:15 VUL); since God gave the spirit, the spirit gives back to God, like someone repaying a debt (2Cor 5:10). Bonaventure does not seem aware at all that, as Murphy notes, the spirit or breath mentioned here may not be the soul in the usual post-Plato-and-Aristotle sense of the term.
It is interesting to note that while Murphy cites Gen 2:7, the creation account, Bonaventure looks to Gen 3:19, the curse after the fall. This fits with Bonaventure’s take on this entire part of Ecclesiastes:according to his division, it treats of the “vanity of punishment,” and therefore treats of death insofar as death is a punishment for sin--and I take it that he means original sin specifically. Already starting at 7:24, Solomon has been discussing the vanity of punishment, i.e., the results of original sin, but up to 12:1 he was talking about punishment which is itself an occasion of sin, such as concupiscence. Here at last, after working slowly through the miseries of a fallen and sinful world which seems on every side to alienate man from his creator, Solomon finds a kind of punishment which actually calls us back to God: “Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the time of affliction comes....” (12:1) Death is indeed a negative in Ecclesiastes, as Murphy rightly concludes, but there is this one redeeming aspect to it.
Bonaventure also offers a spiritual interpretation of this passage: the “dust” refers to sinners, who are thrust into the depths of infernal darkness (this is a technical term, as will become clear below). He arrives at this interpretation by connecting “dust” to Ps 1:4 and “earth” to Prov 25:3.
Ecclesiastes 9:4-10
We go back now to the earlier passage. Here Solomon describes how men are led into a false sense of security because they do not see any providential difference between the fate of good men and the fate of evil men. This false sense of security then leads them into sin. First, he points out that no one can avoid death. Next, he describes how death puts one into a bad state. Lastly, he states the conclusion that would follow if indeed a man could not know whether what he does is pleasing to God, and whether there will be any reward for virtue.
In the questions on this passage, Bonaventure asks how Solomon could draw such an Epicurean conclusion. If we take the whole passage as being said in the person of an Epicurean, the answer is easy, of course; but Bonaventure prefers to take it all in the voice of Solomon. He says that Solomon draws the conclusion as what would follow if these premises were true, namely that a man cant know whether what he does is pleasing to God and whether there will be any reward for virtue. Solomon himself does not hold these premises, but he draws the conclusion as a hypothetical If X were, then Y would be.
But what about the statement that "the dead know nothing any more"? Surely this is not what we believe? In the commentary on the passage, Bonaventure simply notes that the act of knowing presupposes life, while the dead have neither life, nor motion, nor sense. In the questions, he says further that Solomon means that the dead did not know the things of this world, nor are they in the memory of those in the world, nor do they have any affection for things of this world.
What may seem odd to a modern reader is that Bonaventure not only accepts these gloomy views as Solomon’s, but accepts them himself as fact. He does not say that men of Solomon’s time thought the dead don’t know about the things of this world: he simply says that dead men didn’t know about the things of this world. His comment on v. 10 reveals that the past tense “didn’t” is the key. Commenting on the line, “For there is neither work, nor reason, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the depth (inferos) to which you are going,” Bonaventure cites Job 10:22 to support the claim that “there is no reason there” in the “depth,” and then explains: “Sinners went there, and everyone before the coming of Christ, as regards the outer part.” (Emphasis added.)
He doesn’t elaborate on what he means by “outer part,” or why everyone before the coming of Christ went there, but he didn’t need to in the thirteenth century. He was referring to a doctrine that every theology student would have known about, the limbus patrum, the “limbo” or “outer part” of the patriarchs. While the scholastics explored every theoretical detail, of course, you can find the basic idea in The Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Scripture calls the abode of the dead, to which the dead Christ went down, “hell”--Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek--because those who are there are deprived of the vision of God. Such is the case for all the dead, whether evil or righteous, while they await the redeemer: which does not mean that their lot is identical, as Jesus shows through the parable of the poor man Lazarus who was received into “Abraham’s bosom”.... Jesus did not descend into hell to deliver the damned, nor to destroy the hell of damnation, but to free the just who had gone before him.
