Moralia in Job 775

(Verses 12-14) — Do you think that God is higher than heaven, and is exalted above the tops of the stars? And you say: What indeed does God know? and He judges as though through a mist. Clouds are His hiding-place, and He considers not our affairs, and He walks about the poles of heaven. 12. An excellent description of the divine immensity and providence. God so attends to all that He is present to each. — There are very many so dull that they know not how to fear anything except what they see bodily. Whence it comes about that they do not fear God, whom they cannot see.

But the heretics, because they judge themselves to be wise, utter words of derision against Catholics, and suspect that by them He is not feared whom they cannot bodily see — so that, as though through a torpor of sense, they reckon their own Author, because He is higher than heaven and exalted above the tops of the stars, to be unable to see from afar; and because between us and the heavenly seat the regions of the air lie interposed, they reckon that He, as though lurking in a cloud, judges through mist, and, intent on higher things, weighs the lowest less; and while by encircling He confines the poles of heaven, they reckon that He does not see the inner things. But who, even a fool, would suspect these things of God, who assuredly, since He is ever Almighty, so attends to all that He is present to each;

so is He present to each, that He is never absent to all at once? For even though He forsakes certain sinners, He is nevertheless present to those same ones by judgment, to whom He is seen to be absent by help. Thus, then, He so surrounds outward things that He fills the inner; so fills the inner that He surrounds the outward; so rules the highest that He forsakes not the lowest; so is present to the lowest that He withdraws not from the higher; so lies hidden in His own nature, that yet He is known in His working; so is known in His work, that yet He cannot be comprehended by the estimation of the knower; so is present, that He cannot be seen; so cannot be seen, that yet His very judgments testify to His presence;

so offers Himself to be understood by us, that yet He shrouds from us the very ray of His own understanding; and again, so represses us with the darkness of ignorance, that yet He glimmers into our mind with the rays of His brightness: so that the mind, both being lifted up, may see something, and, being dazzled back, may tremble; and because it cannot see Him as He is, may somewhat, by living, come to know Him. But the heretics do not judge the holy Church to know these things, because by foolish judgment they think themselves alone to be wise. Under whose figure it is still subjoined: