Catholic Commentary
Commendation of Simple Joy as God's Gift
15Then I commended mirth, because a man has no better thing under the sun than to eat, to drink, and to be joyful: for that will accompany him in his labor all the days of his life which God has given him under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 8:15 commends eating, drinking, and joy as genuine goods that accompany a person through labor and toil, framing them as gifts from God rather than human achievements. The verse presents joy not as an escape from life's hardships but as a legitimate companion to work and suffering within the life God has given.
Joy is not an escape from life's hardship—it travels with you through it, a gift from God woven into every ordinary day of work and rest.
Catholic tradition brings a uniquely incarnational lens to this verse that transforms its meaning. Where a dualistic reading might see "eat, drink, and be merry" as a counsel of despair or a concession to weakness, the Catholic tradition recognizes it as consistent with the goodness of creation affirmed in Genesis 1 and deepened in the Incarnation.
The Catechism teaches that "the virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every kind of excess: the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco, or medicine" (CCC 2290), but equally affirms that "creation is given to man as a gift" and that humanity is called to receive it with gratitude (CCC 299). The enjoyment Qoheleth commends is not intemperate indulgence but grateful reception — precisely the disposition the Catechism calls for.
St. Thomas Aquinas, commenting on the virtue of eutrapelia (joyful play and recreation), insisted that the refusal of all pleasure and mirth is itself a vice — a deficiency he called agreste (boorishness). For Aquinas, created joy, received in right order, participates in the divine goodness (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 168, a. 4).
Pope John Paul II, in Theology of the Body, grounds bodily pleasure itself in the nuptial meaning of the body — the body's capacity to express and receive love, rooted ultimately in the love of the Trinity. Eating and drinking together, in this framework, are communion acts that image divine generosity.
St. Basil the Great wrote that to enjoy the goods of creation without thanksgiving is a form of theft; to enjoy them with gratitude is to participate in God's own delight in what He has made. This is the difference between vanity and joy in Ecclesiastes — not what one does, but whether one receives it from God's hand.
Contemporary Catholics face twin temptations that this verse directly addresses. The first is a creeping neo-gnosticism — a subtle suspicion of bodily pleasure, rest, and festivity as spiritually inferior to fasting, vigils, and austerity. While asceticism has a proper place, a Christianity that cannot sit at a birthday table, savor a meal, or celebrate a wedding without guilt has lost Qoheleth's wisdom.
The second temptation is anxious productivity — the modern compulsion to justify one's existence through output. Qoheleth insists that joy accompanies labor; it does not require labor to justify it. The days themselves are God's gift, not raw material to be optimized.
Practically: make the Sunday meal a theological act. Light candles. Pour wine. Invite people. Let the gathering be consciously received as a gift from the God who gives days. Teach children that delight in good food is an act of gratitude, not self-indulgence. Confess not only the sins of excess but also the sin of joylessness — what the tradition calls acedia — the refusal to receive what God delights to give.
Commentary
Ecclesiastes 8:15 — Literal and Narrative Analysis
Ecclesiastes 8:15 arrives after one of the book's most anguished passages. In 8:10–14, Qoheleth has catalogued the scandal of moral inversion: the wicked are buried with honor, the righteous suffer, and retribution seems delayed or absent entirely. The reader, disoriented by this moral disorder, arrives at verse 15 not as a glib pivot but as a hard-won conclusion. The Hebrew word translated "commended" (שִׁבַּחְתִּי, shibaḥti) is stronger than simple praise—it carries the sense of extolling or declaring something excellent. Qoheleth is not merely tolerating mirth; he is lifting it up as a genuine good.
The triad "to eat, to drink, and to be joyful" (לֶאֱכוֹל וְלִשְׁתּוֹת וְלִשְׂמוֹח) recurs as a refrain throughout Ecclesiastes (2:24; 3:12–13; 5:18; 9:7), functioning as a kind of structural and theological spine to the book. Each recurrence deepens the claim. Here, the phrase is explicitly tied to labor (amal—the same word used to describe the toil that is otherwise declared "vanity"). Joy does not abolish labor's hardness; rather, it accompanies the laborer within the hardship. The syntax is telling: joy "will accompany him in his labor" — it is a fellow traveler through suffering, not an exit from it.
The closing phrase, "the days of his life which God has given him under the sun," is theologically decisive. The repetition of God's agency (cf. 5:19: "God gives wealth, possessions, and honor") reframes the entire commendation. These simple pleasures are not human achievements seized in defiance of absurdity (as in Camus's Sisyphus); they are received. The giver is God. This is why Qoheleth's counsel cannot be reduced to Epicureanism. Epicurus counseled pleasure as a strategy for managing anxiety; Qoheleth commends joy as a theological posture of receptivity toward a generous Creator.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the typological sense, the Fathers recognized in this repeated Qoheleth refrain a veiled anticipation of the messianic banquet. The table fellowship of Israel—the Passover meal, the meals of peace and thanksgiving—pointed forward to the Eucharistic feast of the New Covenant, where eating and drinking acquire eschatological weight. The anagogical reading (the highest of the four senses) sees in every sanctified meal a shadow of the heavenly banquet of Revelation 19:9.
In the tropological (moral) sense, this verse is a corrective to two opposite errors: the gnostic contempt for the body that would see created pleasure as unworthy of the spiritual life, and the hedonist absolutizing of pleasure that severs it from gratitude toward the Giver. The moral lesson is one of — receiving created goods as gifts from God, using them within the measure of one's vocation and state of life.