In Sovran Maxims, Epicurus lays out his philosophy that pleasure is what gives meaning to one’s life. According to Sovran Maxims, the sole purpose of life is to experience pleasure, with pleasure being defined as a feeling of satisfaction and enjoyment. To maximize pleasure, pain, fear and unnecessary desires must be eliminated. Ecclesiastes is the lamentations of an old preacher. The preacher is troubled by the lack of meaning and purpose in life. He also has a focus on the cyclical nature of the world, which appears to be related to the meaninglessness of life. While the preacher does have a notably pessimistic—bordering on nihilistic—tone throughout the text, he does seem to assign some meaning to God. Both Sovran Maxims and Ecclesiastes …show more content…
“I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth therefore enjoy pleasure and behold, this also I vanity” (E 2:3). The preacher believes that enjoying pleasure is good, but he is still fixated on its fundamental meaningless. The meaning comes from God, and he does not believe is life is meaningful, so he must believe that he is not connect to God as the source of meaning. “And how dieth the wise man? As the fool. Therefor I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit” (E 2:16). The preacher is far from content with his life, and it is because he feels it is meaningless. His belief that “all is vanity and vexation of spirit” is the source of his frustration. If the preacher believed his work was meaningful, he would not hate life. “Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me” (E 2:18). The preacher feels his work is meaningless because he will die and not gain anything for all his troubles, and he is frustrated that after he dies the products of his work will go to a man that did not earn them. The preacher’s concern about his death sets him apart from Epicurus as Epicurus is not at all worried or afraid of his death. It also seems that value and meaning are not immediately given by God, but rather determined later. “For God shall bring every work into judgement, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil” (E 12:14). God is the ultimate arbiter of the value of one’s life, and God judges that value after the fact. Since the preacher believes that God has not judged the value of everything yet, he believes that everything is still meaningless, including his life. In this way, the lack of a direct connection between the preacher and God
One question that tends to strike new Christians is, "what does God want me to do with my life?" Edward Taylor talks about the answer to this question in his poem, titled "Meditation 1.6". Edward Taylor lived from 1642-1729. He was a Puritan poet who made an unusual request. Before he died, he requested that none of his poems be published. It was not until the 1930's that his poems were discovered. In "Meditation 1.6", Taylor compares being a servant of God, to being a golden coin. However, the main, underlying theme of "Meditation 1.6" is God showing the author his faults and using the author to do His bidding.
What is the point of living? If you type this question into Google, you will get many of the following answers: leave a legacy, get rich, love and explore. The one answer that comes up a lot of times is to always be satisfied. We as humans think that we can be satisfied when we have a great career, family, kids, and lots of money. If we look in the bible at the book of Ecclesiastes we can see the story of a man that has everything he can possibly want. I like to call them the three W’s (Wisdom, wealth, women). Although he had all these things he still wasn’t satisfied. In the first verse in Ecclesiastes he starts off by saying “Meaningless! Meaningless!...Everything is meaningless.” Throughout this book we can see that the message is whatever materialistic things we want in life will never fulfill our lives, so we need to look at God and build a relationship with him because only then we will be fulfilled (plus we get to go to heaven). The author put it best “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that it is the whole duty of everyone” (Ecclesiastes 12:13).
...eality was about the horrors and trepidations that have consumed a once healthy society, but he never noticed that there is a different side to reality. It is about friendship, free will, and compassion. The true meaning of joyfulness is to experience new things like going into the wild, but to experience them with another human being. This is the most fulfilling aspect of life because a person is impacting not only his/her life, but also the life of another. When a person joins the amorous aspects of reality, and then mixes it into commencing and enveloping the freedom that nature has to offer, only then will he/she truly have a life of pleasure and contentment.
It is easy to place the blame on fate or God when one is encumbered by suffering. It is much harder to find meaning in that pain, and harvest it into motivation to move forward and grow from the grief. It is imperative for one to understand one’s suffering as a gateway to new wisdom and development; for without suffering, people cannot find true value in happiness nor can they find actual meaning to their lives. In both Antigone and The Holy Bible there are a plethora of instances that give light to the quintessential role suffering plays in defining life across cultures. The Holy Bible and Sophocles’ Antigone both mirror the dichotomous reality in which society is situated, underlining the necessity of both joy and suffering in the world.
