Moralia in Job 674

Verse 5. — 'But you exalt yourselves against me.' 33. Order demands that we first be raised against ourselves, and afterwards against the wicked. The wicked are ignorant of this method of correction. — But perhaps we shall better weigh these words if we show how they especially fit the very friends of blessed Job. For they, seeing the just man smitten, ought to have returned to their own inmost selves, and by no means to have pressed blessed Job with words of rebuke, but to have wept for themselves; because, if he who so served was thus smitten, with what vengeance did they deserve to be stricken who had not so served? To whom it is well said: 'But you exalt yourselves against me.' As if it were more plainly said to them: You who ought to have been raised against your own selves out of my smiting.

For this is the order of being raised up in good: that we be first raised against ourselves, and afterwards against the wicked. For he who is raised against the good is puffed up by pride. But we are raised against our own selves when, recognizing our own evils, we strike ourselves with the strict vengeance of penitence, when we by no means spare ourselves in our sins, and are bent by no flatteries of thoughts toward ourselves. And if we first strictly pursue our own evils within us, it is also just that we be usefully raised even against others' evils, and that, by reproving them, we overcome even in others those things which we punish in ourselves. 34. But the wicked know not this uprising, because they abandon themselves and assail the good.

They bend themselves within their own conscience by the softness of soothing flattery, and are raised up against the life of the good with the severity of harshness. Whence to the friends of blessed Job, swelling up at his scourge, it is now rightly said: 'But you exalt yourselves against me'; that is, you leave yourselves unreproved and rebuke me with strict sentences. For he who does not first judge himself, knows not what he should judge right in another. And even if perhaps he knows by hearing what he ought to judge right, yet he is unable rightly to judge another's merits, to whom the conscience of his own innocence furnishes no rule of judgment. Hence it is that to certain ones lying in wait and leading forth an adulteress to be punished, it is said (John viii, 7):

'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.' For they were going to punish another's sins, and had left their own. They are therefore recalled within to their conscience, that they may first correct their own things, and then reprehend another's. Hence it is that, when the tribe of Benjamin had been overwhelmed in a crime of the flesh, all Israel, gathered together, wished to avenge the iniquity, but nevertheless once and again was itself laid low in the contest of battle. But when the Lord had been consulted whether they ought to go to avenge it, it was commanded. And they who advanced according to the command of the divine voice fell once and a second time, and then at last, smiting the sinful tribe severely, almost utterly destroyed it.

What is it that Israel is inflamed to the avenging of the crime, and yet is first itself laid low, but that those must first be purged through whom the faults of others are smitten, so that they may come already clean by the vengeance, who hasten to correct the vices of others? Whence it is necessary that, when the vengeance of the divine scrutiny ceases against us, our own conscience should itself reprehend itself, and should raise itself against its very self to the lamentations of penitence; and, not lifted up against the good and humble to itself, but rigid against itself, be indeed submissive to all the good. To the proud, therefore, who reprove, it is now rightly said: 'But you exalt yourselves against me, and reprove me with my reproaches.' All the proud account temporal evils to be a grievous reproach;

and they believe each one to be despised by God in proportion as they behold him afflicted by the scourge of smiting. For they seek nothing in conduct, nothing in deeds; but whomsoever they see smitten in this life, they judge to be already condemned by the divine judgment. Whence it is now well said in the voice of blessed Job: