Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (9). Even More Agnosticism from Ecclesiastes. Justice!

Today’s Bible reading: Ecclesiastes 4:1-3; 4:13-16; 5:8; 9:13-15.

One of the things that makes life seem most meaningless is that it is unfair. The powerful oppress the weak, and God does nothing about it.

“Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Behold, the tears of the oppressed, and there is no one to comfort them! And for this reason, the dead are better off than the living, and better yet are those who have not yet been born—for they do not have to see the injustice on the face of the Earth.” “If you travel somewhere and see justice violently taken away, do not be amazed. What do you expect? The administrator who does the injustice has an administrator over him, who has an administrator over him, and so on,” that is, injustice is built into the very fabric of every government. Then Solomon tells a sad story. “There was a little city, with a little population, and a great king came and surrounded it. But in the little city there was a little wise man who figured out how to save the city. But now nobody remembers who he was.”

Not everyone accepts this fate. Certainly one of the poets who wrote what we now know as Carmina Burana did not accept it:

Sors immanis
Et inanis,
Rota tu volubilis,
Satus malus,
Vana salus
Semper dissolubilis,
Odumbrata
Et velata
Michi quoque niteris;
Nunc per ludum
Dorsum nudum
Fero tui sceleris.

Here are some choice words against the fates, the gods, God, perhaps a defiance against the injustice of the world. The little phrase “dorsum nudum” should give you an idea. “Fate monstrous and empty, you are a whirling wheel; when you are in a bad place, health is of no use, it can be overshadowed and hidden…now in the game of fate, I bare my butt against your villainy.” Is this defiance (mooning fate) or is it giving up, baring his shoulders to the whips of fortune? We cannot know, can we?

All of the prophets of the Bible—the major ones like Isaiah, the minor ones like Amos, and Jesus of Nazareth—have refused to believe that injustice will not be set right. They all proclaimed a coming kingdom, which they all understood in different ways, in which injustice would be brought to an end. Not soon enough for those who have already died, but at least at some point in time. Ezekiel dreamed (even hallucinated) about the literal re-establishment of the earliest Law of Moses and the priests. Amos just saw justice rolling down from Heaven. Jesus said his kingdom was not of this world at all.

And it is true that we see evil people brought to ruin, sometimes—but no more often than we see good people brought to ruin. And everybody knows that rich people are well insulated against bad luck. If you fuck up the economy of a whole nation, that nation’s government will give you a handout. But the poor are one little crisis away from financial ruin. I see no evidence that the prophets were right. Indeed, their vision is becoming ever more unattainable.

I am filled with the prophet’s zeal, and salivate at the thought that there will someday be justice. But I fear that I am just imagining it, and that, after all, Solomon will turn out to have been right. I can bare my butt in the face of Luck, or allow it to lash my back, but it will make no difference, so to speak, in the end.

The Inevitable Conclusion?

Many conservative Christians believe that the United States is God’s nation—not for historical reasons, such as Israel, but because God has chosen America to conquer the forces of heathen liberalism in the world. But they only believe that this is the case if the Republican Party is ruling it. It is their hope—and for some of them, their goal—that America become a Christian nation ruled by Christian force.

Perhaps if these people would read their Bibles they might see a parallel from the ancient world that would frighten them. The ancient nation of Judah was ruled by kings and priests who used force to impose religion on their nation. This ancient religious dictatorship ran the nation of Judah into the ground. There was only one way out of the religious stranglehold: conquest. They were conquered by a pagan empire (Babylon).

If the religious conservatives attain the religious dictatorship that some of them seek, there will, once again, probably be only one way out. It is not hard to guess what will happen. Religious conservatives gleefully rack up more debt whenever they see a chance to start another war. They use “fiscal responsibility” as a campaign phrase but have never honored it. China has the largest reserves of cash, and America has the largest debt. This is the proverbial “handwriting on the wall,” which is another reference to an Old Testament story, in which a hand wrote Babylon’s fate on a wall, and immediately thereafter Persia conquered Babylon. This time, however, it is not words but numbers on the wall.

A New World Symphony

There are only about a dozen pieces of music—well, two or three dozen at most—that can bring tears to my eyes. One of them is Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony. It is considered by some to be the perfect expression of Americana. The composer, however, considered it to be Czech, just like himself, and he called it “From the New World” because he happened to be visiting America when he wrote it. It sounds like a little country village of the nineteenth century. Hannibal, Missouri, during Mark Twain’s boyhood. In fact, Dvořák was living in New York City when he wrote it.

