Selected Comments on the Psalms 1091–1107

[Ps 1, continued] … neither the Hebrew nor any of the translators doubled the expression.

“Therefore the ungodly will not rise up in judgment,” and so on. Taking their start from here, the simpler among believers think that the ungodly will not attain to the resurrection, without making at all clear what they understand by the resurrection and what sort of judgment they imagine. For even if they seem to declare themselves on these matters, scrutiny will show that they cannot keep consistently to what follows. If, then, we ask them of what the resurrection takes place, they answer: of the bodies we now wear. Then, when we ask further whether of their whole substance or not, they say, before being examined: of the whole. But if, accommodating ourselves to their simplicity, we raise the further difficulty whether the blood that has flowed out in bloodlettings will rise as well, and the flesh and the hairs that ever existed, or only those we are burdened with at our departure, they take refuge in God’s doing whatever he wishes. The more noble among them, so as not to be forced to gather up in their account the very blood that has often come to be separated from our bodies, say that the body we have at our end will rise. We raised a further difficulty, because bodily nature is changeable: just as foods are assimilated into our body and change their likeness, so our bodies too are changed, and in carnivorous birds and beasts become parts of their bodies; and again those, eaten by human beings or other animals, change in turn and become bodies of human beings or of other animals; and since this goes on for a long time, the same body must often become part of many human beings. Whose body, then, will it be in the resurrection? And so we shall end up falling, without reason, into an abyss of nonsense. After these difficulties they take refuge in the saying that all things are possible to God, and they bring forward expressions of the Scriptures that, taken in the ready sense, can suggest what they think: for example, the one in Ezekiel: “And the hand of the Lord came upon me, and brought me out in the Spirit, and set me in the middle of the plain, and it was full of human bones. And he led me around them, round about; and behold, there were very many on the face of the plain; and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me: Son of man, will these bones live? And I said: Lord God, you know these things. And he said to me: Prophesy, son of man. And I said to them: You dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says Adonai the Lord to these bones: Behold, I bring into you the breath of life, and I will put sinews on you, and bring flesh upon you, and stretch skin over you, and I will put my spirit upon you, and

[Ps 1, continued] you shall live; and I will set you on your land, and you shall know that I am the Lord.” This saying, as the more plausible, they use; and they cite others from the Gospels, for example: “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth,” and “Fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna,” and what is in Paul: “He will give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwells in you.” But every lover of truth, applying his own mind to these things, must contend on the subject of the resurrection, both to preserve the tradition of the ancients and to guard against falling into the nonsense of poor notions, which are both impossible and unworthy of God.

On this topic, then, this must be grasped: every body that is held together by a nature which takes in something from outside, in the manner of food, and excretes other things in place of what is brought in — as the bodies of plants and animals do — never has the same material substrate. That is why the body has not badly been called a river: because, strictly speaking, perhaps not even for two days is the primary substrate in our body the same. And yet Paul, say, or Peter is always the same — not only in respect of the soul, whose substance on our view neither flows nor ever has anything brought into it — even though the nature of the body is in flux, because the form that characterizes the body is the same; so that the features too remain the same, presenting the bodily quality of Peter and of Paul. In virtue of this quality, scars from childhood remain on bodies, and other distinctive marks, moles, and anything else of the kind. This form, by which Peter and Paul are given their form — the bodily form — is put around the soul again in the resurrection, changed for the better; not at all this substrate that was ordered at the first. Just as the form is the same from infancy to the end, even if the features seem to have much variation, so we must understand in the present case that the form is the same as the one to come, though the change for the better will be very great. For the soul, existing in bodily places, must use bodies suited to those places. And just as, if we had to live in the sea, having become water-creatures, we would certainly need to have gills and the rest of the constitution of fish, so those who are to inherit the kingdom of heaven and to be in places that differ must use spiritual bodies, the earlier form not vanishing, even if its change is

[Ps 1, continued] to something more glorious; just as the form of Jesus, and of Moses and Elijah, was not other in the transfiguration than what it had been. Do not stumble, then, if someone says that the primary substrate will not be the same then, when reason shows those able to attend that not even now can the primary substrate remain the same for two days. It is worth attending also to this, that what is sown is of one kind and what rises of another: “For it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” And the Apostle adds to all this, all but teaching us that we are to put off the earthly quality while the form is preserved in the resurrection: “This I say, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption.” For perhaps there will be about the saint that which is held together by what once gave its character to the flesh; but flesh it will no longer be: what was once given its character in the flesh will be given its character in the spiritual body.

