God Gives His Gifts Not to the Idle, but to the Diligent
The Wise Man: With this deceptive reasoning, then, do you wish to beguile me and prove to me that I do wrong to plow, sow, and earn my bread with rightful labor? But do you not consider — or, even if you do, you merely pretend not to — what wise, beautiful order, beyond human understanding, God, glorified unto the endless ages, has established? For as I have already told you, having left me master and chief over all these things, as one leaves a king his servants, all await to eat of my bread. And just as I receive from my King — that is, from God — all things as a gift and without any payment, so I should give to them likewise, as a gift and without payment, all the more since all things were made for me — that is, for man — for his service and ease. That is why my servants too must feed on the remnants of my crumbs. Know, then, that where Scripture says of the birds that they neither sow nor reap, and yet the heavenly Father feeds them, it speaks of the poor, who can neither sow nor reap, but live because of those who plow and sow. And remember also the other place where Scripture says, through the mouth of the faithful Canaanite woman, that „the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table” [Mk 7, 28]. So it is that, by my plowing and sowing, both the birds of the air are fed from the surplus of my field, and the dogs from the crumbs of my table. But neither to the birds in their nest nor to the dogs lying in their den does food come into their mouths of itself; the birds earn it by flying, and the dogs by roaming and sniffing, for they seek their food — their food does not seek them. So, then, if those irrational animals, guided only by their senses, still strive for their food, in what do I wrong God — I who am rational, while also guided by the senses — by seeking my own food? All the more since He Himself, out of such rich mercy, commanded the earth to bring forth seeds, to sprout, to grow, and to yield fruit for my sustenance. This is why I shall ever strive for it, for it is not to the idle and slothful, but to the diligent and hard-working, that God has given His good things, as He said: „Knock, and it shall be opened unto you; ask, and it shall be given you” [Mt 7, 7].
Man Is Given to Face All the Dangers of the World
The World: Now, by your uncultivated mind and your wayward reckoning, I perceive that you will say that in me are all evils, hardships, disorders, torments, misfortunes, and overturnings, and, as you rave, that I am worse than every evil and more bitter than all bitterness, that in me there is found no good thing and no goodness, neither rest nor quiet, neither peace nor ease, but in all things only wickedness — and, comparing me, you liken me to every evil. O poor, thrice-wretched man! O foolish and witless one, how can you say and profess one thing, yet pursue and desire another? But if I am as wicked and terrible, as deceitful and savage as you say, with your unjust heart and lying lips, then why do you dwell in me? And I know truly that you pray to God to lengthen your life in this world, and I know still more surely that, were you convinced you would enter paradise, and were you left to your own will and asked what you desire — to die and go to paradise, or to be left to live in this world — it seems to me — and why do I say only that it seems to me? — you would indeed renounce paradise and cling to me, and would look upon paradise with an evil eye, and upon me with a good eye, and, in short, would choose me rather than paradise.
The Wise Man’s explanation of the text about the birds of the air deserves pause: he does not read it literally, as a commandment against labor, but interprets it — the birds and the dogs, he says, are the image of the poor, who cannot themselves plow and sow, but live off the surplus of those who work. This is exactly the kind of reading Saint John Chrysostom demands of every reader of Scripture: not the letter torn from the rest, but the sense set within the whole. And the fruit of this reading is plain: the Wise Man’s diligence is not selfish, but becomes a source of food for others — „all await to eat of my bread” — fulfilling exactly what the Lord said through the Acts of the Apostles: „it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).
The model the Wise Man offers — man as a small king, giving his servants from what he himself received without payment from the great King — recreates, in a domestic form, the very image of dominion this series encountered in the previous article: the gift does not stop with the one who first receives it, but flows onward, because that is how God’s own grace flows. Saint Basil the Great says in his Homilies to the Rich that abundance given to one always has his neighbor in view, and the one who stops it at himself spoils it even in his own hand, like the manna in the wilderness kept overnight. The promise the Wise Man cites at the end — „knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Mt 7:7) — does not contradict labor, but presupposes it: knocking on a door is itself a work of the hand, not an empty waiting.
The challenge with which the World closes is the hardest in the whole exchange so far, for it no longer attacks an argument, but the heart itself: „you would cling to me, not to paradise, were you truly given the choice.” It is the same kind of question the Savior asks plainly: „where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt 6:21) — not what a man says he loves, but what he chooses when no one is judging him. Saint Isaac the Syrian warns precisely of this kind of self-deception, in which the tongue confesses a hope the heart does not yet hold, and Abba Dorotheos of Gaza calls the knowledge of this very gap „the first step of humility”: to see yourself as you are, not as you speak.
The text does not tell us whether the Wise Man answers this challenge, but it is exactly this silence that leaves the reader alone with the question. The desire for a long life, which the World brings as evidence, is not itself a sin — we have already seen that the commandment to honor one’s parents promises it (Ex 20:12) — but it becomes a snare exactly when it is set above paradise, not alongside it. The difference, the Fathers say, is not seen in words, but in the way a man receives the news of death: with turmoil, as from an enemy, or with peace, as from a messenger calling him home.
