This account of human uniqueness reminded me of a passage (the precise location of which I can’t remember) in The Nature and Destiny of Man, in which Niebuhr pointed to the freedom of humanities’ appetites as one of our unique features, one of our glories and one of the chief occasions of our downfall. We are able to pursue any desire to the extent we choose, to towering absurdities of gluttony; on the other hand, we are able to inhibit any desire we choose, to the point of self-starvation in all manner of ways. Ecclesiastes is the case study par excellence regarding this uniqueness of humanity. The preacher indulges every appetite individually—to his dissatisfaction—and he concludes that the pursuit of lasting meaning cannot result from excellence or excess in any area of life. His final advice is to live life energetically, but to bear in mind its finitude; to enjoy life, but to remember judgment; to serve God, and keep His commandments.

I think Ecclesiastes and Proverbs should be read together. The whole matter of wisdom, of arranging one’s behaviors to lead in the direction of the true and final good of man, can be kept in perspective only with the insights of both books. Proverbs seems strangely practical, almost self-interested at times, in its constant advice about behaviors, while Ecclesiastes seems oppressively impractical in its blanket condemnation of the pursuits of men insofar as they purport to give meaning.

But humanity, in its openness to the world, needs both a sense of the futility of using our freedom to achieve imbalance and an understanding of the practices of self-control that can enable us to move toward the final end for which we have been created. What’s missing, obviously, is any very clear idea of what that end is exactly (pace the confident but vague pronouncements of certain catechisms)—and temptations to develop our own ideas about that end usually result in the kind of ill-fated experiment that the preacher of Ecclesiastes tried.

The occasion for these thoughts is the past few weeks, weeks of busyness to the point of consternation.

During such times, I tend to fall into a particular kind of depression, the kind in which one asks, “what is the meaning of all this activity?” But the real danger of these times is not the question or the consternation out of which it grows but the very real possibility that I might actually answer the question. It is a form of the temptation to conceive my own idea of the end of man. Alcoholism and drug-abuse bear deep similarities to intellectual ambition and devotion to loved ones, insofar as any of these things can become behavioral answers to the question, “what is the meaning of all this activity?” We must not answer the question. We must live life energetically, but bear in mind its finitude. We must enjoy life, but remember the judgment of God.

We must not answer our fragmentation through busyness by becoming more single-minded (presumptuously assuming some personal version of the end of man) but by gathering ourselves together to approach the whole in an orderly manner.