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Summing up Hemingway is not as hard as I thought it was going to be. Hemingway was nihilistic in that he understood the problem of modern man UNDER THE SUN without God in the picture just like Solomon did in the Book of Ecclesiastes. In fact, Hemingway named his book THE SUN ALSO RISES from the first chapter of Ecclesiastes and he seemed to be influenced by several of the verses from Ecclesiastes such as this example below:
“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know” (Ernest Hemingway).
“For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow” (Eccl. 2:18).
When this truth hit home with Hemingway then he drowned himself in his booze. Francis Schaeffer observed:
PAPA HEMINGWAY CAN FIND THE CHAMPAGNE OF PARIS SUFFICIENT FOR A TIME, BUT ONCE HE LEFT HIS YOUTH HE NEVER FOUND IT SUFFICIENT AGAIN. HE HAD A LIFETIME SPENT LOOKING BACK TO PARIS AND THAT CHAMPAGNE AND NEVER FINDING IT ENOUGH.
We live our lives bounded by those two mysteries, birth and death—our beginning and our end—and in between we stumble about in the dark, looking for the light, or at least for a good pair of existential shoes so we will not cut our feet quite so much on the sharp edges of Reality as we head for the Exit. What most of us find is ordinary life. The accidents of history have for now enclosed a space in which a wide swath of humanity—though not all of us, to be sure—experience ordinariness in the prosperity and pleasures of an industrialized and technologized world. With some effort, relative comfort and regular enjoyable experiences belong to us almost as a birthright. This is not necessarily bad. Go ahead, King Solomon said,
“Eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do. Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun …” (Ecclesiastes 9:7-9).
You might as well enjoy yourself. Work hard, eat, drink, dress well, and make love with your wife while you can, “for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). Is Solomon sincerely offering helpful advice here, or is he just being ironic, to make a point? Duane Garrett, a Southern Baptist Old Testament scholar, says that Solomon “anticipates the existentialists” in their perception of the absurdities of life. Indeed, he does. From Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Camus and Sartre, from Dostoevsky to Hemingway, the existential philosophers and writers explored as best they could the realms of absurdity and death, as Solomon had thousands of years before. In the 20th century, the mystery of sex was added to the Existentialist mix. But Solomon had been there first, too.
Solomon wrote the two most indigestible books of the Bible, Song of Songs andEcclesiastes. The former sings the delights of physical love between a man and a woman, replete with carnal metaphors and allusions—“your breasts are like two fawns.” The latter teaches that the course of this earthly life, shut up “under the sun,” is ultimately hebel—meaningless, futile, a chasing after the wind—since the prize and the glory for all who run the race is always the same—the silence of the grave. Sex and Death.
Sex, but Song of Songs is never tawdry or titillating. It is eros poetically restrained, a song of romantic love and consummation constrained within the boundaries of committed love and marriage. Constrained, yet still exuberant, and finally exultant: “Love is as strong as death, its passion intense as the grave. It burns like a blazing fire, like a mighty flame.” (Song of Songs 8:6). Yet even in the midst of celebration and the pledge that somehow love touches the eternal, comes the reminder that physical passion and intimacy, like everything else, is transitory; love may be strong but the grave is inexorable.
Death, but Ecclesiastes is never morbid or obsessive. It is down to earth reality, an unflinching look at the stamp of futility that death impresses on all merely earthly pursuits. Wealth, fame, ambition, achievement, pleasure; they never grant us immortality, they never gain eternity, they all blow away like dust in the wind. Who can argue with this logic? “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). And wisdom may be better than foolishness, but it still won’t stop time: “Like the fool, the wise man too must die!” (Ecclesiastes 2:16). Live long enough and life itself may lose its taste and turn to ashes in your mouth: “All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye is never satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.” Under the aspect of temporality everything eventually loses its shine: “There is nothing new under the sun.”
It’s certainly not Solomon’s fault, then, when the human race recycles the same game with each passing generation, expects different results, and yet is disappointed each time. Albert Camus, the French atheist existentialist, compared Man’s predicament to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, the man condemned by the gods to “ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” Camus was right to make the comparison, but he was wrong to proclaim that this absurd labor can “take place in joy.” Maybe we can be happy for awhile; there is nothing wrong with enjoying the honest, innocent, and even passionate pleasures of our few days here on earth. But true joy? That’s not to be had “under the sun.” What’s the existential man, or woman, to do?
The existential approach to life, like sexuality and high explosives, has the capacity to do damage if not constrained and channeled. Yet, equally, it can both strip away the overburden of the debris of ordinary life, revealing the bare bedrock of human existence, and also create the space—the possibility—of true encounter and real relationship. Taken wrong, the existential sensibility can seem little more than “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” Yet taken right, it can say “enjoy the journey when you can, but do not lose sight of the destination, and never forget that an accounting is inevitably due: ‘For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil’ (Ecclesiastes 12:14).”
