Peter Kreeft on "Three Ways of Living"

Three Ways of Living | The Introduction to Three Philosophies of Life | Peter Kreeft

The Inexhaustibility of Wisdom Literature

I have been a philosopher for all of my adult life, and the three most profound books of philosophy that I have ever read are Ecclesiastes, Job, and Song of Songs. In fact, the book that first made me a philosopher, at about age fifteen, was Ecclesiastes.

Books of philosophy can be classified in many ways: ancient versus modern, Eastern versus Western, optimistic versus pessimistic, theistic versus atheistic, rationalistic versus irrationalistic, monistic versus pluralistic, and many others. But the most important distinction of all, says Gabriel Marcel, is between "the full" and "the empty", the solid and the shallow, the profound and the trivial. When you have read all the books in all the libraries of the world, when you have accompanied all the world's sages on all their journeys into wisdom, you will not have found three more profound books than Ecclesiastes, Job, and Song of Songs.

  These three books are literally inexhaustible. They brim with a mysterious power of renewal. I continually find new nourishment in rereading them, and I never tire of teaching them. They quintessentially exemplify my definition of a classic. A classic is like a cow: it gives fresh milk every morning. A classic is a book that rewards endlessly repeated re-reading. A classic is like the morning, like nature herself: ever young, ever renewing. No, not even like nature, for she, like us, is doomed to die. Only God is ever young, and only the Book he inspired never grows old.

When God wanted to inspire some philosophy, why would he inspire anything but the best? But the best is not necessarily the most sophisticated. Plato says, in the Ion, that the gods deliberately chose the poorest poets to inspire the greatest poems so that the glory would be theirs, not man's. It is exactly what Saint Paul says in 1 Corinthians. And we see this principle at work throughout the Bible: the striking contrast between the primitiveness of the poet and the profundity of the poem, between the smallness of the singer and the greatness of the song, between the absence of human sophistication and the presence of divine sophia, divine wisdom. Something is always breaking through the words, something you can never fully grasp but also never fully miss if only you stand there with uncovered soul. Stand in the divine rain, and seeds of wisdom will grow in your soul.

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Comments

[Augustine]

A wonderful excerpt. I'm sold. Many thanks.

[Clare Krishan]

Enjoyable prose invitation to see Scripture as praise song to God - even the human fallibility was endearing (there's 10 iterations of Ecclesiastes spelled correctly, but 8 spelled Ecciesiastes, chuckle). Will add this title to my wishlist.

Does Kreeft entertain a Muse for his poets' penned poems, who is the cow being milked in each "classic"? It seems to me that the author of Ecclesiastes is aroused to reverence by the mysterious hidden beauty evoked in the words he crafts, perhaps, in a way like T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land submitting to the wisdom of What the Thunder Said? Job was perhaps enthralled by an imagined Muse, a more perfect version of his wife, who instead of cursing God, offers succor in the face of adversity, offers alternate arguments to the three sages? The Muse in the Song of Songs is most obviously the traditional one, as Dante's beloved pure-of-heart Beatrice. Would I be presumptious to categorize these three "types" of the Patriarchs as precursors to Christ's Church as Muse for our souls? That the Old Testament evokes a certain necessity for the feminine helpmate in Salvation history? I would like to think so, since the "masculine" voice of the philosopher is not so readily apprehended by the feminine heart, who yearns to act before she has understood where her actions will take her (Eve's dilemma, no?)