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Naked Questions/16 - After all, what matters in life is its end, not business
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 21/02/2016
"Besides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care. (...) The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; (…) The end of the matter; all has been heard."
Ecclesiastes 12,9-13
It's difficult to read great books. It would take meekness of mind, freedom of spirit, purity of heart, and above all poverty: not to have anything and not to defend anything. Some books and the great works of art come to us in our graves, and repeat to us 'come out'. But we do not manage to get out if we are not naked and poor in as we encounter the author who speaks to us and calls us, if we do not get rid of the shroud, leaving it 'wrapped up in a separate place'.
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This emptying process is even more difficult when it comes to a biblical text. We approach it carrying the loads of many ideologies about religion developed over millennia, rich in our ideas of ​​how God, our faith and that of others should be. And so these great texts do not sing, they fade away without touching us. They do not injure us, and they do not bless us. Qoheleth has blessed us in these four months we passed in his company week after week, but only if we have allowed him to enter up to the marrow of our soul. If we welcomed him to our house, talked and ate with him. And as we are approaching the end of our listening to his song, we find ourselves inundated by the only good consolation possible under the sun: reality in its nakedness, with its great sorrows and its potential and real joys.
Now, in taking leave of us, he gives us one last anti-comforting fresco on old age: “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth (...) before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those who look through the windows are dimmed, and the doors on the street are shut— when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low— they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way (...) the grasshopper drags itself along (...) the pitcher is shattered at the fountain". And then he concludes with his most cherished words that he taught us to understand and love: “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.” (Ecclesiastes 12,1-8). When you're still young, with many teeth (the 'keepers of the house', the 'grinders'), all bright and strong, and your hearing makes you capable of catching the singing of the birds, when desire to scale heights safely is alive in you, when eros (the 'grasshopper') is still strong, and the end of the race is still far ('the amphora that will break'), discover and experience the true joy of the good time you are having: “Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun. ... All that comes is vanity. Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth.” (11,7-9). Wisdom is to look at the whole of life from the perspective of its last days, and there is no dawn in our life that could be as beautiful as the one contemplated from the sunsets of others. Qoheleth does not sing lauds of old age: even here he is the one unmasking ideologies, those that talked too well about the elderly in his time, forgetting their costs and limits. He is anti-ideological and anti-comforting here, too. But he forces us to see old age and to place it at the centre of everyone's life. Especially today, when we have an extreme and vital need for this. The first step to build a new culture of old age and death is to start to see them, to look them in the eye; to get them out from the eclipse in which they entered and have been staying for decades. We shall learn to live and to grow again if we learn to die and to grow old again.
A culture of life loves old age, because it is its climax, not its negation. The culture of death casts and curses old age, and so it saddens even the brightest years. The degree of love for life of a civilization is revealed through its way of seeing and treating old age and death. A culture that's against life despises the old and claims to love children. A culture of life loves them both, because it can still see the beauty of the child when looking at the elderly, and does not make an idol out of the child (in Biblical humanism, the son is the anti-idol). If we despise old age an entire lifetime will steam up, and we do not read into today that has passed like just one day more but also like one day less. Cultures that love life use the tree as the metaphor for life, not the candle. The tree grows with the years, it flowers, it bears fruit and it usually dies at the height of its life returning as a gift to the earth that generated and nurtured it. The candle, however, melts by burning and even when it gives light the passing of time is its enemy. An old man can be seen as a big oak tree or as a wax stub that is dying. The Bible teaches us to look at the oak trees in our forest, as it loves life too much to present it to us like a graveyard populated by a lot of more or less consummated candles.
Old age is the great but denied challenge of our time. We live, and we will live in a world that is increasingly populated by old people but, paradoxically, no other age has ever debased old age and adored and flattered youth (but not the young) as much as ours does. Old age is now viewed only from the market, which is transforming our fear of growing old and dying in its largest business, creating the illusion that there might be a good way of aging that's different from welcoming it and calling it our 'brother'. In the market there is too much of drugged health created by our fear of the natural decay of the body. There are too much of insurances invented and fed by the illusion cultivated by a sense of absolute invulnerability.
Therefore, there is an urgent and vital need for new 'charismas' to teach us again how to grow old and die because we have forgotten it in the span of a single generation. Through the millennia we had developed a whole wisdom of the last stages of life. Perhaps one of the most precious fruits of the great religions had been teaching us how to suffer, grow old and die. There used to be a balance between life and death lived in and with our family, community, religion, faith, time, space and memory, in contact with nature that taught us the rhythm of life and death - which at one point got broken, especially in the West. For us today, old age is surrounded only by ugly adjectives: the word itself has been banished from a world that no longer understands it. But without a good culture of old age and death we cannot have a good relationship with life, with birth and with children. And the less the elderly are loved the less children are loved, and so the latter are transformed into rights or goods or idols.
The Book of Ecclesiastes, after all, was not just an essay. The epilogue of the book tells us that he was also a teacher, a man who 'taught', one who donated 'knowledge to the people', someone who had heard the call to communicate his own findings to others. That's why he is a model for every teacher who lives their job as a task, to help their listeners and students to ask the right, honest, courageous, and painful questions to life, questions that never become adulators. The teacher, if he or she is a friend of Ecclesiastes, works on the questions, hoping to succeed, sometimes, to give some answers that may be provisional and partial, therefore valuable, just as the naked questions and precious "why"-s that are rarely answered.
It is not easy to close this journey in Qoheleth's company, even though he reminds us: “Better is the end of a thing than its beginning” (7,8). We are not always able to stop the journey we have started, because we are not the masters of our time and forces. That's why the first word to be pronounced when a trip is ending is: thank you. Then, if the journey has been long, beautiful, full of encounters, surprises and discoveries, this word of thanks becomes big and plural. The first thanks goes to Qoheleth, that ancient old teacher I can and I want to thank because he is still alive. Thank you, Qoheleth, because your words have had a maturing effect on my life and faith, they served as purification of my many comforting ideologies and illusions. My certainties decreased in number, but those that remain are truer.
