The Wise Man: O flattering world, how you flatter me in order to deceive me! Even though I am indeed naive and unlettered, as you said, yet according to my strength I have searched the Holy Scriptures, and in that same holy and true Scripture I found it said somewhere that a young man asked our Lord Jesus Christ: „Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” [Matthew 19:16 and following]. The good Teacher gave him the good teaching to guard against and flee all that the law and the faith forbid, and to keep and do all that the law and the faith urge and command to be done, and he answered that he kept and fulfilled all these, saying: „All these I have kept from my youth.” Then the Lord showed him the highest requirement, saying to him: „Go, sell all your possessions and give to the poor.” Then the wretched man, being accustomed to loving you and caught in your deception, grew grievously sad and was exceedingly grieved, and rather obeyed you, world worthy of contempt, than the Teacher he had just before confessed to be good. And so he turned away sorrowful, with a broken heart, finding it hard to fulfill the good commandment of the good Teacher. And why was this? Was it not because he was accustomed to you, to your delights, and wholly given over to your pleasures? And so he, through wealth, shut and lost the kingdom of heaven far more than he opened and won it, for it became so narrow and strait for him that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for him to enter the kingdom of heaven. This is why I fear that I will not give my coin like the poor woman, but will grow sad like the rich man when someone asks it of me. So not even with this will you deceive me, for I have no need of your wealth.
The World Is a Prison — So Why Should It Be Loved?
The World: So then, now you do not love me at all?
The Wise Man: But I do love you, as blessed David loved you, who considered you a prison; and again, like David, I pray with humility to almighty God, saying: „Bring my soul out of prison, that I may confess Your name” [Psalm 141:10 / 142:7].
The World: And this word of yours tends more toward hatred and reproach than toward love and praise. What is more, you call me a prison. For what reason? Truly, your dark blindness makes me want to laugh! But come now, poor man, do you not see how spacious and roomy I am, how bright and beautiful, how choice and lovely? Ask those who sit shut up in a prison to tell you what the confinement of a prison means, and what my freedom is.
Cantemir chooses the parable of the rich young man with almost surgical precision, for it speaks not of a wicked man but of one nearly perfect: he had kept the commandments from his youth, had come himself to ask about eternal life, had piety and a sincere desire for salvation. This is exactly why his fall is more telling than that of any open sinner: he was not brought down by some base passion, but by a single thing left unsurrendered — the wealth he was unable to loosen from his heart. St. John Chrysostom observes that Christ did not ask for his poverty as a punishment but as a remedy fitted precisely to his illness: since he was bound to wealth, only the cutting of that bond could heal him. And the word with which the young man departs — „sorrowful” — shows plainly where his heart truly lay: not with the commandments, which he had kept without difficulty, but with the one thing he was unwilling to part with.
Today’s title names exactly this sickness: „let not your heart be hardened.” This is the language of Scripture itself — of Pharaoh, whose heart hardened gradually, at every wonder seen and disobeyed (Exodus 7-11), and of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which repeats the psalmist’s warning: „Today, if you will hear His voice, harden not your hearts” (Hebrews 3:7-8; Psalm 94:8/95:8). Hardening is not a sudden fall but a habit: every small desire left to grow, uncut, adds one more layer over the heart, until it feels neither Christ’s request nor its own sorrow as a call to repentance, but only as a loss to be avoided. The prophet Ezekiel promises the cure for this sickness as a divine gift, not a human achievement: „I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh, and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26).
The Wise Man’s answer to the World’s question — „you do not love me at all?” — is as skillful as the parable above: he does not deny his love, but moves it onto another footing. He loves her as David loved her, that is, he sees her clearly for what she is, asking not to be freed within her, but freed from her. The psalm he cites (141/142, verse 8 in the Hebrew numbering) is David’s own prayer from the cave, when he was hunted and cornered — a perfect icon of the confinement in which the world holds a man even when it appears wide and hospitable.
And here the World gives her most beautiful and most deceitful answer: she boasts of her space, her light, her beauty — the exact opposite of a prison. But this very manner of speech exposes the skillful jailer: a true prison never shows the one it holds its bars, but shows him instead the wide yard he is allowed to pace. The Apostle Peter describes exactly this trap when he speaks of false teachers who „promise them liberty, while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whom a man is overcome, by him also he is brought into bondage” (2 Peter 2:19). The freedom the World sells is the freedom to choose among chains, not freedom from chains; the Apostle Paul names true freedom differently: „For freedom Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1) — a freedom measured not in space, but in the heart’s ability to no longer be held captive by anything created.
St. Isaac the Syrian says that a man is truly free not when he can do whatever he wishes, but when he no longer wishes anything but what is according to God’s will — every other desire, however „spacious and roomy” it may appear, is just one more wall of the same prison. This is why the Wise Man’s word remains the last and the true one: the one who loves the world as David did — that is, who knows her without serving her — is the only one who can truly leave her, even while still remaining, in the body, within her walls.
