And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this severe burden has God given to the sons of man to be afflicted with.
All Commentaries on Ecclesiastes 1:13 Go To Ecclesiastes 1
Gregory of Nyssa
AD 394
These are the things which the true Ecclesiast recounts as he teaches, so I believe, the great mystery of salvation, the reason why God was revealed in flesh. “I gave my heart,” he says, “to enquiring into and investigating by wisdom all that had come about under the heaven.” This is the reason for the Lord’s fleshly coming to dwell with humankind, to give his heart to investigating in his own wisdom what has come about under the heaven. What is above the heaven had no need of investigation, just as there is no need of a medical attendant for what is not in the grip of illness. So because the evils were on earth—for the creeping animal, the serpent which “crawls on its breast and on its belly,” makes the earth its food, eating nothing from heaven; as it crawls on trodden ground it always looks at what treads on it, “watching for the traveler’s heel” and injecting its venom into those who have lost “the power to tread upon serpents”—for this reason he gave his “heart to enquiring into and investigating all that has come about under the heaven.”
