Moralia in Job 328

Verse 11. For what is my strength, that I should endure? or what is my end, that I should act patiently? 24. What is the strength of the righteous, what that of the reprobate. — It must be known that the strength of the righteous is one thing, and the strength of the reprobate another. The strength of the righteous, indeed, is to conquer the flesh, to go against one's own wills, to extinguish the delight of the present life, to love the rough things of this world for eternal rewards, to despise the blandishments of prosperity, to overcome in the heart the fear of adversity.

But the strength of the reprobate is to love transitory things without ceasing, to endure insensibly against the scourges of the Creator, not to rest from the love of temporal things even in adversity, to arrive at vain glory even to the detriment of life, to seek out increases of malice, to assail the life of the good not only with words and manners but even with swords, to place hope in themselves, to perpetrate iniquity daily without any failing of desire. Hence it is that through the Psalmist it is said to the elect: Act manfully, and let your heart be strengthened, all you who hope in the Lord (Ps. xxx, 25). Hence through the prophet it is said to the reprobate:

Woe to you who are mighty to drink wine, and strong men to mingle drunkenness (Isa. v, 22). Hence through Solomon it is said that all the holy contemplate the inward rest without any weakening of desire: Behold the bed of Solomon, sixty valiant men surround it, of the most valiant of Israel (Cant. iii, 7). Hence the Psalmist, intimating in the voice of the Redeemer against the reprobate placed in the Passion, says: Behold, they have seized my soul, the strong have rushed in upon me (Ps. lviii, 4). How well Isaiah embraced both kinds of strength, saying: They that trust in the Lord shall change their strength (Isa. xl, 31).

For because he said not that they shall take, but that they shall change, he made plainly known that the one which is laid aside is another, and the one which is begun is another. 25. In the things wherein the reprobate is strong, the righteous is sluggish. Are not the reprobate also strong, who for the concupiscence of the present life run with so many labors, boldly cast themselves into dangers, willingly bear insults for gains, recoil, overcome by no opposition, from the lust of their appetite, harden under blows, and endure the evils of the world for the world's sake, and, seeking as it were its joys, lose them, yet are not wearied in losing them? Whence it is well said in the voice of the human race through Jeremiah: He has made me drunk with wormwood (Lam. iii, 15).

For a drunken man does not know what he suffers. He therefore is drunk with wormwood who, for love of the present world, being alienated from the sense of reason, while he reckons light whatever he endures for the world, is ignorant of the bitterness of the labor which he bears, because he is doubtless led delightfully to all those things in which he is penally wearied. But on the contrary the righteous man studies to be weak for enduring the dangers of the world for the world's sake; he beholds his end, he attends to how transitory the present life is, and refuses to suffer outward labors for it, whose delight he has inwardly conquered. Blessed Job therefore, pressed by the adversities of the present life, let him say out of his own, let him say out of the voice of all the righteous:

For what is my strength, that I should endure? or what is my end, that I should act patiently? As if he plainly intimated, saying: I cannot bear the evils of the world for the world's sake, because I am no longer strong in the desire of it. For while I behold the end of the present life, why should I suffer its weight, whose appetite I trample underfoot? And because all the unrighteous, as we have said, endure its labors the more strongly, the more greedily they are fed by its delight, rightly he presently adds that same strength of the reprobate, saying: