The Babel Fiasco (Part II, Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is Utterly Meaningless)

“Beginning to think is beginning to undermine” Albert Camus

In thinking about the Babel fiasco the mind turns quickly to the Gothic cathedrals of europe.  These behemoths of Christendom retain the memory of the tower of Bablel and the ensuing fiasco.

Buttressed and encrusted, they strive upward (though not so much in Italy), representing a belief in the necessary and intrinsic relationship between the plane of experience and the realm of the infinite.  However, it is the hermeneutic content of the cathedrals that point to a radically different understanding of the vertical building project.  The cathedrals are born out of a hermeneutic theology, they stem from an understanding and interpretation of scripture.  It is this hermeneutic content that is of interest here.

Hermeneutics buttressed and encrusted. Photo by Olga Feigelman

Hermeneutics transcends correspondence, transcends translation, in meaning to find the fractured ground of the propositional.

Let’s take a leap and look at The Book of Ecclesiastes.  It is Ecclesiastes that provides illumination into the recesses of the gothic mind; an aging Solomon, the great temple builder of the Old Testament, opens his treatise on life with the words “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is Meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).  Solomon is lamenting that meaning cannot be found in the stuff of life, cannot be found on “the plane of experience”.

Solomon’s  temple had been the house of God and yet Solomon invokes the silent God, a God who deals the cards but is apparently absent from the structure of life and meaning Solomon is attempting to form: “God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.” (Ecc. 5:2)

Strangely, amongst The Preacher’s cantakerous musings on the nature of existential meaninglessness he beseeches the reader to fear God, to keep their oaths and measure their words.

Here Solomon both affirms the accountability of man to God while negating the direct presence of God in the narrative of human history.  He places God in His heaven and men and women on their earth.  He implores the people to be silent, to stand only in awe of God – he can only say “much dreaming and many words are meaningless.” (Ecc. 5:7)

To stand in awe and in silence is placed in counterpoint to the plethora of meaningless words and dreams.  The dreams of men and women must be punctuated by an understanding of their ultimate failure.  the Gothic cathedrals are the built personification of Ecclesiastes following Babel.  They have, built into their fabric, the idea of the temple as a fragment of the New Jerusalem (heaven come to earth) and the impossibility of manufacturing meaning on earth.

Part III: Knocking on Heaven’s Door