Too Pragmatic

Or, what my favorite professor at The University of Texas at Austin and Ecclesiastes 1 have in common

Photo by Steve Mitchell

Who drinks coffee at 11 pm but Christians trying to grasp Kierkegaard, Hume, and Bacon without becoming Nietzsche.

Quackenbush on the Drag in Austin, probably 1983. A handful of us were working through European Intellectual Philosophy, which sounds impressive until you realize we were mostly trying to figure out whether anything meant anything and whether we could say so out loud without God falling off the shelf.

My professor was Dr. John Zammito, a brilliant man and a professed Agnostic. His course was European Intellectual History from Bacon to Hegel, which tells you exactly where the ledge was. He was one of the top five teachers I ever had at The University of Texas or Dallas Theological combined. He is now a Professor Emeritus at Rice and told me more than once that I was too pragmatic.

He wasn’t wrong.

The pragmatist’s question is always the same. Does it work? What did it produce? What did you gain? Kierkegaard raised the question of the leap. Hume made causation negotiable. Bacon gave us the method. Nietzsche showed us the honest terminus of the horizontal road, which is useful to know even if it isn’t pleasant. None of it was resolved. Zammito could map every mile of that territory. He knew where each road ended. He just didn’t have another one to offer.

Forty years later, I’m reading Ecclesiastes.

Same coffee. Different mug. I work with tools every day and think in systems. I understand cycles the way a mechanic understands an engine. Input, process, output, repeat. You’d think Ecclesiastes 1 would be comfortable territory.

It wasn’t.

Qoheleth opens with four cycles. The sun rises, sets, and rises again. The wind blows south, turns north, and keeps circling. Rivers run to the sea, and the sea never fills. Generations come and go, and no one remembers. Ceaseless motion. No arrival.

The Hebrew word is hebel, translated as vanity, but its literal meaning is vapor or breath; the thing that dissipates before you can hold it.

My gut said what the pragmatist always says. If nothing arrives, why plan? Why build? The pragmatist’s answer to an unproductive system is to exit it or find a better one. Ecclesiastes doesn’t offer either. It keeps describing the cycles with what feels like inexcusable calm.

That’s the pragmatist talking. Forty years and it hasn’t changed.

“Under the sun” appears fourteen times in this book. It is not decoration. It’s a frame, a deliberate boundary on the instrument being used. It’s also a horizontal-only measurement where everything is evaluated by what you can see, accumulate, and arrive at. Run that instrument long enough with unlimited resources, which Solomon did, and the accurate result is hebel. Not because life is meaningless, but because the instrument can’t reach the thing that gives it meaning.

The feeling Ecclesiastes 1 produces, that restless, what’s the point weight, is not nihilism. It’s not a personal failure. It’s the accurate result of measuring your life with a horizontal-only instrument. The problem isn’t your life. The problem isn’t your plans. The problem is what you’re measuring them against.

The pragmatist asks what you produced. Ecclesiastes is asking who you’re building your life in front of. And that’s entirely different.

Zammito saw the pragmatism problem clearly. He was working entirely under the sun, brilliant as he was, and he could name what was missing. He just couldn’t hand me the tool.

I sent him a draft. He wrote back the same day. He’d been working on Ecclesiastes himself. That kind of irony you don’t manufacture.

He raised a philological question. Are the book’s final two verses, “Fear God, keep his commandments,” Qoheleth’s own conclusion or a later editor’s pious addition? The debate is real among scholars, but Qoheleth cracks the under-the-sun frame well before the last page. In Ecc. 2:24, “this also is from the hand of God.” That vertical thread is in the body of the text. The authorship question doesn’t remove it.

He also pushed for pragmatism. His Qoheleth is more pragmatic than mine. Just live out your life, because God gave it to you, and don’t expect more. He said he didn’t blame me for wanting more. It just isn’t pragmatic, by his lights.

He gave up being a Christian at fourteen and has never regretted it. I believe him.

That’s not the same thing as him being right.

Same argument. Same two men. Forty years later, still going. I consider that one of the better outcomes of writing anything.

Steven Mitchell is a freelance content writer and strategist based in South Orange County, California. He writes about faith, fatherhood, and the work of building something from scratch at CreativeGuySteve.com.

Nancy uses a kaleidoscope as the central image. The Spirit tilts the lens. Same broken pieces, new pattern, new light. That is the experiential side of what Qoheleth is pointing at. The horizontal instrument isn’t wrong because life is wrong. It’s wrong because it can’t reach what gives life meaning. Nancy shows what it looks like when the other lens clicks into place. Go read it.

[embed]See with New Eyes as the Holy Spirit Helps You Shift Perspective God’s Spirit rearranges our experiences into something unexpectedly sacredmedium.com

Click here to follow Refresh the Soul to stay updated with the latest!