I use the term “existentialism” only as a convenience; there is no such philosophical system as Existentialism. On the one hand, an existential frame of mind will cordially distrust any sealed-off, overly structured system of thought, be it Platonism, Calvinism, Marxism, or Veganism. On the other hand, however, the idiot sing-song, the mindless chant often rising from the postmodern landscape—“What’s true for you isn’t true for me”— bestirs both concerned compassion and disgust, something like a mother or father’s reaction to baby puke. No, the chastened, constrained existentialist says, there really is Truth, hard as it may be to find and acknowledge, and sometimes the truth hurts very much. There are hard edges to Reality, and they will not bend or soften to suit your wishes.
No sealed-off “foolproof” system is adequate to actual human living. No “airtight” theology survives contact with real existence. But any journey requires a map, even if it’s only a set of mental way-points, and from where we get our maps makes a difference as to where we end up. This is particularly clear in the life, writing, and death of Ernest Hemingway.
As Hemingway-biographer, Michael Reynolds wrote, “Hemingway was existential long before the word was current.” This was true of Hemingway’s life as well as his writing. In fact, it is impossible for anyone to be existential in writing without being existential in life. Hemingway’s pas de trois with sex and death is well-known, but the core of his existential effort, personal as well as literary, was the quest for grace. Every Hemingway code hero—Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Robert Jordan, Harry Morgan, Thomas Hudson, the matadors of Death in the Afternoon, the old fisherman Santiago—sought “grace under pressure,” a phrase Hemingway himself coined. This grace was cool-headedness in the midst of violence and chaos, resolve in the face of inevitable loss and failure, and poise at the approach of death. This was the grace Hemingway himself sought all his life and never gained.
But this is manufactured “grace,” cobbled together of equal parts worked-up courage and personal ritual. It is hard individual effort, reliance on character, and aesthetic self-making. It is works. There is actually no grace in this “grace.” It is spiritual only in a vague, attenuated sense and religious only abstractly, as a purely personal, subjective sacrament. Hemingway’s spiritual and religious views were deeply ambivalent. To call him a Believer would empty that term of solid meaning, but to call him an Atheist is just propaganda. Grasping atheists are fond of the quote from A Farewell to Arms: “All thinking men are atheists.” But this is not Hemingway, nor even his alter ego, Frederic Henry. It is a major in the Italian Army speaking, not the main, or even a particularly sympathetic, character. Just as well, or better, to quote Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, “I’m pretty religious,” and then call Hemingway a saint. What is true is that religion and the question of God never go away throughout the entire Hemingway oeuvre. To miss this is the same error as missing Melville’s struggle with his own Calvinist demons and thinking Moby Dick is just a tale about hunting a whale.
Hemingway wrote eloquently and stylishly about human struggle and failure, loss and death, relationships, love and, yes, sex. But he was a man profoundly disappointed with life, which included his disappointment with religion, and his disappointment with God. Of Hemingway’s discouragement with the failure of Catholicism in particular to provide him comfort or assuage his sense of guilt, Hemingway scholar Kenneth Lynn wrote, “he … adopted a privately formed and far more pessimistic religious vision which stressed that human life was hopeless, that God was indifferent, and that the cosmos was a vast machine meaninglessly rolling on into eternity.” At the last, Hemingway despaired and took his own life.
That almost sounds like something Qohelet—Solomon as the Teacher—might have felt, and wrote, and done at the end of Ecclesiastes. After a rambling, personal disquisition on the meaninglessness of all human endeavor and achievement; after finding no lasting satisfaction from wine, women, and song; after seeing that “time and chance happen to us all”; and that death, the final disappointment, takes everyone, shouldn’t Solomon have ended up in the same place as Hemingway? But he did not. Why not? Because Solomon had a different map, a map not of his own self-
making, and not a personal code of manly grace under pressure. Solomon’s map allowed him to admit defeat without despair. The map, of course wasTorah, the law and the commandments, and, most importantly in these circumstances, the instruction of the LORD, the covenant God of Israel.
Hemingway’s existentialism failed him because it ended as it began, with the assumptions of an indifferent God in an indifferent universe, and the sufficienc of the self. Hemingway, as accomplished a man and writer as he was, patched his worldview together only from the broken pieces of a difficult youth, the disaffection and disenchantment of the post-World War I generation, and the deep themes of alienation and abandonment that had already overtaken modernist literature. Solomon, too, tried his hand at personal worldview making. He not only made himself, he made an empire. And when in hishubris he turned away from the LORD, the God of Israel, he lived long enough to hear God tell him, “Since this is your attitude . . . I will most certainly tear the kingdom away from you” (1 Kings11:11).
Solomon’s existentialism showed him what Hemingway would also realize, that a man’s life “under the sun” is hebel—vapor—a chasing after the wind. But Solomon’s existential journey was also a return, to the God who alone gives meaning to life. I imagine, and I think it is consonant with Scripture, that Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes toward the end of his life. And I believe that, chastened and contrite, he was offering the broken pieces of his life back to God, who graciously accepted the offering. The last of Ecclesiastes is eloquently cautionary: “Remember your Creator while you are still young, before the days of despair come and the years draw near of which you will say, ‘I find no pleasure in any of this’ ” (Ecclesiastes 12:1); “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is what being a man is all about” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). Maybe if Hemingway had listened to this he would have understood what true manhood is, and maybe he would have lived to find light beyond despair. Kenneth Lynn writes of Hemingway the art lover, that he was “deeply in love with the image of Jesus Christ crucified.” Perhaps even in his desolation, there was a part of Hemingway, deeply buried, that was in love with the real Jesus Christ crucified. Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?
