On the Inscriptions of the Psalms 1 part 2/9

It is as if one of those born in prison, judging the darkness in which he was reared and grew up to be some great good, should then, upon partaking of the grace of the open air, condemn his former judgment, saying: 'What sights of sun and stars and of all the beauty about the heaven did I prefer the accustomed darkness to, through ignorance of the better!'

For this reason he first condemns himself in his discourse for the lack of judgment concerning the good, saying that he was brutish, so long as he saw the good in those things.

But since he came to be with God — and the Word is God — and was guided toward the right hand, and the Word becomes for him a guide toward the right through counsel, and he saw the glory that is in virtue, through which comes the ascension for those who look toward heaven, then he makes use of those utterances, of which the one makes the good that is in the heavens an object of wonder, while the other spits out as worthless and vain the deluded zeal concerning this life.

The whole passage reads as follows:

'I became brutish,' he says, 'before you,' signifying by this the irrational attachment in such matters; then he adds, 'But I am with you always.'

And having said this, he adds also the manner of his union with God, so that we too might learn how he who was formerly brutish is afterward joined to God:

'For you have held,' he says, 'my right hand.'

By this he means God's succor, the impulse of the mind toward the things on the right.

'And with your counsel you have guided me.'

For guidance toward the good does not come about apart from divine counsel.

'And with glory you have received me.'

Rightly does he set glory in contrast to shame — glory which becomes, as it were, a chariot and a wing for the one taken up by the divine hand, whenever someone estranges himself from works of shame.

And thus he added, following upon what had been said:

'For what have I in heaven? and what have I desired upon earth besides you?' — which indeed most men do even to the present day:

though such things are theirs to have in heaven by right, they nevertheless make it a matter of prayer that from God there should come to them their fantastical deceptions — some power, or honor, or wealth, or that wretched little glory over which human nature is mad.

By this he shows that the one who cleaves to God through hopes, and becomes one with him, is in some manner grown together with God.

CHAPTER 7. Such, then, being the ascent toward the height that has taken place in the third section, he who has been lifted up to so great a degree in understanding, having again laid hold of the step lying above, becomes greater and loftier than himself, in the fourth part having, as it were, passed through a certain third heaven, according to Paul, and having become loftier than the heights already traversed.

For it is no longer the common man who receives these things in succession, but the one who has already been closely attached and joined to God.

Thus speaks the text, beginning the section that follows:

'A Prayer of Moses, the man of God.'

For such was he already, that he was no longer schooled by the law, but became for others the introducer of the law:

such as was that lofty Moses of whom we hear — he who willingly shook off royal dignity, as if it were some dust clinging to the sole of his feet;

he who for forty years removed himself as an exile from association with men, living alone by himself with himself alone, and through stillness, without distraction, gazing intently upon the contemplation of things invisible;

he who afterward was illumined by the ineffable light, and loosed the foundation of the soul from the garment of skin, that dead covering;

he who ground down the Egyptian army and its tyrant with successive plagues, and freed Israel from the tyranny through light and water;

for whom, after Egypt, all time was one continuous day, the night never growing black with darkness;

for after the daily course of the sun's rays, another light, freshly wrought from a cloud, succeeded their radiance, so that while the sun set for them at its necessary period, the light remained continuous and unbroken, the brightness from the pillar receiving without interval the rays of the sun's beams;

he who sweetened the bitter and undrinkable water by means of the wood, and transformed the rock into a fountain for those who thirsted;

he who took heavenly food in exchange for earthly food;

he who saw sharply in the divine darkness and beheld in it the invisible One;

he who beheld the tabernacle not made with hands, and worthily comprehended the ordered array of the priesthood;

he who received the tablets fashioned by God, and, when they were shattered, engraved them anew;

he who bore upon his face the tokens of the divine power that had been manifested to him, and, by the brightness proceeding from it, as by certain rays of beams, turned away the eyes of those who approached unworthily;

he who condemned by fire and by the chasm those who rose up against the priesthood, and utterly destroyed those who committed outrage against the divine grace;

he who turned the sorcery of Balaam into piety;

whose end of life is recorded as loftier still;

he who came to be upon the mountain's summit, and left behind for this life no trace, no memorial, of the earthly burden;

he who did not have the character of his beauty altered by time, but preserved, within a mutable nature, that which in beauty is unchangeable.

This is he who inaugurates for us the fourth ascent, and lifts up along with himself him who has already become great through the three ascents already traversed.