And to the passages of the Scriptures that our brothers cite, these things may be said; first, to that in Ezekiel. As far as the simpler wish to take these expressions, there will not even be a resurrection of flesh, but only of bones and skins and sinews. At the same time it must be shown them that they are carried away, as not having understood what is written. For if bones are named, these bones are not necessarily to be understood, any more than in “All my bones have been scattered,” and “Heal me, for my bones are troubled,” where it is clear that bones are not spoken of in the common sense. Indeed, it is added to the saying: “Do they say, Our bones have become dry?” — do they say “our bones have become dry” because they wish to rise gathered together? But that is impossible. Rather, they would say “our bones have become dry” because they had been in captivities and had lost all vital moisture. They add, at any rate: “Our hope has perished; we are undone.” The promise, then, is of the resurrection of the people from its fall and from the deadness, so to speak, into which they had been put to death, handed over to their enemies for their sins. Sinners too are said by the Savior to be tombs full of bones and of all uncleanness; and it befits God to open the tombs of each, and to bring us out of the tombs made alive, as the Savior drew Lazarus out.

As for “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth,” this difficulty must be put to them: as in this life the Creator made every member for some use, so he made the teeth for cutting up solid food. What use, then, do those being punished have for teeth? For on their view, being in Gehenna, they will not eat. And it must be shown that not everything is to be taken according to the letter: “You broke the teeth of sinners,” and “The Lord crushed the molars of the lions.”

[Ps 1, continued] Who is so foolish as to suppose that God, while preserving the bodies of sinners, breaks only their teeth? Just as, then, someone who wanted these things to be so, when pressed, would be drawn to allegory, so we must seek what the gnashing of teeth of those being punished is: the soul has a power of chewing, and at the time when it is convicted of its sins it will gnash its teeth, as it were in a clashing of teeth, according to what it thought. The saying, “Fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna,” perhaps teaches that the soul is incorporeal, and perhaps shows also that it will not be punished without a body; about which, in discussing nature, we have spoken of the form and the primary substrate. And the saying in the Apostle, “He will give life also to our mortal bodies,” since the body is mortal and has no share in the true life, can show that the bodily form of which we spoke, being by nature mortal, will itself also change, “when Christ our life is revealed,” from being a body of death, made alive through the life-giving Spirit, having become spiritual from the Spirit. And the saying, “But someone will say: How are the dead raised, and with what body do they come?” plainly shows that the primary substrate will not rise. For if we have understood the example rightly, we must say that the seminal principle in the grain of wheat, laying hold of the matter lying beside it and pervading the whole of it, having grasped it with its own form, imposes the powers it has on what was once earth and water and air and fire, and, overcoming their qualities, changes them into that of which it is itself the maker; and so the ear is completed, differing exceedingly from the grain it came from, in size and shape and variety.

Of the same. The judgment of the righteous is a passage from a practical body to angelic bodies; that of the ungodly, a transfer from a practical body to dark and gloomy bodies. For there will be raised the

[Ps 1, continued] ungodly, not in the first judgment but in the second … “For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, and the way of the ungodly will perish.” Nothing base is known by God; but the way of the righteous is. For “the Lord knew those who are his.” The way of the righteous is the one who said: “I am the way,” about whom it has been said: “See which is the good way.” The way of the ungodly is the one walked by those who speak evil of the Creator. He is ignorant of evil things and does not know them — not because he cannot grasp all things and embrace them in his mind (for it is unlawful even to think this of God), but because they are unworthy of his knowledge. Perhaps that is why (the word will say it rather boldly) he asks about things he does not know. For when Adam sinned, he does not know him, nor the place into which he had fallen in fleeing from God. That is why he says: “Adam, where are you?” Likewise in the Gospel he asks about things he does not know, since they are not worthy of his knowledge. For since he does not know the demon, nor its name, he asks what its name is, when it answers: “Legion is my name.” And before the woman with the flow of blood received her release, the gift of her healing, he asks, saying: “Who touched me?” God, then, is ignorant of the way of the unrighteous, but knows the way of the righteous. And what is the way of the righteous but the one who said, “I am the way,” whom the Father knows? “For no one has known the Son except the Father.” With what is said about God’s knowledge and ignorance the words that constantly occur in the prophecies will fit: the remembrance and the forgetting of God. For it is often said in prayers: “Remember me,” and “Why do you forget our poverty?” For he casts out of his remembrance those who sin, just as again he admits those who repent …

[Ps 2] “Why have the nations raged, and the peoples meditated vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ,” and so on. Coming upon two Hebrew copies, in one we found these words as the beginning of a second psalm, while in the other they were joined to the first. And in the Acts of the Apostles, “You are my son, today I have begotten you” was said to be of the first psalm. “For as it is written,” it says, “in the first psalm: You are my son, today I have begotten you.” The Greek copies, however, show that this is the second. This must not go unnoticed: that in the Hebrew no number stands beside any of the psalms — first, say, or second, or third. Who would be the speaker of words containing the prophecy about Christ? Either the Holy Spirit

[Ps 2, continued] or the prophet himself. From the diapsalma there is a change of speaker: it is Christ, as we shall show this too when we examine the words. And it is no wonder if in one psalm there is not one speaker; for this can be seen in many places, as we shall show as we go on. So much before the psalm; let us now consider its words.

The word says that four kinds of human beings set upon Christ: nations raging against him, peoples meditating vain things, kings of the earth standing up, with rulers gathered together. And we think that “nations” signifies people foreign to the faith, such as the soldiers who raged against him; “peoples,” those from the tribes of the mutilation (for they are not properly to be called the circumcision, since they did not accept the Savior), who meditated vain things, not having understood the Christ proclaimed in the prophetic words they meditated on; and “kings of the earth and rulers,” Herod and Pontius Pilate and the leaders of the people of the Jews. For the divine Peter the apostle too called these to mind in the Acts of the Apostles, when he cited the present passage. And if you say that the invisible powers too are meant, you will not be wrong. Indeed, the most wise Apostle attributed the crucifixion of Christ not so much to human beings as to ruling powers, saying: “We speak wisdom among the perfect; yet a wisdom not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are being brought to nothing; but we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom, which God foreordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age has known; for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” For what rulers crucified Christ, the Lord of glory, not knowing the wisdom of God and themselves supposed to have certain wisdoms, if not those called in the prophecies the ruler of the kingdom of the Persians and the ruler of the kingdom of the Greeks, and, by consequence, the rulers of the other nations? “The nations,” then, “raged”; that is, as Aquila translated more clearly, “were in uproar.” The word “raged” is onomatopoeic, expressing the inarticulate noise of people in uproar; for such are those who are agitated at the times when they plot against those they are fighting. And if the other translators had not said “were in uproar,” and, as Symmachus, “churns,” one might have taken “raged” as “boasted greatly,” as in one of the prophets we think the word means this: “according to the pride of the Jordan.” And since “he who denies the Son does not have the Father either,” and “he who receives” Christ “receives the one who sent him,” therefore he who makes war against Christ commits impiety against the Father.

[Ps 2, continued] Those, at any rate, who raged and meditated vain things and stood up together and were gathered together acted, as it seemed, against Christ alone; but what they did is reckoned to them as done first against the Father. That is why they are said to have done these things “against the Lord and against his Christ.”

We must not be unaware of the name pronounced among the Greeks with the title “Lord,” and among the Hebrews with the title “Adonai.” For God is named among the Hebrews by ten names, one of which is “Adonai,” which is translated “Lord.” And there are places where “Adonai” is said among the Hebrews and “Lord” among the Greeks, the word written in Scripture declaring this. But sometimes “Iah” stands, and it is pronounced with the title “Lord” among the Greeks, but not among the Hebrews, as in: “Praise the Lord, for a psalm is good.” For here it has said “Lord” in place of “Iah”; and the beginning of the psalm among the Hebrews is “Alleluia.” There is also among them a certain four-letter name that is not pronounced, which is also inscribed on the golden plate of the high priest; and it is spoken with the title “Adonai,” though this is not what is written in the four letters; and among the Greeks it is pronounced “Lord.” And in the more accurate of the copies the name stands in Hebrew characters — Hebrew, however, not those of today but the most ancient. For they say that Ezra in the captivity handed down to them other characters in place of the earlier ones. We have mentioned these things because the four-letter name stands as “Lord” in “But in the law of the Lord,” and in “For the Lord knows the way of the righteous,” and now in “against the Lord and against his Christ.”

This must be noted: that the Seventy and Theodotion set everything in the past tense; Aquila some things in the past and others in the future; and Symmachus everything in the present. For it is the custom of the Seventy often to announce the prophecies about Christ as already accomplished, as in: “They gave gall for my food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink. They divided my garments among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots”; and: “A people I did not know served me; at the hearing of the ear they obeyed me.” We think they speak so because God knows all things before they come to be, both his Christ and what would befall him in his becoming human, and so they are reckoned as already done to the one who suffered this and that. The same applies if the Holy Spirit were narrating what concerns him, as is the case in the present passage. We do not say this as though the prophecies about him never turned to the future tense: “For behold,” it says, “my servant will understand, and will be glorified, and will be exalted exceedingly,” and so on.

