If you’ve ever read the biography of a genius, you’ll
understand that a high IQ on its own is not necessarily a recipe for a
successful or happy life.
Beethoven is thought to have been bipolar. Michelangelo
was probably a high-functioning autist. Isaac Newton may well have been
schizophrenic. Before becoming a Christian, Leo Tolstoy suffered from deep depression
and regularly contemplated suicide.
Obviously there is more to living well than thinking at a
high level and possessing a large number of facts.
Guns, Ammunition and Aim
Political philosopher Vox Day distinguishes the various
factors that contribute to understanding with a martial analogy:
“IQ is the size of the cannon. Experience and knowledge are the ammunition. Wisdom is knowing where to aim it.”
I find that helpful. The smarter you are, the more capacity
you have. But that doesn’t mean you’ve got the right information to work with
or that you know how to make use of that information. You need knowledge and
experience in order to live up to your intellectual potential, and then of
course you need to be perceptive enough to know how best to make use of what
you have learned.
Or, to extend the original analogy a bit, a small firearm with a single bullet can often accomplish everything you need if only
you manage to point it in the right place.
Back to Ecclesiastes
With this in mind, let us return to the Preacher and his reflections
on wisdom and knowledge:
“I said in my heart, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.’ And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.”
We do not know the Preacher’s IQ, and for our purposes it is
unimportant, having established that mere intelligence is quite insufficient to
both understanding and effective governance. But whatever we may label it, we
may reasonably infer that God had given him a unique capacity for effectively
processing information. He had “breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore,”
says the narrator of 1 Kings.
But here the Preacher too speaks of multiple aspects of
understanding: experience, wisdom and knowledge. He speaks of having “acquired great wisdom”, which strongly
suggests it did not come without extensive study. The book of Kings says
Solomon “spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He
spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish,” indicating an
unsurpassed knowledge of biology in his day.
The Preacher then goes on to say that he “has had great experience of wisdom and
knowledge,” meaning, I think, that he had tried out his ideas in the real
world and found that to at least some extent they correlated with reality. They worked.
Languages and Meaning
Students of language know there is rarely an exact,
one-for-one correspondence between any given word in one language and any
specific word in another. Thus it is worthwhile asking how the English
translators of Ecclesiastes have handled the various Hebrew
words that have to do with understanding.
The Hebrew chokmah appears in the book 27 times, and in most translations is consistently
rendered “wisdom”. In scripture it is very often used to refer to the practical
outworking of knowledge in the real world. In Exodus, the chokmah granted to the workmen was not merely theoretical: it
resulted in beautiful garments. Here in Ecclesiastes, a poor man
delivers a city from a siege by wisdom. He was a tactician, and his ideas did not just make sense in theory, but were
effective in battle.
The Hebrew da`ath appears in Ecclesiastes seven times, and is fairly consistently translated “knowledge”. However, its usage in scripture makes it apparent that da`ath does not always mean simply “information”, but quite frequently how to make use of that information.
Going back to our earlier illustration, while we might
fairly say that in general da`ath refers to “ammunition” and chokmah to “where
to point the gun”, there is quite frequently more of an overlap in the semantic
range of the two ideas than might be obvious in English. Sometimes they are
used pretty much synonymously. Thus, it would be unwise to insist too
stridently that either word means exactly this or that in any given context.
Striving After Wind
In any case, the Preacher’s conclusion is more important
than fine distinctions in Hebrew terms. Here he says that the attempt to
investigate wisdom to its limits (or to do the same with madness and folly;
more on that in chapters 2, 7 and 10) is like “striving after wind”.
This is the second time he has used this expression, and
with very slight variation, we will find it used on another eight occasions
throughout the book. The KJV opts to translate the same phrase as “vexation of
spirit”. This is probably because the Hebrew ruwach may mean either “wind” or “spirit”, and there
are simply not enough references to ra`yown
(“striving”, “vexation”) to be sure which English word is the better
translation of the two.
However we may choose to interpret it, it is difficult to
see that there is much material difference between the options; chasing the
wind is the sort of activity that is bound to lead to vexation. When we add “vanity”
to the mix, it appears what the Preacher is telling us is that the search for
understanding is both difficult and frustrating.
Frustrating But Not Pointless
He does not say it is pointless, and you will notice that
for all of his frustration with his search for meaning, he neither gives it up nor counsels others to abandon the quest. He does, however, give us
fair warning:
“For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.”
Perhaps this accounts for Tolstoy’s depression, a
characteristic he shared with Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens and a great
number of other thoughtful men and women down through the centuries.
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