Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723) is best known as a Prince of Moldavia, scholar, and encyclopedist — author of major works on the history of the Ottoman Empire and the geography and customs of Moldavia. Less widely known is that he also wrote the first original philosophical work by a Romanian author: The Discourse, or the Dispute of the Wise Man with the World, or the Judgment of the Soul with the Body (1698).
The two voices of the dialogue are the World, who speaks on behalf of passing goods and pleasures, and the Wise Man, the voice of reason enlightened by faith, who weighs them against eternity. The book also contains a second dialogue, between Soul and Body, but this series follows only the dispute between the World and the Wise Man.
The World boasts of the riches, power, fame, and pleasures she offers to those who submit to her, while the Wise Man dismantles her arguments one by one, showing that everything the World offers is passing, and that true happiness lies in virtue and nearness to God. It isn’t an abstract treatise but a real exchange of arguments — the World doesn’t yield easily, bringing concrete examples (Alexander the Great, riches, glory), while the Wise Man answers with Scripture, reason, and plain observation of how things truly are.
Though it’s taught in schools mainly as “the first Romanian philosophical text,” the Discourse is at its core a spiritual work, written by an Orthodox Christian for Orthodox readers, deeply rooted in patristic thought — a connection that’s easily lost when the text is read only as old literature or a historical curiosity.
The purpose of this series is to reread the Discourse through the eyes of the Church: to take each dialogue, let it speak in its own original voice, and then set it alongside the Church Fathers and Scripture, to see how alive what Cantemir wrote more than three centuries ago still is today.
We begin right at the opening of the dialogue, with the Wise Man’s question about the endless fortune the World promises everyone — and the hidden price few see coming: “Boundless Fortune and Its Bitter End.”
Boundless Fortune and Its Bitter End
Fortune in the World Brings No Happiness
The Wise Man: And until when do they inherit this good and happy gift of yours?
Fortune Is Boundless
The World: Without limit and without end.
He Who Is Fortunate in the World Is Unfortunate
The Wise Man: I have realized, and it is true, that they have no limit — for it is precisely when they do not even think of it that they are stripped and left bare of all these things, and they grow poor; and from famous and praised wealth they fall into a most humiliating and despised poverty. Thus the end, which should have been good and sweet and ought to have brought them joy, becomes ugly and bitter. And man returns to his dust with indescribable sorrow, and his soul is tormented in gehenna, without mercy and without end forever.
Here lies fortune’s hidden wound: what has no boundary can be neither known, nor mastered, nor satisfied. Whoever chases after fortune is never filled — he loses himself exactly when he believes he has arrived. And the moment he stops even thinking about it, he finds himself stripped bare.
It’s the same story as the rich fool in the Gospel: he planned new barns and many years ahead, but that very night his soul was required of him. His wealth availed him nothing, for he was not rich toward God (Luke 12:20-21). Worldly fortune not only fails to last — it overturns exactly at its highest point, and the bitterness matches the sweetness once praised.
Take an Example from the Ancient Histories
The World: Well did I say that you lack knowledge and have become estranged from your own mind. Have you not read the histories, nor searched the chronicles, to learn in how short a time the emperor Alexander, son of Philip, subdued so much of the world; how many regions he conquered, how many cities he tore down and built, how much wealth he gained, and with how much honor he ended his reign?
The World Contradicts Itself
The World boasts of Alexander, but doesn’t see that he’s the very proof against her. What’s more bitter than having everything and being able to keep nothing? What’s sadder than being called “the Great” by men, yet small before death? His fortune was without limit, but his life had a limit. His glory stayed endless in the chronicles, but stopped abruptly in the flesh.
The Wise Man doesn’t dispute his victories, only their duration. The World counts conquered cities; the Wise Man counts what remains after death. The World sees the reach of the empire; the Wise Man sees the narrowness of the grave. The World says “how fast he subdued the world”; the Wise Man asks “how fast he was subdued by death.”
St. John Chrysostom gives the very definition that dismantles the World’s praise: “A true emperor is the one who is master over anger, envy, and pleasure.” By that standard, Alexander conquered the world but wasn’t necessarily emperor over himself — and whoever doesn’t master his passions remains a slave, no matter how many cities he holds. The saint adds the key that overturns the World’s whole scale of values: the rich man isn’t the one who has much, but the one who needs little, just as the poor man is the one who craves much, even if he possessed everything in the world — the exact portrait of Alexander, dead at thirty-three, leaving behind nothing but dust and his heirs’ quarrels.
The Vanity of Worldly Fortune
That’s why Scripture calls all this vanity of vanities (Ecclesiastes 1:2) — not because worldly things are evil in themselves, but because they pass away and cannot fill a heart made for eternity. The Apostle Paul says it plainly: we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out of it (1 Timothy 6:7).