Thanks also to Director Marco Tarquinio. Two years ago, I communicated a desire that I strongly felt to him, to start commenting on some biblical books. I felt the need to make a small contribution so that those ancient and great books come back to us to talk about the economy and social life. I wanted to bring back Adam, Abraham, Hagar, Joseph, Moses, Job to our streets, to the halls of politics, to construction sites and to schools, from where they were and are still too far apart. I asked him to let me do this for two years of time, because I knew that the journey would not be short. And although I am neither a biblical scholar nor a theologian, only a professor of the economic sciences, the director surprised me with a generous and courageous 'yes'. In these two years we have commented on four books - Genesis, Exodus, Job and Ecclesiates - sharing in a human and spiritual experience that should be ranked among the greatest in my life. Today, exactly two years after the first episode on Chapter 1 of Genesis, this first biblical journey ends - even if the desire to return to meet other biblical books in a few months is alive and strong in me. The director still wanted to leave 'page three' of the Sunday issue to me, to continue, as early as next week, searching and writing.
Finally, thanks to you, my readers. There were hundreds of letters that you wrote to me - many of them were really beautiful -, and among them there was that of Anna, a 99-year-old midwife. I received it after the first episode of 'The Midwives of Egypt': perhaps the most beautiful letter of my life, which flourished from a beautiful old age. But all the others were gifts, too, bread and water that have fed me during this journey. And I would like to thank God, for the inspiration and the joy of having been able to write. It is all about gratuitousness. The journey continues, we shall stay together.
 Yes, the journey continues. And it continues with Luigino Bruni, who will continue contributing to this page of "Idee" (Ideas) sharing his valuable experience, the depth of analysis and the engaging writing characteristic of him. This is why I say our "thank you" to him. What he said to me actually regards "Avvenire", the newspaper where it is possible to combine ancient and new forms of wisdom, current issues and a vision for the future thanks to those who first envisioned it about half a century ago, to those who support it and those who keep building it. (mt)
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    [metadesc] => Si conclude anche il commento del libro di Qohelet, con una meditazione sulla vecchiaia, che è sempre più oscurata dalla nostra cultura. E con molta gratitudine, per questi tempo di riflessione tra le pagine della Bibbia e la nostra realtà, infine in compagnia di un antico maestro: scomodo e saggio
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Naked Questions/16 - After all, what matters in life is its end, not business
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 21/02/2016
"Besides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care. (...) The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; (…) The end of the matter; all has been heard."
Ecclesiastes 12,9-13
It's difficult to read great books. It would take meekness of mind, freedom of spirit, purity of heart, and above all poverty: not to have anything and not to defend anything. Some books and the great works of art come to us in our graves, and repeat to us 'come out'. But we do not manage to get out if we are not naked and poor in as we encounter the author who speaks to us and calls us, if we do not get rid of the shroud, leaving it 'wrapped up in a separate place'.
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Naked Questions/14 - Understanding the snare of the "dead flies" and the gift of the "prophets"
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 07/02/2016
“At the foundation of a community there is always a dark, hidden spot, a collective unconscious, which has its origin in the unconscious of the founder and in his/her human need to control. If the community is destined to grow and develop, this dark spot must be purified. The crisis is the purification of this collective unconscious. The community will have to shift from the myth of the perfect founder to a more collective appropriation of the founding myth, purified from what is not essential.”
Jean Vanier, The Founding Myth
“Dead flies make the perfumer's ointment give off a stench; so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honour.” (Ecclesiastes 10,1)
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A few verses ago he left us off with praising the light that illuminates the face of the wise ones (8,1), and now we see Qoheleth further complicating his discourse, showing the vulnerability and fragility of wisdom. Just like a fly that falls in the bulb of the ointment is enough to spoil it, just a little folly is enough to ruin wisdom. Not only wisdom remains "far off", "deep, very deep" (7,24), but even when we experience it, and manage to be, though temporarily, wise, Qoheleth seems to tell us that wisdom succumbs to stupidity. At the beginning of his discourse he stated, “I saw that there is more gain in wisdom than in folly, as there is more gain in light than in darkness” (2,13). Now, as he is approaching the end of his song, he says that folly is stronger. It takes only a little of it to corrupt everything. It is not a fruitful reading of this or other wisdom books if we match a meta-key of reading that reveals to us which verses are truer: the ones on the superiority of wisdom or those where Qoheleth claims the opposite. Instead it is more fruitful to read Qoheleth as a non-ideological, and therefore self-subversive, master of thought.
One of the basic ingredients of cultures that are not yet contaminated by ideology, or of those that have been able to resist or get rid of it, is their ability of self-subversion. Self-subversion, in the sense that the great economist Albert O. Hirschman gave to this word. It is the very rare virtue to question one's own certainties, it means not to look for the elements that confirm our ideas in the things that happen to us, but for those that deny or defy them. It is the virtue of those who believe more in the truth of life that flows by them today than in the truths that built and conquered yesterday. The self-subversive thought is useful for everyone, but it is essential for those who have embraced a faith, whether religious or secular, for those who have adhered to a great proposal promising a new land for them. The exercise of self-subversion is the best prevention against all forms of ideology. Ideology, in fact, is usually conclusive, because of its tendency to make us find at the end of the path just what we had placed there at the beginning. The birth of ideology is a process that consists of (at least) two operations. The first one begins when we still have the consciousness that reality has its own ambivalence, and that everything that happens around it is consistent with our beliefs. We still see a bigger world than that which confirms our thesis, but we start to exclude the uncomfortable and dissonant part from our analysis. The second step consists in convincing ourselves that the world is really made up of only the part that interests and confirms us: because of telling about a different world than the real one, we end up not seeing the totality of reality.
It is here that ideology becomes inexpungeable: evidence contrary to our ideas can no longer make us correct our beliefs, simply because we are no longer able to see that evidence. Like those who gradually lose the ability to see colours due to a disturbance of vision, and instead of getting a cure they become convinced that the world is black and white. It is also for this reason that the person captured by ideology appears to us as someone with good faith and a strange sincerity, which can confuse our judgments, diagnoses and therapies very much. Self-subversion is only possible in the first stage, when we can still recognize the signs of the virus that is about to get activated in the body.
A first signal of upcoming fever is the decrease of interest for different ideas, and a consequent seeking out of more and more people who think like us. Let us have no more new questions, all we want is the old and reliable answers. A second sign is the emergence of a sense of persecution. It begins to divide the world into two groups: a small one, of the friends with whom we share the same vision, and another one containing all those who do not understand us and are perceived as hostile. An imaginary enemy is created who is then sighted everywhere: in newspapers, on TV, in the neighbours, in God (if he is different from the idea that we forged of him). Even the best people, those we have always respected, begin to be questioned and relativized, if and when they say things that do not confirm our incipient ideology. This creates, day after day, a "sacred text" of which we become the evangelists and prophets.
