For the Knowing Man, This World Is Hell and Torment
The Wise Man: It is true and certain that you possess all the evil qualities you said above that I attribute to you, and so all creation and all human nature must know you, for without doubt so you are. Indeed I pray to God to live as long as possible in you and amid your wickednesses, but not because I love you, or have any special desire for you or for the ornaments through which your nakedness is seen, but so that, living as long as possible amid the torments of your evils, through your evils I may become good. Know truly that this is how I reckon you, and to this I liken you, O world: you are the fire, my body the pot, and my soul the gold. And just as the more the goldsmith boils the gold in the pot, the purer it comes out, so I too, for this reason, pray in all things and for all things to glorious God to grant me to live in you as long as possible, so that the longer I am tormented and the more terribly I am burned in your dreadful fire, the more beautifully I may be adorned with a prouder crown; as Paul, Christ’s chosen vessel, also says: „as by fire” [1 Cor 6, 15]. For which word, with a wandering reckoning, the Papists say that in the world beyond there exists a purifying fire, which in their tongue they call purgatory. To this, and against this opinion, I answer you, as I do the Papists, that in the place mentioned the blessed Paul does not say there exists a third, separate place — that is, purgatory — besides paradise and hell, which neither does our Church admit, but only two places: paradise and hell; neither the Eastern Church nor any other Holy Scripture making mention of purgatory. By the words „as by fire” he calls you fire, and shows that the righteous, walking in you, walk as through fire, and come out of your fire cleansed and purified like gold. So, then, you are for me now a purifying fire, and the longer I live in you — as I have already told you — not according to your pleasure, but according to God’s commandment, the more blessed and worthy of a greater gift I shall come forth. Know also that, in this age, you are a purifying fire for human bodies (for there is no other in the world beyond, as the Papists vainly claim). So then, those of sound mind and fearful of God, if they guard themselves against you and your delights, you send forth to the endless age more radiant, purer, more worthy of praise and more blessed, and, though you are wicked, you become for them good and useful. But those weak in mind and poor in knowledge, who, forgetting the laws of the Lord their God, abandon themselves to your caresses and delights and become entangled in your various perditions, you cast out poor and stripped of every good, and do not leave them merely so, but because of you make them also heirs of gehenna. And as the righteous, blessed, filled with every perfect gift and adorned, shall inherit the kingdom of the heavens, so the unjust and sinful, who in life knew neither evil nor any bitterness, shall inherit hell and gehenna, the fire prepared for the Devil and his servants, unto the endless ages, the terrible and unbearable torment from which there is never any redemption or forgiveness.
If You Resist the World — That Is, the Devil — Bravely, You Shall Overcome
The World: I beg you now, my sweet and beloved friend, for the name of God, since I too have begun to realize that your words are not words of reproach, and that however much I might resist you — though I too would have something to answer — I shall still not be able to overcome you, nor could I bear to be yoked together with you; in the name of the living God, I conjure you to tell me truly, for I myself am unable to know what I am and how I am, and ever since I have quarreled and argued with you, my mind seems to have entered the Cretan Labyrinth, and I am unable to find anywhere any path or any way out, though I have searched much. And since God the all-maker did not make you stone, wood, or some other kind of senseless animal, but a man endowed with mind and reason, and renewed you with a divine spirit, again I say and beg you, tell me, what manner of wickedness and what manner of goodness do I have; and ever since you have lived and walked through me, have you found nothing to please you, nothing worthy of you? And if, as I say, you should yet find and take pleasure in something, then, beloved, be free and permitted to take it and do as you wish. But if you find nothing that pleases you, neither shall I compel you by force or by any vexation to be pleased. Do I, indeed, have any power to trouble you with such things? And if you do not wish to befriend me and my goods in the least, nor to praise me, at least be silent, hold your tongue, and do not despise me before everyone. I tell you and beg you again: be silent, for I know that silence is praised by wise men.
The Wise Man’s doctrinal clarification deserves pause, for it is no digression but the very foundation of his asceticism: the fire of which the Apostle speaks (1 Cor 3:13-15) opens no third place between paradise and hell, but names the trial of this very life. The Eastern Church has steadfastly kept only the two ends — not because it disregards the need for purification, but because it places purification exactly where Scripture places it: in the struggle here, not in a realm beyond. Saint John Chrysostom says the same thing without ambiguity: the trials of this life are the furnace, not some furnace to come; whoever endures them with patience comes out of them purified, and whoever refuses them has nowhere left to endure them.
The image of the goldsmith who boils the gold in the pot until it comes out pure is no innovation of Cantemir’s, but takes up directly the prophetic language: „I will purge them as gold and silver is purged” (Mal 3:2-3), and the Apostle Peter calls the trial of faith „much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire” (1 Pt 1:7). This is why the Wise Man does not ask the World to be gentler, but accepts precisely her harshness as useful — not because evil becomes good, but because the patient bearing of evil, rightly received, transforms the one who bears it. Saint Mark the Ascetic says plainly that it is not the temptation that is praiseworthy, but the manner in which man uses it as an occasion for humility and prayer — exactly the distinction the Wise Man draws when he says he lives in the World „not according to her pleasure, but according to God’s commandment.”
The World’s collapse at the end of this exchange speaks louder than any argument won: she admits she cannot know herself, comparing the confusion of her mind to the Cretan Labyrinth. This is exactly the sign Abba Dorotheos of Gaza gives as the beginning of true humility — yet the World does not arrive at humility, but at a subtler form of pride: she no longer asks to be praised, only not to be despised „before everyone.” This is not repentance, but concern for appearance; and the difference between the two is made plain by Saint Isaac the Syrian, who says that true humility asks nothing of the onlooker, not even permitted silence.
Her final request — „be silent, for silence is praised by wise men” — uses a true saying for a foreign purpose, just as she had done earlier with the verse about the birds of the air. The silence the Fathers truly praise is not the silence that hides evil from the world’s eyes, but the silence of prayer and watchfulness of the mind: „a time to keep silence, and a time to speak” (Eccl 3:7), says the Preacher, and Abba Arsenius confessed that he had often repented of speaking, but never of keeping silent — a silence, however, turned toward God, not toward the sparing of one’s own image. The Wise Man owes the World neither praise nor this last kind of silence; he owes her only the truth he has spoken to her so far, and that, once said, remains said.
