God Did Not Leave You a Slave, but a Master; Therefore You Should Command the World, Not the World You
The Wise Man: The word you set before me is indeed found in Holy Scripture. So it is, and I believe it. But remember also that after the almighty God perfectly formed you and all that is within you — that is, the earth and all it brings forth, the sea and all it holds — He made me from clay and dust; you He made by the word, but me He Himself shaped with His almighty hands, and afterward, breathing His Spirit into me, gave me life, saying: „Adam, the work of My hands,” and, making me after His likeness, He raised me lord and master over all things in the world — that is, in you — giving me all things for my own: the sheep, the oxen, even the fish of the sea and the rest, and „crowned me with a little lower than the angels” [Ps 8, 6]. In short, He made me master and you servant, commanding me to command you, and you to obey me, and left you to my will, that I might use you as I please. Behold, then, it is not I who must submit to you, but you to me, and it is not I who must obey you, but you who must obey me. And since I have been given by God the all-giver such authority to use your things as I please — though toward good ends — do not think that if I entrust myself to the hope of the God who gave me this hope, I shall lack anything! No! I shall indeed have all things in abundance, and shall lack nothing at all. For „they that seek God shall not want any good thing” [Ps 33, 10], and again, obeying the holy commandment, I shall labor and in sweat shall earn my bread. Moreover, I shall not strive for myself alone, but shall seek to be of use to others too, and, above all, to share with others from the gift the Master gave me, so that, making my talents fruitful, I may bring a still greater gain. But to bring a gain, not to wander unbridled, in vain and without profit, through revelries and indulgences that harm the body as much as the soul; rather, working my land, I shall eat, and shall feed my brother too. For how could I still call myself a man, and how could I count myself a faithful servant to my Master, if — God forbid! — I spent my gift and my gain on your unclean and debauched desires! For we see that not only rational beings, that is, men, do not do this, but not even animals — creatures endowed with senses — for even they show some love, one toward another. How, then, could I listen to your cunning and corrupting words and make myself worse than irrational animals, changing my human nature into an irrational one? I would become worse than the irrational animals were I to obey you and act according to your word.
God, Who Cares for Sinners, How Much More Shall He Care for the Righteous?
The World: Now I see how you strive to find many words, though without any sense, to answer me. But I too wish to ask you, since you say you read Holy Scripture — does it not say in one place: „Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap… yet your heavenly Father feedeth them”? [Mt 6, 26]. Now, then, why do you wish to show yourself disobedient to Holy Scripture? How is it you transgress God’s commandment, disregarding it, and toil and struggle in every way? You plow, you sow, you hunt, you labor, and so on? Why do you not rely on hope alone — and then I should like to see how you would live! Then you would know how good I am, and how good the goodness of my goodness truly is.
The argument with which the Wise Man opens this exchange overturns the entire logic the World had built up to now: it is not man who is subject to her, but she who, by God’s ordinance, is subject to him. Saint Gregory of Nyssa observes in On the Making of Man that, unlike the rest of creation, man was not made by a simple word, but as the crown of the work — shaped by God’s hands and given life directly — precisely so that his dignity as master should be evident in the very manner of his making, before any commandment was even given him. The psalm the Wise Man cites confirms the same hierarchy: man is „crowned with glory and honor” and set „over the works” of God’s hands (Ps 8:6-7). Slavery, then, is not man’s nature, but only the state to which passion brings him down when he chooses to serve the World instead of ruling her.
The World then attempts a cunning move, much like the one in the wilderness of temptation: whereas until now she had accused the Wise Man of using her gifts too much, she now accuses him of the exact opposite — of relying too little on hope, by laboring. Saint John Chrysostom, expounding this very verse about the birds of the air, shows that the Lord’s commandment does not forbid work, but tormenting anxiety (merimna): the birds do not sit motionless, but fly, search, and gather — they simply have no barns, and do not fret over tomorrow. The text the World quotes to stop the Wise Man’s labor in fact describes exactly what he is doing: to work without anxious care, not to work not at all.
This is why the Wise Man is not drawn into the trap, but answers with the commandment that follows naturally from the first: „in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” (Gen 3:19), and the Apostle adds plainly: „if any would not work, neither should he eat” (2 Thess 3:10). There is no contradiction between the two commandments, but a single ordinance with two faces: labor of the hands for what is needful, and freedom of the soul from care for what exceeds it. The parable of the talents which the Wise Man recalls shows the same thing: the master does not praise the servant who buried his gift out of fear, but the one who worked it and brought forth fruit (Mt 25:14-30) — the passivity the World asks for here is not humility, but the burial of the talent under another name.
For this very reason, the passivity the World proposes ought to be viewed with suspicion: she does not call the Wise Man to rest in God, but to another form of dependence — on herself, on her gifts, received without labor and without the thanksgiving owed to the Giver. Abba Dorotheos of Gaza calls this bait „idleness dressed in the garment of humility,” the hardest of temptations to recognize, precisely because it makes use of a true word of Scripture put to a foreign work. The one who remains master — and not slave — is not the one who does not labor, but the one who labors without placing his hope in the work of his own hands, but in the One who gave him both his hands and the earth, and the commandment to rule it.
