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.