論詩篇的標題 第 1 章 第 8/9 段

for the gloom in the cave, hiding the sight, took away all possibility of exposing what was done.

Although he was able, with a single blow to the back, to drive the whole sword clean through the heart, he neither touched Saul's body nor intended to.

Rather, unnoticed by him, he cut off with the sword the edge of his double cloak, so that afterward the cloak might testify to his kindness toward Saul, showing, through the cutting of that edge, the power he had had for a blow against his body.

Saul then comes out from the cave, knowing nothing of what had happened, wearing his little cloak now with its edge cut away.

But this was nothing other than a bloodless trophy over enemies.

And crying out to Saul with a great voice, he recounts this new and wondrous feat of valor, which no gore of blood stained, whereby the victor triumphed and the vanquished was preserved alive.

to trust one's own safety in the destruction of one's adversaries, but also, while those who plot against him remain alive, to have security as though troubled by no one.

Rather, the account teaches us this through the history: that the man who excels in virtue proves his manhood not against his kinsmen, but against the passions.

For what he says afterward to the victor, sinking with shame at the deeds he had dared, and revealing through lament and tears his inward aversion to wickedness, one may learn from the history itself.

The subject-matter, then, of the fifty-sixth psalm, so far as it is disclosed by the historical narrative, is this.

But the very words of the heading, through which the encounter at the cave is signified, are as follows:

But as to how the thoughts of the psalm may be fitted to what is inscribed in the title, it would now be timely, having first set out the God-inspired words, to grasp in a few words the contemplation contained in them as well.

"Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me, for my soul trusts in you, and in the shadow of your wings will I hope, until the iniquity pass away."

The psalmist entreats that the divine mercy be granted in return for his trust in God and his firm hope in him: "until," he says, "the iniquity pass away."

But so that the meaning may become clearer to us, we will analyze the discourse in this way:

The nature of sin is unstable and transitory: it neither subsisted together with creation from the first, at the hand of him who gave subsistence and substance to the universe, nor does it continue to abide perpetually alongside the things that exist.

For the things that have their being from Being also remain forever in being;

but if there is something outside Being, whose essence lies not in being but has its subsistence in the not-being of the Good, this is the grass upon the housetop — rootless, unsown, unplowed — which, even though for the present it troubles us with its insubstantial growth, will nonetheless, in the appointed times, at the restoration of the universe to the Good, pass away and vanish, so that no trace of the evil now prevailing over us will be left remaining in the life set before us in hope.

"For yet a little while," he says, "and the sinner shall not exist; and you shall seek his place, and it shall not be found."

The discourse, then, philosophizes at the outset of the psalm, expounding the nature of evil by means of lofty doctrines.

For it teaches that we need the alliance of mercy up to that point — until the iniquity that has taken up evil residence in our life passes away from our life.

And such an alliance is granted to us by trusting in the power of him who fights alongside us, and by being armed with the shadow of God's wings.

And one who understands the virtues as constituting for us the shadow of the divine wings, serving in place of a garment, will not go astray.

For the divine itself, whatever it is in its nature, remains unattainable and incomprehensible to human nature, soaring aloft somewhere, ineffably, above the reasoning of mankind.

But a certain impress of that ineffable nature comes to be, through the outline-sketch of the virtues, in those who look toward it — so that all wisdom, prudence, and knowledge, and every approach of comprehending thought, are not themselves the divine wings, but the shadow of the divine wings.

But great is this benefaction for us, even if it is only a shadow.

"For I will cry," he says, "to God Most High, to God who has done good to me" — through this shadow which he sent from on high to the life below.

For he saved me through the Spirit who overshadowed me in the cloud; and those who, in the earlier psalms, had trampled him underfoot, he has now turned around into the rank of the reproached.

"For God sent forth his mercy and his truth, and delivered my soul from the midst of young lions."

That is to say, young lions, who tore at him with their fearsome, gaping jaws and the sharp points of their claws.

But the allies came, mercy and truth, the good pairing.

For mercy is not without discernment, nor is truth without mercy.

And through these I am freed from living together with these young lions.

"But these beasts," he says, "are sons of men, whose teeth are weapons and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword."

