Remember Your Creator

The book ends with a great poem of old age and death, then with its final word. Qoheleth calls man to remember his Creator from youth, before the body declines and life goes out like a lamp. He looks death in the face: the dust returns to the earth, but the breath returns to God who gave it. And he gives at last the key of the whole book, to fear God and keep his commandments. What Qoheleth still saw as an enigma, Christ will come to reveal fully.

Remember your Creator

Before the final poem, Qoheleth issues a pressing appeal to youth: “Remember your Creators in the days of your youth.” Ecclesiastes 12:1 The Hebrew text carries a plural, "your Creators," a plural of majesty that says the whole fullness of the one God, and in which Christian tradition has heard a discreet resonance of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The appeal is clear: to give God the springtime of life, and not its ashes alone, before the evil days come in which the heart finds savor in nothing. The whole of life is to be lived before its Author, and one does not put off to old age what should be the first movement of youth.

The poem of old age

There follows one of the most beautiful poems of the Bible, which describes the decline of the body under veiled and tender images. The light dims, the sun and stars grow dark; the keepers of the house tremble, these are the arms that weaken; the women who grind cease because they are few, these are the teeth that fail; those who look through the windows grow dim, these are the eyes that cloud over; the doors on the street are shut, the sound of the mill fades, one rises at the song of the bird but the songs die away. It is old age painted with delicacy, with nothing macabre. Then the end draws near: “before... the pitcher is broken at the spring, the pulley is broken over the well.” Ecclesiastes 12:6 The pitcher broken at the fountain, the pulley snapped at the well, these are the images of the fragile life that one day breaks and draws water no more.

The dust and the breath

Then Qoheleth says death in two movements: “the dust returns to the earth, where it came from, and the breath of life returns to God who had given it.” Ecclesiastes 12:7 Here, at the very end, he lifts at last the horizon he had kept "under the sun." The body returns to the dust from which it was drawn, as in the garden of the origins; but the breath, the ruaḥ, goes back up to God who had given it. This is far more than the "same fate as the beast" he observed at the start: the breath of man returns to its source. Without yet knowing the resurrection, Qoheleth points beyond the grave, to the God who holds in his hand the breath he had lent.

Fear God, this is the whole of man

Then comes at last the word that gathers all: “fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of humankind.” Ecclesiastes 12:13 After so much breath, this is what remains, the one solid point. The fear of God, which all the sages placed at the beginning of wisdom, is here the end of the search, its resting point. And it opens onto judgment: “For God will bring into judgment every deed, even the hidden, whether good or evil.” Ecclesiastes 12:14 If God judges every act, then nothing is finally a mere breath: the smallest gesture has weight before him. The judgment answers the doubt of the whole book, for the injustice Qoheleth saw "under the sun" is not the last word: God will set all in its right place.

What Qoheleth awaited

The Church reads this book as a long question that calls for Christ as its answer. The eternity set in the heart, that desire nothing finite fills, is the desire for God himself, which the Gospel comes at last to satisfy. The vanity Qoheleth observed, Saint Paul names and surpasses: “Creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but because of the one who subjected it; yet it keeps hope.” Romans 8:20-21 The same transience Qoheleth saw, Paul sees as a creation that groans and waits to be freed from corruption, for the glory of the children of God: the breath is not the end, but the labor of birth. The death that took the wise like the fool, the risen Christ has conquered: what Qoheleth glimpsed only as an enigma, the breath that returns to God, the Resurrection reveals in broad day, even to the body raised. And "fear God and keep his commandments," the last word of the book, is fulfilled in Christ, who gathers all the commandments into love. The most lucid meditation on the emptiness of the finite finds at last its rest where, without yet knowing it, it was tending from the start: in God, made near in Christ.