And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

I have often joked that Ecclesiastes 12:12 is my so-called “life verse.” If there is any devotional benefit to the sincere application of this moniker, it is not sufficient in my estimation to escape the charge of some degree of self-centeredness, of egoistic butchery committed against Holy Scripture in service of a self-aggrandizing sense of a protagonistic relationship to the cosmic narrative, at worst. At best, this individualistic approach nonetheless may engender a more intimate and focused purpose of relating to the meta-narrative unfolded in Scripture, even if only after the sloppy manner of modernity. 

This potential benefit is better observed in retrospect through the lives of the saints. Though the cult of the saints, especially in Roman Catholicism, is prone to a few regrettable tendencies, the principle of saintly patronage (apart from its sometime affinity for vagueness) betrays the utility of didactic storycrafting in navigating the world, especially as regards one’s self-image in relation to history and the collective.

That is to say, the lives of the saints accrue a specificity in memorial of which a “realistic” portrait of any life likely falls terrifically short. Modern people tend to think biographically rather than hagiographically, imagining that the substance of a life is in rote ‘frame-by-frame’ reconstruction of moments with any interpretive story thread dismissed as unobjective. That a modern person might consider Winston Churchill’s life, for example, as consisting fundamentally in the arrangement of the location of his birth, the manner of his education, the pattern of his profuse drinking, the order of his proclamations, the style of his speeches, and the cause of his death rather than as the disembodied occupation of a mythic role in an explanatory narrative is not relegated to his consideration of the historic. This same mindset soaks into the stories he imagines of himself.

This modern man so often and so profoundly thinks of himself biographically. He considers his life as a listicle of factoids, a table of achievements, failures, habits, desires both chronic and momentary summed into an encyclopedic timeline of himself. The story begins with birth and ends with death, containing everything while about nothing. In contrast, we might consider that hagiographies are often light on details that do not pertain to a peculiar moral, spiritual image which constitutes their heart and substance.

Perhaps it is because modern man spurns the moral realm that he hates moral stories. He becomes, in this fashion, more like the pagan Greeks of antiquity, the criteria for divinity and heroism reduced ad nihilum until the gods are as vile and viler than man and great men are measured by magnitude of consequence rather than quality of heart and purity of deed. Or else, internalizing the moral realm, he assumes his own heroism a priori and rationally wedges the facts of himself into that mold. Both alternatives could be reasonably reverse-engineered from the clear result: a self-perception devoid of a moral point, of an external purpose. 

When the man in question takes stock of himself, he is more likely to examine the history he’s made than the virtue he’s cultivated and the sins he’s yet to expiate. The biographical mind can construct a catalogue of facts, but not a proper story. The meaningful life must pertain to the meaningful world. The world of fact cannot produce a life that includes purpose.

The gospels, as a matter of fact, are not all equally biographical. Luke’s gospel is noteworthy for taking the superlative title on that metric, but the gospels of Mark and John do not even recount Jesus’ birth. That’s because the gospels are not mere chronistic enumerations of events, they have purpose. They are intended, both by their human authors and the Holy genius that inhabits them, toward a narrative end. The gospels are not primarily informative because they do not contain mere information. They are primarily vivifying and mortifying because their contents are living and sharp.

Returning to the less cynical part of my so-called, “life verse,” it is vitally important to the endeavor at hand that there is simply too much to ever know. The totality of the body of knowable facts need not be infinite in order to be effectively so because the brevity of a man’s days and the littleness of his mind make it unassailable. For example, not only would the task of biographically cognizing the lives of the saints in the sum of their parts be prohibitively exhausting, it would also be defeatingly futile. Of what avail would it be to memorize every microscopic moment of every saint’s historic life, since “there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going”? 

Just as a life has an aspect beyond the simple sum of its parts, such knowledge needs a purpose beyond itself. The Wise Man finds no deliverance from meaninglessness in knowledge. Not only is the mountain of knowable things too big to climb, there simply isn’t any value at its summit. The man who weeps for ignorance at the base will weep all the more for vanity at the peak. 

Here, the irony of Ecclesiastes 12:12’s application to my own life becomes doubled by unforeseen profundity. There is no end to minute material facts of my life, and the addition of all these valueless baubles cannot somehow amount to a valuable principle. Actualization of the self cannot come through the infinite addition of hollow realities, but their hollowness can be filled by meaning with a perspective cosmically distant from the subject. I am not everyone, nor anyone, but merely and wonderfully someone. Becoming someone isn’t about attaining to everything, but just something.

Meaningful self-perception requires the humble acknowledgement of oneself in the indispensable context of humanity and time. How could a man’s life attain to totality when his time is so infinitesimally finite? “The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” How could he be all when he is only one? There are more people than any one individual, and none of them can alone amount to much. So, to examine the individual, the truth must be remembered that to define is to limit, and to limit is to define.

