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Vanity, I Tell You! Politics is Vanity!

Vanity, I Tell You! Politics is Vanity!

Last updated on: July 25, 2016 at 5:42 am by Henry Karlson

Vanity, I Tell You! Politics is Vanity! 2016-07-25T05:42:00-05:00 Henry Karlson

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John Lydgate’s Siege of Troy, showing the Wheel of Fortune. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Citizens of the United States, there is one big question which lies before you.

Trump or Clinton, who are you going to vote for?

Or, will you choose some third party candidate because you can’t stand the GOP and DNC Candidates?

Perhaps you will choose to be a heretic and do the unthinkable and not vote, feeling, as a result the wrath of all others who will tell you that as a consequence of your choice, you have no right to speak out as to what happens after the election (Did that argument ever make any logical sense?)

Whatever you choose, whoever you vote for, be prepared. You will be told, once again, this is the most important election ever. You will be pressured to vote for someone chosen for you instead of deciding, based upon your own conscience, who you want to elect for President of the United States.

Yes, there are grave things afoot in the world, and what happens in this election is going to have consequences for all.

But really, we need to keep this in perspective.

Politics is vanity. Yes, some good can be had, for a short time, and we should do what we can to create the most just society possible, but if we are too wrapped up in politics, we ignore the higher virtues of faith, hope and love and find ourselves strung by the twists of fate which happen as a result of political intrigue.

The great philosopher Boethius had to learn this the hard way. In all likelihood, it cost him his life. He had been seduced by political fortune only to find himself to be fortune’s fool. It was a lesson which he learned late in his life, when he found himself a political prisoner awaiting the fortune’s final blow: death. But he learned it and was able to write upon it, to warn us all not to be enticed as he was by fortune, lest we too shall find that whatever success we have found is taken away from us, leaving us in ruin. And so, in his Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius reported what Philosophy has taught him:

Instead, all she has done in your case is remain constant to her own inconsistency; she was just the same when she was smiling, when she deluded you with the allurements of her false happiness. You have merely discovered the changing face of that blind power; she who still conceals herself from others has completely revealed herself to you. If you like her, follow her ways without complaint. If you abhor her treachery, spurn and reject her, that sports so to a man’s destruction. [1]

If we put our faith in fortune, if was cast our lots entirely with the political intrigues of the day, we will find that, at the end of our life, it has been for nothing. This is not to say no good had been done, for surely, whatever justice and charity which we helped bring about was good, but, when looking at history, we will see it was, or will be, a short-lived gain. We must work for the gain, but we must not find ourselves so attached to it that we make of it more than it is. Just a part of the flow of human history, where nations and peoples rise and fall. At best, we will be given a temporary gain. Everything which comes around goes around – or, as the Preacher said:

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun (Eccl. 1:9 RSV).

So long as we put our hopes in the world of change, we will find our hopes are all in vain. Everything in time is in flux. What is built up will be destroyed. Politics makes us forget this as it seduces us, again and again, making us think that the next political campaign will be the one which brings out real, lasting change (or a restoration of some past glory which has gone away). And so, let us remember once again the words of the wise preacher:

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever (Eccl. 1:2-4 RSV).

When we see how vain our political intrigue is, this does not mean we are to do nothing, that we are able to ignore justice and its pursuit. Rather, it means we understand the limits of politics in such a pursuit, showing why we can never abandon our conscience for the sake of a political end. We will hurt ourselves by disobeying our conscience as we willfully sin for the sake of political gain. Indeed, when we sell ourselves out in such a fashion, we must realize that ultimately what we gain will be very limited and in vain, for what little we gained will eventually be taken away from us, while the consequences of disobeying our conscience will not leave us after the swift change of fortune.

Why is it all vanity? Because, we see, the world is in flux. Everything changes. What we grasp now will not last, and if we try too hard to keep that which is going away, we will find ourselves acting contrary to the good itself in order to preserve that which is not to be preserved, because we will be focused on some limited former good instead of the greater good which lies before us.. And then, with the sin, comes the guilt, and so, as St. Bonaventure said, Ecclesiastes begins with the inter-relationship of three kinds of vanity, all of which flow from the fact that the world is constantly changing:

