Blessedness Through the Psalms: St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Teaching

Editor's Note: The following excerpt is from Saint Gregory of Nyssa’s Treatise on the Inscription of the Psalms. Do we struggle praying the Psalter? I believe many must answer, yes. The Psalms are rarely, if ever, explained to us. Lamentably, our dioceses and parishes will cut the Psalm Readings out first when abbreviating the services. Today’s worldview for the Christian is not shaped by the Psalter like it was in Israel (both Old Israel and the New until modern times). Consequently, the way we view our existence and our own lives is according to secular ideas rather than the formative lessons found in the Psalter. St. Gregory’s treatment is one option to extract the lessons of the Psalter, so we provide his initial words of this book below:

Prophet and King David

Treatise on the Inscription of the Psalms (Part I, Chapter I)[1]

The goal [τέλος] of the virtuous life is blessedness. For everything that one takes pains in doing is always referable to some goal.[2] Just as the art of the physician looks to health, and the aim of farming is to provide for life, so also the acquisition of virtue looks to the one who lives by it becoming blessed. This is the summation and object of everything conceived in relation to the good. What is truly and properly contemplated and apprehended in this sublime concept, then, would reasonably be called the divine nature. For so the great Paul designated God when he put ‘blessed’ before all the other words about God in one of his letters. He wrote in the following words, ‘The blessed and only ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality and who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no human being has seen or can see. To him be honour and rule forever.’[3]

All these sublime concepts about the divine would, then, in my opinion, constitute a definition of blessedness. For if someone were asked what beatitude is, he would give a properly pious answer if he followed Paul’s statement and said that that nature which transcends everything is first and properly called blessed. Among humans, however, that beatitude, which is the nature of the one participated in, occurs to a certain extent, and is specified, by participation in true being. Likeness to God, therefore, is a definition of human blessedness.

Saint Gregory of Nyssa

Since, then, the truly good, or that which is beyond the good, in which everything that participates becomes blessed, is alone both blessed and desirable by nature, well does the divine scripture of the Psalter point the way to this for us through a skillful and natural sequence in teaching which is simple in its appearance and lacking in artifice by setting forth systematically in various and diverse forms the method for acquiring the blessing. It is possible, therefore, even in the first hymn to get some idea of what lies ahead of us, and to see how the Word divides virtue into three parts and bears additional witness to beatitude by some suitable analogy for each division.

Now, on one hand, it pronounces separation from evil to be blessed, since this is the beginning of turning to what is better. But after this, it calls the meditation on things that are sublime and more divine blessed, since this actually produces the capacity for what is better. Finally it pronounces blessed the likeness to God which is achieved by those who are being perfected through these stages, and on account of which the blessings previously received are mentioned. This latter is intimated by the evergreen tree, to which the life which has been perfected through virtue is likened.

ENDNOTES

[1] St. Gregory of Nyssa, translated by Ronald E. Heine, Gregory of Nyssa’s Treatise on the Inscriptions of the Psalms, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 84–85.

[2] Cf. Ammonius in Porphyris Isagogen, ed. A. Busse, CAG 4.3 (Berlin, 1891), 1–2, where a similar statement is made, and where the example of the physician, among other examples, is cited.

[3] I Tim. 6: 15–16.