Blessed Is He Who Has Not Mingled with the World
The Wise Man: “You lie, being as you are proud and false, for true understanding calls blessed not the one who dwells in you, but rather the one who has gone out of you — and above all, the one who has not yet entered you. Not with this either can you defeat me.”
The Righteous Man Shall Not Be Shaken, Whatever Befalls Him
The World: “Oh, poor, worthless, ignorant man! But did not the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles, the martyrs, and the other saints all walk together with me, and did not all of them make use of me? And since all these, whom I have kept within me as in a treasury, like precious jewels, are called blessed, why do you hurl such unworthy words at me and give me such improper answers?”
The World changes her bait once more: unable to deceive through desire, she now tries to justify herself through the saints. But the Wise Man clearly separates what she deliberately confuses: to make use of the world is not the same as belonging to it, and to dwell in it for a time is not the same as having settled one’s heart there. St. Paul the Apostle says the same thing in other words: “those who use the world, as not using it to the full, for the form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31). The patriarchs, prophets, and apostles passed through the world as through a stranger’s house, not as through their own inheritance; Scripture itself calls them “strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Heb. 11:13), for their hearts thirsted for another homeland, not for the treasury the World boasts of having kept for them.
Blessedness, says the Wise Man, belongs neither to the one who dwells in the world enslaved to it, nor — just as importantly — to the one who has never known it and therefore cannot truly claim to have overcome it; but to the one who has gone out of it. This is exactly the distinction made by Abba Anthony the Great: it is not the absence of temptation that makes a man holy, but the overcoming of it through going out — an inward going out, of the heart, even for one who remains bodily in the midst of the world. St. Isaac the Syrian calls this state “living in the body as though without a body”: the man works, wears clothes, eats and sleeps in the world, but his soul has already gone out of it through an undivided longing for God.
This is why the saints the World calls her own never truly belonged to her. David wore a crown, yet wrote, “I am a stranger on the earth” (Ps. 118:19). Abraham had flocks and silver, yet “waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. 11:10). The martyrs passed through fire, through wild beasts, through the sword, precisely because they did not consider the world worthy to keep their hearts. St. John Chrysostom says plainly: the righteous man is not shaken by the world’s goods or its blows, because he has not built the foundation of his soul on anything in it, but on Christ, “the chief cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20).
So the treasury the World boasts of is an empty treasury: she has kept no one, but has only been, for a time, the place through which passed those whose eyes were fixed on another city. Blessedness is not found by remaining in her, but by going out — with the heart, even before going out with the body.
