Dimitrie Cantemir, The Divan — Book Two (the judgment of the soul with the body)
Know that the world is passing
Believing, then, that the world was made by God, believe likewise that this world is passing and that the world to come is eternal, concerning which John the Theologian bears witness: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” (Rev. 21:1); and “We look for new heavens and a new earth” (2 Pet. 3:13).
The body follows the fate of the world; the days of man are as grass
Man himself follows the fate of the world, for it is said: “As for man, his days are as grass” (Ps. 102:15). Why so? Because the first-created man, not walking in the commandments of his Creator and not obeying them, became mortal and passing through this world. But wherein did he err? In that he let himself be deceived by the beauty of the fruit: “And the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and pleasant to the eyes, and she took of its fruit and ate, and gave also to her husband” (Gen. 3:6). Then straightway all the goods of the world and its riches became unstable and useless to man. As Ecclesiastes made known (5:14): “Naked he came forth from his mother’s womb, naked shall he go, and shall take nothing with him of his labors.”
In the world vanity followed
Thereafter vanity followed in this world, for the same one says again: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Eccl. 1:1).
The world is upheld by the mercy of God
But know that if poor mankind has been found for so long in vanity and in ill-considered circumstances, and if after so much bitter time men still live in the world to this day, this is owed to the all-rich mercy of God, for it is said: “Long-suffering and of great mercy; not according to our iniquities, nor according to our sins has He dealt with us” (Ps. 102:8, 10).
The previous article, “The Garden Received and the Treasure Seized,” opened the garden: the world received as an orchard, man as a tree, wealth as a treasure. The present text brings its autumn. Four assertions hold to one another like links in a chain: the world passes; the body passes with it; vanity settles upon both; and yet both still are, not by their own strength but by the mercy of God. He who keeps only the first three links arrives at pagan despair; he who keeps only the last, at a gratitude without depth. The text holds all four at once, and by this very thing it is a patristic text.
A Passing That Is Not Annihilation
“Know” asks not for information but for formation: this knowledge is not added to the mind but puts it in order. Psychology has measured it. Laura Carstensen’s research on socioemotional selectivity shows that when a person feels his horizon of time narrowing, he reorders his desires: he sets aside novelty and accumulation and turns toward what has weight and meaning. The knowledge of the end is therefore first an instrument of discernment and only then a bitterness. The Fathers named it the remembrance of death (mnēmē thanatou) and set it near the beginning of the ascent (St. John of the Ladder, Step 6).
The two witnesses, John and Peter, say “a new heaven and a new earth,” and in their Greek “new” is kainos, not neos: new in kind, not new in date. Neos would have meant another world set in place of the old; kainos says the same world, made otherwise. The verb “passed away” (parēlthen) is that of a procession going by before the eyes, the same verb by which the Lord says heaven and earth “shall pass away” (Matt. 24:35), and the Apostle specifies what passes: “the form (schēma) of this world” (1 Cor. 7:31), not its being. St. Maximus the Confessor will give the formula: the principles (logoi) of creatures remain, the mode (tropos) of corruption is changed; and St. John Chrysostom, expounding Rom. 8:21, teaches that creation will not be annihilated but changed into a better state.
Greek thought knew the same fact and bore it otherwise. For Heraclitus no one steps twice into the same river; Plato, in the Timaeus (27d–28a), separates what “is always becoming and never is” from what “always is and never becomes,” and the mind’s only escape from the flux was flight into a world of Forms, where nothing passes because nothing lives. Scripture does not flee from becoming toward a Being without history; it takes becoming itself and sets it in Him Who Is. Therefore the passing of the world is not a draining toward nothing but a birth: “the whole creation groans and travails in pain together” (Rom. 8:22).
The Body That Keeps Pace With the World
“Man himself follows the fate of the world,” yet not by a blind law of nature but by an appointed bond. Man had been set as mediator: St. Maximus (Ambigua 41) shows that he was called to unite by degrees what creation had divided—paradise and the inhabited world, heaven and earth, the sensible and the intelligible, creature and uncreated God. A mediator who falls drags after him what he was to lift up. Hence “cursed is the ground for your sake” (Gen. 3:17), and hence creation was subjected to vanity “not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope” (Rom. 8:20): Chrysostom understands that it was subjected for man’s sake and together with man.
What was inherited from Adam, however, is death and corruption (Rom. 5:12), not guilt; “God did not make death” (Wis. 1:13). The body is mortal, not evil, and this distinction bears everything that follows in the judgment of the soul with the body. Plato, in the Phaedo, saw in the body a tomb (sōma–sēma) from which the soul ought to escape; the Apostle answers that the Christian’s expectation is not escape from the body but “the redemption of our body” (Rom. 8:23). The soul will be able to accuse its body, but the text has first established that both stand under the same sentence and await the same salvation.
The Fruit That Seemed Good
Cantemir also gives the cause: man “let himself be deceived by the beauty of the fruit.” The Septuagint names three sides of the fruit: good for food, pleasant to the eyes, desirable for gaining understanding (Gen. 3:6). The tree was not evil, for all that God had made was “very good” (Gen. 1:31); the evil lay not in the fruit but in the manner and the hour of taking it, in the tropos, St. Maximus would say, not in the logos: desire moved from the Giver to the gift, from what is thought to what is sensed. Aristotle held, in the Nicomachean Ethics (III, 4), that the object of the will is the apparent good; Genesis 3:6 is the history of this thesis, with its verbs set in order: she saw, she took, she ate, she gave. It is the same ladder James describes (1:14–15)—desire conceives sin, sin brings forth death—and that Evagrius would name thought, assent, passion. Psychology today calls it more drily the affect heuristic (Slovic): the feeling that a thing is good arrives before the analysis and takes its place.
