Dimitrie Cantemir — The Divan, or the Wise Man’s Quarrel with the World
The man rich in the world is poor and blind
For although in the world, that is, by the world’s reckoning, they are called rich and glorious, they are nevertheless poor and blind, taking no heed of it, as John attests (Rev. 3:17): “You say: I am rich, and I have grown rich, and I lack nothing, and you do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked.” David, though a king, knew this, saying to himself: “I am poor and needy” [Ps. 87:15].
The wide and broad road leads to death
Likewise, the road of such men will lead to an unhappy end and a bad harbor, of which it is well said: “There is a way that seems right to men, but in the end it leads to the depths of hell” (Prov. 14:12), and in the same place: “The ways of those who remember wrongs lead to death” (12:28); for all flesh will return to dust, and the mighty sooner than the rest, as it is said: “Every mighty man has a short life” (Sirach 10:11), and he will come to a bad end. Of this Job also speaks well (20:15): “The wealth gathered unjustly he will vomit up; an angel will drive it out of his house,” that is, it will repay them with the terrible punishments of hell.
Two Words About One Illness
Cantemir’s Wise Man says two things in turn: about the state of the rich of the world (poor and blind) and about their road (wide, and toward death). The first is the diagnosis, the second the prognosis, and both describe one illness: the kind that cannot be seen from within. Let us say at the outset what the text does not say. It does not say that luck gives or takes, nor that chance raises one man and overturns another. The Wise Man has no luck; he has Providence. God weighs, and His scales are not “the world’s reckoning.”
Two words from Revelation, spoken to two Churches, set the two reckonings face to face. To Smyrna: “I know your tribulation and your poverty — yet you are rich” (Revelation 2:9). To Laodicea: “You say, I am rich… and you do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked” (3:17). The one poor and rich, the other rich and poor: the same reality, two balance sheets.
“You Say”: The Illness That Declares Itself Healthy
Notice the verb: you say. Laodicea is not asked what condition she is in; she issues her own certificate. And the illness is not poverty but you do not know. Neurologists know a disorder that resembles this: Anton–Babinski syndrome, in which a person blinded by brain damage denies that he cannot see, describes rooms, faces and colors, and bumps into walls without changing his story. He is not lying; the very signal that would have told him something is missing has disappeared. The rich of that world are in the same position: the faculty that should show them their lack is precisely the one absorbed by counting. This blindness also has a milder form, known to the psychology of attention: in the famous gorilla experiment (Simons and Chabris, 1999), people counting passes between players failed to see a person in a gorilla suit walk through the middle of the scene. Whoever counts no longer sees what is not counted: the neighbor, death, God.
In the Lord’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16), the rich man is accused of no crime. It is not said that he stole or oppressed anyone. He is accused of blindness: Lazarus lay at his gate for years, and he did not see him. That is why the remedy in Revelation fits the illness so exactly: the One who speaks counsels Laodicea to buy from Him “gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich, and white garments, that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see” (3:18). The three lacks, poor, naked and blind, are those of fallen Adam; the three gifts (gold passed through fire, the garment, sight) are Christ’s.
The pagan philosophers suspected this reversal. Socrates charges the Athenians with feeling no shame at caring for money, reputation and honor while not caring for wisdom, truth and the soul (Apology, 29d–e). Plato, in Book VIII of the Republic, describes the oligarchic soul as a cramped one: all its powers are put in the service of accumulation, while the rest of the man goes hungry. And Seneca writes, in his second Letter, that the poor man is not he who has little but he who desires more. The border between wealth and poverty does not run along the line of money.
None of this makes wealth, as such, a sin. Abraham was rich (Genesis 13:2), and Job (1:3). Clement of Alexandria, in his homily Who Is the Rich Man That Is Saved?, teaches that the Lord says “poor in spirit,” not poor in purse (Matthew 5:3): wealth is a tool, and the bad rich man is the one whom the tool has mastered. Cantemir’s “rich in the world” is he whose treasure is in the world, for “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21).