The constitution of our nature knows nothing of these sensible arrows set in human mouths in place of teeth; but whenever a person becomes conformed to passion and is transformed into the prevailing evil, having lost his natural form, he becomes a beast.

Therefore, having mentioned lions, he named the sons of men "beasts," whose teeth and tongue are the instruments of war.

He, then, who has been raised so far above his opponents as to lodge under the shadow of the divine wings and to be taken up from earth into the heavenly portion — "for he sent," he says, "from heaven, and saved me" — no longer looks toward earthly things, but is occupied with the glory in the heavens, saying, "Be exalted above the heavens, O God, and your glory over all the earth."

And, recounting the assaults of his enemies, he says that they are turned back upon their own evils, falling into the very pits they had dug.

For he says, "They prepared a snare for my feet, and bowed down my soul."

"They dug a pit before my face, and fell into it."

But he himself says that he is in readiness to hymn the divine glory through praise.

How blessed is he of such greatness of soul, whose heart is prepared for the praise of the divine glory, containing within itself the uncontainable!

Saying that he is prepared and ready, he does not delay the song, but summons his own living instruments by name, calling them to the service of hymn-singing, saying, "Awake, psaltery and harp."

This signifies the harmonious concord — unto the divine doxology — of the twofold man, the visible and the hidden, and the instruments obey the one who calls them.

And the time of such music is the dawn.

For the glory of God is not roused for anyone who has not put away the works of darkness.

"I will awake, then, at the dawn," say the psaltery and the harp to the one who calls them.

And thus he promises to render to God the thanksgiving — which he calls "confession" — fulfilled among peoples and nations.

For the grace of faith is divided equally between these two names, both toward the peoples and toward the nations.

For God is not the God of Jews only, but also of Gentiles.

Since God is one, who will justify the circumcision by faith and the uncircumcision through faith, for this reason — as though a twofold stream of divine blessing had been poured out upon both, divided in one part toward the peoples and in another toward the nations — the prophecy offers thanksgiving to God on behalf of both, because, although sin has increased without limit, the mercy of God surpasses it in its own greatness, and rises even above the very height of the heavens.

For, he says, 'great is your mercy above the heavens.'

And the words of the doxology concerning these things I think are the final utterances of the psalm, in which he says, 'Be exalted, O God, above the heavens, and your glory above all the earth.'

CHAPTER 15. But the sequence that lies above this height of the psalm surpasses it in magnificence by as much as one may learn from the very words that are written.

Just as among runners, the one who outstrips the victor over the others wins for himself a greater glory than the former, having shown himself superior to the one who ran before him, so it seems that the fifty-seventh psalm, though the one gone through before it has shown itself great in its meaning, surpasses it in the grandeur of its own thoughts by its native genius;

For as that former psalm held the prize of victory over the others, so this one has the advantage over the psalm that surpassed the others.

And indeed the inscription 'Unto the end' bears witness to victory for this psalm as well.

But it seems that in this victory the text testifies not so much to the defeat of the adversaries as to the abundance of good things.

Now the wording of the inscription runs as follows:

How many times is the contender of long-suffering proclaimed victor by the very judge of the contest for this crown of victory! — the Holy Spirit itself, perhaps, taking up this utterance again and again with wonder, as being beyond human power and surpassing the bounds of nature.

For it belonged to the incorporeal and immaterial nature alone to say such a thing, a nature to which none of the human passions attaches.

But being a man, and having anger bound up with his nature, and suffering evil at the hands of one who had received no occasion for evil, but had been deemed worthy of many great goods — both concerning the common rule and concerning what had been done for him personally — this man became an exile, driven out by the very one who had received his benefaction, and became a fugitive from his own hearth, being pursued unto death by the one who had been well treated.

going now to one place, now to another out of desperate helplessness — lodging in deserts, fleeing to mountain heights, becoming a suppliant of foreigners, suffering hardship for want of necessities, for the most part enduring under the open sky, having often undergone from that same man mortal danger — at one time when he rushed with his own hand, by the spear, to murder him, and again when he had the house in which he was staying surrounded by his guards, so that he might not escape death — and then, everywhere, that man inquiring busily where he was lodging, and whither he fled, and to whom he went, and to whom he was removing;

The voice [in the title, 'Do not destroy'] is directly the voice of God, forbidding the destruction of the man.

