I said in my heart, Come now, I will test you with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity.
All Commentaries on Ecclesiastes 2:1 Go To Ecclesiastes 2
Gregory of Nyssa
AD 394
He condemns pleasures as futile. For he says, “I said in my heart, Come hither, I will test you in merriment, and also in good, and this too is futility.” For he did not give himself to this kind of experience straight away or slide into partaking of pleasures without having tasted the austere and more devout life. Rather, after training himself with these things and achieving in his character the severity and determination through which the lessons of wisdom come most readily to those who pursue them, he then descends to things considered agreeable to the senses. [He does this] not because he is drawn down to them by passion but in order to investigate whether the sensual experience of them makes any contribution to the knowledge of true Good. That is why he makes his own what he had originally regarded as alien, laughter, and calls the condition dizziness, in that it is equivalent in meaning to “frenzy” or “madness”; for what else would anyone properly call laughter? It is neither speech nor activity directed to any end but an unseemly loss of bodily control.