For he who has arrived at this height stands, in a certain manner, as a boundary between the mutable and the immutable nature, and mediates fittingly between the two extremes, bringing to God supplications on behalf of those altered by sin, and conveying across the mercy of the transcendent power to those who stand in need of mercy — so that we too might learn through this, that the more one departs from the low and earthly things, the more one is made akin to the nature that surpasses all understanding;

and through beneficence he imitates the divine, doing that which is proper to the divine nature:

I mean doing good to everything that needs beneficence, insofar as it stands in want of good deeds.

The title is 'A Prayer of Moses, the man of God.'

For since humanity had been overpowered by the evil of sin, and, torn away from union with the good, had become entangled with the opposing passions, and stood in need of some embassy to the One who is able to recall it from ruin, the man of God becomes, in place of an ambassador, one who pleads on behalf of the fall of his kinsmen, and moves the divine to compassion for those who had perished.

For immediately he pleads his case, as it were, before the hearer, and says that to God alone belongs that which, in every good, is firm and unmoved and ever remaining the same;

whereas the human, being set within change and alteration, never remains in the same state, whether it ascend toward the better, or whether it fall away from participation in the better.

For this reason he asks that the immutable One become, for every generation, a refuge unto salvation for the one who wanders.

'Lord, you have become our refuge from generation to generation.'

Why does he say this? Because, he says, you exist before creation, encompassing within yourself the whole extent of the age, both from the point at which the nature of the age had its beginning and unto whatever end it shall proceed;

and the end of the unending is infinity.

'For before the mountains were brought into being,' he says, 'and the earth and the inhabited world were formed, even from age to age you are.'

But the human, by the mutability of its nature, having been carried down from the height of good things toward the lowly and slippery place of sin, was swept away;

'Therefore,' he says, 'stretch out your hand, you who cannot fall, to him who has slipped — being that by nature which you are, and becoming this also for us — and, "Turn him not back from the height that is with you into the lowliness of sin."'

Then he becomes a minister of the Master's voice, and utters the loving word, saying:

'Return, you sons of men.'

And such a saying is a doctrine:

for the discourse looks to nature, and prescribes the remedy for its evils.

'For since,' he says, 'being mutable, you have flowed away from the good, make use again, toward the good, of your mutability;'

'and from whence you have fallen, thither turn back again;'

since it lies within the moral choice of human beings to allot to themselves, by their own authority, whatever they wish, whether the good or the base;

and what follows next is another doctrine:

For it says: 'A thousand years in your sight, O Lord, are as yesterday, which has passed by, but their things counted as nothing shall be years.'

What, then, are we taught doctrinally in these words? That for the one who, through conversion, has turned back again to the good, even if his life has been inscribed with countless offenses, so that the accumulated evils seem to amount to a thousand years, it counts for nothing with God, once the man has turned back;

for the divine eye always looks upon what is present, and does not take past things into account, but before God it is reckoned as but a single day, or part of a night, which has gone by and run its course.

But what is present in wickedness, even though it be reckoned by sinners as nothing, is beheld by God as a multitude of years.

For it says: 'Their things counted as nothing shall be years.'

And well and fittingly does he call the transgressions 'things counted as nothing';

because the one who commits evil is by a certain nature disposed to regard his offense as nothing, and to find some excuses for each of the deeds done in wickedness, so that it is ready at hand for him to say of each: 'Desire is nothing, and anger is nothing, and each such thing is nothing';

for these, he says, are movements of nature;

none of these, he supposes, would be reckoned as any evil at all by him who watches over human life.

For this reason he says that these 'things counted as nothing,' when they abide in the deliberate choice of the one who does them and do not pass away, are judged before the divine eye, case by case, as an expanse of years.

Again he depicts in his discourse the transient nature of our being, so that he might the more move God to mercy;

for he says, setting vividly before our eyes by the illustration what one ought to think the wretchedness of our nature to be: morning and evening, that is, youth and old age;

verdure at dawn, and flower, and its passing away;

and after this, when the moisture proper to that season of life has been spent, and the plant has shed its blossom, and its connatural season has breathed away, dryness and withering are what remains.

'In the morning let it pass away like grass; in the morning let it flourish and pass away; in the evening let it fall, grow hard, and wither.'

And in what follows he laments the human condition still more, saying that human life has been consumed by wrath, being tossed as by some wind through the onslaught of anger;

and it is clear that by 'wrath' and 'anger' he signifies the apostatizing power, through which a failing of life comes upon human beings, and a disturbance of what was at rest.

