By Renouncing the World, You Shall Obtain the Seal of Blessedness
The Wise Man: “Now you grow talkative and false. Do you perhaps think that the saints I mentioned above were born of you, or imagine that they mingled with you? On the contrary, they, the blessed ones, obtained the seal of blessedness by renouncing you and your sweetness first of all. And those, thrice-blessed in remembrance, renounced not only you, but even themselves, keeping the command of their good Teacher, who says: ‘Whoever wishes to follow Me, let him deny himself’ [Mt. 16:24]. They hated you so much that when someone told them they would die — that is, perish from you — they felt an unspeakable, indescribable joy. Faced with such a blessed, never vain joy, however dreadful, poisoned, and merciless death might have been, they paid it no heed. And so some of them, entering fire, seemed to enter dew; others, entering frost and ice, seemed to enter warmth and a bath; others still, while being beaten with ox-sinews, behaved as though receiving gifts, and others, dragged at mad speed, bound to the tails of wild horses and crushed on the stones of the streets, behaved as if they were on a pleasant walk. Likewise many others endured countless other torments beyond measure, unbearable, yet did not shrink from any of it — rather, they ran toward it, that is, toward the torments, with joyful heart and glad soul. Why? So as to escape you an hour sooner, and to reach the end they had striven for since their childhood. So too the hermits (O, blessed ones, for they chose the better part), who fled your hateful hatred to hide themselves together with venomous crawling things and terrible beasts, alone, without companions, in fearsome mountains, in solitude, in the depths of the deepest caves. Why? Because they rightly judged that no beast more dreadful, more hostile, more venomous than you exists, and above all, so as not to see your wretched ugliness, reviled by every sensible man, which in the weak eyes of some seems to have some beauty, by which, through the deceit of ignorance, most are quite badly misled. And those (O, thrice-praised with every mouth!) chose rather to dwell in caves, to die of hunger and waste away with thirst, than to live in you, to chase after your goods, and to stumble their priceless, holy souls through your delights. These, O slanderer, you falsely call fools! Of whose folly may we all diligently beg God to make us partakers too, that you may count us also among the foolish and unwise.”
Accustomed to Worldly Desires, God’s Commandments Will Seem Hard to You
The World: “I marvel exceedingly why you speak such vain things and utter lies, talking in emptiness. Do you mean to say, then, that those who renounce me find some good or gain some benefit? Oh, I say again, how greatly I marvel and wonder! See now what I wish to ask you: what kind of life, what kind of existence will a man lead who dwells on a deserted mountain, who lives in a dragon’s den or in the cave of a lion, a bear, or a panther? What sort of life will he spend, ever amid the roaring of lions, the growling of bears, the hissing of dragons and serpents, gripped always — I might almost say without pause — by dread and terror of dreadful beasts and wild creatures; in summer tormented by heat, scalded and scorched by the blaze; in winter freezing and numbed with cold and frost; wasted and starved with hunger; burnt and consumed with thirst — who, even if he should find something to eat and drink, some root of grass or water from a hollow tree, does not so much eat and drink it as it wastes and finishes him off? If all this seems wisdom to you, you are a great fool and may be counted among the senseless.”
The Wise Man’s key word is seal: the blessedness of the saints is not some vague state, but a seal set upon the soul through renunciation — first of the world, then, more deeply, of oneself. The Lord did not simply say “leave the world,” but “whoever wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself” (Mt. 16:24); for the world remains a mistress even over one who has fled to the desert, if her desires remain unchanged in his heart. This is why Abba Isaac the Syrian says there are men who have gone out of the world in body while the world has not gone out of them; true renunciation is inward, and the renunciation of self is harder than the renunciation of possessions, for the nearest enemy is not outside, but in one’s own will.
The martyrs’ joy in torment is not human heroism but grace: St. Paul the Apostle testifies to the same thing — “I rejoice in my sufferings” (Col. 1:24) and “when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10). Those Cantemir portrays entering fire as if entering dew are not men without feeling, but men in whom grace has overwhelmed the feeling of nature; the Epistle to the Hebrews says of such strivers that “the world was not worthy of them” (Heb. 11:38) — not because it drove them out, but because it could not contain the measure they had reached. The hermits, for their part, did not flee from men, but from the deceit of the false beauty the World wears “in the weak eyes of some,” as Cantemir himself says — a beauty St. Isaac the Syrian calls a painted lure, not a true face.
The World answers with the only argument she has left: fear of hardship. She asks the Wise Man what kind of life that is, in a cave, in hunger, in heat and frost — and, humanly speaking, she is right: the hermit’s life is harsh. But it is precisely here that her final deception lies, for she measures by the body’s senses a life that feeds from elsewhere. The Lord said of His yoke that it is good and His burden light (Mt. 11:30) — not because ascetic labor costs nothing, but because grace turns hardship into joy for the one who bears it out of love, exactly as Cantemir shows in the image of fire felt as dew. St. John Climacus writes that hermits do not suffer the lack of food as a punishment, but as a table at which they are filled in a way the body is not. What the World calls madness is, in fact, the only sound judgment left in a world that has called good evil and hardship unbearable, though she alone, with her never-satisfied desires, is the true burden without end (1 Jn. 2:15-17).