It brings tears to my eyes not because it evokes scenes of America, and only partly because of its supernal melodies. I cry because this music creates, in the minds of many listeners, a vision of what a world could be like, how fair the world could be, if it only were not for our religiously-inspired and profit-fortified arrogance and hatred. It is the symphony of a new world, one that will be forever beyond our reach. It would not be heaven, filled with cotton-candy airy sweetness. There is dissonance, but it is meaningful dissonance. The New World Symphony has melodies of heartbreaking sadness. These sadnesses are, however, resolved and made meaningful by the roles they play in the glorious climax.

I have little faith that such a world—in which we still have challenges and pain, but in which we ultimately prevail against them, the kind of world the Biblical prophets promised—will ever exist. But, for brief moments, when I listen to such pieces of music as the New World Symphony, I can fantasize about such a world.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (8). Just Enjoy Life, Part Three.

Today’s Bible reading: Ecclesiastes 4:6; 5:12; 5:18-20; 6: 1-9; 9:7-10; 10:19.

Just enjoy life—This was one of the important conclusions of Ecclesiastes. Consider two of the passages above. One says, “Go eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do.” This has a second layer of meaning: If you know that you are doing evil, you cannot really enjoy your bread and your wine. “Keep your garments white and oil on your face…” Today we would say, keep body and clothes clean, so that you can feel good about yourself, in confident happiness. “Food is for laughter, and wine gladdens life; and money answers everything.”

But Solomon does not say just to enjoy empty pleasures. The Biblical Solomon is said to have had a thousand sexual partners, but he was miserable. The writer of Ecclesiastes, pretending to be Solomon, says that true sexual enjoyment is, “Enjoy life with the wife whom you love.”

But the kind of pleasure that is most fulfilling is the satisfaction of good work. Among the passages noted above: “Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much; but the surfeit of the rich will never let him sleep.” Note that a craftsman can sleep, contented with his good work; but a slave cannot feel satisfaction. “Behold, what I have seen to be good is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all your work at which you spend the few days of your life under the sun. Your gift is to enjoy what you have been given, little or much. If you are happy, you won’t have time to sit around and think about the days of your life.” You won’t be singing, as Roy Clark did in the 1960s, “Yesterday when I was young, the taste of life was sweet, like rain upon my tongue…”

According to Solomon, it is a great tragedy when you cannot enjoy whatever good you may have. “There is a great evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavily upon men: God may give a man everything that one could desire, and yet does not give him the power to enjoy it. He could have a hundred children, and live to a ripe old age, but if he cannot enjoy them, a stillborn fetus is better off than he is, for the fetus comes from nothingness and goes into nothingness, and has never known anything; at least the dead fetus can rest. It is better to enjoy what you can see than to always be yearning for what you cannot have.”

Once again, we encounter Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, Luck the Empress of the World. Enjoy your work and your pleasure right now, don’t wait until it is too late. “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might—for there is no work, no thought, no knowledge, no wisdom in Death to which you are going.”

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (7). Just Enjoy Life, part two

Another pleasure, which takes up most of the Song of Solomon (another unjustly ignored book of the Bible) is romantic love. To save space, I will not quote the Song of Solomon. But here is part of a medieval poem that is in Carmina Burana:

Si puer cum puellula
Moraretur in cellula,
Felix coniunctio.
Amore suscrescente,
Pariter e medio
Avulso procul edio,
Fit ludus ineffabilis
Membris, lacertis, labilis.

The unknown minstrel wrote, if a young man and a young woman are in a little room, how happy their coupling; love grows, and from them weariness is driven away, and playfulness begins in their limbs, their arms, their lips.

I think most of us realize that no more long-term happiness can be found in loose sex than in excessive drinking. We can be truly happy only if we take care of our bodies and respect other people. But there is no denying that sex is one of the greatest pleasures of life, a fact regarding which the Biblical writer of Song of Solomon was not bashful.

Erotic love is actually three different things, as explained by Helen Fisher in Why We Love. One kind of erotic love is lust, caused by the hormone testosterone, which a person can feel for many others at the same time. Another kind is passion, the crazed fixation upon just one other person, caused by the brain chemical dopamine (it is interesting that this neurotransmitter sounds like “dope” and makes you act like a dope). The third kind is contentment, caused by the hormone oxytocin. Promiscuity makes use of only the first. Although being in love can make you miserable (sound familiar to any of you?), human experience is poorer without it. By the time you get older, love consists of little teacups of oxytocin. But it is mighty good.