Thus the text runs: 'We have failed in your wrath, and in your anger we have been troubled.'

And to these he adds, in due sequence, that it is not fitting for God to make human wickedness a spectacle, nor ought the age defiled by our sins to appear before his unblemished countenance;

and he expresses this very thought in these words, interpreting it thus:

'You have set our iniquities before you.'

as if one were to insert the phrase 'to what end' and thereby carry the sense forward more clearly, so that the meaning of the saying would be this: 'It befits you to have good things before your eyes, but what is lawless is unworthy to be seen by you';

make, therefore, that which is human to be such that it is not unworthy of your oversight, but let our age become worthy to appear before you;

since, as things now stand, all our days have failed away;

for not to be in you is not to exist at all.

For over those whom the dominion of wrath prevails, life is unsubstantial and shadow-like, resembling the thread of a spider's web;

for just as that thread is visible so long as it happens to remain intact, but if someone brings a hand near it, it is at once torn asunder at the touch of the fingers and vanishes,

so also human life, ever entangled with insubstantial pursuits as though with airy threads, weaves in vain for itself a web that has no real existence.

And if anyone should lay hold of it with firm reasoning, this vain pursuit slips from his grasp and vanishes into nothing;

for all the things zealously pursued in this life are mere conceit, and not substantial reality.

Mere conceit is honor, rank, lineage, arrogance, pomp, wealth — all the things in which the spiders of this life busy themselves, for the sake of which such people have need of God as their physician;

for this, I believe, is the sense of the saying that runs: 'The days of our years, in themselves, are seventy years;'

'but if in strength, eighty years, and the greater part of them is toil and hardship.'

Not that life is toilsome for the one who lives beyond this measure, but that of so brief a life, the greater part consists in toil and hardship.

The life in the middle span is given over still more abundantly to labors;

and old age, above all, bears witness by its very gray hair and wrinkles to the increase of toil.

Again he devises another way by which the divine might be made gracious toward human beings;

and the sense of what is said is as follows:

the weight of our sins draws after it a great punishment;

but the substance of our nature is a paltry thing, unable to sustain the wrath that would be proportionate to the offenses committed;

but even if what is inflicted upon us for punishment is mild, it will be sufficient for the instruction of those who endure it;

if, then, the mildness of the recompense sufficed for both instruction and punishment, who could withstand the full might of wrath? Or what number could measure out the fear of your anger? If, then, wrath is unbearable, but the working of loving-kindness is bearable, make known to us your right hand in such a manner that we may be able to bear it — in wisdom, not in punishment — while instruction is being wrought in us by you.

Since, then, the sense has already been set forth by us beforehand, it would follow fittingly to adduce the very God-inspired words themselves, which run in this manner:

'Because gentleness has come upon us, and we shall be instructed.'

'Who knows the might of your wrath, and, out of fear of you, who can number your anger? So make known to me your right hand, and turn to wisdom those whose hearts have been instructed;'

Good, indeed, is the wording that has been added, in due sequence, to what was said before.

For it says that, because of the weakness of our nature, we cannot sustain the magnitude of the wrath which sin stirs up against us, but we have need of being instructed.

Therefore, turn us back, O Lord, deferring nothing with regard to your grace.

For the phrase 'How long?' signifies the hastening of grace: 'and be moved to compassion,' he says, 'upon your servants.'

'For it is not to strangers,' he says, 'but to your own servants that you will be reconciled.'

Then, as one who has already obtained grace and has seen that light by which the darkness of those who wander in this life is illumined, and from which the day of virtue takes its beginning, he says: 'We were filled in the morning with your mercy, and we exulted and were glad; in all our days we were glad.'

For the joy that is in you has succeeded the time spent in the humiliation of sin, and the years of wickedness have passed away.

For thus we understand the saying: 'In exchange for the days in which you humbled us, [and] the years in which we saw evils.'

And thus he takes courage, calling those who have been illumined through conversion 'children of the works of God.'

'Look,' he says, 'upon your servants and upon your works;'

he indicates the patriarchs around Abraham.

For these are truly the works of God.

'And guide their sons.'

For those who do the works of Abraham become children of the patriarchs, being adopted, through virtue, into kinship with them.

