Moralia in Job 1084

Verse 20. — Suddenly they shall die, and in the middle of the night the peoples shall be troubled, and shall pass on. 3. The death of all the wicked is sudden, because not foreseen. — However late the wicked are taken away from this life, they are taken away suddenly and unexpectedly, because they know not how to foresee their end by thinking of it. That is sudden to a man which he could not think of beforehand. Suddenly was that rich man taken away, who deserted the barns which he was preparing, and found the place of hell which he did not foresee. He was exercising his soul upon one thing through thought, but he sent it forth to another by sentence; one thing he contemplated while he lived, another thing he experienced while he died. For he left the temporal things he had long dealt with, and found the eternal things unexpected.

Whence to him, on account of this ignorance of his blindness, well is it said through the divine sentence: This night they require your soul of you (Luke 12:20). In the night indeed it is taken away, which is lost in the darkness of the heart. In the night it is taken away, which was unwilling to have the light of consideration, so that it might foresee what it could suffer. Whence well does the apostle Paul say to the disciples thinking of things to come: But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you like a thief. For you are all sons of light, and sons of day; we are not of the night nor of darkness (1 Thess. 5:4-5). For the day of departure overtakes like a thief in the night, when it casts out the souls of fools not foreseeing things to come. Whence here too it is aptly added:

And in the middle of the night the peoples shall be troubled, and shall pass on. In the middle of the night, troubled, they pass on, who, humbled by the obscurity of their negligence, are snatched away. Then they shall be bowed down by the sentence of the Judge, who now neglect to be bowed down by the humility of the heart. But the elect, lest they be bowed down unwillingly in death, bow themselves willingly in humility. Whence, concerning the offspring of persecutors converted to holy Church, it is said: The sons of those who humbled you shall come bowed down to you (Isa. 60:14). 4. The life of man after sin is a passing-through: it was otherwise before sin. — And well, concerning the dying peoples, he does not say:

They shall pass, but they shall pass on, because even by living temporally we daily tend toward our end, and we pass through the present life as though by treading a certain road. For this very thing, for those about to die to live, is as it were to go toward death. And however many days of life we accomplish, we approach by as many steps, as on a journey, to the appointed place. For the very increases are the decreases of times, because however great the spaces of our life shall have begun to be, they begin now to be so much the less. But the first man was so constituted, that while he remained, the times should depart, lest with the times he himself should pass away. For he stood while the moments ran down, because he by no means tended toward the term of life through the increments of days.

He stood so much the more robustly, as he more closely clung to the ever-standing One. But when the forbidden thing came to pass, presently, the Creator being offended, he began to go with time. The state of immortality being lost, the course of mortality swallowed him up (Gen. 3:4). And while from youth he was drawn to old age, from old age to death, by passing on he learned, by standing, what he had been. And because we are born from his stock, we retain the bitterness of the root as it were in the shoot. For because we draw our origin from him, we obtain his course by being born, so that by that very daily moment in which we live, we unceasingly pass away from life, and the space of living, from which it is believed we grow, from thence decreases.

Since, then, we tend daily toward the summit of dying through the increments of living, it is rightly said of the dying not that 'they shall pass over' but that 'they shall pass through'; for they pass even while they live, but they pass through when they die. There follows: