Be blind, mute, and deaf to the world’s desires!
The World: You ignorant man, I cannot help but laugh at you constantly. Do you not see that you too walk in me and by my light, and make use of it in all your affairs, and yet still say I have no light?
Think upon the last things
The Wise Man: As for my faith, you have rightly called me “ignorant,” for of your things I know nothing; and even if I know something, I know it is false. And if (in your words) I am lacking in discernment, it is for this reason: that, walking through you, I walk as though I were not in you.
The World defends her light with an argument that seems irrefutable: “you walk through me, you make use of me — therefore you need my light.” This is her oldest deceit — to confuse the use of created things with submission to the spirit that rules them. That man lives in the body, eats bread, walks the earth, uses hands and eyes — this is no sin, but God’s natural ordering of things. Yet the World calls “her light” the very thing that belongs to nature, in order to smuggle in, under the same name, her soul-killing desires.
The Wise Man does not deny that he walks through the world — that would be impossible and false. He answers differently, with a distinction the Fathers called “being in the world, but not of the world” (John 17:14-16). He walks through the world “as though I were not in it” — that is, without binding his heart to it, without receiving its spirit, without feeding on its desires. It is the very word of the Apostle Paul: “those who use the world, as not using it fully” (1 Corinthians 7:31). The body walks through the world; the mind, watchfully awake, walks elsewhere.
This is why the title Cantemir gives this passage is so stark and clear: be blind, mute, and deaf to the desires of the world. Not to the world as such — eyes, ears, and mouth remain man’s natural servants — but to her desires, to what the senses bring inward as bait for the passions. Saint John Climacus calls the guarding of the senses the beginning of all spiritual labor: whoever lets the eye wander, the ear listen to vanity, and the mouth speak without measure has opened the gate of the soul’s citadel to the enemy, however much “light” he believes he is receiving through them.
And the link to the second half of the saying is no accident. The one who closes his senses to the world’s desires is precisely the one who makes room within himself for thinking on the last things — on death, on judgment, on eternity. Saint John Chrysostom said that the remembrance of death is like a wall holding back the waves of the passions; and Cantemir, through the Wise Man’s mouth, shows plainly where the world’s false light leads: to forgetting the end. The one blinded by desire no longer sees even the death that is coming, because his eyes are full of things that pass away.
So this is not a true blindness, deafness, or muteness — but a watch freely chosen, set at the gates of the senses, so that the soul may remain awake where it truly matters: in thinking upon the last things.