The Book of Ecclesiastes, along with that of Job, is in itself an exercise in the self-subversion inherent to the Bible, because it constantly denies the ideas of God and religion that it actually proposes, to prevent them from turning into ideology. The Elohim-God of Qoheleth has stayed alive because Qoheleth has subverted it so many times.
Ideology - which is a sophisticated form of idolatry - is a disease of universal significance, but it is particularly common and serious when it affects religious people, because even God and other invisible inhabitants of the world are consumed and used as materials for the construction of an ideological empire. When even God becomes the same as our idea of ​​Him, the ideology is perfect and there is no way out of it anymore. Those dead flies have spoiled the whole of the perfume. It is difficult to find authentic communities or people of faith because, in most cases, instead of faith and ideals we find variants of the many ideologies that inhabit the world.
Faith and the ideology of faith are two very different things. Faith liberates from our own dogmas and idols, it asks questions; ideology binds, consumes and enslaves us to the idol, and creates a lot of easy and false answers. No real spiritual life begins unless one day we are able to free ourselves from the ideology of the faith that we have gradually built.
The ideological phase is (almost) inevitable, especially in spiritual and charismatic communities. A building is created around the original idea that has "called us", it grows little by little: first it's a tent, then a temple which houses "the ark" of the first covenant, in the end, next to the temple we build a palace for ourselves that's bigger than the temple built for God - as Solomon-Qoheleth had done (1Kings 7,1). Ideology is the process that goes from the invisible voice to the building of the ark, then from the ark to the tent, and after that to the temple and the palace. Individual and collective self-subversion, on the rare times that it actually happens, is the work of destruction, this time intentionally, of the many buildings that have been constructed one by one around the first promise, in order to return to the first gratuitousness of the first word.
It is a journey backwards, a return home by reducing, simplifying, removing the empires of sand that we have built. Sometimes we make this return journey in the last few months or days of our life, when we see the collapse of our palace and our temple, to finally become free of everything, and masters of nothing.
The ark, the temple and the palace rise gradually in the service of the charisma and its community, and even when they start to become too large they are seen and justified as ancillary and necessary elements for the development of the community.
Over time, however, and without anyone ever taking full consciousness, ideological constructions end up stifling the gratuitousness of the original vocation. Ideology first joins the ideal and supports it, but soon it takes its place, in a process that can last a long time, sometimes a whole life, and it is almost always with no return.
It is, in fact, very difficult to be aware of the ideological secretion of the original ideal, because they assume the same forms, they are children of the same parents, they have the same traits and the same beauties, they use the same words, they say the same prayers and (in the beginning) lead to the same spiritual fruits. It is, in fact, the same gift that becomes an obsession, progressively contaminating the critical skills of individual and collective discernment as theses are also enchanted by the same spell.
But the miracle of great blessing can also happen - history tells us so. That's when at the height of the experience of an ideal community which had meanwhile become - unintentionally and perhaps inevitably – an ideological community, someone breaks free from the spell and understands, or at least intuits, the ideological transformation that's taken place.
The end of the spell on the outside and inside is manifested as a crisis, but it is actually the ridge between the old narrow horizon and the new spacious one that is about to clear out, it is the watershed between the old life and the new. But in order for this liberation from the ideology to become collective, the person (or people) who generated it must also wake up and get out of the spell. This event is even rarer because the enchanter is the first one to be enchanted by their own magic: “He who digs a pit will fall into it, and a serpent will bite him who breaks through a wall. He who quarries stones is hurt by them, and he who splits logs is endangered by them” (10,8-9).
Sometimes, however, even the founder manages to break free from their own spell, but this in itself is not enough for the liberation of the entire community. He has to "disappear". Elijah the prophet and teacher leaves his "cloak" to Elisha, his disciple and successor, and disappears in the sky, kidnapped by the chariot of fire. That's how a great self-subversion is accomplished: the age of ideology ends and that of spiritual life begins for all.
However, when prophets do not know how to "die" by disappearing once they are "disenchanted", or when their followers do not allow them to disappear because they are still imprisoned by the spell, it may happen that the snake bites its piper: “If the serpent bites before it is charmed, there is no advantage to the charmer” (10,11). Prophets save their communities if they can break the spell they themselves have created, and leave us nothing but the poverty of their cloak.
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    [metadesc] => L’ideologia è tappa quasi obbligata nel cammino di ogni fede. L’auto-sovversione è un esercizio fondamentale per prevenire e curare l’ideologia, finché siamo in tempo. Qohelet è un grande esercizio di auto-sovversione presente nella Bibbia.
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Naked Questions/14 - Understanding the snare of the "dead flies" and the gift of the "prophets"
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 07/02/2016
“At the foundation of a community there is always a dark, hidden spot, a collective unconscious, which has its origin in the unconscious of the founder and in his/her human need to control. If the community is destined to grow and develop, this dark spot must be purified. The crisis is the purification of this collective unconscious. The community will have to shift from the myth of the perfect founder to a more collective appropriation of the founding myth, purified from what is not essential.”
Jean Vanier, The Founding Myth
“Dead flies make the perfumer's ointment give off a stench; so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honour.” (Ecclesiastes 10,1)
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Naked Questions/12 - We need a double gratuitousness: both in giving and receiving
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 24/01/2016
"Wisdom cries aloud in the street, in the markets she raises her voice; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks."
Book of Proverbs, 1,20-21
Wisdom exists. On this earth there is nothing better than to desire and seek it. But it remains far away, because if you get too close, it disappears or is transformed into something else that's simpler and more trivial. It is something very different from what we call intelligence, talent, wisdom, competence or culture today.
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These are forms of capital that we can and must manage, grow, cultivate, we own them and are responsible for them. Wisdom is something else. It is not a stock at our disposal. It interacts with our natural and moral capital, but it is different. There are people capable of wisdom who are not particularly clever, they are not learned, or little experienced. It is a gift that, like all gifts, doesn't really depend on merits. Even children can speak words of wisdom. It is a free breath of wind blowing where it wants. Like beauty, truth, holiness and happiness, it can and should be sought, but is never the simple result of a deliberate project. It is not a virtue, it is a gift. Sometimes it comes only when we lost the will to master it.