For in this, I think, we see the dispensation of the Holy Spirit: that the prior achievements of the holy men should be set forth as guidance for the life that comes after, imitation leading us on toward an equal and like good.

And it is possible to perceive, through the very words of this psalm, the greatness of the one who has advanced by progress to the level of this psalm, and how far he has risen above the greatness of what had gone before.

He draws mercy in as his ally; yet, having risen aloft, as though from some high watchtower, he cries out reprovingly to those below who dwell in the hollows of the foothills of human life, saying as follows:

'O men, what do you speak and do? Is what is spoken righteousness? Do you render judgment through uprightness? And indeed I see that your hearts are on the earth, and every movement of the heart is a deed and not merely a thought.'

For as soon as evil takes shape in the mind, the deed, wrought through the hands, is at once intertwined with the thoughts.

These things, for the sake of clarity, I have set forth having paraphrased a little from the wording of the psalm, which has the words as follows:

'If indeed you truly speak righteousness, judge uprightly, O sons of men.'

'For indeed in your heart you work iniquities on the earth; your hands weave together injustice.'

Then, lamenting over those who have fallen away from salvation, he adds the words that follow: 'The sinners,' he says, 'have been estranged from the womb, and have gone astray from the belly.'

You might understand what is said by examining what was the first womb of the human constitution, and what belly it was that bore mankind in the womb.

For I think there is none other than the loving-kindness and goodness of God, from which we were both formed and begotten.

For he said, 'Let us make man according to our image and likeness' — he who formed their hearts each one individually.

And again he says, 'I have begotten and exalted sons, but they have rejected me.'

And it is possible to gather countless such utterances from the holy Scripture, through which it is recognized what belly formed us, and what womb it was that brought us forth into the light through begetting.

Looking, then, to these things, he who laments over the destruction of those who have fallen away utters his grief.

For the utterance by which he bewails the sinners is outright a lament.

'How,' he says, 'have the sinners been estranged from the womb? How have they gone astray from the belly?' — having honored the lie above the truth, [these] whose fury bears a likeness to the father of the lie, the first serpent. 'Like the deaf asp,' he says, 'that stops her ears, which will not listen to the voice of charmers, though skillfully charmed by a wise charmer.'

For the wise men versed in these matters have observed this nature of the beast:

that, inflamed with fury, it holds its breath back in its throat and does not release it, swelling up like a wineskin from the retention of its breath, so that all the charms devised by those skilled in such things — through some natural antipathy — for beasts, remain idle and ineffective upon it.

And through these things he gives us to understand that the heart of those held fast in evil remains deaf to the healing brought to them by their teachers.

And indeed the whole sequence of the psalm is carried forward through lamentation, by him who groans over the destruction of the wretched.

For he proclaims beforehand against them what is to come, saying, 'God will break their teeth in their mouth.'

What teeth? Evidently those that devour the fruit of disobedience, the servants of the pleasures of the belly (which he named 'weapons and arrows' in the preceding psalm), through which the word of truth is torn to pieces. 'And the jaw-teeth of the lions,' he says, 'the Lord has broken.'

You would understand whom he called lions, if you were to learn the peculiar traits of these beasts.

For they say that lions are askew in the eye, whose nature is carnivorous and given to blood.

And you surely know the riddle of the distortion of the eyes of those who do not look toward what is straight, and the offensiveness of the panting breath of those who have employed their mouth for blasphemy, and who therefore have a kinship with the foul stench of sin.

And whatever is understood through that panting breath — that flesh and blood, which above all nourishes the nature of lions, are things cast out from the kingdom of God.

For in the time when the worthy are honored, 'these,' he says, 'shall be brought to nothing,' collapsing together with the unstable nature of the material things to which they had attached themselves during their life.

'For they shall be brought to nothing,' he says, 'like water passing away.'

He who guides human life does not cease shooting his arrows against them, until he has unstrung their strength.

'For he will bend his bow,' he says, 'until they grow faint,' and become like melting wax, easily molded into every form of the character that belongs to sin;

And to these he further adds those lamenting words concerning the wretched: 'Fire fell,' he says, 'and they did not see the sun.'

