The Wise Man: Listen, world so greedy to kill men’s souls: these examples you show me so often and at such length I have studied and examined, and I have found them to be most dangerous. Come, remember yourself this praised king and prophet David, into what state you once brought him, when he let himself be caught in the snare of your worldly caprices; not only was his life shortened, but from the paradise he was to inherit, he came within a hair of being swallowed by gehenna. This happened at the time when, urged on by you, world so ill-disposed toward man, he fell into sin with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. He barely escaped your snare then, for he realized at once the foulness of your urging and began to confess (as the prophet Nathan bore witness) and to say: „Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your great mercy, for I know my transgression, and my sin is always before me” [Psalm 50/51:1-2, 4]. And I know even without inquiry that, along with the prophet David of whom you boast, his son said to you: „Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” [Ecclesiastes 1:1] — that is, you are vanity, and your things are vanities. And I have heard, too, what you plotted against his son, the most wise Solomon, who, after the great boldness he had before God, such that God spoke to him mouth to mouth, ended by letting himself be fooled by you, and, breaking the divine commandment, took foreign wives and daughters among his concubines. In this way he, that marvel of wisdom, through your delights — surrounded also by the beauty of women — was moved from wisdom to folly, from purity to defilement, from righteousness to unrighteousness, and was turned from a saint into a sinner to such a degree that he even raised up temples to idols made by hand. Now then, since you have been able to carry your devices so far as to make even that most-wise man, praised for his wisdom by the ineffable mouth of God, lose his faith in that God, how much more shall you deceive and remake me, poor as I am, who possess not a part or a third, not even a thousandth of a small part, of his wisdom? And so you would have me forget God entirely, my creator and the giver of my life, to abandon Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in it, and to worship gold, silver, and things made by human hands, and through your delights, your foods and drinks, to glorify my belly in place of God. This is why blessed Paul, teaching me with power and firmness to keep away from such things, forbids them to me in a manner both beautiful and wondrous [Philippians 3:19].
Having Heard That Many Inherited Paradise Through Wealth, Do Not Under This Pretext Covet Riches, for They Have Led Most Men to Hell
The World: Alas, naive man, again you stray from just and sound judgment. Do you think that, adorned with my gifts, laden and enriched with my goods, you will lose your soul? I do not understand why you keep telling me that through my fitting delights you will end up worshiping idols! O marvel of your great ignorance and the dullness of your uncultivated mind! Have you not realized that through great wealth you will be of great benefit to your soul? With wealth you can build churches, monasteries, wells, bridges; with wealth you can free slaves and redeem debtors; with wealth you can show mercy, and strengthen the weak. But above all, have you not read in Holy Scripture (or perhaps you are unlettered) that the kingdom of heaven is very cheap, since a woman, by casting only two coins into the treasury, purchased for herself the kingdom of heaven? How then should my wealth not be a blessing, and how would you not be mad if you did not strive to obtain it, since it is beneficial both for the soul and for the body?
The Wise Man no longer speaks here of things that are lost — riches, scepters, palaces — but of the most precious thing the world has ever brought down: the very man of God. His choice of examples is striking precisely because he does not take some ordinary man, but David, „the man after God’s own heart,” and Solomon, to whom God Himself spoke mouth to mouth. If wealth and beauty could shake even these, the Wise Man says, how much more can they overthrow one as powerless as himself. It is the same teaching the Apostle leaves as a warning to all: „Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12).
David fell through desire (2 Samuel 11), but rose again through repentance; Solomon fell through love of foreign women, who turned his heart toward idols (1 Kings 11), and Scripture never clearly says that he returned. St. John Chrysostom notes precisely this distinction: the fall itself is not the condemnation, but the failure to repent after falling. David wept as soon as Nathan showed him his sin; Solomon, intoxicated by his own wisdom and his own wealth, kept sliding until he raised temples to idols. Wisdom and grace received do not protect against falling — they make the fall heavier, precisely because the one who falls from a great height has more to lose, and often less watchfulness to see his own fall.
Here also lies the limit of the answer the World is about to give: she is right when she says that wealth can build churches and feed the poor — no one, not even the holy Fathers, has ever denied that goods rightly used serve salvation. St. John Chrysostom himself urges the rich to make of their wealth nothing but a bridge toward almsgiving. But the very example she calls to her aid — the woman with the two coins (Mark 12:41-44; Luke 21:1-4) — exposes her without her realizing it: the Lord did not praise the sum, but the heart; the widow was praised because she gave all she had, not because she had little or much. The kingdom of heaven was not „cheap” for her — it cost her everything. The World turns a parable of self-emptying into an advertisement for wealth, when it speaks precisely of wealth’s renunciation.
St. Gregory the Theologian, meditating on Solomon’s fall, says that nothing is more dangerous than grace that rests upon itself, satisfied with the gifts received, no longer watchful. And Abba Dorotheos of Gaza calls this very self-assurance „the foundation of all the passions” — the one who believes himself strong no longer prays in fear, and so falls more deeply than the one who knows himself weak. Blessed Paul, whom the Wise Man cites, speaks of those enslaved to the belly and to earthly things: „whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly… who set their mind on earthly things” (Philippians 3:19) — not to condemn the body, but to show what happens when the heart shifts its center from God to delight, however justified that delight may seem.
So today’s word does not contradict yesterday’s, but deepens it: it is not wealth that builds up or brings down the soul, but watchfulness, or the lack of it. And the clearest sign of danger is not poverty of mind, but precisely the confidence that one is too wise, or too holy, ever to fall.