"I said, “I will be wise,”. but it was far from me. That which has been is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out?" (Ecclesiastes 7,23-24) Wisdom escapes us. Its depth is too deep, its distance too far. Yet, sometimes, it is noted, it acts, works and transforms history. And we can recognize it: «Who is like the wise And who knows the interpretation of a thing? A man's wisdom makes his face shine, and the hardness of his face is changed» (8,1).
Wisdom then has its typical brilliance; it changes one's facial features. Others who look at these people can see their shining face - like that of Moses, when he came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the law. Wisdom is a relationship, its splendour appears to those who recognize it in the faces of others. Under the sun we can see the signs of wisdom from its light on a human face. The witness of wisdom is the other person that sees its unique light, which is a good mirror only if it is opaque and absorbs the light that does not have to be returned to the wise one. This poverty is typical. The wise one casts a special light that gets lit inside a relationship, a light that disappears when they look, narcissistically, in a mirror other than the other person's eyes in front of them. This constitutive relatedness of wisdom is an intrinsic device of gratuitousness that prevents the wise one to appropriate his wisdom to and for himself, risking the loss of light on his face. When the wise man begins to see his own face brighter than that of others and to fall in love with its different light, wisdom disappears for lack of gratuitousness: «That water is not for me» (Bernardette Soubirous).
All wise people are always provisional wise people. They give off the light of wisdom only while they experience it. And between one experience of wisdom and another they are poor and needy as all living beings under the sun, they speak the words used by all others and they have the light of all faces. So the special light of wisdom is ephemeral, it only lives inside a specific relationship and while the experience lasts. It cannot be accumulated; we cannot keep it in a treasure chest. If wisdom is a gift-gratuitousness, there are no "professional" wise people: «do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself?» (7,16).
Wisdom is far away, deep in depths. No wise person is wise forever and ever. Wisdom is an experience. If we are wise and until we can feel wisdom, and no matter how many wise and bright words we said before, we have no guarantee of continuing to utter them tomorrow, too. We can only hope so. There is no wisdom without the renewal of its miracle of generosity, here and now.
For this reason it is not true that the wise ones are always the best witnesses of the words they say. True wisdom that speaks words transforming the lives of others is not always able to transform the lives of those who say them. Wisdom always exceeds the wise one, however great and a true witness they may be. The proof of the wise ones' wisdom is not their moral life, their testimony is not the truth about their words. The splendour of their face and words is the proof of the presence of their wisdom. This is one of the great mysteries of charis-gratuitousness on earth.
Here are some suggestions. Distrust the "wise men" who show themselves as a model for those who see and follow the glow of their face, showing their life as a measure of the wisdom of their words. And distrust those who believe and say that they possess wisdom, as well as those who feel they are its owners, who think they have it always at hand, who consider it their capital they may avail of at all times. They are certainly fake wise men. The first wisdom of the wise is the awareness of themselves not being humble the source of wisdom as they say, but a source from which, sometimes without knowing the reasons, different and always new kind of water comes out. What they know is that they are like a blind man who sometimes sees and shows things. When wisdom is lit inside a relationship, the first to be surprised, grateful and amazed by the wisdom present there is the one who finds a previously unknown light in their own face, and becomes the listener of his/her own words, because they are not only his/her. Qoheleth was able to give us words of wisdom because he never thought of having reached it.
There is a third warning: it is not good to tell the wise that their face is shining with a different light, because that way we expose them to the greatest temptation. In order not to reduce the wise light on earth gratuitousness is required in the wise, but also in those who watch them and benefit from their wisdom. And if the first gratuitousness is hard, the second one is no less arduous, either. If, in fact, the great temptation of the wise is falling in love with themselves and taking possession of their own wisdom, their desire to transform the true and ephemeral light into a fake and constant light, then those who contemplate and benefit from that wisdom are always tempted to institutionalize the glow of that face, not to be content with a temporary glow, and so turn the wise one in an unchanging and unchangeable god. In the generative relationship of wisdom the ever present risk is that of idolatry.
The virtue of the wise one is then in knowing how to resist in the specific painful effort of giving the gift of a light that they can neither know nor control. Wisdom only blooms among equals, and only among the poor. The kingdom of wisdom is the realm of these poor people: those who do not make themselves god and those who do not want to worship an idol. To understand Qoheleth's vision of wisdom we have should not forget his polemic with the "apocalyptic" movements of his time, populated by visionaries who entertained enchanted crowds by their tales of revelations, of which they were the only and undisputed masters. In this world there are certainly some more knowledgeable people, some who are less so and many who are foolish. There are also some very wise people, but there is no guarantee that wisdom and its light will always activate even in the most knowledgeable people. Qoheleth loves and seeks wisdom, but warns of the wise ones when they become a status or a social category, an élite that uses the light shining on their face "for profit".
There are artificial and cold lights on people's face, artfully modified facial features and winks that convince only the flatterer type of followers of the false wise men. Those who are familiar with the life of people who have experienced wisdom know that their biggest challenge was to preserve wisdom through the passing of years. There comes a point when the temptation to take possession of the light that they give as gift to the others becomes very strong, almost invincible. And that's when, very often, the light unperceivably begins to change in its brightness and the face starts to lose the ancient traits. Gratuitousness disappears, and so do its typical fruits: freedom, joy, the presence of the poor. It is a process involving the ex-wise and their listeners, and therefore it is a trap from which it is difficult to escape, but not impossible.
Let us not forget that Qoheleth presents himself to his listeners with the name of Solomon (chapter 1), who was the wisest king, but in the last part of his life he suffered a setback. The complex, ambivalent and mysterious personal story of King Solomon is an essential background to understand Qoheleth's words on wisdom. Although wise in his youth, the aging Solomon's heart was "turned away" by his wives, and he worshiped foreign gods (1 Kings 11) - a fact that may partly explain the harsh criticism Qoheleth exerts on women: (7.26-28). Not even the wisest of all men was always wise and will be for all his life.