Self-realization is through self-definition, which is self-limitation. A blade is honed by removal of material rather than addition, a work of art is completed when the time of the artist’s work is finished, finally delimited. It becomes itself through its limits. It can’t be named and admired and studied and critiqued unless it has a beginning and end. Self-consciousness consists in the knowledge that one is oneself and no one else, no where else, no when else. 

Solomon’s wisdom in Ecclesiastes 12:12 is a stumbling block which I confess I’ve consistently succumbed to the temptation to surmount. The heart is desperately sick, and the mind is desperately voracious. The mind is made for knowledge and is as necessary yet gluttonous as the stomach. It was made to know the infinite God, “He has put eternity into man’s mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” In this light, my life has often amounted to a salivating after the fruit of knowledge and finding its sensation mortally deprivating. “Just a little more knowledge,” I am guilty of thinking, “And then I will get it,” always one truth away from gnosis, one measly fact removed from enlightened bliss. 

But the tragic comedy of wisdom’s vain cycle is in the constant return to destitute ignorance. The naked veil of ignorance is knowledge’s faithful companion and invincible nemesis. As sure as the hotter a fire burns the faster it extinguishes itself, the quantity of wisdom fuels the depth of foolishness. Each ledge of the mountain only reveals by its height the more height to be ascended.

What a pickle we find ourselves in, eh? Perhaps the greatest pickle of all — that knowledge is not man’s ascendance but his downfall. But, “Man does not live by bread alone.” There is a fact above the facts. Nestled in the gospel is this happy fact: that man, who cannot become all in all, does not have to, because the All-in-All became man. And so, to become oneself, to be deified, realized, reborn, is not a matter of ascent but of descent through the very belly of Sheol that imprisons us. The process this side glory of becoming who one is is of becoming who one is meant to be. The intention of God, which by Love is communicated to us as purpose, is singular and particular, just like the very individual existence His love imparts in one’s first birth. 

So, a meaningful life is not a vague set of facts. It has a point, a moral. One’s perception of his particular purpose must be held, like everything else, with an open hand, or else his own ignorance will be gripped as tightly and become entangled with what he treasures. As Kierkegaard opines, faith is the conviction that what is offered up on the open hand will be given back with more perfect goodness than before. It is the conviction that the purpose exists that must be held tight. The white stone can’t be read until after judgement, but that hardly makes its existence any less vital to hope.

My exhortation, then (which can only be an exhortation because it is first an aspiration), is to a life that is not vague, torn in all directions, stretched so thin by striving after the wind that it becomes transparent and illegible. God does not call His beloved to a collective salvation only, but to individual lives, with particular good works ordained beforehand for which each man in Christ is created and recreated. Having offered the aforementioned disclaimers, I say a “life verse” may be a serviceable articulation of an intended moral point to one’s life. The men who do great things are the men who do specific things. Nobody “changes the world” in the abstract without first making a concrete impact on the immediate. A mission devoid of limitations is one devoid of definition and therefore bereft of consequence. In order to achieve consequence, consequence must first be sacrificed and intent purified.

If one wants to be free of Solomon’s vanity, one must first accept it. A meaningful life must be sanctified from biography to hagiography, in some sense, by this “resignation” in the Kierkegaardian sense. You and I can’t do anything, so we shall settle for doing just something. “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might.” Though I am myself often tempted and absorbed by the tantalizing prospect of limitless achievement, total self-determination, boundless learning, the deepest despairs of the soul are reliably found beyond that facade. Her crowning joys are the other way, lurking to ambush the spirit with life even beneath the dregs of hell. That’s where the loving Savior deposited them for us on His personal visit there. Through the paradox of the dying God-Man, the paradox of knowledge and her vanity become the same paradox of resurrection. 

In the beginning, God created everything by defining it, drawing lines to delimit it. And the Word was God, the same God who will create you and I again through the cross. He speaks the name of the one whose hairs on her head and days on this earth He has numbered. He speaks it into the void waters of Hades and creates His beloved, and calls her good. Each receives one name and one name only, not a myriad of titles and appellations, but a singular identity from Heaven itself. From the single identity, the wellspring of relationships, lines of love inscribed between the dotted stars of individuals, emerge in splendor, like the begetting of One and proceeding of Another from the One-in-Three. The Eternal is Love, relationship born of swirling interplay of divine Individual and infinite Union. The Individual does not exist without the Union, and neither the Union without the Individual. 

To participate in the Infinite, one must first become a single person. To attain to relation, one must first become absolute, and to attain to the Absolute, one must experience relation to Him. This is something knowledge of the mind can never generate. It is a sense of the spirit imparted from beyond sense.

The bondservant’s yoke of freedom is a manacle of limitation. Only by being someone can she be free, and only by not being anyone can she be someone. Only by knowing nothing can she know something and Everything, personally. 

“For by the unceasing and absolute renunciation of yourself and of all things, you may be borne on high, through pure and entire self-abnegation, into the superessential radiance of the divine darkness.” — Dionysius, The Mystical Theology