But as we enjoy summer and autumn, let us remember the pleasures of drink and love, and other pleasures that restrictive religion tells us we should feel guilty about even in moderation. Let us not spend our lives denying ourselves moderate and safe pleasures, only to find ourselves old and unable to enjoy them. For far too soon, Luck the Empress of the World will draw our time to a close.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (6). Just enjoy life, part one.

With this entry, I resume a series that I began last spring, and which was interrupted by (in my opinion) more urgent postings. The most recent one was posted on March 6, 2010. In this series, I compare and contrast thoughts from Carmina Burana (Carl Orff) and the Bible, to reach some conclusions that are quite different from fundamentalist Christianity. Please look back at the earlier five entries if you missed them.

In the previous entry in the Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi series, we saw that the writer of Ecclesiastes, whom many assume to be Solomon, reached the conclusion, at least temporarily, that we should stop worrying about the ups and downs of life, and whether it makes sense, and just enjoy what we have. Earlier in this series we also examined pieces of music, especially Orff’s Carmina Burana, which expressed some of the same ideas as Ecclesiastes.

There is also a fair amount of medieval poetry, used in Carmina Burana, which celebrates the enjoyment of life.

One kind of enjoyment is drinking. While the Bible has little to say about the enjoyment of drinking, the Persian poet Omar Khayyam had a lot. I wanted to share with you some of the medieval poetry of Carmina Burana with you. An unknown minstrel wrote what appear to be the words to a drinking game. Read the Latin words aloud and appreciate their beauty:

Semet bibunt pro captivis
Post hec bibunt ter pro vivis,
Quater pro Christianis cunctis,
Quinquies pro fidelibus defunctis,
Sexies pro sororibus vanis,
Septies pro militibus silvanis,
Octies pro fratribus perversis,
Nonies pro monarchis dispersis,
Decies pro navigantibus,
Undecies pro discordantibus,
Duodecies pro penitentibus,
Tredecies pro iter agentibus.

It translates roughly:
Once they drink for those in jail;
After that, three times for the living,
Four times for all Christians,
Five times for those who died faithful,
Six times for the weak sisters,
Seven times for the forest rangers,
Eight times for erring brothers,
Nine times for wandering monks,
Ten times for the sailors,
Eleven times for those who quarrel,
Twelve times for those who repent,
Thirteen times for travelers.

Then the unknown musician wrote about how everybody drinks, so you might as well too:

Tam pro papa quam pro rege
Bibunt omnes sine lege.
Bibi hera, bibit herus,
Bibit miles, bibit cierus,
Bibit ille, bibit illa,
Bibit servus cum ancilla,
Bibit velox, bibit piger,
Bibit albus, bibit niger,
Bibit constans, bibit vagus,
Bibit rudis, bibit magus,
Bibit pauper et egrotus,
Bibit exul et ignotus,
Bibit puer, bibit canus,
Bibit presul et decanus,
Bibit soror, bibit frater,
Bibit anus, bibit mater,
Bibit iste, bibit ille,
Bibunt centum, bibunt mille.

It translates roughly:
The pope the same as a king,
Everyone drinks without restraint.
The mistress drinks, the master drinks,
The soldier drinks, the cleric drinks,
The man drinks, the woman drinks,
The servant drinks with the maid,
The quick man drinks, the lazy man drinks,
The white man drinks, the black man drinks,
The regular drinks, the wanderer drinks,
The beginner drinks, the wise man drinks,
The poor man drinks and the invalid,
The exile drinks and the stranger,
The boy drinks, the greybeard drinks,
The president drinks and the deacon,
The sister drinks, the brother drinks,
The old man drinks, the mother drinks,
That woman drinks, this man drinks,
A hundred drink, a thousand drink.

I am certainly not one to encourage drunkenness. It’s fun to joke about, of course; the 1960s singer Shep Woolley (this could not have been his real name; and he doubled as the drunk Ben Colder) sang, “And we danced, and we danced, at least I thought it was dancing until somebody stepped on my hand.” But actually getting drunk is dangerous and extremely unhealthy, and I don’t do it. And, as my wife, who also does not get drunk, says, it’s no fun: if you pass out under the table, you miss all the fun. Passed out drunk, the operatic character Hoffman slept through his dream-come-true. But hey, when St. Patty’s day comes around, or at the end of a thirsty summer—at such a time (and most any other time) remember that a little mild drinking is a universal and timeless pleasure. As Henry Purcell wrote centuries ago, “If all be true that I should think, there are five reasons we should drink: Good friends; good wine; being dry, or the threat of being so by and by; and any other reason.”