約伯倫理 第 41 章

Gregory, laboring under sickness, completed the following work. He neglected the art of speaking. What versions of Scripture he uses. — Which exposition, to be examined by your Beatitude, I have sent — not because I ought to have done so as though it were worthy, but because I remember that I promised it at your request. In it, whatever your Holiness shall find lukewarm and uncultivated, let him pardon me the more swiftly, in proportion as he is not ignorant that I say this while sick. For while the body is worn down by trouble, with the mind affected, even the pursuits of speaking languish. For many courses of years are now rolling by in which I am tortured by frequent pains of the viscera, at every hour and moment growing weary with the strength of my stomach broken, panting with slow but nevertheless continual fevers.

And amid these things, while I anxiously weigh that, as Scripture testifies, Every son who is received by God is scourged (Heb. xii, 6), the more harshly I am pressed down by present evils, the more surely do I breathe again in the confident anticipation of things eternal. And perhaps this was the counsel of divine providence, that I, stricken, should expound the stricken Job, and through scourges should better feel the mind of one scourged. Yet nevertheless, to those who consider rightly it is clear that with no small adversity a bodily trouble sets itself against the pursuits of my labor in this, that when the strength of the flesh scarcely suffices to furnish the ministry of speech, the mind cannot worthily intimate what it feels. For what is the office of the body but the instrument of the heart?

And however skilled the craftsman of singing may be, he cannot fulfill his art unless the external instruments accord with him for it: for indeed a shaken instrument does not render back in its proper sound the song which the trained hand commands; nor does the breath express the art, if the pipe, split with cracks, shrills. How much more grievously, then, is the quality of my exposition pressed down, in which a fracture of the instrument so scatters the grace of speaking that no art of skill may compose it? But I beg that, running through the words of this work, you seek not in them a foliage of words, because through the sacred eloquence the levity of unfruitful loquacity is diligently restrained by its expounders, since it is forbidden that a grove be planted in the temple of God (Deut. xvi, 21).

And we all, beyond doubt, know that as often as the stalks of an over-luxuriant crop thrive in leaves, the grains swell with a lesser fullness of ears. Whence also I have disdained to observe the very art of speaking which the teachings of external discipline instill. For, as the tenor of this very letter also announces, I do not flee the collision of metacism, I do not avoid the confusion of barbarism, I contemn to observe the positions and motions and the cases of prepositions, because I deem it exceedingly unworthy to restrain the words of the heavenly oracle under the rules of Donatus. Nor indeed have these things been observed by any of the interpreters in the authority of Sacred Scripture.

And since indeed our exposition takes its rise from it, it is assuredly fitting that, like an offspring brought forth, it should imitate the appearance of its own mother. Now I discourse from the new translation; but when the cause of proof requires it, I take up testimonies now from the new, now from the old; so that, because the Apostolic See, over which by God's authority I preside, uses both, the labor of my study also may be supported from both. In which he briefly touches on those things that are to be expounded throughout the whole work.