Eternal Life Has No End; Strive, Then, Not to Become Young from Old, but Righteous from a Sinner
The Wise Man: Not so, hypocrite, not so; but like dust before the wind [Ps 2, 4], so deceitful are the lies of your words; I said „before the wind,” that is, before the truth. And true are my words that my youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s, for I did not speak them of myself, nor out of my own mind. Your accuser and my witness is the divine father David in the psalm, and therefore come, take heed and hear my words, for when I said that my youth shall be renewed — sinner though I am, I still have this hope — I speak not only of my own youth, but of the youth of all God’s chosen ones; and I did not say „has been renewed” or „is being renewed,” but I said „shall be renewed” (and this I believe, and so it shall be); nor did I say that youth shall be renewed by the return of days, but by good deeds profitable to the soul; and not in this age of your kingdom, but in the age and kingdom of the heavens, where the soul of man, overcoming through virtues, shall never grow old again. If you still wish, remember the word of the Lord, where He says: „Honor thy father and thy mother, that thou mayest live long upon the earth” [Ex 2, 12]. Behold, then, that good deeds prolong life and renew youth not only in the age to come, which is without end, but even in this one, which has an end — all the more since it is not you, but heaven, that is our homeland.
Hope Not in What the Body Sees, but in What the Soul Contemplates
The World: How can I call you, or count you among all men of sound mind, or number you among the wise, when you believe rumored, unseen things, and rely upon things to come which are only yet to happen — things you pronounce upon without knowing what they are, how they are, or when they will happen — and in which you hope while remaining in the darkness of ignorance and want of learning? But I have proven to you all that I have shown and told you. Why do you not believe my words, but instead believe in things to come, in things unseen, rumored, and incomprehensible? Were you a prophet, I would say: „This one is a prophet and knows things to come.” But since you are no prophet, but a man like other men, and since you are like other men, behold, you do not know the things that are to be. You tell me, moreover, that at the end of this age it will be thus and so on the other side, yet you cannot know not only what shall be at the end of the age, but not even what shall be or happen before or after. With such a mind and such reckoning, your mind is in the wind and your reckoning in the clouds, for you place all your hope and faith in things to come and things that are yet to be. Therefore, setting aside now your stubbornness, come to me, consider and see, take it into your head and understand that all that is mine is true, and this not only because I tell you so, but because it is thus attested also by other wise men. For all that I have told you, behold, I have set it also before your eyes. Be not, then, stubborn and distrustful, but submissive and trusting.
Cantemir shifts the center of the dispute here to where it truly lay from the start: not the question of bodily youth, which the World had rightly dismissed, but the manner of reading a promise. The Wise Man does not say „has been renewed,” but „shall be renewed” — future tense, not a claim of fact. This is exactly the distinction the Apostle draws between sight and faith: „hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?” (Rom 8:24). To demand immediate proof for an eternal promise is, in effect, to demand its abolition — to turn it into an event here, measurable on the World’s wheel.
The clearest sign of the shift in meaning the Wise Man brings is his own formula: not the body’s youth, but the passage from sinner to righteous. Saint Isaac the Syrian calls repentance „a second birth,” the only renewal man can ask for without lying, since it depends not on age but on the will; and Saint John Chrysostom observes that the man who was yesterday drunk with passions and today rises through repentance has truly grown young, more than he would by the turning back of years. Here lies the very difference between the wheel of the previous chapter and the ladder the Fathers speak of: the wheel brings you down again to where you rose from; the ladder of repentance, once climbed, does not turn back.
The World’s argument — „you believe unseen things; I have proven to you what I have shown you” — seems reasonable only if bodily sight is the sole criterion of truth. Saint Paul overturns exactly this criterion: „we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Cor 4:18). This is no plea for credulity, but for a different order of certainty: the World confuses evidence with truth, as though what cannot be touched by hand could not be more certain than what is seen. Saint Isaac the Syrian says plainly that the senses testify only to perishable things, while faith alone — „the eye of the soul,” not of the body — testifies to the things that do not pass away.
The Wise Man’s reference to the commandment to honor one’s parents, with its promise of long life, shows that he does not despise this life at all, but places it rightly: good deeds prolong and renew even the present age, but their purpose is not this age, but the one that has no end. Saint Maximus the Confessor calls this motion of the soul toward virtue an endless epektasis — not because the soul is dissatisfied, but because the good toward which it advances is infinite, so that there can never be a moment when the renewal stops, as the World’s weary round of years must eventually stop. This is why the Wise Man’s closing is no retreat from the dispute, but a reclaiming of his true homeland: „it is not you, but heaven, that is our homeland.”
