To believe that the world was made by God
So this world was made by God, the maker of all things, as Moses, the oldest of all historians, testifies: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth” etc. (Gen. 1:1).
The world is like a garden, and men like the flowers in it
The world is like a garden, and within it men are like the flowers, as Hosea testifies (14:5): “Israel shall blossom as the lily,” or “All flesh is grass, and all its glory as the flower of grass: the grass withers, the flower fades” (Is. 40:7-8).
Man is like the tree and like the fruit — that is, his deeds are like the fruit.
A good tree brings forth good fruit [Mt. 7:17], to which is added what follows there, said of the good man: “And he shall be like a tree planted by the streams of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season, and its leaf shall not wither” (Ps. 1:3 and Jer. 17:8).
The world is like a treasure: if you use it for good, it will be for your good; if for evil, it will be evil for you
The world is like a treasure (of transient things, of course). If you use its wealth rightly, it will be for your good, for Ecclesiastes says (6:12): “Wealth gathered unjustly turns to the harm of the one who gained it,” and again: “He who loves silver will not be satisfied with silver” (5:10).
Moses, the first historian, does not write a cosmogony to satisfy the mind, but to lay the foundation on which every confession that follows will stand: “In the beginning God made.” In the previous article we saw how St. Basil rejects Aristotle’s unbegotten world precisely because a world with no beginning can have no end — and a world with no end has no judgment. Cantemir does not repeat the argument here; he presupposes it: if the world is made, everything in it bears the seal of making — that is, it is gift, not property. From this one foundation, the three images that follow all unfold.
That is why the text moves straight to the garden. The garden is not a decorative figure but a precise one: a garden does not sustain itself — it requires a Gardener. Hosea sees Israel growing “as the lily” — a flower with no root of its own, living only as long as it stays fastened to the soil that feeds it. Isaiah goes further: “all flesh is grass.” He does not say like grass — he says is. St. Basil, in the homilies on the Hexaemeron, notes that grass does not perish from any fault of its own but from its transient nature; what fades quickly is what never had root in eternity, only in the passing hour. Seen psychologically, this is the wound Ernest Becker called the denial of death: the self-construction that wants to be permanent precisely because, at bottom, it knows itself to be grass. Cantemir needs no Becker to see this — he needs only Isaiah.
But the text does not stop at the flower — it moves to the tree. This is a precise theological movement: the flower shows the passing beauty of nature, the tree shows the fruit that remains. “A good tree brings forth good fruit” is not a botanical law but a law of action: the deed is not added to man from outside; it comes out of him the way fruit comes out of a tree — according to nature, not according to a will displayed for others to see. St. Maximus the Confessor distinguishes here between the logos of nature (what the tree is) and the tropos of its working (how it bears fruit), and Psalm 1 joins the two: the tree “planted by the streams of water” bears fruit “in its season,” not on the onlooker’s demand. It is a quiet rebuke to the good deed picked green, shown before its time to be praised — the kenodoxia I have written of so often: fruit torn off before ripening feeds no one, however it shines to the eye.
The last image shifts register — from nature to will. The garden and the tree grow by their own law; the treasure grows by no law at all — it sits where you put it, and shows exactly who you are. Ecclesiastes does not say wealth is evil; he says wealth gathered unjustly turns back against the one who gathered it, because the injustice in the gaining stays lodged in the thing gained, like a working mystery. And “he who loves silver will not be satisfied with silver” describes precisely what Erich Fromm called the structure of having: the more you possess, the more the emptiness demands, because it is no longer being but the thing possessed that has become the ground of the self. St. John Chrysostom says the same thing differently: the love of silver is not calmed by silver, because the sickness is not in the silver — it is in the love.
The three images — garden, tree, treasure — are not three separate teachings but one, seen from three angles: everything received as gift (beauty, fruit, wealth) remains gift only for as long as it is not seized as one’s own against the Giver. Christ gathers all three into a single parable, that of the rich fool who wanted to build bigger barns: “Consider the lilies of the field… and so God clothes them” (Lk. 12:27), and in the same chapter: “this night your soul will be required of you” (Lk. 12:20). The flower that withers overnight and the treasure gathered over a lifetime die the same death, in the same hour. The only thing that does not die is the fruit — the deed brought forth from the tree in its season, not kept back in a barn to be admired.
