After Dimitrie Cantemir, “The Divan, or the Wise Man’s Quarrel with the World”
The passage
Take example from the ancient histories. Do not be deceived by some of the examples from the ancient histories, but rather grow wise through them. For you will find, concerning the emperors who in a short time subdued many, that “one should not fear those who kill the body, but those who kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28), and, moreover, that he who kills will be killed, for again it says: “All who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52), and even by the hand of the least.
— Dimitrie Cantemir, Divanul
The answer
In a single sentence Cantemir sets two verbs that look like brothers but are enemies: to be deceived and to grow wise. Both start from the same place, the same history book, the same pages of fallen cities and raised banners. One reader leaves them with a hunger to stand against others, another with the fear of God. History changes nothing in itself; it changes the reader.
The reader’s deception is easy to describe. He sees a man who in a short time subdued many nations and concludes, without noticing it: the sword works. But “in a short time” is precisely the trap. The book shows him only the years of the climb, while the descent is given in two lines. The human eye measures by the moment; Providence measures by generations. Whoever judges the sword by its first gleam is like one who praises a cloud for being beautiful at dawn.
First, what Christ says, and what He does not say. “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). This is not advice about courage; it is a change of measure. The conqueror measures the world in bodies, in cities, in tribute. The Gospel measures it in souls. And so the mightiest emperor on earth can be altogether powerless, for all his power stops at the border of the body, while the martyr he cuts down passes through him without his knowing.
Then, the sword that returns. “All who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52) is said to Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, at the very moment his sword was defending the Blameless One. Christ does not say: the sword against the righteous is bad, and the sword of the righteous is good. He says more: the sword as the foundation of the world is bad, and He healed Malchus’s ear so that not even the evidence of it would remain. This is not the hatred of the righteous against the conqueror, but a kind of justice that has no need of us to carry itself out. It is not fate, it is not luck; it is order, the ordering of Providence.
And “even by the hand of the least,” says Cantemir, and here his words must be read with open eyes. Scripture is full of this kind of return. Abimelech, who killed his seventy brothers in order to reign, dies under a millstone thrown by a woman from a tower, and begs his armor-bearer to run him through so that it would not be said a woman killed him (Judges 9). Sennacherib, who filled Assyria with countless conquests and blasphemed the God of Israel, is killed in the house of his idol by his own sons (Isaiah 37:38). Goliath, with all his armor, falls to the stone of a shepherd still a boy (1 Samuel 17). And Herod Agrippa, who received the crowd’s worship as a god, is eaten by worms because he did not give glory to God (Acts 12:23). The great do not fall to their equals; they fall to the one they never took notice of.
Secular history tells the same story in its own tongue. Conquerors who gathered empires in a few years died young, in a foreign bed, or by a hand they had recently pardoned. I do not say this to rejoice over anyone’s fall, for resistance to violence is not learned from the joy of a vengeance. It is learned from compassion: every sword, before it kills another, has already killed something in the one who drew it.
Finally, the hardest nuance. If we drew from all this the conclusion that whoever does evil will be punished in a way our eyes can understand, we would pass from one deception to another. There are tyrants who die in their beds, and there are righteous men who end by the sword. Saint Paul reminds us that these things “happened to them as an example, and were written down for our instruction” (1 Corinthians 10:11). For instruction, then, not for prediction. History does not give us a law of retribution for us to wield, but a warning for our own soul: whoever relies on the sword puts his soul into the hand of whoever can take it. And the soul, not the body, is the one city that no one takes unless its owner opens the gate.
Wisdom, then, is not knowing who won. Wisdom is knowing what the winner lost.
Apophthegm
A brother was reading to an elder the history of an emperor who had subdued many peoples in a single year. “A great man, Father!” said the brother.
The elder asked, “And his anger, whose slave was it?”
“It doesn’t say,” answered the brother.
The elder said, “Then you have not read his history, brother. You have read only what he had. Tell me instead: your anger today, whose slave was it?”
And the brother fell silent, because he had just quarreled with the cook.
