My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken, and become loathsome.
Read Chapter 7
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
And yet if we take Job’s words as the voice of the holy church universal, doubtless we find it at one time sunk to the earth by the “corruption” of the flesh, at another time by “the defilement of dust.” For [the church] has many within it who, while devoted to the love of the flesh, become corrupt with the putrefaction of excess. In addition, there are some people who certainly keep from the gratification of the flesh, yet grovel with all their heart in earthly practices. So let holy church speak through the words of one of its members, let it express what it endures from either sort of person. “My flesh is clothed with corruption and the defilement of dust.” It is as if [the church] said in plain words, “There are many who are members of me in faith, yet these are not sound or pure members in practice. For they either are mastered by foul desires and run to and fro in corruption’s rottenness, or, being devoted to earthly practices, they are soiled with dust. For in those whom I have ...
19. But we shall make out these words more exactly and more applicably, if we go back to the order of the foregoing interpretation. For by sleep the torpor of inaction, and by rising the exercising of action, is represented. By the name of the evening moreover, because it accords with sleep, we have set forth again the desire of inaction. But Holy Church, as long as she is leading a life of corruption, never ceases to bewail the inconveniences of her condition of mutability. For man was created for this end, that, with mind erect, he might mount to the citadel of contemplation, and that no touch of corruption should cause him to swerve from the love of his Maker; but herein, that he moved the foot of his will to transgression, turning it away from the innate stedfastness of his standing, he immediately fell away from the love of his Creator into himself. Yet in forsaking the love of God, that true stronghold of his standing, he could not stand fast in himself either; in that by t...
