The Course and Fortune of the World Are Like a Wheel When It Turns
The Wise Man: I find myself in a boundless perplexity, wondering and marveling with what hymns, what praises, what glory I should proclaim, praise, and glorify that painter — sharp of mind, skilled in reckoning, perfect in learning — who first truly rendered and painted, true to reality, the image and likeness of the life of your children; O beautiful, perfect mind, more skilled and sharper than a razor’s edge, who likened the world to a wheel forever turning about its axle. Truly, indeed, powerful and utterly without falsehood is this comparison! For as the lower part of the wheel rises upward, and, reaching the topmost point, where it ought to remain, even if not for long, yet not even for a moment — not even the blink of an eye — but from that topmost point turns with great swiftness toward the part below, so that the part you saw rising a moment ago you see, almost in the same instant, descending, and the part that stood at the upper point of balance is now at the lower point of balance. And just as the eye can scarcely tell when the wheel rises and when it falls and when it completes a turn, so is the life and course of your children’s lives: the mind can scarcely grasp when each is born, what he does, how long he lives, and when he dies. And as the part of the wheel that, rising from the ground, was lifted above, and, descending again, reaches below, to the very place from which it had risen, so too your children, coming forth from the earth, in time, precisely when they least expect it, return again to their dust, and for a small, short-lived, vain and useless pleasure, in a short while die shamefully and vanish. Truly, they are worthy to be wept and mourned, for in the end, after a useless life, dying in the body, they die also in the soul, and become heirs and dwellers of the unquenchable fire of gehenna. As for me, however, O world, being a son of God, the giver of every perfect gift, my youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s [Ps 102, 5].
Seek to Lengthen Your Life Not in This Age, but in the Age to Come
The World: O poor man, how have you become a mother of lies and a fountain of empty words? How can such a thing be? For behold, it is 7,207 years since I was made by my Creator, and until now, however many men and sons of men have come into me, I have not seen the youth of a single one renewed. Nor have I heard of old men, or those who have reached old age, becoming young again and returning to the age of youth. You, perhaps, I may yet come to see; but, as I reckon, you will be no more skilled or worthy than the other men — who for so many thousands of years have passed through so many countless thousands of generations, and who are still alive even now — that you should say it were possible for you to be more skilled or worthy than some of them; but out of so great a multitude of men, how is it that none has managed to do as you claim, and to have his youth renewed, and to become strong from weak and young from old? Unless, as I told you before, you have become the mother of lies and the fountain of fables, for I reckon well and know truly that not even you will live any longer than other men.
The image of the wheel that Cantemir places in the Wise Man’s mouth is no isolated invention: it is the same figure that, eleven centuries earlier, Boethius used in prison, in the Consolation of Philosophy, putting into Fortune’s own mouth: it is her ceaseless game to spin the wheel in its swift circle, letting one rise if he wishes, on the sole condition that he not complain when she brings him down again. Both thinkers arrive at the same conclusion by different roads: the only mistake is to be astonished at the turning, not the turning itself. The Preacher had said the same thing before either of them: „one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever… the sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose” (Eccl 1:4-5) — motion without a destination of its own, motion that circles rather than advances.
But here Cantemir does not stop at Boethius’s stoic resignation; he opens a way out of the wheel that pagan philosophy could not see: „my youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s” (Ps 102:5). The patristic reading of this verse — in Saint Basil the Great and Saint John Chrysostom — ties the eagle’s renewal not to a law of nature but to the grace that changes nature; and Isaiah says plainly to whom this gift is given: „they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles” (Is 40:31). It is not, then, a second bodily youth, which the World is quite right to deny from the outset, but „the inward man… renewed day by day” (2 Cor 4:16) — a vertical motion, toward God, which does not follow the law of the wheel.
The World’s answer is, in fact, an unwitting testimony: seven thousand two hundred and seven years of watching have not proven her a liar concerning death, but for that very reason she cannot judge what does not belong to her turning. Saint Maximus the Confessor clearly distinguishes the circular motion of things subject to time (γένεσις-φθορά, coming-to-be and decay) from the soul’s motion toward the unmoved rest that is in God, the only motion that never returns to where it began; and Saint Gregory of Nyssa calls this endless ascent epektasis — not a wheel, but a ladder with no last rung. The World is right as far as her wheel extends; the Wise Man is right precisely because he no longer seeks to remain on it.
This is why the counsel with which this exchange closes — „seek to lengthen your life not in this age, but in the age to come” — is no consolation for those who have fallen from the wheel, but the only reasonable strategy against a wheel that, however high one climbs on it, always brings one down again. Saint Isaac the Syrian says that the wise man does not fight the wheel to stop it, but steps outside its field, binding his life to Him who „is the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Heb 13:8) — the one point in all creation that no longer turns.
