Pondering wisdom-folly polarity during Lent

Sometimes it’s important take a reprieve from meditating on death. I would like to focus directly on a binary or pair-group that Qoheleth develops in the Book of Ecclesiastes: wisdom and folly. These two terms, more generally, are often paired together in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament.

Please note that while I have taken several graduate courses in the old and new testaments, I am certainly no biblical scholar. As a Benedictine, I read scripture to try and hear the voice of the living God and what that God might be speaking to me. This is a phenomenological reading of scripture, which means not treating it as an object for detached analysis. Instead, I attend to experience, especially my own, considering current contexts (i.e. the horizon I mentioned last week) so that I can listen, interpret and make sense of how God, World and Self are given in that experience.

Ultimately, at least this is my desire, I hope to not reduce the encounter with God through scripture to merely my own gaze. I mean, I hope to not reduce God to my measure. So, in some ways, then, reading scripture phenomenologically is also a “counter-experience” to use a phrase by Jean-Luc Marion, a contemporary French philosopher and Catholic. Not only am I gazing at scripture, but I am also being gazed at. Okay, moving on.

At the end of Ecclesiastes, the author summarizes Qoheleth’s approach to wisdom by including two precepts: 1. Have reverence for God and 2. Keep God’s commands (I am using the Good News translation). When I first read this summary, I was struck at how forced it came across. I had just finished reading what some scholars describe as a “revolt” against the wisdom tradition that Qoheleth received by previous generations. Is the author of Ecclesiastes—by offering a neat and tidy summary—attempting to resolve the contradiction and tension between wisdom and folly? Would not a better approach, one that does not aim to resolve the tension or contradiction, be to hold wisdom and folly together as an inseparable paradox that itself might have something to teach and offer new generations of believers and non-believers alike? This is a key question that has emerged during Lent in my daily lectio of Ecclesiastes.

What might that look like, to hold wisdom and folly together in tension? Perhaps it might be that in holding this polarity in tension we experience God. In other words, a living life of faith should not be predisposed to absolving the tension but learning to accept and attend to it. To learn from it. Would it be possible, for example, to acquire wisdom in the absence of folly? How would I know what wisdom is or entails without being able to identify what it is not? Is it not through participating in folly that we learn to grow and acquire wisdom?

The next issue of The Record (April 2) will mark the last issue during the season of Lent. My plan is to continue pondering this wisdom-folly polarity and see how St. Paul’s notion of the wisdom of Cross might be seen as a response to the wisdom-folly distinction of Ecclesiastes. If Paul is saying that God’s wisdom appears in the Cross of Christ as foolishness, does this dissolve wisdom-folly polarity?