He tears himself in his anger: shall the earth be forsaken for you? and shall the rock be removed out of its place?
All Commentaries on Job 18:4 Go To Job 18
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
4. Heretics esteem whether a strong feeling for the rule of right, or the spiritual grace of holy preaching, not as good weight of virtue, but as the madness of fury. By which same fury they believe that ‘the souls of the faithful are ruined,’ in that they imagine that the life of the Church is destroyed by the very same means whereby they see she is made to kindle against themselves. It goes on;
Shall the earth be forsaken for thee?
5. For they think that they themselves worship God every where, that they themselves have occupied the whole world. What is it then to say, Shall the earth be forsaken for thee? but what they often say to the faithful, viz. ‘that if this thing which you say be true, all the earth is forsaken by God, which we ourselves already occupy from the multitude of us.’ Now the holy Church universal proclaims that God cannot be truly worshipped saving within herself, asserting that all they that are without her shall never be saved. But conversely heretics, who are confident that it is possible for them to be saved even without her pale, maintain that the Divine aid is rendered to them in every place. Whence they say; Shall the earth be forsaken for thee? i.e. ‘is it so, that whosoever is out of thee cannot be saved?’ Whence it is added further;
And shall the rocks be moved out of their place?
6. Heretics call those persons ‘rocks’ who in their views by the sublimity of their thoughts stand out in the human race, which same they glory that they have for teachers. But when Holy Church addresses herself to the task of gathering together the different erring preachers within the bosom of the right faith, what else is this but that she ‘removes the rocks from their places,’ that having a right view of things, they may lie down in humility within her, who aforetime were standing stiff in their own wrong notions? But heretics altogether make against the doing of this, and withstand the ‘rocks being moved out of their places’ on account of her voice, because they are averse that they, who among themselves, being lifted up in their thoughts, were embued with false doctrine, by coming to her should think what is true in a humble spirit.
7. Now, it very often happens that heretics, when they see any persons within the bosom of Holy Church travailing whether with want or calamities, lift themselves up directly in the presumption of righteousness, and whatsoever they see to have happened of an adverse kind to the faithful, they suppose it is done for their iniquities, not knowing doubtless that the complexion of the present life does not in the least degree prove the worth of men’s conduct. For very often both good things befal the bad, and bad ones befal the good, on the very principle that real goods are reserved for the good, and real ills for the bad, in the season of the eternal recompensing. Thus Bildad bearing a figure of heretics, who lift themselves up on the grounds of this life’s good fortune, swells against the strokes of blessed Job, as if with their voice in opposition to the reproach of the righteous, and expressly he is arguing against the ungodly indeed, but how wickedly he speaks in such terms against a good man, he is not aware.