God has become angry with his people. He complains in the fifteenth century English play Everyman about humans and their obsession with material items, riches, and wealth. Men and women, he feels, have taken for granted their blessings. God wants to reprimand Everyman for his sinful life and sends Death to summon him. At the beginning of the allegorical work where figures and actions symbolize general truths, a messenger shares God’s concerns. The messenger tells the audience to watch and listen closely to the morality play so they can learn a lesson about life. Everyman fears Death, and he desires to know what one must do to earn salvation and enter heaven. The writer then implies that the way to achieve salvation is by doing good works. Through positive deeds, a man has the capability of enjoying communion with Christ (McRae 306-307). Everyman’s author wrote the play before the Protestant Reformation, so the piece of literature shares the view of Roman Catholicism during that period. Roman Catholics often rely on a spiritual leader’s interpretation of the Scriptures and some additional texts, while Protestants believe the Bible alone should studied by each individual believer. Biblical Christianity teaches something different from what Everyman does. The Bible stresses that salvation occurs through faith and belief in Jesus Christ and his sacrifice for humankind’s sins on Calvary’s cross. St. Paul in the book of Ephesians writes, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is a gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (2.8-10). When Christians...
In book III of The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius establishes the fact that God is the world's helmsman, the divine reason, the supreme good, the origin of all things. He demonstrates that God is omnipotent and omniscient. Nothing more superior can even be conceived of. Through the concept of unity, through which things basically become good, Boethius shows that God and happiness are one, the divine goodness. He concludes, "God is the essence of happiness." (70)
Ultimately, the god aids humans in our quest towards completion; Eros attempts to transform the despondency sewn into people by Zeus into happiness and contentment. Individuals have born into them, an affliction stemming from an overwhelming feeling of longing, and man must try to overcome this affliction by any means necessary. However, it is Eros that is able to truly bring two slices back to a unified whole. By following Eros, not only are we able to be healed from our yearning, but we are also capable of being pious beings while being truly
What if you were called to a home in the middle of the night where a young girl had committed suicide? Would you be able to comfort her grieving parents? Walk into the girl’s room to see where she had committed the act? Could you tell them that God was there in their time of need? Could you then go home to your small child and still have strength left? In Mark Jarman’s poem “Questions for Ecclesiastes”, his father had to do just that. Jarman uses a narrative style of poetry to question God’s will and how words fall short in times of tradgy.
...and pleasure, there was still a feeling of emptiness that nothing seemed to fill. Real meaning in life and the only way to fill that emptiness is found with a relationship with God. That relationship with God is only possible through His Son, Jesus Christ.
... There is no joy, no choice, and no individuality. If those qualities are not present in life, then what is the purpose of living? In the council’s opinion the purpose of life and living is to provide for all of man (meaning to just work day in and day out) and not for oneself. If my life had no purpose, no individuality, and no happiness, I would not want to live.
The exert from Lenior's Happiness a Philosopher's Guide talks about the meaning of life and our happiness:
“What is a man/If his chief good and market of his time/ Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more./ Sure He that made us with such large discourse,/Looking before and after, gave us not/ That capability and godlike reason/ To fust in us unused. Now whether it be. Bestial oblivion or some craven scruple/ Of thinking too precisely on th’ event” (4.4 35-43).
The intellectual traditions of the ancient world tend to focus on answering four questions that play into the purpose of one’s life. The four questions being, who am I, where am I, who am I with and what is necessary to be happy. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus and Epictetus all had different opinions on these questions which allowed me to develop my own understanding through dissection of their philosophies. These four questions were also addressed through several aspects of readings throughout the quarter. The purpose of good and evil, religion, civilization, government, honor, shame and pleasure all helped develop some concrete background for the philosophers to apply their thinking.
In Greek tragedy the natural forces are destructive. These forces might be nature, gods or fate. Man is helpless in facing these powers.
Life has meaning. One way in understanding life is the importance that life has. If something is considered important then it is valuable. Life is important because of the fact that it serves a purpose and has some sort of value connected to it. Value can be interpreted in relation to someone or some procedure that can be said to have interests. In the religious viewpoint it is understood that God is the person that individuals are valuable to. God was the one that created humans and we are important to Him because we are made in his image. Being made in his image, for the religious people, makes us wonder if we are living our life as if God would want us to. Most religious people go through each and every day with the question of “What Would Jesus Do?” The reason why most individuals live their life by this question is because God is very important to them and they do not want to do anything to disappoint Him. That is not the only possibility. Life can be important within ourselves. It doesn’t ma...