The World: And to this too you must answer: am I not full of every good thing?
The Wise Man: You are not full, if I consider that you are „vanity of vanities, and all that is yours is vanity” (Eccl. 1:2).
The World does not surrender easily. Having been stripped of its claim to beauty and wisdom, it makes one last attempt: to show itself full — full of goods, full of gifts, full of everything man could need to be happy. And at first glance it seems right: how many good things does this world not give us? Bread, water, sunlight, friendship, love, work, rest. How can one say it is not full, when everything we touch and see comes from it?
But the Wise Man is not deceived by appearances; he goes to the root. And the root is the very word with which Ecclesiastes begins: „Vanity of vanities… all is vanity” (Eccl. 1:2). Solomon is not saying the world contains nothing — he is saying that nothing it contains can fill man, can quiet his thirst for happiness, for meaning, for eternity. It is like trying to quench thirst by drinking seawater: the more you drink, the fiercer the thirst burns. So it is with the goods of the world: they are not lacking, but they never satisfy.
Saint John Chrysostom, commenting on Ecclesiastes, says that Solomon did not write this book to slander God’s creation — for creation is good, as God Himself declared at the making of the world (Gen. 1:31) — but to show that using the world apart from God, as an end in itself, is vanity. The thing itself is not evil; what is evil is when man places all his hope in it, expecting from a passing creature what only the Creator can give: true rest.
And it is precisely rest that this meeting’s title speaks of: „in the world you will find no goodness and no rest.” Because the goodness without which there can be no true rest is not the kind gathered by the hand, but the kind received into the heart. And man’s heart, as Blessed Augustine says, is restless until it rests in God — a word that, though not written by an Eastern Father, testifies to the same truth Cantemir voices through his Wise Man: the world can fill the hands, but it cannot fill the heart.
Saint Isaac the Syrian goes further, saying that the soul which seeks its rest in outward things is like a man trying to grasp the wind in his palm: the tighter he closes his hand, the emptier it remains. Rest is not the absence of things, but the presence of God in man. That is why the Lord does not say, „Come to Me, all who labor, and you will acquire goods,” but: „Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Mt. 11:28). Rest cannot be bought, inherited, or accumulated — it is received only from the One who alone can give it.
So when the World boasts that it is full, the Wise Man does not deny its riches — he shows its limit: it may be full of things, yet empty of permanence. And the man who seeks in it complete goodness and true rest chases a shadow that flees all the faster the more persistently it is pursued. The goodness that satisfies and the rest that remains are not found „under the sun,” but above it — with the One who made both the sun and man, and the true rest of them both.