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Midnight in Paris (2011) Scene: “What are you writing?”/’Hemingway’.
This series deals with the Book of Ecclesiastes and Woody Allen films. The first post dealt with MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT and it dealt with the fact that in the Book of Ecclesiastes Solomon does contend like Hobbes and Stanley that life is “nasty, brutish and short” and as a result has no meaning UNDER THE SUN.
The movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS offers many of the same themes we see in Ecclesiastes. The second post looked at the question: WAS THERE EVER A GOLDEN AGE AND DID THE MOST TALENTED UNIVERSAL MEN OF THAT TIME FIND TRUE SATISFACTION DURING IT?
In the third post in this series we discover in Ecclesiastes that man UNDER THE SUN finds himself caught in the never ending cycle of birth and death. The SURREALISTS make a leap into the area of nonreason in order to get out of this cycle and that is why the scene in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS with Salvador Dali, Man Ray, and Luis Bunuel works so well!!!! These surrealists look to the area of their dreams to find a meaning for their lives and their break with reality is only because they know that they can’t find a rational meaning in life without God in the picture.
The fourth post looks at the solution of WINE, WOMEN AND SONG and the fifth and sixth posts look at the solution T.S.Eliot found in the Christian Faith and how he left his fragmented message of pessimism behind. In the seventh post the SURREALISTS say that time and chance is all we have but how can that explain love or art and the hunger for God? The eighth post looks at the subject of DEATH both in Ecclesiastes and MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. In the ninth post we look at the nihilistic worldview of Woody Allen and why he keeps putting suicides into his films.
In the tenth post I show how Woody Allen pokes fun at the brilliant thinkers of this world and how King Solomon did the same thing 3000 years ago. In the eleventh post I point out how many of Woody Allen’s liberal political views come a lack of understanding of the sinful nature of man and where it originated. In the twelfth post I look at the mannishness of man and vacuum in his heart that can only be satisfied by a relationship with God.
In the thirteenth post we look at the life of Ernest Hemingway as pictured in MIDNIGHT AND PARIS and relate it to the change of outlook he had on life as the years passed. In the fourteenth post we look at Hemingway’s idea of Paris being a movable feast. The fifteenth and sixteenth posts both compare Hemingway’s statement, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know…” with Ecclesiastes 2:18 “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” The seventeenth post looks at these words Woody Allen put into Hemingway’s mouth, “We fear death because we feel that we haven’t loved well enough or loved at all.”
In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Hemingway and Gil Pender talk about their literary idol Mark Twain and the eighteenth post is summed up nicely by Kris Hemphill‘swords, “Both Twain and [King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes] voice questions our souls long to have answered: Where does one find enduring meaning, life purpose, and sustainable joy, and why do so few seem to find it? The nineteenth post looks at the tension felt both in the life of Gil Pender (written by Woody Allen) in the movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS and in Mark Twain’s life and that is when an atheist says he wants to scoff at the idea THAT WE WERE PUT HERE FOR A PURPOSE but he must stay face the reality of Ecclesiastes 3:11 that says “God has planted eternity in the heart of men…” and THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING! Therefore, the secular view that there is no such thing as love or purpose looks implausible. The twentieth post examines how Mark Twain discovered just like King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes that there is no explanation for the suffering and injustice that occurs in life UNDER THE SUN. Solomon actually brought God back into the picture in the last chapter and he looked ABOVE THE SUN for the books to be balanced and for the tears to be wiped away.
The twenty-first post looks at the words of King Solomon, Woody Allen and Mark Twain that without God in the picture our lives UNDER THE SUN will accomplish nothing that lasts. The twenty-second post looks at King Solomon’s experiment 3000 years that proved that luxuries can’t bring satisfaction to one’s life but we have seen this proven over and over through the ages. Mark Twain lampooned the rich in his book “The Gilded Age” and he discussed get rich quick fever, but Sam Clemens loved money and the comfort and luxuries it could buy. Likewise Scott Fitzgerald was very successful in the 1920’s after his publication of THE GREAT GATSBY and lived a lavish lifestyle until his death in 1940 as a result of alcoholism.
In the twenty-third post we look at Mark Twain’s statement that people should either commit suicide or stay drunk if they are “demonstrably wise” and want to “keep their reasoning faculties.” We actually see this play out in the film MIDNIGHT IN PARIS with the character Zelda Fitzgerald. In the twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth posts I look at Mark Twain and the issue of racism. In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS we see the difference between the attitudes concerning race in 1925 Paris and the rest of the world.
The twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth posts are summing up Mark Twain. In the 29th post we ask did MIDNIGHT IN PARIS accurately portray Hemingway’s personality and outlook on life? and in the 30th post the life and views of Hemingway are summed up.
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