I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him. – Ecclesiastes 3:14


15 Augusti
In Assumptione Beatæ Mariæ Virginis


Contents



A note on method

What follows is a philosophical proposition, not a doctrinal pronouncement, and its reading of Ecclesiastes 3:14 is offered as one exegetical possibility among others. It presupposes the account of the non-derivative ground developed in The Is and the AM: Presence, Identity, and the Ground that holds and the account of the invariant Now developed in Does Time need Me, or do I need Time?; the reader is referred to those works for the metaphysics the present essay only names.


I. A Strange Piece of Reasoning

Qoheleth does not say people should fear God. He says God arranges things – permanently, untouchably – so that people will fear him. The fear is not a moral instruction added on top of the observation. It is the observation’s intended effect. Something about the permanence of what God does is supposed to produce, in anyone who notices it, a particular posture: fear.

That is worth pausing on before going further, because it is not obvious. Why would permanence produce fear? Permanence sounds like it should produce comfort – a foundation, something to lean on. But Qoheleth is not writing to people who feel unsupported. He is writing to people, rich and poor alike, who have spent the whole book trying to add to their lives – more wisdom, more pleasure, more labor, more accumulation – only to watch each addition evaporate. Into that scene he drops a sentence about a work that admits no addition and no subtraction. And he says: this is what should make you afraid.

The fear, then, is not fear of punishment. It is the fear of finding out that you are not the one in charge of the ledger.


II. What Fear of God Actually Names

Strip away the word’s frightening connotations and what remains is something closer to exposure. To fear God, in this structural sense, is to feel – not merely believe, but feel – that you do not sustain yourself. It is the recognition that your existence, your next breath, your continuance from this moment into the next, is not something you are generating. It is being given to you, and it could stop being given. The place where it is given is not the past and not the future but the crossing point – the invariant Now at which a life is actually held in being – and fear of God is what exposure at that point feels like: the discovery that one is not the author of one’s own actualization there. This does not exhaust what Scripture means by the fear of God; it names the ontological condition from which reverence, humility, obedience, and trust first become intelligible – the creature recognizing that it is creature. And the giving is present, not the memory of a past act: the ground does not hold a life in being once, long ago, but at each Now it occupies.

This is not primarily an emotional state. It is a form of accurate perception. A person who fears God in this sense has simply stopped mistaking their dependence for self-sufficiency. And because that mistake is the default posture of a functioning human life – nobody walks around feeling their own contingency at every moment – fear of God is less an emotion to be worked up and more a covering to be removed.

Which raises the real question of the essay: what does the removing, and what does the covering?


III. Why the Poor Fear and the Rich Do Not

There is something true in the common observation: it is disproportionately the poor, the sick, the recently bereaved, the person standing over a hospital bed, who cry out to God, who invoke him, who fear him in any recognizable sense. The comfortable tend not to. This is not a new observation – it runs through the prophets, through the Gospels, through every pastor who has ever noticed that the hardest place to preach the gospel is not the slum but the suburb.

The reason is structural, not moral. Poverty does not manufacture virtue. What it does is strip away the insulation between a person and their own dependence. When you do not know where tomorrow’s food is coming from, you cannot pretend you are the author of your own continuance. The gap between you and the ground you stand on is visible every day, because nothing is covering it.

Wealth does the opposite – not by lying to a person outright, but by functioning as evidence against a truth that is nonetheless still true. Money is, among the things human beings have built, one of the most efficient technologies ever devised for the specific purpose of adding and subtracting. It exists to let you increase what you have and decrease what threatens you. Buy insurance and subtract the risk. Buy a house and add security. Buy healthcare and subtract mortality, or at least postpone the news of it. Every transaction wealth enables is a small, real, functional demonstration that addition and subtraction are things you can perform on your own life.

And this is where Ecclesiastes 3:14 becomes exact rather than merely poetic. Nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. The verse is not a general statement about God’s greatness. It is a precise description of the one domain where the entire logic of money simply does not apply. Money’s whole grammar is addition and subtraction – the economy proper to derived things, which acquire what they are and can lose it. God’s work, Qoheleth says, admits neither: it is the non-derivative ground, the One who acquires nothing and forfeits nothing because he does not receive his being from elsewhere. A rich person can go their whole life performing successful addition and subtraction on every visible layer of their existence – and never once encounter the layer where that grammar breaks down, because money is remarkably good at keeping that layer out of view.

This is not a claim that wealth is evil, or that the rich are worse than the poor. It is narrower and, I think, more useful: wealth is effective camouflage. It does not remove the dependence. It removes the feeling of the dependence, by supplying a convincing, functional substitute – a life in which you appear, for long uninterrupted stretches, to be adding and subtracting your own security by your own competence. Money can purchase security within existence; it cannot purchase the existence within which security is possible. But control over the conditions of existence is not the same as possession of its ground. Wealth can increase the range of what a person can control without increasing the ontological source from which that person’s existence is received. The richer person may therefore exercise greater practical sovereignty over circumstances while remaining no less dependent in being.