Note that in this triple vanity there is a succession as one comes from another. Thus, the vanity of sin comes from the vanity of changeableness, even though this is not the whole cause. The vanity of guilt comes from the vanity of sin. He arranges these vanities in what he sees as a reverse order while still examining the relationships. And since the double vanity of sin and guilt come from the vanity of changeableness, but this third does not come from them, he says vanity of vanities twice, but later vanity once.[2]

What exactly makes the changeable things of the world itself vanity? For are they not good, created by a good God in and through the Word? Yes, they are and insofar as they have the Word as exemplar, they are good and not in vain. The vanity lies in the way they exist in the world, and in the way we abstract their existence in the mind, both of which are constantly changing and so allow no real contact with the good essence so long as we are attached to their changeable form. And this is what St. Bonaventure explained:

First, changeableness is proven in the existence of creatures. Creatures exist in three ways, namely, in the Word by reason of exemplarity; in the world as being material; in the human mind as an abstraction. The first way of existing is unending and unchangeable, and so there is no vanity in it. There is vanity in the others, and so this section has two parts. There is a vanity of subjection to change in things according to the being they have in the world. Second, there is a vanity according to the being they have in the human mind.[3]

Things as they are in God, or as they are restored by the Word, are good. But as we find and experience them in world of flux is not their eternal form, but only an exterior image presenting a slice of that form, we do not properly get at them as they are. This is why our conventions for them will fail. We will try to explain what they are but our knowledge and understanding of them is limited, based upon an abstraction of all the changeable forms of a particular thing we have experienced without knowing the fullness of its internal logos established by the Logos. And so when we try to interact with the world based upon the conventions we established, since the world is constantly changing, those conventions will constantly be overturned by the reality which they sought to represent. If we ignore the change and try to interact with the world based upon our conventions, imposing them upon the phenomena instead of emptying ourselves of those conventions to experience the phenomena as they come to us, we will as a result fail to interact with the world as it really is. This explains why, then, in our choices we will act not according to the fullness of truth and the good which is one with it, but for some lesser form of truth and lesser good which opens up room for sin (once we remember sin is the result of choosing a lesser good than is expected of us). And so this is how and why sin and with sin, guilt, arises from the changeable nature of the world.

This is why when we try to establish a permanent form based upon a temporal slice of its being, what we produce will be false and so in vain. Politics, by how it acts upon the world, is constantly creating such constructions, and so the end result, of course, is the same as with any other such construct: we create a falsehood which, insofar as it fails to connect with the truth, will leave open room for sin to come and destroy from the inside that which we have tried to establish. It is all in vain, and so long as we think fortune favors us and our political impositions, we are creating the means for our own downfall. So much as we try to take control and stop such change, the more that change will come and take us down in the process.

It is all vain.

Why do we get so worked up in such vanity? Why do we ignore the virtues for the sake of political intrigue? Wisdom tells us we must do what we can in an unattached manner, always emptying ourselves of our false conceptions so we can grow more and more in wisdom and justice. We must deny ourselves for the sake of the other. IF we do this, we can follow the ways of God – the path of love – which tells us to love our neighbor in and with our love for God, and at the end of that path we will find the truth which is not vain:

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil (Eccl. 11:13-14 RSV).

And this is how we overcome fortune’s doom. When we look to eternity and the truth which is in God, we will not be so stung by the twists of fate. Yes, we exist in the world, and so we can be suffer in and with it, but we will not be broken down by it. We will, as Boethius wrote, be able to hold ourselves high as we find ourselves overcoming the blows of fate:

He who has ground proud fate beneath his heel
Calm in his own well-ordered life
And has looked in the face good and ill fortune
Still able to keep erect his unconquered head,
He shall not be troubled by the rage or threats of the sea
Driving the running tide up from the deep,
Nor by Vesuvius
How often it break from its deep forges
Flinging its smoking fires abroad,
Nor by the blazing thunderbolt
That strikes down lofty towers.[4]

Let us therefore seek virtue first. Let us follow the path of love, and so let us not get stuck in the vanity of politics. Let us, that is, not led by politics away from the charity which we must have if we want to receive that which eternal truth which is not in vain.

[1] Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy in Boethius: The Theological Tractates and the Consolation of Philosophy. trans. S.J. Tester (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 177.

[2] St. Bonaventure, Commentary on Ecclesiastes. trans. and ed. Campion Murrary, O.F.M. and Robert J. Karris, O.F.M. (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2005), 94

[3] St. Bonaventure, Commentary on Ecclesiastes, 97-8,

[4] Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 145.

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