fancy that just as Pharisaism had affinities with Stoicism, so Sadducæism had with Epicureanism. As Harnack well says, 'No intellectual movement could withdraw itself from the influences which proceeded from the victory of the Greeks over the Eastern world.'[1] Mr. Tyler,[2] however, and his ally Dean Plumptre, have scarcely made the best of their case, the Epicurean affinities which they discover in Koheleth being by no means striking. Much use is made of the De Rerum Naturâ of Lucretius—a somewhat late authority! But if points of contact with Lucretius are to be hunted for, ought we not also to mention the discrepancies between the 'wise man' and the poet? If Lucr. i. 113-116 may be used to illustrate Eccles. iii. 21, must we not equally emphasise the difference between the festive mirth recommended by Koheleth (ix. 7, 8 &c.) and the simple pleasures so beautifully sung by Lucretius (ii. 20-33), and which remind us rather of the charming naturalness of the Hebrew Song of Songs?[3] The number of vague analogies between Koheleth and Epicureanism might perhaps have been even increased, but I can find no passage in the former which distinctly expresses any scholastic doctrine of Epicureanism. For instance the doctrine of Atomism assumed for illustration by Dean Plumptre,[4] cannot be found there by even the keenest exegesis; the plurality of worlds is not even distantly alluded to, and the denial of the spirit, if implied in iii, 21 (see p. 212), is only implied in the primitive Hebrew sense, familiar to us from Job and the Psalter. The recommendation of [Greek: ataraxia] (to use the Epicurean term), coupled with sensuous pleasure (v. 18-20), requires no philosophic basis, and is simply the expression of a pococurante mood, only too natural in one debarred from a
- ↑ Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, p. 46.
- ↑ See his Ecclesiastes, a Contribution to its Interpretation, &c. (1874). The main results of this work were accepted by Prof. Siegfried, who reviewed it in the Zeitschrift f. wissenschaftl. Theologie, 1875, pp. 284-291.
- ↑ This discrepancy I had noted down before observing that Dean Plumptre had quoted the very same passage of Lucretius as a parallel to Eccles. ii. 24. For my own view of Koheleth's recommendations, see p. 253. Lucretius seems to me, in this strain, to soar higher than Koheleth; Omar Khayyâm to fall below him.
- ↑ Ecclesiastes, p. 47.
