Creer que Dios habla

The Skeptic Believer

A wise man exercising a severe critic of the religious and moral frame of mind of his contemporaries, Qohelet displays this task in a radical but rather joyful manner. This joyfulness I understand to be the consequence of assuming human impotence regarding knowledge in a sound way, i.e. without trying to deny it neither through any traditional concession to the human need of metaphysical shelter nor through any sort of self-assurance, which means through any kind of confidence of being powerful in the field of knowledge.

In this paper I’m aiming at something quite specific, namely an understanding of what I would like to call a spiritual non-nihilistic deconstruction of the metaphysical shelter and the consequent demolition of dogmatic confidence and self-assurance. This ‘living in the open’ is a many-faced issue that has been observed in the Western Tradition in a peculiar manner when related to the spiritual life of the individual. I’m referring to the mystical experience of reaching the un-knowledge of the divine through a systematical process of self-negation.

But before going any further, I would like to set forth my prejudice in this way: Most individuals may assume that they are protected under the ceiling of a certain set of doctrines or that they are intellectually powerful under the influence of some common ideology or even by means of the rationalization of certain traditional practices and habits. This done, they’ll inevitably tend to forget God, since God is properly to be approached by the removal of the self and its operations.

So let us pay attention to some presuppositions already working in my approach.


My first presuppositions is that Qohelet—without being himself a mystic— systematically presents ‘all’ possible beliefs as senseless (vanity of vanities, all is vanity). Now, from an epistemological point of view, this means that, since we can understand ‘beliefs’ in a wide sense as being sets of opinions, doctrines, ideologies or even practices and habits, Qohelet’s faithful demolition of ‘all’ beliefs means that the only sole belief he is willing to retain is God’s existence. Moreover, the point he is trying to make when he claims that ‘all’ is vanity of vanities is that this unique belief in God is best served when standing radically alone with absolutely no other belief aside.

My second presupposition is that Qohelet’s famous expression ‘under the sun’ should be understood as meaning ‘under the capacity of human knowledge’. I must mention here some authors like Barton, Zapletal or Zimmerli who think that ‘all’ in ‘all is vanity’ refers only to ‘what is done under the sun’, which is, I believe, a very restricted ‘all’. If ‘all’ is all, it doesn’t concern exclusively human actions on earth as vane. Such authors search for textual support in Qo 5, 1: “God is in Heaven, Man is on Earth”, and they might be right, but I think that such interpretation of Qohelet’s wisdom would turn the whole Book into one that doesn’t ‘make hands unclean’.

If we are aiming to disclose real spiritual force from this Book, up to the point that we wouldn’t touch its pages without reverence, then I think we should read ‘under the sun’ not in a moral but in a post-metaphysical sense.

So, if ‘all’ means ‘all’, and if ‘under the sun’ means ‘under the power of human knowledge’, we are thus confronted with the rather awesome task of discovering what makes the difference between the belief in God’s existence, which Qohelet doesn’t doubt, and all other kind of beliefs, even the most traditional ones, that are seen by him as senseless spiritual obstacles or even burdens in the path towards the Divine.

In my opinion, the reason for Qohelet being utterly skeptic towards any belief whatsoever is that he—not being a mystic—has nevertheless learned through experience that as far as they are opinions standing in between God and the faithful, these believes will inevitably trouble the spirit and depart the self from its goal. It’s also quite transparent for me that, as a skeptic believer, Qohelet sees all opinions tending to behave as theoretical knowledge. Therefore, he is not acting as a moralist, in the sense of giving privilege to one kind of opinions over others. What he wants to achieve is to free the heart of the believer from the need of metaphysical shelter and ideological self-assurance, which means to free the human spirit from itself.

What we don’t know yet is why the belief in God’s existence is not considered by Qohelet a burden as well. Or if we put it this way: Why isn’t he a Nihilist?

Saint Jerome believed that the reason for this singularity of Qohelet’s belief in God was to be found in the nothingness of all created Beings when compared with the Creator. We couldn’t expect anything else from a theologian who assumes this positive account of God’s transcendence. But if our premise is that Qohelet is a radical skeptic believer, we must concede that he wouldn’t feel entirely comfortable with such a theological outcome. This is why I would intend a rather different approach to the question, namely an epistemological and post-metaphysical one.

I believe, in fact, that the epistemological clue to the difference between the belief in God and all other belief can be found in Qohelet’s faithful skepticism. If we define skepticism in general as the intellectual attitude that systematically doubts any proposition that pretends to portray knowledge and that, furthermore, evens all opinions as probable, we can certainly see that Qohelet is doing much the same when he states that ‘all’ is vanity. There is however something disturbing in the fact that God’s existence in not affected by this otherwise consistent process of demolition. Clear enough, God’s existence is by no means a scientific proposition, but why is it not an opinion to be evened with all others as well?

One thing we could assume with certain confidence, namely that for a Jewish believer of the Ancient times God’s existence wasn’t a matter of theoretical knowledge as it was for the Greek philosophers searching the First Principle. Let us use here that commonplace according to which Jewish sages understood that the Word brings things into Being. Since man is the only created Being that is capable of language, he has through language an immediate rational account of Creator and Creation. But if we are not going to respond as Saint Jerome did, assuming a metaphysical reading of this rational account in terms of some elaborated theological opinion, we must confront ourselves with accepting that God’s existence may not be a matter of opinion! This is—I would presume—the main asset of Qohelet’s wisdom.

Now, provided that it isn’t knowledge of any kind, what can it possibly mean that God’s existence is not an opinion? Moreover, what on earth can it mean that not being an opinion the belief in God is not even a belief?

What we are stating here is that, in a basic platonic epistemological scheme where the only two terms were knowledge (episteme) and opinion (doxa), Qohelet’s belief in God’s existence must be placed as a rather special kind of doxa that seems to burst the scheme. In fact, the pyhrronian skeptics criticized the platonic epistemological scheme as being actually a twofold display of opinion, i.e. the opinions that, labeled as knowledge, were supposedly not opinions any more, and those that, not being able to reach the high category of knowledge, were just opinions. As far as I see, Qohelet’s doubt is doing pretty much the same, treating all knowledge as mere opinions and all opinions as pretended knowledge. Therefore, they should all be set aside as vanity.

This assumed we can now go a step further. If the existence of God isn’t an opinion of which we should bother, that may be so precisely because it is the only opinion that, properly understood, can’t pretend to be knowledge of any kind. This would save that sole opinion from the fate of being vanity.

Now let’s see what is implied in this thesis.