„You ought first to know by whom this world was made, together with its whole extent, that is, all its circumstances. After this you must understand that it is passing and unstable, as its own Creator, our Lord Jesus Christ, says: ‘Heaven and earth will pass away’ (Mt. 5:18), and as another, like Him, teaches: ‘There is a time for everything, and all things pass with time’ (Eccl. 3:1).” — Dimitrie Cantemir, The Divan, the dispute of soul and body
It is no accident that Cantemir opens this second dispute, too, with a „you ought to know.” It is the same movement the Church makes before pronouncing any moral commandment: first the confession of faith, only then the precept. St. Basil the Great does not begin the *Hexaemeron* with a sermon on the passions, but with „In the beginning God made heaven and earth” — because a man who does not know who made the world cannot know how to conduct himself in it. The body cannot be judged before the world the body is made of has first been judged. So too the dispute of soul and body begins, in right order, not with accusation but with confession of the Maker.
But notice the second, finer move: from „who made the world” we pass at once to „the world passes.” This is no accidental shift of subject — it is the very heart of the dogma of creation. A world that was made cannot be eternal, for only the Uncreated is without end. Pagan philosophy could conceive of an uncreated, and therefore everlasting, world — Aristotle himself left the cosmos without beginning or end, precisely because he refused to place a Maker outside it. Scripture does the opposite: because the world has a beginning outside itself, it also has an end. The world’s passing is not a mournful observation about decay; it is the logical consequence of its having been created. What was brought out of non-being can return toward non-being — only grace holds it.
Here too lies the sting for the soul about to accuse the body: the body is not guilty of being transient; guilty is the soul that asked the body to be what it cannot be — stable. This, in fact, is the oldest form of philautia: not the coarse love of pleasure, but hope wrongly placed — the hope for permanence set down inside a thing which, by the very act of its making, was pronounced passing. Evagrius calls this the root of all logismoi: the soul seeking, in created things, the rest that only the Maker can give. Ecclesiastes does not say „all is vanity” to drive man to despair, but to detach him from a hope wrongly placed, that he might be freed for the other one.
Modern psychology, too, has found the same wound, in its own language, without knowing its name. Research on the „impact bias” and the illusion of permanence shows that the mind instinctively treats the present state as stable, even against all evidence to the contrary: the pain of now feels as though it will last forever; the joy of now feels as though it will never end. It is a form of cognitive blindness before time. But where the therapeutic account stops at „accepting impermanence” as a technique for reducing anxiety, the patristic account goes further: it is not enough to accept that things pass — one must know *who* does not pass. Without this second step, „all things pass” remains only a Stoic resignation, a stillness with no Person in it. With it, it becomes what it was for Cantemir from the start: not a theory about the world, but a confession about its Maker.
This is why the dispute of soul and body could not have begun otherwise. Before any guilt is weighed between them, both must first be set beneath the same truth: nothing in what they are, taken apart, can stand in place of the One who made them both — and who will, for a time, separate them too, in His own time.
