The Wise Man: This lying word of yours is true, for even the children of this age — whom you call your children, and who in turn hold you for their mother and, deceiving themselves, count you their benefactress — it seems to them that nothing is lacking to them, and that they are fully provided and furnished with all things. But as I reckon — and not I alone, but any man of sound mind will admit this — they are not filled with all goods and riches, but rather are surrounded by every poverty and every evil. Let every man therefore know truly, with certainty and without error, that those whom you call your children, and to whom you say you give all goods and all riches, are not rich but rather poor; they are not in great abundance and satisfied with all things, but rather are poor wretches and starving men, as David says in the Psalms [39, 23]. And if you wish to know and understand the right reckoning and the good stewardship, it is this: he who flees from you and guards himself against all your goods, and who seeks God with his whole soul and his whole heart, that man shall lack no good thing [Ps 33, 10]. Hear me, O world: however poor I may be in the Lord, I am richer than you and all your wealth; holding fast to the Lord, however weak I may be, I am stronger than you and all your power, as the blessed Paul teaches us [2 Cor 12, 9].
The Man Left to His Own Will, the Higher He Climbs, the Worse Shall Be His Fall
The World: O reckless one, most worthless of all! Take heed and consider the strength and power, the greatness and valor of my beloved children, whom, because they served me, I have crowned with these priceless crowns and adorned with beautiful diadems; these, you, with your simple and wicked reckoning, count poor and afflicted, and call them sick and helpless. Did not some of them conquer Africa, Asia, Europe — or rather, the whole globe of the earth and the riches of these parts of the world? Did not some of them break the jaw of the lion, and others bind the sea with chains? Did not some turn mountains into plains, and others divert the course of rivers, which, being too deep for anyone to cross, they lowered to such a degree that not even a man’s knee would be wet, turning them from great to small and from deep to shallow? Did not some raise wondrous and indescribable cities, which they surrounded and fortified with high, thick walls? And did not others tear down, in the blink of an eye, great cities as strong and mighty as those, mixing their tall columns with the dust of the earth? But why should I praise and recount their wondrous deeds to a fool like you? For even if I wished to keep silent about their wondrous and unbelievable deeds, they show it for themselves, and set it before the sight and hearing of every man, as do their other deeds (that is, my children’s), unknown to the multitude, along with their measureless and countless powers and riches, which, if you cannot see with your own eyes, go to the historians, new and old, for they will fully show you all the wondrous and glorious things they have done and undone.
The Wise Man overturns here the ordinary measure of wealth and poverty, following the psalmist exactly: those who appear satisfied in the world are in fact „poor and hungry” (Ps 33/34:10 in the Septuagint numbering), while the one who flees the world for God’s sake „shall lack no good thing.” This is no comforting figure of speech for the poor, but an objective judgment about the soul’s hunger: the one full of the world and empty of God is, in God’s sight, the hungriest of all, even if his body wants for nothing. Saint Basil the Great says the same in his Homilies to the Rich: wealth does not fill a man but only increases his thirst, for the soul has a different food than gold.
The Apostle’s word which the Wise Man brings as his seal — „My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9) — overturns exactly the praise the World goes on to offer: conquests, walls, crowns. Saint Paul does not boast of his triumphs but of his weaknesses, for he understood that all human strength is borrowed and passing, while the strength that comes from humility is the only lasting one. The World counts her children by their conquests; Scripture counts its saints by the falls from which they rose.
The litany of great deeds with which the World boasts — mountains turned to plains, rivers dried up, cities raised and then torn down „in the blink of an eye” — repeats, without knowing it, its own condemnation: everything that is lifted up falls down, and the greatness of a deed does not change its end. It is the very structure of the Tower of Babel, raised „to make us a name” (Gen 11:4) and scattered by its own pride; and it is the echo of the Theotokos’s song: „He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree” (Lk 1:52). Saint John Chrysostom observes that history does not remember cities for their walls, but for the moment they fell — and that is exactly what the World, without meaning to, recommends when it sends us to the historians.
What remains, then, is the clear choice the Wise Man sets before us: either a wealth that counts itself great and proves poor at the judgment, or a voluntary poverty which, clinging to God, lacks nothing. Saint Isaac the Syrian calls this poverty „the wealth that cannot be plundered,” for no one can take it away — not death, not time, not the fall of any kingdom; and Abba Dorotheos of Gaza adds that the man left to his own will — trusting in his own strength, like the World’s children in this passage — the higher he climbs without God, the more terrible his fall shall be.
