The Body Is Likened to the World, and the Soul to Heaven
The Wise Man: Since you have conjured me in the name of the great God to lead your mind, which you have thrust into the Cretan Labyrinth, to some road and way out, I shall tell you much, gladly and truly, and I shall not mock you. You are the creation and handiwork of the everlasting King, adorned in all your ornaments — for God makes nothing ugly or unpleasing — perfected in all things within six days, as Moses, the most ancient of all historians, writes. You are called the Macrocosm, the prototype and model of the Microcosm, that is, of man; and therefore all the adornments found in you may be explained as belonging to man, and all those of man as belonging to you. Thus, first in you is the light, which in man corresponds to faith; in you is the firmament above, that is, the heaven, which in man is hope; in you the waters above, which in man are the cares left by God, and then the waters below, which are the disturbances that come from the flesh; in you is the earth — in man, the body. The herbs and trees signify good works; your seeds and fruits are the virtues and almsgiving. The sun is the image of wisdom concerning eternal things, and the moon the image of temporal things. The fish, which always dwell in water, are humility; the flying birds are the contemplation of heavenly things; the irrational animals are the aiding and showing mercy to the poor; the creeping things, that is, the animals that crawl upon their bellies, are compassion for the sufferings of others; the wild beasts signify meditation upon demons and evil; and man, fashioned after the image of God, signifies man’s own proper and natural constitution, the proper and natural fullness of the mind; paradise represents perfect happiness and the imitation of glory.
Therefore, the Microcosm, that is, man, having faith as light, that is, as law, having a firmament, that is, hope — for these are what I need first of all — must show forth the truth by the light of faith, and scatter and destroy sin and darkness. In this way, then, are you, O world!
You have further asked me: what kind of goodness and what kind of evil do you have? I shall show you this too. Your goodness is this: just as you are pure to the sight of the bodily eye, so let me be unclouded in the light of faith and walk through it in good peace; as the firmament, that is, the heaven, is strong and wide, so let my hope in God be strong and unshaken; and likewise all the rest, as I have marked and shown you above; if you wish to judge them rightly, then you are good, and very good for me, indeed helpful for the benefit of my body and soul.
But your evil is this and in this way: if the Microcosm, that is, man, will not be enlightened by faith and strengthened by hope, if he does not heed the temptations and troubles that surround him, if he does not compel his flesh toward good works, so that the fruit of the virtues may be born and spring up, and if he does not walk in humility and gentleness and look toward heavenly things rather than earthly ones — that is, if he follows the desires of the flesh rather than those of the soul; if he does not grieve and show mercy for the sufferings and misfortunes of others, and does not reflect and meditate on how he ought to guard and defend himself from the demons who strive to do harm to human nature and from their wickedness; if he does not remember that he is made after the image and likeness of his Creator — that is, of God — and that he is quickened and renewed by His Holy Spirit, and does not know that he is man, and not beast, with a right and perfect mind to know good and evil, so as to shun and guard against evil and to have and do good; and if he does not labor and strive, for as long as he dwells within you, to obtain paradise, that is, perfect and unending glory and happiness, through the aforementioned and thrice-blessed virtues — then you are evil, and all that is yours is evil.
For if the Microcosm, that is, man, departs from these bright adornments, he will not be able to illumine the dreadful darkness and gloom of sins and errors, and thus will be given over as prey to hell and the fire of Gehenna. And to such a wretched one someone might say Christ’s own word: «It would have been better for him to have been born a stone, and not a man». In this way, then, you make yourself evil and dreadful toward man, and in this way you turn and transform from good into evil, from desired into repulsive, from gentle into savage, from beautiful into ugly, from helpful into harmful, and, in a word, from life-giving into death-bringing. Behold, then, I have now led you out of the Labyrinth, that is, out of the confusion and the prison that had gripped your mind, and I have shown you what you are and how you are. So know and recognize yourself without fail, and so let all creation know you.
