^17:1 My spirit will be weakened, my days will be shortened, and only the tomb remains for me.
^17:2 I have not sinned, and my eye lingers in bitternesses.
^17:3 Deliver me and place me beside you, and let the hand of anyone fight against me.
^17:4 You have made their heart far from instruction; therefore they will not be exalted.
^17:5 He promises prey to his companions, and the eyes of his sons will fail.
^17:6 He has set me as a proverb of the crowd and as his example before them.
^17:7 My eye has grown dim through indignation, and my members have been reduced as though to nothing.
^17:8 The just will be astonished over this, and the innocent will be stirred up against the hypocrite.
^17:9 And the just will hold to his way, and with clean hands he will add strength.

268. My spirit will be weakened, etc. Job had shown above the multiplicity of his affliction, the humility of his mind, his innocence, and the brevity of a life that does not return, by which the verbosity of his friends was refuted; and therefore in this chapter he intends to make manifest the things set forth and finally to conclude their ignorance.

First, however, he begins to make manifest what he had said about the course of human life, and he sets forth first the cause of the brevity of life, when he says: My spirit will be weakened. For the life of the body is through the vital spirits, which are diffused from the heart to all the members, and as long as they endure in the body, the body lives; but when the power of natural heat begins to be weakened in the heart, spirits of this kind are diminished, and he designates this diminution and weakening by the weakening of the spirit. And he adds the effect of this cause, saying: my days will be shortened; for the weakness of the vital spirit shortens the days of life. And lest someone believe that the weakened spirit was to be strengthened again according to the form of this mortal life, to exclude this he adds: and only the tomb remains for me, as if to say: when the brief days of this life are ended, nothing of the present life remains for me except the tomb and those things that belong to the tomb.

269. Then he shows in another way that their consolation is vain: for they consoled him by saying that adversities of this kind had come upon him because of sins, and that, if he repented of them, he would return to prosperity. But excluding this, he says: I have not sinned, because, namely, he did not have a remorseful conscience concerning some grave sin on account of which he had incurred such great adversities; hence below in 27:6 he also says: For my heart does not reproach me in all my life. And therefore this is not contrary to what is said in 1 John 1:8: If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves; and by this he expresses what he had said above concerning his innocence: These things I have suffered without iniquity of my hand. But he adds: and my eye lingers in bitternesses. Now he says bitternesses in the plural because of the many adversities that he enumerated above; and he says lingers because, although amid bitternesses he had humbled himself by sewing sackcloth over his skin, nevertheless the bitternesses still persist;

but he attributes the bitternesses to the eye because of weeping, concerning which he had said above: My face has swollen from weeping, and again: my eye drips toward God, because his eye wept amid bitternesses in such a way that it tended only toward divine help; and therefore here there is added: Deliver me. For he understood that he could be delivered by him alone who had shut him up with the iniquitous one. But he was not asking to be delivered from adversity in the manner of those who after adversity attain earthly prosperity, but he asks to be brought to spiritual height, whence he adds: and place me beside you. For since God is the very essence of goodness, it is necessary that one who is placed beside God be delivered from evil. Now man is placed beside God insofar as he approaches him in mind through knowledge and love; but this happens imperfectly in the state of the way, in which man suffers attacks, and because he is placed beside God, he is not overcome by them. But perfectly man is placed beside God in mind in the state of ultimate happiness, in which he can no longer suffer attacks, and he shows that he desires this, saying: and let the hand of anyone fight against me, because, namely, however much anyone may wish to attack me, if I have been perfectly placed beside you, no one’s attack will trouble me. This, therefore, is what Job had as consolation amid bitternesses, hoping that he would be placed beside God, where he could not fear attacks.

270. But the verbose friends of Job did not understand this spiritual consolation of his, and therefore he adds: You have made their heart far from instruction, namely, from your spiritual instruction, by which you teach us to hope for spiritual goods while temporal things are despised; and because they place their hope only in temporal and lowest things, they cannot arrive at spiritual height so as to be placed beside God, and this is what he adds: therefore they will not be exalted. And from the fact that they have been made far from spiritual instruction, it follows that Eliphaz promised Job only temporal things as consolation, and this is what he adds: He promises prey to his companions, that is, the attainment of temporal things, which cannot come to one unless another loses them, whence the acquisition of temporal things is likened to plunder. But it is not universally true that after repentance men recover temporal prosperity, because not even the good always flourish in temporal prosperity, whence he adds: and the eyes of his sons will fail. He calls his sons those who, believing his promise, hope for temporal things from the good works they do; but when they do not attain them, their eyes fail, as though falling away from their hope. And just as Eliphaz promised temporal things to those acting well, so also he asserted that all temporal adversities come because of the sins of the one who suffers them; and because Job had suffered many adversities, he set him as an example among the crowd, and this is what he adds: He has set me as a proverb of the crowd and as his example before them, because, namely, to assert his judgment about the cause of adversities he set Job as an example, as if he had been punished for sin.

271. Now it belongs to the zeal of the just that, when they see the rectitude of divine judgments perverted by false doctrine, they become indignant,

and therefore Job consequently shows the greatness of his zeal in two ways:

first indeed through a certain disturbance of mind—for anger through vice blinds the eye, but anger through zeal disturbs the eye, as Gregory says—and therefore he adds: My eye has grown dim through indignation, namely, the eye of reason, whose keenness has been disturbed by the anger of zeal;

second, through the fact that anger through zeal also causes in the body a certain commotion from sorrow—whence it is said in 1 Maccabees 2:24 that Mattathias, seeing a Jew sacrificing to idols, grieved, and his reins trembled—and therefore here there is added: and my members have been reduced as though to nothing, insofar as, through sorrow, the body of man seems to waste away. But someone could believe that this dimming of the eye was against justice and that this indignation was against innocence,

and therefore, to exclude this, he adds: The just will be astonished over this, as if to say: it belongs even to the just, when they see the doctrine of the wicked, to be struck with astonishment, and he called this astonishment above a dimming. There follows: and the innocent will be stirred up against the hypocrite, as if to say: it is not against innocence if someone, indignant through zeal for justice, is stirred up against a hypocrite who perverts true doctrine. And because, as has been said, anger through zeal disturbs the soul but does not blind it, so the just man is astonished or grows dim from zeal, yet does not depart from justice, and this is what he adds: And the just will hold to his way, because, namely, he will not abandon it because of the anger of zeal; for such anger does not precede reason but follows it, and therefore cannot separate man from justice. For anger through zeal is useful, because it makes a man rise up against evils with greater courage of soul, and this is what he adds: and with clean hands he will add strength, namely, stirred up through zeal; hence the Philosopher also says in Book III of the Ethics that anger helps courage.