“Let us burst their bonds,” and so on. It seems to me that the angels who came down with the Savior,

[Ps 2, continued] being indignant at the plot against him by the invisible kings and rulers, spoke the first four verses, at the same time wondering why ever these things were happening. Then, since it was those powers who had bound human beings and laid their own yoke on them, the Son of God answers the angels, urging them to imitate him as he bursts the bonds of sinners and casts off their yoke. Let us too burst the bonds with which we were bound when we sinned, for each one is held fast by the cords of his own sins. And perhaps it is better to burst the bonds, as Samson did, than to loose them, as the sin of Jerusalem was loosed, because she received from the Lord’s hand double for her sins. The one who has cast off from himself the yoke just mentioned can take up the kind yoke of Jesus, and carry his light burden, and become his beast of burden; and the disciples will loose its bond.

“Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and in his anger he will trouble them,” and so on. The words of threats are words spoken in wrath. But God promises to repent of the evils he speaks of doing, if those who hear repent. God spoke in his wrath through Jonah to the Ninevites; and since they repented in sackcloth and ashes, they suffered none of what they had heard. And God foreknew, when he sent Jonah, the repentance that would come; clearly he sent Jonah for their salvation. Perhaps here too he will speak in his wrath to those who sin, for their salvation. For he did not say, “He will punish them in his wrath,” even if they repent.

Of the same. Anger differs from wrath, as those skilled in names also say, in that anger is wrath rising up like smoke and still being kindled, while wrath is a desire for retribution. Anger, then, is as it were less complete than wrath, and wrath is already near to its fulfillment. Here, as applied to our usage, “retribution” must be understood as the punishment of sins, and “desire” as will. That in divine Scripture too anger is something less than wrath is clear from its being said that rebuke comes with anger, and discipline with wrath: “Lord,” it says, “do not rebuke me in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath.” The one who still has hope of healing without torments is rebuked by a word that touches him; but the one who has gained nothing from rebuke needs the discipline that comes through whips and rods. “For all discipline seems for the present to be not of joy but of grief; but afterward it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” God, then, will speak to those who have sinned, whom he laughs at and mocks while they are still in their transgressions and, through insensibility, are proud

[Ps 2, continued] of their own evils as though they were goods; he will speak to them in his wrath, and, showing his anger, he will trouble them. For he does not bring torments and punishments upon them all at once, since a word spoken beforehand in anger to turn them back can produce repentance in them through fear, before they have refused the healing that comes by gentler means. Writing to the Thessalonians, at any rate, the blessed Paul says about the Jews who crucified the Lord: “The wrath has come upon them to the end.” Or did not the wrath announced beforehand through the prophets come upon them, when they suffered every terrible and incurable thing at the hands of the Romans?

“Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession,” and so on. For he has been made heir of all as a man, by the economy, so that he might then recover as his own proper inheritance those on earth who had been impiously scattered by the devil and the evil powers with him. When this had been brought to its end, he says to his Father about us: “Those you gave me out of the world were yours, and you gave them to me.” See, then, how he rises, even with the flesh, to the wealth that is his by nature. For if those in the world were the Father’s, they would in some way be understood to belong also to the Word who counsels him; therefore he also said: “All that is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine; and I have been glorified in them.” How, then, is he commanded to ask, and receives nations as an inheritance, and makes the ends of the earth his possession? Because, when man had broken utterly away from his servitude under God, the Creator and Father, wishing to save him, sent into this present world the only-begotten Word, so that, having become flesh and been contained, while remaining by nature unchanged, he might proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. So even if he is said to receive, and to be made heir, because of his humanity, let us not be ignorant of the economy.

Of the same. By the inheritance he means the rational nature, which itself also inherits wisdom, and likewise knowledge and truth and righteousness. And the inheritance of the rational nature is the contemplation of bodily and bodiless things, and of God, the cause of them all.

“You will shepherd them with a rod of iron; like a potter’s vessels you will shatter them,” and so on. In the Apostle too the sterner treatment, which sinners need and the weaker of those who are thought to have believed, is called a rod, when he says: “What do you wish? Shall I come to you with a rod, or in love and a spirit of gentleness?” And still earlier, in the Prophet, the divine word threatens sinners with a rod and whips, while not withdrawing mercy from their Father, that is, from Christ, since they need such healing. “For I will visit their iniquities with a rod,” he says,