Moralia in Job 596

Verse 35.—He conceived sorrow, and brought forth iniquity, and his womb prepares deceits. 64. He who plots perverse things conceives sorrow, being about to bring forth iniquity.—He conceives sorrow, indeed, when he plots perverse things. He brings forth iniquity when he begins to accomplish what he had plotted. By envying he conceives sorrow, by disparaging he brings forth iniquity. Grave indeed is the iniquity when he who is perverse contrives to show others perverse, that thereby he himself may appear, as it were, holy, in that he has taught that others are not holy. But it must be known that in sacred discourse by the name of belly or womb the mind is wont to be understood. For this is why it is said through Solomon: The lamp of the Lord is the breath of man, which searches out all the secrets of the belly (Prov.

xx, 27). For the light of grace, which comes from above, affords to man a breath unto life. Which light is said to search out all the secrets of the belly, because it penetrates the hidden things of the mind, so that those things which lay hidden from the soul concerning itself, it brings back by weeping before its eyes. Hence Jeremiah says: My belly, my belly, I am pained (Jer. iv, 19). Who, that he might show what he had called his belly, added: The senses of my heart are troubled. By the name of womb, therefore, the mind is rightly understood, because just as offspring is conceived in the womb, so thought is generated in the mind; and just as foods are contained in the belly, so thoughts are contained in the mind.

The womb of the hypocrite, therefore, prepares deceits, because he ever conceives the greater malice against his neighbours in his mind, the more he seeks to be seen alone above all as more innocent. These things Eliphaz set forth because he supposed blessed Job to have been smitten with so great a stroke on account of hypocrisy. But his words, although they suit many, are foreign to him alone for whom alone they were spoken, because the holy man had no duplicity in his acts, whom the Truth praised for the simplicity of his heart under a veiled form.