IV. Qoheleth Already Knew This

It would be a mistake to read Ecclesiastes as praising poverty or condemning wealth outright – the book is not that simple, and neither is the world. Qoheleth watches the camouflage fail in real time. In 5:12 he observes that the laborer sleeps sweetly whatever he eats, but the abundance of the rich man permits him no sleep. A few verses later, in 6:1-2, he names something he calls an evil he has seen under the sun: a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that he lacks nothing his heart desires – yet God does not give him power to enjoy it, and a stranger enjoys it instead.

That is the camouflage tearing. Wealth does not actually reach the layer it was covering. It only postpones the moment of finding that out. Sooner or later – illness, a diagnosis, a market collapse, a child who will not speak to you, the particular 3 a.m. in which none of it can be spent – the addition-and-subtraction machinery seizes up, and the person discovers, often for the first time in decades, that they were never the one sustaining their own life to begin with. Jesus says almost the same thing about the man tearing down his barns to build bigger ones: this very night your soul is required of you (Luke 12:20). The camouflage does not fail because wealth is cursed. It fails because it was never actually built to reach that far. It was only ever built to look, for a while, like it did.


V. The Real Distinction Is Not Rich and Poor

If the argument stopped here it would collapse into a simple moral tale – poor good, rich bad – which is neither what Ecclesiastes teaches nor what is observably true. Plenty of poor people are bitter toward God, or indifferent to him, precisely because they have found other, smaller forms of camouflage: resentment, numbness, distraction, the sheer exhaustion of survival that leaves no room to feel anything as large as fear. And plenty of the wealthy have had the camouflage tear early – through grief, through failure, through an illness money couldn’t buy off – and have ended up more exposed, more genuinely fearful of God, than people with far less.

So the line does not run between rich and poor. It runs between covered and uncovered. Money is simply the most common, most efficient covering available in a wealthy society, which is why the pattern shows up so reliably at the level of populations even though it fails constantly at the level of individuals. Fear of God does not track income. It tracks how much insulation currently stands between a person and the plain fact of their own contingency – and insulation can be bought, but it can also be built from pride, distraction, busyness, or the simple decision to look away.


VI. What the Permanence Is Actually For

Return, finally, to the strange logic with which Qoheleth begins. God’s work endures, admits no addition, no subtraction – so that people will fear him. Read through everything above, this stops sounding like a threat and starts sounding like something closer to mercy, if a severe one. The permanence is not there to intimidate. It is there as a fixed point that no amount of covering can actually move, waiting under every layer of camouflage a person builds, for the day the camouflage inevitably wears through.

The fear this produces, rightly understood, is not the terror of a hostile power. It is the vertigo of a person who has just discovered – usually not by argument but by circumstance – that the ground under their additions and subtractions was never their own ground to begin with. That discovery is available to the poor on nearly any ordinary day, which is why they reach for God so much more readily. It is available to the rich too. It may arrive later – or, more precisely, wealth can postpone the occasions on which dependence becomes impossible to ignore. When the covering finally tears, the discovery can therefore feel sudden, even though the dependence itself was present all along.

Nothing can be added to what God does, and nothing taken away. Every human fortune, by contrast, is nothing but addition and subtraction, performed for a while, on borrowed ground. The fear Qoheleth names is simply what it feels like to notice the difference.

Muéveme, en fin, tu amor, y en tal manera, que, aunque no hubiera cielo, yo te amara, y, aunque no hubiera infierno, te temiera. – Anónimo, Soneto a Cristo Crucificado



References

  • The Holy Bible. Ecclesiastes 3:14-20; 5:1-12; 6:1-2; Luke 12:13-21; Mark 10:17-27.
  • Gaitan, Oscar. The Is and the AM: Presence, Identity, and the Ground that Holds. 2026.
  • Gaitan, Oscar. Does Time need Me, or do I need Time?. 2026.
  • Gaitan, Oscar. Where Is God? Suffering, the Present Moment, and the Ground That Does Not Intervene. 2026.
  • Gaitan, Oscar. The Corridor: On the Ground That Does Not Withdraw. 2026.
  • Gaitan, Oscar. The Ground That Knows: On Grounding, Presence, and What Divine Knowledge Is. 2026.


Further Reading

Book

  • The Lemniscate of Time: A Geometric Meditation on Eternity and Temporal Succession
    ISBN: 9798248842360
    Zenodo: DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18684516


Selected Essays