David: The King Who Calls Himself Poor
Cantemir brings in David, a king and master of a treasury, saying: “I am poor and needy.” (Cantemir notes it at Psalm 87; the same cry is heard in Psalms 39, 69 and 85.) It is not a figure of speech but an accounting. When David fulfills his father’s dream for the Temple and the people bring gifts for the house of the Lord, he prays: “All that is in heaven and on earth is Yours… and from Your hand we have taken and given to You,” and adds: “For we are strangers before You, and sojourners, as all our fathers were” (1 Chronicles 29:11–15). Here is the true balance sheet: all I have is His, and I am only in a borrowed place. Such a man is truly rich: Paul would call him one of those “having nothing, and yet possessing everything” (2 Corinthians 6:10).
Psychology has tested this distinction as far as it can. Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan showed, as early as the 1990s, that people whose central goal is financial success, image and status report more anxiety, less vitality and poorer relationships than those who pursue what they would call “intrinsic” goals: belonging, growth, helping. In other words, the man rich in the world pays dearly for what he gathers, even if he does not know what his losses are called.
The Road That Seems Straight
“There is a way that seems right to men” (Proverbs 14:12). The word that matters is seems. The wide road does not announce its end; each step of it is reasonable. The Lord says it in the Sermon on the Mount: “wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it” (Matthew 7:13). The two ways appear also in the oldest guide of the Church, the Didache: “There are two ways, one of life and one of death.” Notice: many. The wide road is wide because it is crowded, and social psychology (from Asch to Cialdini) has shown how much the crowd teaches us to consider good whatever it does. “It must be fine, everyone does it” is the argument of the wide road.
The second half of the text, Proverbs 12:28, speaks of “those who remember wrongs,” that is, those who keep the evil done to them in memory like a ledger. The ledger of debts and the ledger of offenses are often the same ledger; in the Lord’s Prayer, Christ uses one word for both: “Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). The one who has learned to keep ledgers in order to gather has learned, at the same time, to keep ledgers in order not to forgive.
The Mighty and the Short Life
“Every mighty man has a short life,” says the teaching of Jesus son of Sirach, and Cantemir turns it toward the same dust to which all flesh returns. Psalm 48 says that no one can ransom his brother, nor give God a price for his soul. Modern psychology has found the other face of this truth: Tim Kasser and Kennon Sheldon showed in 2000 that people led to think about their own death increase their desire for wealth and consumption. Accumulation is, in large part, an attempt to postpone death: whoever cannot stop time tries to fill it. But the word of Scripture remains: what we gather in order not to die shows us only how much we fear death.
The Wealth That Is Vomited Up
“The wealth gathered unjustly he will vomit up; an angel will drive it out of his house” (Job 20:15). The image is physical and harsh: wealth swallowed without justice is vomited, like food that is not the man’s own. Saint Basil the Great, in his homily on the words “I will tear down my barns” (Luke 12:18), says the same thing more simply: the bread you keep in surplus belongs to the hungry, the cloak in your chest to the naked, the money you bury to the poor. Wealth is not the man’s possession; it is his trust. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 23:1). That is why the angel in Job does not steal: he returns home what was never the man’s.
Cantemir adds that this means “the terrible punishments of hell.” Let us ask the whole Tradition how this word is understood. Saint Isaac the Syrian says that those condemned in Gehenna are tormented by the scourge of love: the very light of God that is joy to those who loved Him is pain to those who turned away. The punishment of the rich man, then, ceases to be vengeance and becomes an encounter: the one who put everything he had into things sees his things taken from his hand and stands empty before Him who was never in his ledgers.
A Word From the Fathers
A brother rich in cellars came to an elder and said: “Father, I lack nothing; give me a word.”
And the elder said to him: “Go and count what you have.”
He went, counted, and returned, and told the elder how many things there were.
The elder said: “Everything you have has been counted. Only you have not yet been counted. Who counts you?”
And the brother was silent for many days; and in that year he never again said to anyone: I lack nothing.