All of us, however, can be wise, we all have had experiences of this wisdom in life. At least once. It is not a luxury, available only for a few chosen souls, leaders of some spiritual clubs. Real wisdom is popular, it dwells inside the houses of all, in the workplaces, in the streets, in the markets. It is the light that we see lighting up in the face of a friend who, poor just like us, collects our pain and is able to tell us words of life that always console us, sometimes even save us. The light that we have seen many times in the faces of our parents, when they gave us those few different words with which we can still keep walking. And while we warm ourselves by the light of wisdom - if the light of the other person's face does not warm us then it is not the light of wisdom - we all gain an experience of the distance of the wisdom, and of the "deep depth". And so we continue to desire and seek it, with gratuitousness.
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    [metadesc] => La prima esperienza che fa chi ama la sapienza è la certezza di non possederla. La sapienza è una esperienza, una luce che si accende sul volto mentre accade dentro un rapporto. E che muore per mancanza di gratuità.
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    [text] => 
Naked Questions/12 - We need a double gratuitousness: both in giving and receiving
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 24/01/2016
"Wisdom cries aloud in the street, in the markets she raises her voice; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks."
Book of Proverbs, 1,20-21
Wisdom exists. On this earth there is nothing better than to desire and seek it. But it remains far away, because if you get too close, it disappears or is transformed into something else that's simpler and more trivial. It is something very different from what we call intelligence, talent, wisdom, competence or culture today.
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Naked Questions/10 - Accumulating goods is not bliss, happiness lies in work
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 10/01/2016
 “When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces. In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.”
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
The desecration of the law and justice have always activated the voice and the indignation of the prophets who continue to expose the corrupt and call them to conversion.
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The criticism Qoheleth casts on his unequal society is different, but no less radical than the prophetic one. He doesn't really believe in the moral conversion of the powerful, but with the strength of his wisdom he dismounts the logic of their power and wealth from within, pointing out the intrinsic vanity in it as a layperson.
To restore hope to the poor who have been humiliated the fiery words of the new prophets would be needed, but a few new Qoheleths would be equally valuable, as they should be capable of revealing the nonsense and the sadness of our fake richness and false happiness.
“If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and righteousness, do not be amazed at the matter, for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them. But this is gain for a land in every way: a king committed to cultivated fields.” (Ecclesiastes 5,8-9). Half way through into his discourse, Qoheleth takes us inside the dynamics of power and bureaucratic and hierarchical societies. His first mention is of the "oppressed poor", but instead of a moral condemnation he "loves" the poor with truth, revealing a not-so-evident reality. He tells us that those who seem strong and belonging to the rulers are actually victims of a sick and corrupt system.
The unmasking eye of Ecclesiastes can see the high pyramid of oppression, exploitation and injustice over the poor. On top of a torturer there's another one that oppresses him, and so on, until the last boss, the king, whom Qoheleth still sees as "committed to cultivated fields". Although the meaning of this verse (5,8) is doubtful because it's been corrupted by time, it is not a farfetched idea that Ecclesiastes wanted to place the king in the chain of servitude and vanity, too. Not even the greatest and richest man - as Genesis also tells us in the "Joseph Cycle" - can free himself from the dependence on the rhythms of nature, from famine and calamities, from returning to dust and to earth as all Adams: “As he came from his mother's womb he shall go again, naked as he came...” (5,15).
There are many things we can read from this description of injustice as a social pyramid of oppression. First of all Qoheleth offers us the opportunity to take a less severe moral look on the last taskmaster who oppresses the poor, because his act of unfair abuse is often sparked by other abuses of which he is the victim in turn. There is no moral justification for his behaviour, only an invitation to a better reading of the exploitation in question. Those that seem victim-perpetrator relationships to us are often victim-victim ones instead. The world is filled by hevel, everything is an endless Abel, the earth is full of victims: Qoheleth told us so in the opening passages of his book. Now he shows us victims where we only see executioners. Hence there are three important things to be noted: the rise of hierarchies increases the number of victims under the sky; the weight of the entire pyramid pours on the last oppressed poor; if we want to save the poor from oppression the pyramids generating victims should be demolished. Yesterday and today. Today as we look at capitalist enterprises or other hierarchical institutions, the abuse of power or exploitation itself does not appear to us as their first nature. Furthermore, the new management ideology is replacing hierarchical relationships with incentives that are presented as horizontal relations, contracts based on the free choice of all parties involved in it. In fact, if we are guided by the ancient wisdom and we try to look beyond ideological appearances, we will realise that when a wicked financial product is administered to a pensioner by an officer there is also an official of a higher order that puts pressure on and oppresses that first official for the achievement of corporate goals on which the wages and careers of both of them depend. And so on, going up the steps of the pyramid, until we reach the top and find heads of companies that, in turn, are "servants" to the market movements, geopolitics and natural phenomena. In that final product-abuse there weighs the whole chain of ill born relationships.
Not all hierarchies are characterised by abuse and harassment, but still many, and the Bible invites us to dream of a type of new land, law and justice that is not there yet. There are no organizations without exercise of authority, but you cannot exercise a non-hierarchical authority. There are only a few historical experiments of non-hierarchical authorities, and many among them have been unsuccessful. But the poor will be "oppressed" and the victims will be multiplying until we learn to translate the principle of fraternity in the governance of companies and institutions.
After this description of the morphology of power and hierarchy, Qoheleth returns to one of its major themes: the vanity of the pursuit of wealth, the smoke of avarice: “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity [smoke, hevel]” (5,10). It is a phrase that we should display at the entrance of business schools, companies and banks. When money becomes an end instead of being a means, it turns into a tool that creates endless unhappiness, because its accumulation soon becomes the main purpose of life; and accumulation, by its very nature, has no end, it is an idol that always wants to eat. There is no poor more miserable than the greedy one, because the increase of his money increases his hunger. And then he continues: “When goods increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes? Sweet is the sleep of a labourer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep.” (5,11:-12). What great wisdom!
Here Qoheleth takes us inside a palace of his era in the Middle East. He shows us a rich man, and a plethora of courtiers and parasites around him that eat his wealth. It's all and only about unhappiness, of parasites and also the rich whose wealth and dreams get eaten. Outside the building there is instead a worker, a farmer or a craftsman, who lives by his labour and has sweet dreams. In these few words we find the ancient and eternal conflict between income and labour, between those who live by eating yesterday's bread and others who live from the little bread of their work. It has never been work to create great wealth. It is almost always produced by income, i.e. by income deriving from some form of privilege, abuse or advantage. And income generates parasites, unproductive consumption, from which there is no work or happiness born for anyone. The "parasitic syndrome" never fails to appear in times of moral decay, when entrepreneurs, workers, entire social categories stop generating work and new revenue streams today and invest energy to protect the profits and privileges of yesterday.
