A Reminder of What Was Said Before
Have you seen, then, my friend, from the very beginning, how, what, and in what manner the world is? Have you seen to what end the beautiful delights of the world lead? Have you seen what the world, that is, the body, desires, and what it urges man, that is, the soul, to do? Have you seen how many flatteries, how many snares, how many traps it lays on every side and along every path of man’s poor soul? Have you seen the life and the years of man for as long as he is in the world?
Strive, then, to be wholly good and full of virtues. For if you are not so, „narrow is the way to heaven,” and, as it is said: „Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 18:3); that is, let us be pure in all things and gentle in all things. Especially because of the weak nature of men, many and various means of salvation have been shown to us, so that, even if we cannot find ourselves at the very top of the ladder, we may at least be near the top, or in the middle. For many are the mansions of God (Jn. 14:2), and let us not find ourselves wholly and entirely estranged and removed from this path. But if it seems hard to you to renounce the world entirely, and you wish not to be wholly solitary and poor in this world, but to know some measure of ease in your life, it is hard indeed; for „as it is hard for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, it is even harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 19:24).
Yet He who is all-merciful also says that „what is not possible with men is possible with God” (Mt. 19:26), since there is nothing that God cannot do, for „all things are in His hand, and opening it, all things are filled with His goodness” (Ps. 144:17 [145:16]). And since this temporal world is a world in need of governance (for what is not governed cannot progress), if anyone, with full wisdom and good judgment, being in the world, should be able to govern the world and yet keep his soul unharmed and pure, beautiful and good, this would be a fine thing, since it would be pleasing both to God and to men.
But who, then, could that man be? He who shall stamp firmly and in detail upon his mind, who shall listen with the ears of the soul, and, listening and understanding, shall fulfill the seventy-seven tasks set before us by Andrew called Wissowatius, and which he calls the Spurs of the Virtues and the Reins of Sins, that is, the urging toward virtues and the restraint from sins, which we shall show and set before the eyes of each reader. For, as it seems to me, that man will be pleasing both to God and to men, and, moreover, will have profit both from this passing life and from the life to come, and, after a glorious and honorable life, shall find honor at death and honor after death, and at the second resurrection shall find honor once more, unto the glory of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen!
With this closing word, the First Book of the Divan truly comes to an end. All the voices heard until now — the vain praise of Fortune, the World’s cunning, her ever more subtle reckonings, but also the Wise Man’s ever sterner answers — gather here into a single question addressed directly to the reader: „have you seen?” This is no longer a dispute between two characters, but a mirror held up before each one of us.
The call to perfection is spoken without evasion: „narrow is the way to heaven,” a direct echo of the Savior’s own word in Matthew 7:14, and the condition placed beside it — that we become „as little children” (Matthew 18:3) — does not contradict but crowns the Wise Man’s earlier reckoning of infancy as an age free of malice: what is asked of the mature man is not ignorance, but the childlike freedom from malice and purity, now won through struggle rather than through lack of knowledge.
But at the very moment when this rigor seems overwhelming, Cantemir places a pastoral turn of rare gentleness for an ascetic text: „in My Father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2). St. Paul says something similar when he writes that „there is one glory of the sun… and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory” (1 Corinthians 15:41) — not all the saints stand at the same height on the ladder, but all are within the same house of the Father. It is the same hope St. John Climacus leaves at the very end of his Ladder: even the one who cannot climb to the highest rung must not abandon the ladder, but should climb as far as he can, in humility, content with the place where grace has set him.
The tension between the camel that cannot pass through the eye of a needle (Matthew 19:24) and the word that opens that way, „with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26), is exactly the tension the whole Divan has built, point by point: man alone cannot overcome the world by his own strength — but grace works precisely where human reckoning stops, powerless. St. John Chrysostom often reminds us that the Gospel does not demand a single path to salvation, the monastic one, but recognizes also in the laity — those who remain „in the world” to govern it wisely — the very same call to holiness, exactly what Cantemir here calls „to govern the world and keep one’s soul unharmed.”
It is worth noting that, to close, Cantemir sends the reader onward, toward the seventy-seven exhortations of Andrew Wissowatius — a seventeenth-century Polish theologian, known chiefly for other doctrinal controversies of his time, but used here only as the author of a practical list of virtues and sins, not as a dogmatic authority. Cantemir, a man of his age, gathers wisdom wherever he finds it useful, just as he does elsewhere in the work with Nietzsche — but he closes, significantly, not with Wissowatius’s name, but with the Church’s Trinitarian doxology: „unto the glory of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen!” — confessing, thus, to the very last word, where the true foundation of everything that has been said truly lies.
