Moralia in Job 346

1. Job's humility and love toward his persecutors. By which the Church's charity toward heretics is foreshadowed. In the preceding book we have already treated how blessed Job makes known to us the force of his humility, saying: Chapter 6, verse 27.— You rush upon the orphan, and you strive to overthrow your friend. For he intimates how great a weakness he perceives himself to be under, in that he calls himself an orphan; but because even wounded charity knows not how to recede from love, he both complains that he is wished to be overthrown, and yet testifies that he is a friend.

Whose words, as we have already often said, so specially suit himself that yet through them, out of the prophetic spirit, the mind of the faithful people is also expressed, out of the voice of the universal Church, which, tolerating the opposition of heretics, both perceives itself weak through humility and yet does not recede from the greatness of love to be preserved. For the people of holy Church, because it is the son of a dead father, is not incongruously called an orphan; whose life, now risen, it indeed follows through faith, but does not yet contemplate face to face. But the heretics rush upon the orphan when they afflict the humility of the faithful people with importunate and false allegations.

And yet he is a friend whom they endeavour to overturn, because the faithful people of God does not cease, by loving, to call to the truth even those very ones whom it tolerates as persecutors. But amid these things it must be known that holy men neither fear through weakness to sustain false things, nor, when wounded, ever keep silent about the truth. Whence it is subjoined: