Ecclesiastes and the Second Naiveté
“An Old Man Reading,” by Ferdinand Bol (1642). National Gallery of Art.
Let’s be honest: Ecclesiastes is a bit of a strange book at first glance.
It doesn’t sound like a sermon or a letter, like the prophets and Proverbs. It sounds like a man thinking out loud at two o’clock in the morning, wrestling with life’s unfairness and futility, pacing the floor, muttering questions he knows don’t have easy answers.
“Vanity of vanities,” the Preacher sighs. “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” (Eccl 1:2–3).
We’re used to opening the Bible and hoping to find something like, “It’s okay… Just trust God, and everything will be all right.” But Ecclesiastes says, “Trust God anyway, even when it won’t.”
It refuses to gloss over the ugliness of life “under the sun.” And that’s exactly why we need to pick it up and read.
We live in an age addicted to easy answers. There’s always a new life-hack by a new self-help influencer promising you a better you in a 15 second TikTok. Open your phone and you’ll find a thousand shortcuts to meaning, all promising a shortcut to happiness if you’ll just hit that like button, smash subscribe, and pay $11.99 a month for the insiders.
But the Preacher offers no shortcuts. He drags us by the hand through the long, slow road of doubt and disappointment. Work, wisdom, pleasure, success, even religion itself… none of them delivers the final payoff. “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind” (Eccl 1:14).
This is a book obsessed with life “under the sun.” That phrase echoes like a bell through its chapters, some thirty times or more. “Under the sun” is where you and I live. It’s the world as it appears, limited, decaying, filled with moments of joy that always slip through your fingers.
Ecclesiastes is honest about the boredom, anxiety, and dissatisfaction that still gnaw at us even after we’ve built the life we always thought we wanted. It’s less a motivational TED talk than it is a weathered journal from a survivor, and it’s been waiting for you to take it off the shelf and let it speak.
First Naiveté: The Unexamined Faith
Most of us begin life with a sort of bright-eyed faith—a first naivete, as French philosopher Paul Ricœur put it. We trust what we’re told. We believe in the goodness of life. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we get a decade or two before the cracks begin to show.
This is the Sunday school faith of childhood: simple, sincere, grateful. There’s beauty here, and we shouldn’t sneer at it. Jesus himself told us to become like children. But if we stay here forever, we risk mistaking sentimentality for faith. We confuse “God is good” with “nothing bad will happen to me.”
But it’s only a matter of time before reality tests that creed.
Ecclesiastes has no patience for such illusions. The Preacher torches them. He walks through every room of life and comes out coughing, waving the smoke away. “I said of laughter, ‘It is mad,’ and of pleasure, ‘What use is it?’” (Eccl 2:2). The book won’t let us stay children. It tells the truth—sometimes in a voice so raw it stings.
Some of us—perhaps most of us—eventually move into a stage of suspicion and criticism. The world is more broken than we thought. We see through the promises of work, money, achievement, even religion. Suffering comes. Good people lose. Death is real.
The world shrugs.
Ecclesiastes meets us right there. The Preacher’s questions are our own: “So… what’s the point?” “Why even bother?” “Why should I fear God if the same fate overtakes the wise and the fool?” (see Eccl 2:14–16).
This is not a comfortable place, but it’s definitly necessary. Real faith is not built on denial, and the Preacher knows this. He refuses to let us tape a happy ending onto the story. His gift to us is raw honesty about life ‘below the sun,’ in the imminent, in mortality. It gives voice to those who feel like outsiders in church, who sit quietly through cheerful songs and wonder, “Does anyone here see what I see?”
If you’ve ever whispered those questions in the dark, Ecclesiastes is your book. It gives you permission to ask the taboo questions you’ve wondered but never dared to mutter aloud.
Second Naiveté: A Hard-Won Trust
Paul Ricœur spoke of a “second naiveté”—a faith that comes after suspicion, after criticism, after the hard questions have been asked. It’s not a return to childhood innocence, but something deeper, more weathered. It’s the “fear of God” the Preacher lands on in the final verses—not a cowering dread, but a posture of awe, humility, and obedience in a world that cannot be tamed.
“Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccl 12:13). This is a decision, not a resignation, to live with open hands, to trust God not because the world makes sense but because He is good, even when the world isn’t.
And here’s the secret Ecclesiastes doesn’t say outloud but implies loudly: “under the sun” isn’t all there is. The Preacher’s relentless honesty isn’t meant to drive us to despair, but to unmask our misplaced hopes and point us toward a better one: a hope “above the sun.” The disappointments of the imminent—of the here and now—are meant to stir our hearts for the transcendent. When everything under the sun fails to satisfy, Ecclesiastes dares us to lift our eyes and remember: there is more.
Second naivete is not a naive hope that tomorrow under the sun will be brighter. It’s a childlike trust that eternity is real, that the God who made us has planted “eternity in our hearts” (Eccl 3:11). True hope doesn’t settle for what is passing. It aches for what is permanent. It longs for the day when the sun itself will fade but the Light above will never fail.
Second naivete is what happens when we carry our doubts through the desert and still decide to worship. It’s Job, sitting in the ashes, saying, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” It’s the parent who prays for a child that won’t return. It’s the believer who lights a candle in the fog and waits for morning.
Moments before his conversion, St. Augustine heard the words tolle lege—take up and read—and everything changed. Maybe it’s time for us to do the same with Ecclesiastes.
Take up this book and let it question you. Let it interrupt your platitudes. Let it teach you how to hope after cynicism. Don’t rush to the end. Sit with the questions. Read it slowly, aloud if you can. Hear the voice of a man who has seen everything, lost everything, and still found something worth clinging to.
You may find that Ecclesiastes becomes your companion in the late watches of the night. You may discover, to your surprise, that it gives you permission to tell the truth in prayer, to grieve, to laugh, to sit quietly before God and say, “I don’t understand, but I’m still here.”
If you’ve been burned by shallow faith or cheap answers, Ecclesiastes is your invitation home. If you’re angry at God, confused by suffering, or just bored with the same old spiritual slogans, this book is for you. It won’t try to fix you. It will sit beside you in the dust, listen to your questions, and quietly ask a few of its own.
This is the gift of second naivete: a faith that refuses to close its eyes, yet also refuses to walk away. The Preacher does not end with despair, but with reverence. He asks us to embrace the world as it is, not as we wish it were, and to find God right there, in the middle of the mess.
And then, to look up, to hope for something more than life “under the sun.” To hunger for the “new heavens and new earth” that Christ promises, where the shadows lift and meaning is finally made full.
So—take up and read. Bring your questions, your wounds, your doubts. Ecclesiastes is waiting. It won’t give you easy answers. It will give you something better: the courage to keep seeking God, even in the fog. The permission to hope, even after hope has been shattered and remade. The wisdom to live honestly, joyfully, humbly, “under the sun,” with your eyes fixed on the One who stands above it.
That’s the journey: from naïve hope, through desert honesty, to a childlike faith reborn. Not in this world’s promises, but in the promise of the One who holds eternity in his hands.
Maybe, just maybe, that’s what faith really looks like.
