Moralia in Job 1155

Same verse. — 'And commands it to come again.' 26. The light of truth, which is hidden from proud and preoccupied minds, is revealed to the afflicted and humbled. — Because the light of truth, which is hidden from proud and preoccupied minds, is revealed to the afflicted and humbled. For the law comes when the afflicted mind recognizes those very shadows of tribulations which it endures from perishing things, because unless it perceived something of the interior light, it would not even see this, that it had lost the light. Which can be understood also specially of the Jews, who therefore dared to contradict our Redeemer coming in the flesh, because within themselves they proved to be monstrous.

But from these monstrous ones the light has been hidden away, because the proud, while they persecute the light of truth, have lost it. But because at the end of the world they are to be received into the faith, it is rightly subjoined: 'And commands it to come again.' Whence also it is said through Isaiah: 'If the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved' (Isaiah 10:22). For then the light returns to them, when they themselves return to confessing the power of our Redeemer. 27. God, as he wills, either hides or reveals the light. — But if we take 'in hands,' by no means as one noun through the dative case, but as two parts of speech, it can be understood that the light is hidden in the hands, when before the upright judge each of the wicked is blinded in his own works.

Yet it is commanded to come again, because when sinners have recognized that they cannot be saved by their own strength, they receive the light of grace, and are illumined by the rays of inmost protection, so that afterward they may love the heavenly homeland with greater ardor than that with which they formerly burned in earthly delight. But when we speak of the heavenly homeland—in which we hear that hosts of angels endowed with wondrous brightness are present, over which the Creator of all things presides, whom, rejecting all things, he fills with his own vision, whose true inheritance is light and of whose light there is no failing—we lead back our mind to ourselves, and consider that we bear earthly members, and weigh that, born

in darkness and alien from the rays of the inmost light, we have lived so much the more wickedly, in that, given over to bodily things, we dwelt farther from spiritual things. Moved by this consideration, the heart, ill-conscious of itself, trembles, and despairs that it could become a citizen of that homeland of which it hears. Whence here too it is fittingly subjoined, whereby the fearful mind may be brought back to confidence. For concerning this light there is presently added: