約伯倫理 第 366 章

Same place: 'I will converse with the bitterness of my soul' (Job 7:11). 38. A compunct mind uncovers within itself much that is to be bewailed. It recalls with how many gifts of God it has been ungrateful. — For being afflicted by dread of the divine judgment, while we bewail certain ill-done deeds, we are, by the very force of our bitterness, roused the more vigilantly to examine ourselves, and we find within us other things also which we may bewail the more. For often what lay hidden from us while we were torpid becomes more subtly known to us while we weep; and the afflicted mind more surely finds the evil it had done and did not know, and its own strife more truly reveals to it how far it has strayed from the peace of truth, because the guilt of which, secure, it took no thought, this, when stirred, it detects within itself.

For the growing bitterness of penitence importunately forces upon the shamefaced heart the unlawful things it has committed, shows the strict Judge over against these, strikes it with the threats of punishments, wounds the mind with dread, confounds it with shame, rebukes its unlawful motions, disturbs the quiet of its noxious security;

it enumerates what good things the Creator has bestowed upon it, and what evil things it has itself returned for his goods: that it was wondrously created by him, that it was gratuitously nourished, that it was enriched in its condition with the substance of reason, that it was called by the grace of the Creator, that even when called it was itself unwilling to follow, that the mercy of Him who called did not despise it though deaf and resisting, that it was illumined by gifts, that of its own accord it was blinded by depraved acts even after the gifts, that it was purged from the errors of its blindness by the scourges of fatherly solicitude, that from the pains of the scourges it was led back to the joys of salvation by the medicine of mercy; that, though subject to certain faults — even if not grave ones — it does not cease to sin even amid the scourges;

that the grace from above did not forsake its sinner even when despised. Since, therefore, it rebukes the afflicted mind with such severity, now by the recounting of God's gifts, now by the reproaches of its own conduct, the bitterness of the soul has, in the heart of the righteous, its own tongue, which speaks to them the more subtly, in the measure that it is heard the more inwardly. Whence it is by no means said, 'I will talk in the bitterness of my soul,' but, 'I will converse with the bitterness of my soul,' because the force of grief, which, reckoning up sins one by one, rouses the torpid soul to laments, forms, as it were, toward it the words of conversation, in which, being corrected, it may find itself, and may rise up now the more anxious for its own keeping.

Let the righteous man therefore say from his own voice, and, holding the type of holy Church, let him say from ours: 'I will converse with the bitterness of my soul.' As if he more plainly intimated, saying: Within, against myself, I hold converse with the grief of my heart, and without, I hide myself from the stroke of the Judge. But the mind, pressed by the pains of penitence, is constrained within itself, and is separated by strong thought from all the delights of the flesh; it desires to advance to the highest things, and yet still feels the contradiction of the corruption of the body. Whence it is fittingly subjoined at once: