Moralia in Job 1204

VERSE 8. -- 'Because He shut in the sea with doors?' 43. The human heart is a boiling sea, which God alone is able to restrain. -- What is the sea but our heart, turbid with fury, bitter with strife, swollen with the elation of pride, dark with the fraud of malice? How greatly this sea rages, whoever discerns in himself the hidden temptations of his thoughts perceives. For behold, we now leave behind perverse things, we now cleave to right desires, we now cut away wicked works from without; yet secretly within we are wearied by that storm of the old life with which we came hither -- which, unless the barriers of immense fear, by regard of judgment and dread of eternal torment, restrained it, all the foundations of the work built up within us would utterly have fallen.

For if that which rages within through suggestion were to break forth without through deliberation, the fabric of our life would lie utterly overthrown. For, conceived in iniquity and brought forth in sin (Ps. 51:5), through the troubles of ingrafted corruption we bring hither the battle with ourselves, which we may conquer only with labour. Whence rightly it is said of this sea: 'When it broke forth as issuing from the womb.' For the womb of evil thought is youth. Of which the Lord says through Moses: 'For the sense and thought of man's heart are prone to evil from his youth' (Gen. 8:21). For the evil of corruption, which each one of us took from the birth of carnal desires, he exercises in the advance of age;

and unless the hand of divine dread restrained this, guilt would suddenly swallow up into the deep every good of created nature. Let no one therefore ascribe to himself the victory over his thoughts, since the Truth says: 'Who shut in the sea with doors, when it broke forth as issuing from the womb?' For unless the grace of God restrained the flowing of the heart from the very beginning of thought, the sea raging with the storms of temptation would beyond doubt have overwhelmed the land of the human mind, so that, drenched with salt waves, it would wither -- that is, delighting in the pernicious pleasures of the flesh, it would perish. God alone therefore shuts in the sea with doors, who casts the barriers of inspired dread against the depraved motions of the heart.

But because we are forbidden to pursue the things we see, since we are held back from the delight of bodily things, it is fitting also to raise our eyes by merit to invisible things, and to behold that very thing which we are commanded to pursue. But what do we do? Those things do not yet lie open to weak gazes. Behold, we are called to their love, yet we are restrained from their vision, because even if at times we glimpse something stealthily and slightly, we are still dimmed by too uncertain a sight. Whence it is fitly subjoined: VERSE 9. -- 'When I made a cloud the garment thereof, and wrapped it as with swaddling-clothes in mist.' 44. This sea is wrapped in darkness and mist.

-- This tumultuous sea, that is, our heart fluctuating with thoughts, is clothed with a cloud, because, lest it purely behold the inward quiet, it is darkened by the confusion of its own unrest. This sea is wrapped in mist as in the swaddling-clothes of infancy, because from contemplating sublime things it is bound, by senses still tender, by the weakness of its own condition. Let us behold Paul, wrapped in a certain mist as in the swaddling-clothes of infancy, when he says: 'We see now through a glass in a dark manner, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I am known' (1 Cor. 13:12). Who, if he did not perceive himself an infant for grasping heavenly things, would in no way have prefixed the comparison of his own age to these, saying:

'When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.' We ascend then to the strength of youth, when we behold with sure sense that life to which we tend; but now, because the keenness of our intention is dulled by its own weakness from the inward light, our mind is held bound in the swaddling-clothes of infancy. Where it is fitly subjoined: