No surprises of plot

Does saying this in a few words truly give away the plot of a book that had no surprises of plot? Hardly, but the magic of the book—and I must admit that it has magic—is in the patient, elaborate, luxuriant practice of meditative reflection on the difficult and holy words, rarely more than a few at a time. The work may strike some readers as bizarre, but it is serious and even artful, and it has the power to move many. Job on his dung heap is Christ accepting incarnate life and its ills; Job’s four sons represent the classical cardinal virtues of justice, wisdom, fortitude, and temperance; and his three daughters stand for the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. The book can be read as a mechanical parlor game, but its function is to give rise to a loosely connected series of meditations on the Christian life. The wide readership and influence of the Moralia indicate that it evidently did what it needed to for its church.

Rome around him

We cannot follow Gregory this way without remembering that the book of Job is a book that appeals especially to self-absorption and selfpity. Back in Rome, we saw Gregory regularly lamenting the fall of Rome around him, and though he never quite made himself out to be Job in so many words, the link is unmistakable. On the last pages of the Moralia, he comes as close as he ever does to telling us a version of his own story— what we might call his confessions. There we capture behind the rhetoric some flavor of what it felt like to be wise, holy, and saved; to be unsure and anxious at the same time; and still to be Roman as well.

Now that I have finished this work, I see that I must return to myself.

For our mind is much fragmented and scattered beyond itself, even when it tries to speak rightly. While we think of words and how to bring them out, those very words diminish the soul’s integrity by plundering it from inside. So I must return from the forum of speech to the senate house of the heart, to call together the thoughts of the mind for a kind of council to deliberate how best I may watch over myself, to see to it that in my heart I speak no heedless evil nor speak poorly any good. . . . For when I turn inward to myself, pushing aside the leafy verbiage, pushing aside the branching arguments, and examine my intentions down at the very root, I know it really was my intention to please God, but some little appetite for the praise of men crept in, I know not how, and intruded on my simple desire to please God. And when later, too much later, I recognize this, I find that I have in fact done something different from what I know I set out to do.