Moralia in Job 1090

Verse 25. — For He knows their works, and therefore He shall bring on the night, and they shall be crushed. God sometimes punishes the sinner with blinding. — It is above all to be known that every wicked man is crushed in the night in two ways: either when he is smitten with the tribulation of an outward penalty, or when he is inwardly blinded by a hidden sentence. He falls in the night, when through the last judgement he loses the light of life forever. Whence it is written: Bind his hands and feet, and cast him into the outer darkness (Matt. 22:13). For then he is cast, constrained, into the outer darkness, because now he is voluntarily blinded in his inward parts.

Again, the wicked man is crushed in the night when, confounded by the confusion of his preceding sins, he does not find the light of truth, and does not recognize what he ought thenceforth to do. For every sin which, however, is not sooner wiped away by repentance, is either a sin and the cause of sin, or a sin and the punishment of sin. For a sin which repentance does not wash away soon draws, by its very weight, to another. Whence it comes about that it is not only a sin, but a sin and the cause of sin. For from that fault the following guilt arises, from which the blinded mind is led to be more grievously bound from on high.

But a sin which arises from a sin is not now merely a sin, but a sin and the punishment of sin, because by a just judgement almighty God darkens the heart of the sinner, so that by the desert of the preceding sin he falls also into others. For him whom He was unwilling to deliver, He smote by deserting. Not without cause, then, is that called the punishment of sin, which, by a blindness justly imposed from above, is perpetrated out of vengeance for the preceding sin. And this indeed is done by a disposition ordained from above, but confounded below by iniquity, so that both the preceding fault is the cause of the following, and again the following fault is the punishment of the preceding. This Paul had well beheld in the unbelieving and slippery as it were a certain seed of error, when he said:

Who, when they had known God, did not glorify Him as God, nor gave thanks; but became vain in their thoughts (Rom. 1:21). But what sprang up from the seed of this error he at once appends, saying: Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness, that they might afflict their own bodies with contumelies among themselves (Rom. 1:24). For because, knowing God, they committed the sin of pride by understanding, they are blinded also so that they do not understand what they commit. And they who are unwilling to follow their own understanding in the sin and cause of sin, lose also the very light of understanding in the sin and punishment of sin.

By the desert, then, of the former sin, the pit of the following sins is covered over, so that he who knowingly perpetrates evil thenceforth justly falls also into others unknowingly. Faults are punished with faults, that from the increase of vices the torments may be augmented. — For this is done, that faults may be smitten with faults, so that the very increases of vices become the torments of the sinners. For because almighty God grants time for repentance, which nevertheless human malice twists to the use of its own iniquity, doubtless by the just judgement of God the fault is permitted to be increased, that it may sometime be heaped up for smiting more deeply. For hence again the Apostle Paul says of certain men: That they may fill up their sins always (1 Thess. 2:16). Hence it is said by the voice of the angel to John:

Let him that hurts, hurt still; and he that is in filth, let him be filthy still (Rev. 22:11). Hence David says: Add iniquity upon their iniquity, that they enter not into thy justice (Ps. 68:28). Hence again it is said of the Lord by the same Psalmist: He made a way for the path of His anger by sendings through evil angels (Ps. 77:49). For the Lord justly permits a heart weighed down by former merits to be deceived also by the subsequent persuasions of the malignant spirits, so that, when it is worthily drawn into fault, its guilt is heaped up into punishment. Whence the Lord is said to have made a way for His anger out of a path. For a way is broader than a path.

But to make a way out of the path of His anger is, by strict judgement, to widen the causes of anger, so that those who, being enlightened, would not act rightly, being justly blinded may act so still, whereby they may deserve to be punished more. Hence it is said through Moses: The sins of the Amorites are not yet complete (Gen. 15:16). Hence through the same Moses the Lord says: For their vine is of the vine of Sodom, and of the suburbs of Gomorrah; their grape is a grape of gall, and their cluster is a cluster of bitterness. Their wine is the venom of dragons, and the incurable venom of asps. Are not these things laid up in store with me, and sealed up in my treasures? In the day of vengeance I will repay them (Deut. 32:32–35). How many of their evils he recounted, and yet at once he adds:

In the time when their foot shall slip (Deut. 32:35). Behold, their most atrocious crimes are described, and yet unto the day of vengeance a still following slip is looked for, whereby their faults may be heaped up. They already have that for which we deserve to be smitten; yet the sin is still suffered to grow, so that a more atrocious punishment may torment the sinners. Already the sin and cause of sin deserves punishment; but it is awaited still, that the increase of punishment may substitute the sin and punishment of sin. The same sin is sometimes both punishment and cause of sin. God blinds by not delivering from blindness. — But very often one and the same sin is a sin and both the punishment and the cause of sin. This we shall show better if we bring the very facts into the open.

For the unbridled gluttony of the belly goads the fullness of the flesh into the heat of lust. But lust, once committed, is often covered over either by perjury or by murder, lest it be punished by the vengeance of human laws. Let us therefore set before our eyes that a certain man loosed the reins of voracity for himself; overcome by that voracity he committed the crime of adultery; but, caught in the adultery, in order not to be dragged to judgement, he secretly killed the adulteress's husband. This adultery, then, set between voracity and murder, born of the one and begetting the other, is a sin and both punishment and cause of sin. It is indeed a sin in itself; but it is the punishment of sin, because it increased the fault of voracity;

but it is the cause of sin, because it also begot the following murder. One and the same sin, therefore, is both the punishment of the preceding and the cause of the following fault, because both, while it aggravates the past, it condemns, and it sows the following things that are to be condemned. Therefore, because by the preceding sins the eye of the heart is blinded, that very blindness which confounds the sinner's mind by the condemnation of the foregoing fault is rightly called night, because through it the light of truth is hidden from the eyes of the offender. Fittingly, then, it is said:

For He knows their works, and therefore He shall bring on the night, and they shall be crushed; because, as has often been said, the preceding evils bring it about that they are enwrapped again in following darkness for sinning, so that they can now no longer see the light of justice, which even when they could, they were unwilling to see. But the Lord is said to bring on the night, not that He Himself brings in darkness, but that He does not mercifully illumine the darkened hearts of sinners, so that this very thing—to have blinded them in the night—is to have been unwilling to deliver them from the darkness of blindness. There follows: