The Wise Man: O great deceiver, O snare laid in the darkness that you are! What a wide and spacious road, yet covered with ice, you show me, and with what refined skill (known, though, to the rational man) you teach me that you are worthy of belief, and so I should believe you. But with these lying deceptions of yours you will not beguile my soul, nor shake my judgment; I not only do not believe them, but I do not even wish to hear of them. Therefore I have no need to refute you, for you yourself prove that you speak fables, all the more since I truly know and understand without difficulty that all your works are like comedies, which seem to be something and, after a very short while, are as though they had never been. So are you, and so are your works, like comedies — you yourself are a comedy harmful to the soul. The comedies men make harm no one in anything, save that they let us pass the time without profit; but you bring both the body to trouble and the soul to torment; more still, you profit neither here nor there, except that, through your spears — that is, through your pleasures — you sweeten the eye and wound the unseen hearts, and not only the heart of the body, but that of the soul as well, whose wound has no healing. For this reason, then, waiting I shall wait, that is, hoping I shall hope in the Lord, and not for long, nor with delay, for my hope shall be fulfilled. For above all things, my faith is hope, and through true faith my hope shall not be in vain for me. In this way I shall be crowned the more beautifully, for I have believed with all my heart and all my soul, without wavering, that which I have heard, and I have truly hoped in what was promised me.
The Unclean Desires, Multiplying, in the End Drown You in the Depths of Despair
The World: O wanderer, O man of little knowledge, do you wish to tell me, to teach me? Or do you mean, perhaps, that you are older in years than I? For all that you tell me you have heard, I have seen with my own eyes, and however much more I shall yet see from here on, not even your great-grandchildren will hear of it! Do not pretend to know more than I. Do you think I have not seen enough of those with a mind like yours, reckoning as you now reckon, who set their hope on things to come, and so, left with hope alone, lost my goods as well, and never reached what they imagined, nor found what they sought, and were given neither time nor place for repentance? But since they too were disobedient like you, unwilling to hear my profitable words, they were deprived of everything and cast far away. See, then, now, and listen to me, and believe all I shall tell you; for I shall tell you the words of a man wiser than you, and indeed it seems to me that by this I shall overcome you: „Who knows the spirit of the sons of men, whether it goeth upward, or the spirit of the beast, whether it goeth downward? All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” [Eccl 3, 20-21]. Neither has eye seen nor ear heard the justification of your hope. Know, then, truly, that you labor in vain and hope for nothing. And consider at least this: since he who is in me and makes use of my goods, upon leaving me (that is, after death), has seen no good thing, what good, then, shall he find, or what happiness shall he meet? I know that, in your great stubbornness, you will answer that they found it, or shall find it. But tell me, whence comes so strong a confidence, or which of those who have left me — that is, of the dead — has returned, that is, risen, to come and tell you that he has found another good better than my good? Behold, I ask of you not two witnesses, but one alone. But I am certain you will find no answer, and you shall be convinced that your hope is in vain.
The World chooses her witness carefully: she quotes Solomon, but precisely the verse in which the Preacher, speaking as wisdom „under the sun,” asks the question without yet giving it an answer — „who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward…?” (Eccl 3:21). Saint Gregory of Nyssa shows in his Homilies on Ecclesiastes that the whole book is written exactly to heal the mind of its trust in things „under the sun,” not to settle the question of the soul; Solomon’s perplexity is a step, not a conclusion. The World reads a question as though it were an answer — and it is precisely this kind of reading, says Saint John Chrysostom, that distinguishes the one who ransacks Scripture for a weapon from the one who listens to it for the truth.
The challenge with which the World closes — „which of the dead has returned to tell you?” — is not new; it is the very request of the merciless rich man in hell, who wished to send Lazarus back to warn his brothers: „If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (Lk 16:31). Abraham does not answer there with an additional proof, but shows the limit of the demand itself: unbelief that refuses Scripture is not healed by a miracle, but deepened by it. And yet God gave more than the World here demands: „Christ is risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Cor 15:20) — a witness has truly returned from death, and it is of Him that the Apostles testify, as of one seen and touched, not merely heard of.
The formula the Wise Man chooses as the foundation of his answer — „waiting I shall wait, hoping I shall hope in the Lord” — echoes the psalmist almost word for word: „I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me” (Ps 39:2, LXX numbering), and the Apostle adds the ground on which such hope cannot be in vain: „hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost” (Rom 5:5). This is no hope founded on guesswork, as the World suggests, but on a Person already known through faith — which is why the Apostle Paul calls it „the evidence of things not seen” (Heb 11:1), not a guess at things uncertain.
Saint Peter calls exactly this kind of hope „a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Pt 1:3) — living, unlike the comedies the Wise Man speaks of, which seem to be something and are at once nothing. The World is, in a way, right to say she has seen no one return; but this shows only that her judgment stops at the border of death, while Christian hope begins exactly where the World’s judgment ends. This is why the Wise Man does not ask the World for proof in her own language, but is content with the only testimony that matters: „I have believed with all my heart and all my soul, without wavering.”