Parasitism is a disease that is not found in the economic sphere only. Those who fall into this syndrome include, for example, those communities or movements that become large and beautiful thanks to the work of the founders and the first generation, and instead of developing what they inherited by new work, risk and creativity they begin to live off of it, satiated by the past, unable to generate "children" and a future. The parasitic syndrome is still the leading cause of death of businesses and communities.
Qoheleth clearly stands on the side of labour, those who work "under the sun" to earn a living. He has already told us so (3,12-13), and now he repeats it with more poetry and force: “Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink ... for this is his lot.” (5,18) There is no other happiness than what we can see in our everyday work, enjoying the fruits it brings. Qoheleth continues his polemic against religion and economic compensation in a coherent fashion.
The blessing of God is not in wealth and possessions. However, surprising us, he also tells us that it is possible that even the rich, for a special grant of God, may share a "part" of this good happiness: “Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil—this is the gift of God.” (5,19) It's rare, but not impossible: the rich man, too, can be happy, if he works and manages to enjoy his effort.
There are millions of people, rich and poor, businessmen and housewives, who can give substance and happiness to their lives simply by working. There are those who defeat death and vanitas every day by rearranging a room, preparing a meal, repairing a car, teaching a lesson. There are certainly higher forms of happiness than these in our lives, but we cannot reach them unless we learn to find the simple happiness in the ordinary efforts of every day. We are only saved by working. Not because of a sentimental joy or self-comforting that abounds in the pens of non-workers - Qoheleth would never forgive us for that - but for the one that flourishes inside fatigue and even in tears. The Book of Ecclesiastes, however, tells us something even more beautiful: “For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart” (5,20). Work is a generator of joy because if we get engaged in a non-vain activity our heart is distracted from "thinking too much" – and wrongly – about vanities that may be real in our lives; and also because that's where Elohim is waiting for us with his joyfullness.
This humble joy is not the opium of the peoples, it is simply our good fate. If the presence of Elohim in the heart is a "response" to the good efforts, if it is the first salary of the worker, then the joy that sometimes surprises us during work can be no less than the presence of the divine on earth. This, Qoheleth, my friend, is really good news. So where is your much evidenced pessimism? Under the sun, non-vain joy is actually possible.
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    [metadesc] => La gerarchia aumenta il numero delle vittime, perché anche chi opprime è a sua volta un oppresso. La ricerca di ricchezza affama, e l’avarizia è insaziabile. Chi lavora sogna dolci sogni, e incontra Dio nel suo cuore. Dov’è allora il pessimismo di Qohelet?
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Naked Questions/10 - Accumulating goods is not bliss, happiness lies in work
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 10/01/2016
 “When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces. In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.”
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
The desecration of the law and justice have always activated the voice and the indignation of the prophets who continue to expose the corrupt and call them to conversion.
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Naked Questions/8 - Life lived in isolation and its salt (and salary) are savourless 
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 27/12/2015
"On the beach of the worlds / the surf is broken / ancient and new alike / carrying human desires / palpitating in the sun / invoking life. ... And we are here waiting for him. Because he is still to come. ... And no one / will be left alone in the end"
Rough translation of the excerpt from the poem by Maria Pia Giudici entitled Sulla spiaggia dei mondi (On the beach of the worlds)
Solitudes are not all the same. There are people who have become lonely in life, elderly people whose solitude continues to be inhabited by the absence-presence of those whom they have loved. Some people are lonely simply because they are poor, isolated and abandoned on the outskirts of our cities.
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But there are also the different instances of loneliness of the powerful, or that of the victims of a socio-economic model that celebrates the liberation from bonds as an achievement of civilization, promising another type of happiness by replacing people with merchandise. The good instances of loneliness, which can even be blessed ('blessed solitude, sola beatitudo') are increasingly intertwined with meetings: they are the breaks in the ordinary social rhythm of life, the different dialogues that recreate and regenerate the inner space in order to meet the face of the other again. But when loneliness becomes an alternative to life in community, when I’d rather meet myself just to run away from you, if I get used to being alone because I do not know how to be with anyone, the strong words of Qoheleth return: woe to him who is alone.
“Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man's envy of his neighbour. This also is vanity and a striving after wind. The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh. Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.” (Ecclesiastes 4: 4-6)
Qoheleth continues criticising his society. ‘Under the sun’ he sees men who rush into a competition that for Qoheleth is not the spirit of development but only the result of social envy. He saw men outscore the others in a game where everyone loses, in ‘positional races’ with no goal. He saw this in his world, and we see it even more in ours. And so his strong judgment is issued yet again: hebel, vanity, smoke, silly run of the wind. On the opposite side of this frenzy, Qoheleth sees those who reject entering the race, crossing their arms in inactivity. This is not a sign of wisdom, either. It is just as foolish as the envy-driven competition of the first scene.
After that, he shows us a wise road to take: leaving a hand free so that its palm can be filled by calmness and rest gained from 'consolation'. The two hands of the human being are not to be engaged in the same activity: if the one who leaves both hands motionless is foolish then the one who makes both of them busy with hectic work is equally insane. The fruit of labour and industriousness can be enjoyed only if we leave a gap for no-work, if one palm is empty and can accept the fruits conquered by the other. He who never works is crazy, and he who always works is crazier.
Our civilization is built around the condemnation of idleness, and has created a culture of good life based on work by establishing a fundamental link between human dignity, democracy and labour. If your arms are inactive because you do not want to or cannot work in your working age do not generate either welfare or joy. In the race that western civilization began several decades ago, however, we have forgotten the second folly-vanity according to wise Qoheleth: life is smoke and a striving after wind also because of too much work. Work is only good in its right 'time'.
In that ancient culture the experience of Egypt and Babylon were still alive, when the Jews became slaves and had to constantly work with both hands. Only the slaves and those enslaved by envy and greed are scrambling always just for work. It is difficult to say today whether the ones suffering more are the unemployed who cross their arms innocently or the overpaid managers who spend Christmas in the office because work - like all idols - has gradually eaten up their soul and friends. These are different types of suffering and both are very serious, but we do not see the second one as madness and vanitas, and we incentivize it.