Before Christ’s death and resurrection, everyone without exception went to “Sheol,” or Hell. However, Sheol had several layers: those who died in the state of grace went to the “outer part,” or limbus in Latin (where we get the modern term “limbo”); those who died outside the state of grace went to the deepest part of Sheol, the “depth of infernal darkness,” as Bonaventure calls it. When Christ died and descended into Sheol, he did not enter the deepest part, where the damned reside, but rather the outer part, where the souls of the justified were. These he released and brought with him into heaven.
This idea can be found clearly in some passages of the New Testament, as in 1Pet 3:18-19, 4:6, and John 5:25, while other passages merely hint at it, such as Phil 2:10. The early Christian authors Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian clearly pass it on, and the Church Fathers as well. By the time Bonaventure was writing his commentary, he could simply assume that all his readers were quite aware of these facts of the faith, and so he did not need to spell out the meaning of his reference to the limbus.
Knowing that he has the doctrine of the limbus patrum in the background helps explain why he simply accepts Solomon’s gloomy views of the afterlife as fact. Truth be told, there wasn’t much to be said for being dead before Christ came along. The ancient idea of the underworld as a shadowy realm of gibbering half-men may well be the way things were.
Ecclesiastes 9:4-10 is one of the passages for which Bonaventure offers a spiritual interpretation, but in the interests of space I wont go into that.
Concluding Reflections
Looking back on the two commentaries we have surveyed, we see different strengths in each. Murphy seems to be more historically aware, so to speak: he stops to question whether “breath” or “spirit” really means the same thing as “spirit” does for us today. When Qoheleth says that the spirit returns to God, is he really talking about the soul’s relation to it’s creator? Murphy’s linguistic skills are another strength. While Bonaventure chose not to use much of the linguistic and textual-critical data available to him, Murphy devotes a special section (the “notes”) to such matters. With such careful attention to ancient thought and language, Murphy measures up well against the words of Vatican II:
To rightly understand what the sacred author wished to assert in writing, one must give due attention both to the customary and native manners of perceiving, speaking, and narrating which were in force at the time of the hagiographer, and to the customs which were wont to be observed at that time in men’s dealings with one another.
Bonaventures strength seems to lie in what one might call theological awareness. How do Ecclesiastes statements about death and the state of souls after death relate to what the New Testament teaches, or for that matter to what theological/philosophical arguments can demonstrate? How does this treatment of death relate to the revealed cause of death, namely the fall of Adam? Bonaventure measures up well against the next line of the document just quoted:
But, since Sacred Scripture must also be read and interpreted by the same Spirit by whom it was written, to rightly unearth the sense of the sacred texts one must attend no less diligently to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture, with account being taken of the living tradition of the Church and of the analogy of faith.
Just as each commentator has particular strengths, so each commentator has particular weaknesses. Every approach to Scripture has its inherent temptation. The temptation in Bonaventures heavily theological approach is to keep Ecclesiastes on a leash, so to speak: in the attempt to fit Ecclesiastes into the analogy of faith, there is a danger that we will not allow the sacred text to challenge our way of thinking about the contents of that faith.
But there is also a weakness in Murphy’s very historical approach. (Every approach has its inherent temptation.) Perhaps the most striking difference between Bonaventure and Murphy is that the question of whether Ecclesiastes teaches truth or falsehood does not seem to occur to Murphy, while for Bonaventure it is a constant concern. For Bonaventure, if Ecclesiastes has a gloomy view of the afterlife, this has to be explained by reference to the limbus patrum; in fact, he has a special section of his commentary (the “questions”) devoted mainly to this sort of question. For Murphy, if Ecclesiastes teaches that there is nothing after death--well, that’s what the author thought, and an exegete’s job is to recover an accurate historical account of what the author thought.
This is the temptation peculiar to the historical-critical approach: to make history itself the goal rather than the means of interpretation. Historical considerations are necessary as a means of interpreting Scripture, and this is the great strength of modern efforts. But at the same time, one must keep firmly in view that the ultimate goal of using historical considerations in exegesis is not to discover history, not to discover merely what a historical individual historically thought, but rather to discover “the truth which God wished to be recorded in the Sacred Letters for the sake of our salvation.”
I hope this exercise in reading old books has been as helpful for my reader as it has been for me. Bonaventure’s slow, deep voice is a valuable one to have in the great conversation. If we continue to listen respectfully to men not only of many nationalities but also of many times, we will find ourselves surrounded by a cloud of wise counselors--and we will see more clearly what our age has to offer them.