The three sides of the fruit are those the Fathers recognized in “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16), and which Christ met in the wilderness and overturned in turn (Luke 4:1–13): bread from stone, the kingdoms of the world, the wing of the temple. What the first Adam lost through desire, the second won through restraint.
“Then straightway all the goods of the world became unstable and useless to man.” The goods lost nothing of themselves; man’s bond with them changed. From means of communion, held in the hand of the Giver, they became possessions, things the hand must seize and never let go. But what is seized is lost: “naked he came forth, naked shall he go.” Naked, moreover, at the beginning too: after the fall they “knew that they were naked” (Gen. 3:7); the nakedness at the grave is the same nakedness, seen to the end.
Research on the fear of death (terror management theory: Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski) shows that the reminder of death drives man, most often, not toward renunciation but toward accumulation; Kasser and Sheldon (2000) observed that participants led to contemplate their own death imagined for their future greater income and consumption. Ecclesiastes states the fact; the heart, set face to face with it, denies it by gathering. What does not fit in the hand may yet fit in the soul: the same Scripture says that the works of those who die in the Lord “follow them” (Rev. 14:13). The toil for oneself stays under the earth; the toil done in God passes with the man.
Vanity Under the Sun
The Hebrew word in Ecclesiastes, hevel, means vapor, breath; the Septuagint renders it mataiotēs, the same word with which the Apostle speaks of creation’s subjection (Rom. 8:20). Vanity is therefore not nothing but something real that cannot be held: a breath is not gathered in the fist. St. Gregory of Nyssa, in his homilies on Ecclesiastes, reads it not as contempt for creation, which Genesis called “very good” and whose beauty proclaims its Maker (Wis. 13:5), but as a verdict upon the heart that takes the passing for the goal. The things are not empty; empty is the measure they are asked to fill.
The book does not only say “all is vanity”; it repeats, more than twenty times, “under the sun”: the toil under the sun, the life under the sun. Camus made of this enclosure a heroic posture—one must imagine Sisyphus happy; Ecclesiastes does not remain in it, but closes with “fear God and keep His commandments” (12:13). Life under the sun is vain; life under the Sun of Righteousness (Mal. 4:2) is no longer measured by the same unit. Psychology too has found a face of this vanity: the focusing illusion (Kahneman and colleagues, 2006), by which a thing seems, while the mind rests upon it, far more important to happiness than it will prove, as happens with income. Desire promises more than it gives, and not once, but every time.
The Mercy That Upholds the World
“If men still live in the world to this day, this is owed to the all-rich mercy of God.” St. Athanasius the Great (On the Incarnation, 3–4) shows that things made out of nothing bear in their nature an inclination to return to nothing and stand only by participation in the Word. Hebrews 1:3 says that the Son “upholds all things by the word of His power,” and Col. 1:17 that “in Him all things hold together.” The persistence of the world is not a neutral fact but a deed. Leibniz’s question, taken up by Heidegger—why is there something rather than nothing?—finds here the answer of the psalm: when God hides His face, creatures are troubled, their breath is taken, and they return to their dust, and when He opens His hand, they are filled with good (Ps. 103:28–29).
This mercy is not the reward of a good world. After the flood, God resolves not to curse the ground again for man’s sake precisely “because the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth,” and promises that, all the days of the earth, seedtime and harvest shall not cease (Gen. 8:21–22). The continuance of the world rests upon the evil of the heart, not on any merit of its own: “not according to our iniquities has He dealt with us” (Ps. 102:10).
This patience can, however, be misread, and Scripture knows it. Peter foresees scoffers who will say that “all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation” (2 Pet. 3:4), and Ecclesiastes observes that because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, the heart of the sons of men is fully set to do evil (8:11). Psychology knows the mechanism: man prefers the near reward to the distant one, and a deferred consequence teaches poorly (Laibson, hyperbolic discounting); if the normalcy bias is added, the confidence that tomorrow’s world will resemble yesterday’s, the delay is read as impunity. Peter’s answer stands in the same chapter that promises the new heavens: the Lord is long-suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish (3:9), and the long-suffering of the Lord is salvation (3:15). The all-rich mercy of the text is “the riches of His goodness,” of which the Apostle asks whether it is despised by him who does not know that the goodness of God leads him to repentance (Rom. 2:4). Time is the form mercy takes toward a world that falls.
St. Isaac the Syrian says that the sins of all flesh, set against God’s providence and mercy, are like a handful of sand thrown into the sea. Under this measure the world is no longer read as a draining away but as a long-suffering.
The Same Psalm
Cantemir draws both citations from the same psalm, and their proximity is no accident: Psalm 102, which calls man grass (v. 15), says two verses further that the mercy of the Lord is “from everlasting to everlasting upon those who fear Him” (v. 17). Grass and mercy stand in the same psalm; what passes is not forgotten by Him Who remains. And the psalm begins with a command the soul gives itself: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, His holy name… and forget not all His benefits” (vv. 1–2).
The judgment of the soul with the body begins, then, from a text in which the soul, instead of accusing its body, summons all that is within to bless, and the remembrance of passing ends not in lament but in the memory of benefits. The Lord Himself says it in the same manner: the grass of the field, “which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven,” God clothes (Matt. 6:30). He who knows that the world passes has no reason to idolize it; he who knows that mercy upholds it has no reason to despise it; and he who knows both arrives at the one posture the psalm names: blessing.