It is the relationship between one and two that is the focus of this chapter of Ecclesiastes: “Again, I saw vanity under the sun: one person [one, not two] who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil, and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks, »For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure« This also is vanity and an unhappy business.” (4,7-8) We are reading a wonderful page, a veritable distillate of anthropology. Qoheleth reveals a deep, radical and terrible relationship between solitude and work. He presents us with a man who works too much, always ('there is no end to all his toil'), and all the riches he earns do not satisfy him ever. It is in this non-satiety that the key to this verse lies: the riches that cannot be shared does not satiate, it does not satisfy our hearts. It only feeds the striving after wind, and produces the great self-deception that wealth in itself or an increase in assets will satiate today's poverty tomorrow. And the carousel continues to turn, getting emptier and emptier.
Suddenly Ecclesiastes makes us enter into the soul of this person, showing us a quick but intense way of self-examination: 'but why all these toils for nothing? Who and what is this crazy job consuming my life good for?' If we could read the diary of the soul of our time, we would find millions of such cases of self-examination. Loneliness 'distorts incentives' and makes you work too much, because job satisfaction becomes a substitute for happiness outside of work. Work that gradually becomes everything destroys all the few remaining relationships, and so you work even more. Working time increases, I come home tired, I do not feel like going out, the 'cost' of relationships outside of work increases, tomorrow I'll go out less, and I will work more... Then one day the timely question may come: 'But why and for whom?' It is a rather dramatic question if the first time we ask it from ourselves is just before pension, but one that can be liberating if we are still in time. As long as we are alive enough to ask this question, we can still hope: the really sad day is the one when we decide not to suffer for our own unhappiness and just adapt to it. We convince ourselves to be well inside the trap into which we have fallen, and we do not ask for anything, so as not to die.
“Two are better than one (...). For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him — a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (4,9-12).
This is not a specific praise of family or friendship or even the spirituality of the community. This message is more radical. Life does not work if you're alone. When we are alone we are weak, vulnerable and miserable. More than two millennia have passed since these ancient words were written, and we have created contracts, insurances and thermal blankets to manage without the other. And so we have created the greatest collective illusion of human history: to believe that we can rise again, protect and warm ourselves on our own. But we also learned that it is not enough just to be in two in the same bed to feel warmth: there are no colder beds than those where you sleep in two, each immersed in their own solitude with no more words to say. It is not enough to be in two to escape the 'woe to him who is alone'. There are many instances of desperate loneliness masked as company, and many true companies hidden behind what seems like solitude.
“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil.” (4,9). Good salary can be shared. The true meaning of hard work is to have someone who is waiting for our salary. Salary without a horizon that's bigger than our ego is like salt without the dough it should flavour. The right time for a good salary is that of the home. Accumulating wealth without there being someone who should grow, live, study, be taken care of by this wealth, is nothing but a striving after wind, it is food that does not satiate our hunger, even when consumed in five-star restaurants.
Our era is losing the right time of work also because the link between work and family has been broken. When there are no children, when the horizon of work is too low, it is hard to find an answer to the naked question of Ecclesiastes. But our post-capitalist society has a growing need for people without strong ties of belonging, and so it lacks the limits on working hours, shifts, just as the rhythm of the different 'times'. This is what the ideal executives of big corporations are like. At times someone asks themselves: "why all this work, for whom is it"? It is a question that may be the beginning of a new life. The selection of new goods and services to accompany loneliness is becoming wider and more sophisticated with the sale of pseudo-relational goods. We produce people who are more and more lonely and we produce more and more goods to satisfy their insatiable loneliness. And the GDP - the indicator of our misery - grows and with it grows the unmet demand for gratuitousness.
But what will happen when this question of Ecclesiastes becomes a collective one? What new answers will we be able to give together? Will there still be good salt in the pantries of our businesses and cities? And if, looking carefully in every corner, we find even just a handful of it, will that be enough to flavour the dough? And will that salt still taste good?
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    [metadesc] => L’umanesimo biblico è quello del ‘due o più’, dove impariamo a dire bene ‘io’ solo dopo aver appreso a pronunciare il nome dell’altro. Il salario buono è quello condiviso. La nostra economia ha bisogno di persone sole che cercano merci per saziare una solitudine insaziabile. È la casa abitata il giusto tempo del lavoro.
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Naked Questions/8 - Life lived in isolation and its salt (and salary) are savourless 
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 27/12/2015
"On the beach of the worlds / the surf is broken / ancient and new alike / carrying human desires / palpitating in the sun / invoking life. ... And we are here waiting for him. Because he is still to come. ... And no one / will be left alone in the end"
Rough translation of the excerpt from the poem by Maria Pia Giudici entitled Sulla spiaggia dei mondi (On the beach of the worlds)
Solitudes are not all the same. There are people who have become lonely in life, elderly people whose solitude continues to be inhabited by the absence-presence of those whom they have loved. Some people are lonely simply because they are poor, isolated and abandoned on the outskirts of our cities.
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Naked Questions/6 - Joy should be learnt (and re-learnt) by living the life we have
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 13/12/2015
"Here is the grandest sequence of infinitive verbs of all literature. When we are under a relentless force and urgency in our actions, when good or bad things impose and overlap themselves and one is fully absorbed by the world, then there is no other way to name our actions except for an infinitive verb."
Erri de Luca, Kohèlet
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
    [fulltext] => a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.” (Ecclesiastes 3,1-8) And we should stop here, in front of so much strength and beauty that come to us as a breeze after crossing the painful area of the hebel, of vanitas with Qoheleth.
We got to the heart of the Book of Ecclesiastes, and to one of the most beautiful pages of the Bible. Although the word dominating this poem by Qoheleth is time as a favourable time - in Hebrew it is ‘et: point, now, moment, kairos- it is not a philosophical reflection on time. He does not talk to the Greek philosophers of his world. His horizon is that of the Bible and that of wisdom. Continuing his research Qoheleth now discovers that 'under the sun' there is an order, a law imprinted in nature and in human actions by the creator. Having travelled through the ocean of vanity, he finally reaches land. The smoke is halted by the spectacle of the rhythm of life and human action. This order, finally, appears to him a non-vanity.