Then, in the concluding verses, he joins the human to God through purity, praying that the brightness of God may, through a pure life, shine also upon our life;

'Let,' he says, 'the brightness of the Lord our God be upon us,' so that all the pursuits of our life may bear saving fruit, and everything we do may look toward one single purpose;

For this reason, having said in the plural, 'And direct the works of our hands upon us,' he then, contracting the many into one work, adds: 'and direct the work of our hands.'

For the varied and manifold cultivation of the virtues becomes a single work;

and this is the salvation of the one who acts rightly.

Thus, then, having raised to the fourth step of the psalmic ascent the understanding of those who ascend together with him, and having set it above all the vanity that most people pursue zealously in this life, the prophet, in showing the spider-web-like and unsubstantial deceit of the material life — which leads to no good end for those given to vanity —

for the downy and evanescent ones, in weak and feeble flight, like flies licking about the sticky things of life, become entangled and bound, as if by nets, in the enveloping web of such threads;

I mean, being enwrapped, as it were in spider-woven webs, by luxuries and honors and glories and the various desires, becoming the prey and food of that beast which hunts by means of such things.

But if someone, being eagle-like in nature, gazing more keenly toward the ray of light with the unswerving eye of the soul, and stretching himself toward the height, should draw near to such spider-webs, then, by the mere breeze of his swift wing-feathers, in the rush of his flight, he utterly annihilates, by the onrush of his wings, whatever such thing he happens to approach.

...that it is possible for the brightness of God once more to shine upon human life — now he unveils to us in his discourse the whole grace that comes from God, setting it before our eyes in manifold ways, for those who, from the height, behold the divine wonders.

For he was not content to signify this grace in a single manner, but variously sets forth the calamities into which we fell together, through our inclination toward evil.

In many ways he recounts the alliance that has come to be for us from God toward the good, so that he might multiply the occasions for thanksgiving, the thanksgiving toward God increasing in proportion to the good things.

For immediately, he says, at the beginning of the discourse: "Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy endures forever."

For since "confession" is here understood in the sense of thanksgiving, not of avowal of sins, he enjoins that God be glorified for his goodness alone, signifying by this that all the good and saving things that have come to men from God have come about wholly by grace and goodness.

We have contributed no cause toward the good; on the contrary, though we have been in every kind of evil, he does not depart from his own nature, but does that which he is.

For it was not fitting that he who is good by nature should act otherwise than according to what he is by nature.

"Let those redeemed by the Lord say so," he says, "whom he redeemed from the hand of the enemy, and gathered them out of the lands, from east and west and north and sea."

The discourse proclaims the complete return of the human race to the good.

For "redemption," by this word, signifies the recall from captivity.

And God has given himself as a ransom on behalf of those held fast by death, to him who has the power of death.

And since all were held in the prison-guard of death, he clearly buys back all by the ransom, so that no one is left under the dominion of death after the redemption that has come about for all.

For it is not possible for anyone to be in death, when death no longer exists.

For he says, "from east and west and north and sea," signifying the south by "sea."

Having thus set forth in summary the beneficence of God, which he worked upon the whole of human nature, he next recounts, by means of certain arrangements of the psalm, both the falling away of men toward evil and the guidance toward the better that came from God in each case.

"They wandered in the wilderness, in a waterless region."

For having abandoned the way, he says (and the way is the Lord), they wandered in the wilderness outside the oversight of God, a wilderness wholly dry and parched, cut off from the spiritual dew.

For this reason, wandering in the trackless waste, they were unable to find the city of God, in which is the dwelling place of those who are worthy.

For he says, "They found no city to dwell in, hungering and thirsting."

For since their strength was failing through lack of nourishment, the evil was intensified for them.

For how could there be food in a parched and barren land? And whence could one cure thirst in a waterless place? It is clear that the prophecy speaks neither of bread as food nor of water as drink, but of the true food as nourishment, and of that spiritual drink as the drink.

And the Lord becomes these two things, offering himself fittingly to those in need, becoming food to those who hunger and a fountain to those who thirst.

What, then, was found to be the solution to such helplessness, to the wandering, to the desolation, to the misery in the waterless place, to the fainting that comes from hunger? O the wonder!

One voice, uttered in turning toward God, transformed all things toward the good.

For he says, "They cried to the Lord in their affliction, and he brought them out of their distresses, and guided them into a straight way, to go to a city of habitation."

By "way" he means the Lord himself, from whom they had gone astray.

And this way says in the Gospel, "No one comes to me, unless my Father wills to draw him."

He leads those who have gone astray onto the way.

And this same one also becomes a city of habitation, as the Apostle says: "In him we live and move and have our being."

Fittingly he adds the exhortation to thanksgiving, that those who have obtained these things should "give thanks to the Lord for his mercies, and for his wonders to the sons of men" — that is, let them not, in ingratitude, conceal the benefit in silence, but let them proclaim aloud in thanksgiving the grace, that he has made full the soul that was empty of good things.

For he says, "He has satisfied the empty soul, and the hungering soul he has filled with good things."

Again, in another manner, he sets before our eyes the calamity of our nature, and recounts the divine loving-kindness through which nature is transformed toward the better.

What he says is as follows:

That humanity departed from the light and was bowed down toward sin, and was no longer in an upright posture, and was estranged from the true life.

For he says, "sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, bound in poverty and iron."

For it was immovable from evil, being held fast by a heavy fetter.

And the fetter is the poverty of the good, like a kind of iron shaped around the hearts.

And the cause of all these things was disobedience to the divine law and the setting aside of the counsel of the Most High.

For this is what he signifies in saying, "Because they embittered the words of God, and provoked the counsel of the Most High."

In consequence of these things, toil and humiliation, as is fitting, await the life of such persons — toil, because they were separated from their nourishment; humiliation, because they were unwilling to remain in the Most High.

For he says, "their heart was humbled in toils."

And separation from power is nothing other than weakness.

For what help could be found apart from power? Therefore he says, "They grew weak, and there was no one to help."

But again, one voice transformed the calamities into gladness.

For he says, "They cried to the Lord in their affliction, and out of their distresses he saved them."

He makes the darkness vanish, dissolves death, and breaks apart the bonds.

For he says, "He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and broke apart their bonds."

Let grace, then, he says, be proclaimed with praise, because the inescapable prison-guard of death has been dissolved, that guard secured with bronze gates and iron bars, as the prophet says.

For such was thought to be the strength surrounding death, so long as the power of death had not yet been abolished by the presence of the true life — that everything that came to be within it remained inescapable, held as it were by certain iron bars and impassable gates. But "he shattered," he says, "the bronze gates, and broke in pieces the iron bars" — and this is nothing other than the abolishing of the way of their lawlessness, and the transforming of their life toward piety.

This abolishing of those gates is the transformation of life into righteousness.

For he says, "He took hold of them, out of the way of their lawlessness."

Again, in yet another way, he sets forth in the discourse the wretchedness of humanity.

And he expresses this thought, that lawlessness is a humiliation, and he says this fittingly.

For the word of another prophet, too, agrees with this same thought — the one who says that lawlessness sits upon a talent of lead, showing that evil is something heavy and downward-dragging, pulling down together into its own pit the one who is on the heights on account of his likeness to the divine.

And for this reason they turned away from that all-powerful food, concerning which the word says to the first <humans>, "Of every tree that is in paradise you shall eat for food."

For just as there "every tree" names the fullness of every good thing, so here the word calls "every food" the true and all-powerful nourishment, from which turning away produces the weakness that ends in death.

And he speaks thus: "Their soul abhorred all food, and they drew near even to the gates of death."

And again the voice toward God turns the calamity into a festal gathering.

...he saved them out of their distresses, and he recounts the manner of the salvation.

And the narrative is nothing other than gospel outright.

For he says, "He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from their corruptions."

You see a living and animate Word sent for the salvation of those who are perishing, delivering from corruption the one who has come to be in it.

What evangelist so nakedly proclaims the mystery? Let grace, then, he says, be praised aloud by those who have received good, and let the praise become a hymn for the benefits received.

For he says, "Let them offer to him a sacrifice of praise, and declare his works with gladness."

After this, he again arranges the sufferings, and again adds, after the sufferings, the grace of God.

And he speaks of the folly of men, that having abandoned the stable and unwavering life, they became seafaring in their moral choice.

For he says, "those who go down to the sea in ships" — and instead of tilling paradise, in which they were formerly appointed, they made their labor a submerged one.

And by "sea" he means this material life, which is troubled by all the winds of temptations and surges with successive passions.

For he says, "doing business in many waters."

And, "These have seen the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep."

For having become submerged in the evil of life, and having often suffered the wicked shipwrecks of the soul, they saw upon themselves the works of the loving-kindness of him who rescued us from the depths.

For he says, "He spoke, and the stormy wind arose."

But this thought must be referred not to God but to the enemy.

For it is the voice of the adversary that produces the wind of the storm.