Moralia in Job 410

Verse 11. If he come to me, I shall not see him; and if he depart, I shall not understand. 20. Man is so blind that he often deems the gift of grace to be wrath, and the reverse. For the human race, shut out from inward joys through the demand of its fault, has lost the eyes of the mind, and knows not by what steps of its own deserts it advances. For often that is a gift of grace which one reckons wrath, and often it is the wrath of divine severity which one deems to be grace. For very often it esteems the gifts of virtues to be grace, and yet, lifted up by those very gifts, it falls. Very often it dreads the adversities of temptations as though they were wrath, and yet, pressed by those very temptations, it rises up more watchful for the guarding of the virtues.

For who would not reckon himself to draw near to God when he perceives himself to grow by heavenly gifts—when he receives either the gift of prophecy, or the office of teaching, or gains strength to exercise the grace of healing? And yet often the mind, while it is dissolved by security in its own virtue, is pierced, through the ambush of the adversary, by the dart of unforeseen fault; and thence it becomes far from God for eternity, whence it drew near to him for a season without the guard of caution. And who would not now reckon himself forsaken by divine grace when, after the proof of purity, he sees himself assailed by the temptations of the flesh, base things heaped upon his mind, and before the eyes of his thought certain wicked and unclean things stirring?

And yet when these things weary but do not overcome, they by no means slay through pollution, but preserve through humility; so that the mind, discovering itself weak in temptation, may betake itself wholly to the help of the Godhead, and utterly lose confidence in itself; and thus it comes to pass that it cleaves the more loftily to God from that very point whence it sighed that it had fallen the more deeply from God. The approach, therefore, and the withdrawal of God from our mind is by no means known, so long as the end of alternating things is unknown; for concerning temptation it is uncertain whether it prove or destroy, and concerning gifts it is by no means discerned whether they here reward the forsaken, or nourish them on the way, that they may lead them through to the fatherland.

Let man, therefore, once expelled from inward joys, behold the gates of the spiritual secret closed against him, and, cast forth outside unto himself, let him groan in the flesh, and, considering the losses of his blindness, let him say: If he come to me, I shall not see him; and if he depart, I shall not understand. As if he openly lamented, saying: Since once of my own will I lost my eyes, because I suffer the blindness of a night I sought for myself, I now recognize neither the rising nor the setting of the sun. And yet man, who is oppressed by the penalty of infirmity and weighed down by the darkness of his blindness, hastens to the judgment of the supernal light, that he may render the account of his own deeds. Whence also presently it is subjoined: