約伯倫理 第 37 章

When the following work was begun, on what occasion, at whose urging, and at the request of whom. 1. To the most reverend and most holy brother Leander, fellow bishop, Gregory, servant of the servants of God. Some time ago, most blessed brother, when I came to know you in the city of Constantinople — at the time when the replies of the Apostolic See kept me bound there, and an appointed legation from the Visigoths had brought you thither on matters of the faith — I laid open in your ears everything that displeased me about myself: how for a long time and far I had put off the grace of conversion, and how, even after I had been breathed upon by heavenly desire, I thought it better to remain covered in secular garb (Joan. Diac., bk. i, ch. 27).

For it was already being opened to me, out of love for eternity, what I should seek; but ingrained habit had bound me, so that I would not change my outward manner of life. And while my mind still compelled me to serve the present world, as it were, only in outward appearance, many things began to grow up against me out of the care of that same world, so that I was now held in it not by appearance but — what is graver — in mind. At length, anxiously fleeing all these things, I sought the harbor of the monastery, and leaving behind the things that are of the world — as I then vainly believed — I escaped naked from the shipwreck of this life.

For because a wave often dashes even from the bosom of the safest shore a ship carelessly moored, when the storm rises, suddenly, under the pretext of the ecclesiastical order, I found myself again upon the open sea of secular affairs; and the quiet of the monastery, which by having it I had not held firmly, I came to know only by losing it — how strictly it ought to have been held. For when the virtue of obedience was set against me for receiving the ministry of the sacred altar, this was undertaken under the guise of the Church, so that, if it might be done without penalty, it should again be turned aside by flight. And after this, to me unwilling and resisting, since the ministry of the altar was already heavy, the weight of pastoral care was also laid upon me.

This I now bear the more hardly, in that, feeling myself unequal to it, I find no breathing-space in any consolation of confidence. For because the times of the world are now troubled, as evils multiply and the end draws near, we ourselves, who are believed to serve the inner mysteries, are entangled in outward cares — just as at the very time when I approached the ministry of the altar, this was brought about concerning me, without my knowing it, that I should take up the burden of the sacred order in order that I might keep watch more freely in an earthly palace; where indeed many of my brethren from the monastery, bound to me by kindred charity, followed me.

This I perceive to have been done by divine dispensation, so that by their constant example I might be held fast, as by a cable of anchor, to the peaceful shore of prayer, while I was tossed by the ceaseless surge of secular affairs. For to their fellowship, as to the bosom of a most safe harbor, I fled from the eddies and billows of earthly business; and although that ministry, having drawn me out of the monastery, had by the sword of its preoccupation extinguished me from my former life of quiet, yet among them, through the converse of studious reading, the aspiration of daily compunction gave me life. Then it pleased those same brethren, you too urging it, as you yourself remember, to compel me by their insistent petition to expound the book of blessed Job;

and, according as truth should pour in strength, to open to them the mysteries of so great a depth. They added this also to me in the burden of their petition: that I should not only strike out the words of the history through the senses of allegory, but should straightway bend the senses of allegory to the exercise of morality; adding something yet heavier, that I should gird whatever things had been understood with testimonies; and should unravel the testimonies brought forward — if perhaps they seemed obscure — by the interposition of an added exposition.