Moralia in Job 1224

35. No man knows his own beginning or end. — As if He openly said: What wonder if thou understandest not thine end, thou who comprehendest not even thy beginning? And thou who art ignorant by what beginning thou hast come hither, what wonder if thou knowest not by what end thou shalt be taken away? If therefore it was mine to bring thee forth through thy beginning from the hidden things to the manifest, it shall be mine also to recall thee from the manifest to the hidden. Why dost thou complain of anything concerning the dispensation of thy life, thou who, not knowing thyself, art held in the hand of the Artificer? Thou oughtest therefore to be exalted so much the less in what thou doest, the more that, shut within the bosom of eternity, thou knowest neither by what order thou hast come hither, nor when or how thou shalt be led forth hence. 36. From this law Christ is exempted. — These things, however, can also be understood otherwise:

Didst thou know then that thou wast to be born, and hadst thou known the number of thy days? Understand: as I, who knew that I was to be born, I who even before my human birth lived always substantially in the divinity. For men then begin to be, when they are born in the womb of their mothers. For that very conception is called a nativity, according to that which is written: That which is born in her is of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:20). And for this reason they know not that they are to be born, because they do not exist before they are created. But God, who without beginning has always existed, foreknew concerning Himself this which took its beginning in the womb of the Virgin; and because He foreknew, He disposed; because He disposed, He assuredly bore nothing in human form apart from His own will.

Let man therefore be convicted, that he complains of his own scourges, he who could not foreknow his own origin, if even He who by foreknowing His own origin disposed it, prepared Himself for scourges among men. There follows: