Читать книгу The Great Reduction - Jay Trott - Страница 21

Through our great works and search for wisdom we are trying to redress a certain perceived crookedness. We want to present an upright image to the world—we want to be straight—but we cannot deceive ourselves. In old age it becomes very plain that what is crooked cannot be made straight.

Solomon has had his own crookedness revealed to him. For one thing, he debased marriage with his multiple wives and concubines. He had a personal warning about taking foreign wives and turning away to their gods, and yet he did it anyway.

There was also a warning in the law. While the Israelites were still wandering in the desert, they were told that if they appoint a king, “neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.”

Solomon did both of those things to glorious excess, as he himself tells us. The purpose of Proverbs was to make the crooked straight, but in his old age Solomon has seen that what is crooked cannot be made straight, not by human hands anyway. The crookedness is part of who we are.

Augustine had a term for this, but we will not use it here. Suffice it to say that old men know their crookedness better than anyone, lying awake on their beds under the cold, full moon. But to someone like Solomon, this is a crushing revelation. What good is his wisdom if he cannot make the crooked straight?

In fact, it is no good. The only way we can ever be truly happy is to have an identity that is straight, that reflects our heroic concept of ourselves, our desire to be thought of as good. This is the identity the philosophers tried to obtain through their endless discussions about “the good.”

But if we are crooked by nature, then wisdom is powerless to give us what we want. We can be the wisest man in the world, like Solomon, but our wisdom cannot make us straight. This is the reason for Solomon’s reevaluation of wisdom, the thing he loved the most.