In ancient cultures, when a sage observed the rhythm of life and its seasons, human events, the laws of the trades, the causes of suffering and joy, he felt the presence of wisdom beneath things. He saw actions produce bad fruit because they were taken at the wrong time, births and deaths follow an intrinsic and non-arbitrary command. He remained enchanted by how everything had its place, amazed by the rationality of life, captured by the sense - meaning and direction - of the works and days. The law of life exists, and the harmony of the symphony of the earth can be heard only by tuning in to its own rhythms.
Reaching the bottom of his disappointment at the lack of a true sense in all labours under the sun, the song of Qoheleth has its first turning point here. That ancient wise man looks at the world and the succession of human actions and discovers a truth. He also feels that things are good and beautiful: “What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time.” (3,9-11). He made everything beautiful 'in its time', in the right moment.
Our actions have a point at which they are beautiful, a season in which they shine. To realise this we must look at them in their time, in their right moment. When things appear ugly and not good maybe we're just out of time: we are eating fruits that are not ripe yet, we are evaluating a process that's still ongoing, we cannot wait for a vocation to be fulfilled, or we stop at Good Friday. We see a tree in its faded autumn look without waiting for the spring.
At the end of his poem on time, there is a the question: 'What gain (yitron) has the worker from his toil', and for the first time he does not respond by saying vanitas or smoke, but gives us a glimpse of a different perspective, a gain that's greater than zero, a positive difference between revenues and costs of labouring under the sun. The times mentioned in Ecclesiastes in his poem are, in fact, human times, the moments of the life and work (amal), the normal rhythm of ordinary 'affairs' under the sun. We are talking about the times of the rivers, the mating of animals and the migrations of birds. Here the good things are human things: birth, death, amassing stones, crying, building, sewing and peace. This fatigue is good: it is the labour of birth and death, is the good effort of human labour. Being born, dying, crying, working is not always beautiful: only when it is the right time for them. There are people who, like the patriarchs, die 'full of days', and there are deaths arriving in the wrong time and these are not beautiful. Work is beautiful if done in its right time. But there is also the work of slaves and servants, ancient and modern, the work that does not know its right time because the working time becomes the time of life. And so it does not generate any wise 'gain'. There are people who become beautiful if found at the right moment of their work, and others destroyed by a wrongly timed work, or a work time that never comes or has come too early and did not return anymore.
If you want to really know a person you must see them working in their right time. And when someone is not put in a position to work in the right time, he or she is prevented from expressing his or her beauty. We deprive ourselves of too much beauty by leaving young people out of our businesses, by not letting them meet work at the 'right time'. And if youth is the favourable time for work, perhaps the work of those who start late will not become as good as it could.
And it is at this point that Qoheleth inserts a most mysterious, great and much discussed sentence in his book: “Also, he (Elohim) has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (3,11). Here the Book of Ecclesiastes gives us the key to the vanitas that it has so far revealed to us. In his anthropo-theology, Elohim-God has placed principles in the world in a way that there is tension between them. Inside the Adam-man he placed olam, a mysterious and polysemic Hebrew word, which has been translated in many ways over the centuries. Olam has to do with the desire embedded in our hearts to want to own the world as a whole. Olam is the first spring of religion, science and philosophy. We see the flower blossom and we would like to know all its mystery: multiplicity explained by the individual sciences (chemistry, botany) is not enough for us. We feel a strong charm of (the notion of) one, we would like to take the whole of the blossoming in our possession. Qoheleth tells us that the entirety of times and moments are blocked away from us. The Adam does not have possession of the times of his world, he is not in control of the rhythm of life. The non-vanitas lies in recognizing it.
In the culture of his time, in the face of this barrage, the temptation of the mystery rites, magic and horoscopes was much stronger. The magicians and soothsayers have always promised to meet all the needs of olam and enter into the mystery of the times of life. And so they also promised that we would be able to control our birth and death, love and hate, tears and happiness. Today with the wizards and the soothsayers who continue to have a large and growing market, are joined by technology that promises to eliminate all barriers to satisfy our olam, handing over to us the law of birth and death, the times and the souls of the workers. Although this technology prompts Qoheleth saying: hebel, smoke, a striving after wind.
Qoheleth also combats these false solutions, and offers an unexpected way to resolve the conflict between the desire of the (entire) one and the only real chance of the fragment: “I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man” (3,12-13). Here Qoheleth seems to deny his own statement from before, when he called vanity the pursuit of happiness in wine, sensual pleasures and wealth (ch. 2). In fact the wisdom of Ecclesiastes continues to surprise us. When he is granting the truth of non-possession of the mystery of the world, when he realizes in pain that he is not the master of things whose life fascinates and seduces him and that he cannot eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the Adam can turn around, see things differently and discover the flow of life. And feel how true this gift is. Death can be defeated only by living the life we ​​have.
After suffering for years or decades for not being able to dominate reality above and under the sun, it may happen that one day we return to our working group, turn on the computer and begin to do the usual work again, feeling that the real life we ​​were looking for in the wrong place was just there, waiting for us to save us. In this fragment there was everything possible, but we could not learn it without pain. After tasting the pigs food, having felt that a spiritual quest remained unfulfilled because it was impossible to do so, a piece of bread can have the good taste of paradise. When we were able to keep walking while our ideologies of yesterday were evaporating, after giving up the untrue consolations forever, suddenly, a new zest for life can come. It is the joy after the experience of vanity, which is all different from the joy of the previous phase of illusions. It is a way of rejoicing that you can relearn. From hand to hand with the angels of youth new foods, embraces and works can flourish. A new name. This is the great miracle that keeps happening every day under the sun.
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    [metadesc] => Il poema dei tempi ci introduce alla prima non-vanità del libro del Qohelet. C’è una bellezza nelle cose quando sono colte e vissute nel loro tempo opportuno. L’uomo non può possedere il mistero del tempo e della vita, ma Qohelet ci dice che nel vivere, nell’amare, nel lavoro ci può essere una gioia vera, forse la sola possibile sotto il sole.
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Naked Questions/6 - Joy should be learnt (and re-learnt) by living the life we have
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 13/12/2015
"Here is the grandest sequence of infinitive verbs of all literature. When we are under a relentless force and urgency in our actions, when good or bad things impose and overlap themselves and one is fully absorbed by the world, then there is no other way to name our actions except for an infinitive verb."
Erri de Luca, Kohèlet
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
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