Yet in the end you could not restrain yourself until you had shown me the cunning and wickedness you keep hidden in your conscience, and you begged me, since I have come to know you, not to reveal you to others; but this is beyond my nature, for an Arab poet says: «Two things lead the mind astray: to keep silent when one ought to speak, and to speak when one ought to be silent». And now, at the fitting time, it is good to strive to speak; therefore, though I have not known you entirely — and what do I say, entirely, when I have not known even the thousandth part of you! — yet in the measure that I have come to know you, I shall bear witness of you ceaselessly to all, without keeping silent. For this I must, and this befits me to do.
When the World Praises You, Examine Yourself, Whether You Are as Men Say; But Do Not Be Proud of This Either
The World: I have now come to know and understand that your words are right and your judgment is just, and I thank you greatly for showing me, as was fitting, this road and this way out for my ignorant mind. Therefore I promise you with all my soul to be good to you, and not evil, gentle, and not terrifying, helpful, and not harmful, life-giving, and not deadly, and I wish that from now on you may find yourself in my friendship and love, and that I may serve you in all things as a good friend and as a faithful mother, whose heart burns for her son.
With this point we come close to the end of the First Book of the Divan. And it is a fitting close: after so many pages in which the World boasted, defended herself, accused, and finally collapsed, confessing her own inability to know herself, the Wise Man no longer judges her from without — he reads her from within, as an overturned icon of man himself.
This reading — the Macrocosm as mirror of the Microcosm — is no rhetorical invention of Cantemir’s, but the inheritance of an old and steady patristic tradition. St. Gregory of Nyssa, in On the Making of Man, shows that man was fashioned last of all creatures precisely because he is called to recapitulate them all in himself, a kind of „small world” gathering into itself the whole thread of creation. St. Maximus the Confessor goes further still: man is the mediator (mesites) appointed by God to unite in himself the sensible and the intelligible, earth and heaven, the created and the uncreated — not by his own power, but by grace, following the pattern of Christ, the New Adam. When Cantemir reads light as faith, heaven as hope, the waters above as God’s care and the waters below as the flesh’s turmoil, he is simply continuing the kind of hexaemeral exegesis that St. Basil the Great inaugurated in his homilies on Genesis: the days of creation are not only history, but also an image of every soul’s spiritual ascent.
Yet the heart of the teaching lies in the simplest and, at once, hardest observation: the world is neither good nor evil in itself — it becomes, in man and through man, whatever man makes of it. „From good into evil, from desired into repulsive, from gentle into savage” — not because the nature of creation changes, but because man, departing from faith and hope, darkens his own inner eye and sees through it a disfigured world. This is exactly what St. Paul calls using the world „as not using it to the full” (1 Corinthians 7:31) — not contempt for creation, but freedom from bondage to it, a freedom won only through living faith and unshaken hope.
The second teaching — „when the world praises you, examine yourself” — is the touchstone of this whole edifice. Without it, everything said above could easily slide into spiritual pride: self-satisfaction at having „understood” the mystery of the Macrocosm. St. John Climacus places precisely here the subtlest snare of the spiritual life — vainglory, which feeds not on sin but on man’s very successes, on the praise received for virtue. This is why Abba Dorotheos of Gaza counsels that the one who is praised should not believe the praise, but examine himself carefully as to whether he is truly as men say — and even if he is, he should not be lifted up in heart, since every good has its cause in the grace of God, not in himself. The Apostle Paul asks for the same examination: „Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith” (2 Corinthians 13:5).
And when the World, at the end, turns from adversary into „faithful mother,” we are witnessing not a change in the world, but the healing of man’s gaze upon it. St. Isaac the Syrian says that the one who has seen the truth about himself also sees the truth about all that surrounds him — and only then does the world cease to be a Labyrinth and truly become a father’s house, a ladder toward heaven, a ceaseless occasion to ascend from the Macrocosm to its Maker.
