If, then, there are points of agreement between Koheleth and M. Aurelius, there must also of necessity be points of disagreement. Every page of their writings would, I think, supply them. Suffice it to put side by side the saying of Koheleth, 'God is in heaven, and thou upon earth' (v. 2), and M. Aurelius' invocation of the world as the 'city of God' (iv. 23). The comparison suggests one of the greatest discrepancies between Koheleth and the Stoics—the doctrine of God. Such faith as the former still retains is faith in a transcendent and not an immanent Deity. The germs of a doctrine of Immanence which the older Wisdom-literature contains (Kleinert quotes Ps. civ. 30, Job xxvi. 13), have found no lodgment in the mind of our author, who is more affected by the legal and extreme supernaturalistic[1] point of view than he is perhaps aware.
Mr. Tyler's introduction to his Ecclesiastes is a work of great acuteness and originality, and seeks to provide against all reasonable objections; I cannot do justice to it here. One part of his theory, however, is too remarkable to be passed over (see above, pp. 240, 241). He supposes that Stoic and Epicurean doctrines were deliberately set over against each other by the wise man who wrote our book, in order by the clash of opposites to deter the reader from dangerous and unsatisfying investigations. The goal of the author's philosophising thus becomes the negation of all philosophy, and this 'sacrificio dell' intelletto' he insinuatingly commends by the subtlest use of artifice. Such a theory may have occurred to one or another early writer (see Ginsburg), but seems out of harmony with the character of the author as revealed in his book. He is not such a weak-kneed wrestler for truth. You may fancy him sometimes a Stoic, sometimes an Epicurean; but he always speaks like a man in earnest, however his opinions may change through the fluctuations of his moods. Mr. Tyler's theory confounds Koheleth's point of view with that of a far inferior thinker, the author of Ecclesiasticus (see above, p. 199).
- ↑ The phrase is objectionably modern, but in this connection could not be avoided.
