I mean, what do you have to lose?
You come from nothing,
You go back to nothing.
What have you lost? Nothing!
Always look on the bright side of life.
- Monty Python
Never say of anything that I have lost it. Only that I have given it back.
- Epictetus
and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
- Ecclesiastes 12:7
God is nothing, and the source/ground of all being*. We must face God (nothingness), indeed accept and appreciate him (it and non-it), in order to passionately live. Only the wise fool thinks life is meaningless because it is momentary (Ecc 12:8). Rather, life is nothing but moments, and life is meaningful because meaning has full reign, if we so desire, with (only) nothing to stop it. If only nothingness is against you, everything is for you.
God (nothingness), will frustrate the wisdom of the wise (the teacher of Ecclesiastes, who taught the worship of God through teachings made up by men [Ecc 12:13]) (See also Isaiah 24:14). This frustration will come in the form of despair (with cries such as “Everything is meaningless!”), as the wisdom of the wise (its ‘reason’ and expectations) reflects absurdity whence shone upon the world. (The world does not obey our expectations and demands of it; this is the absurd). To avoid this dispair we must accept, appreciate and live in full view of God (nothingness) as we experience the world and create our narrative of meaning.
*To say that God is anything but nothing is to create an idol. God is not a being and cannot be objectified with a noun nor described with adjectives, except in a poetic sense which does not purport to pin God down. This God could quite rightly pass Derrida’s criteria for the Logos, but I wouldn’t want to disrupt his Sophist-like games.