Another of the interpreters clarifies the sense of this saying, having rendered the untimely slipping of the miscarriage from the womb with these words:

'A woman's miscarried child,' he says, 'shall not behold the sun.'

Since, then, at the beginning of the psalm he says that 'the sinners have been estranged from the womb, and have gone astray from the belly' — which is the same as 'they were miscarried' — and states as the cause of this misfortune of theirs their likeness to the serpent and the asp, for this reason he now, taking up again the same statement, says that, having become imperfect in the reckoning of nature, and miscarried through wickedness, they slipped out and fell from that womb which we have understood, having become fire against themselves through their material choice;

for which reason they did not look up toward the sun.

By the sun he indicates the true light, toward which the offspring of the Jews, brought to no completion, did not look up.

And the discourse that follows fits in due sequence with what precedes.

For what he there called 'the deaf asp,' this he now, having changed the figure, calls 'a senseless thorn';

for understanding arises out of hearing;

and he who has not received hearing altogether casts away, along with hearing, understanding as well.

So also here, having first set forth the name 'thorn' as a kind of genus, he adds the harsher species among thorns, naming the buckthorn, whose points are sharp, whose projecting spikes are continuous, and whose scratches are harmful and poisonous to those who draw near.

Nevertheless, even if you were a thorn, he says, and even if the buckthorn is among thorns, [it is] as you still suppose yourselves to be alive;

for he does not truly live who does not possess true life.

And just as the life of sinners is not truly what it is called, but is only so named (for that which is severed from true life is not life);

so also in the case of God, wrath — even though it both appears so to sinners and is so named by them — is no more truly wrath, but rather it is the way they name the recompense given back according to God's justice as 'wrath.'

This, then, is the meaning of 'as though living.'

And '[so] as though in wrath he will swallow you up,' since you are not in true life, nor is he truly to be regarded as being in wrath.

'The righteous shall rejoice when he sees vengeance' — not as one gloating over those who perish, but as one who, setting his own affairs side by side in comparison with theirs, will then count himself blessed for his good counsel, because he was not among those in whose case he beholds the vengeance upon sinners.

For he will perceive the purity of his own hands the more clearly by comparing it against the gore of sinners.

'He shall wash his hands,' he says, 'in the blood of the sinner.'

But we know that we wash for no other reason than that we may cleanse away filth with water;

yet the defilement of blood does not cleanse away the pre-existing filth, but itself becomes filth.

Therefore, just as the color white becomes more manifest by being set beside blood, so also the purity of the hands of the righteous is rendered more brilliant through comparison with its opposite.

For what is now disbelieved — namely, what participation in the better good belongs to those who have willingly suffered hardship through the labors of virtue — will then be made manifest through experience;

for he who beholds these things will say that there was, it seems, a fruit laid up for the righteous in the just judgment of God.

Do you see to what mountain heights the discourse has climbed? How greatly it surpasses in magnitude the psalms gone through before? CHAPTER 16.

But not even this becomes the limit of the ascent to the height for those who advance through virtue.

For the one who comes after him in the sequence of order is found to surpass him also in the grandeur of contemplation.

Again the title proclaims the crown-bearer;

again the inscription set over it bears witness that such a victory is beyond what is human.

For "unto the end," it says, "destroy not."

It has often been said that what is signified by "the end" is victory, and there is no need to interpret again in this discourse what is already known.

But "destroy not" — this humane utterance, surpassing every excess of long-suffering, has here ascended to a loftier plane of meaning.

For who does not know that any ordinary person is ready to do good even to those who have shown no prior wickedness?

But often, too, when some small grief has occurred beforehand, the more magnanimous person bears the displeasure caused by small things, and at the time for doing good is not turned away from acting kindly toward the one who had grieved him in some slight matter.

But the one who is petty in mind, even if the provocation that occurs is slight, unleashes upon him the whole force of his retaliation, seizing the occasion for doing harm.

Therefore the marvel is not equal, even if the benefaction happens to be alike, in the case of one who has suffered no prior wrong and in the case of one who has repaid with good the one who had grieved him before.

But surely you are not unaware, O lover of learning, of that part of the history which is signified by the title.

But he, by divine assistance, having stepped himself aside from the cast, the thrust of the spear-point is driven deep into the wall.

He ran out from the palace, and came to be in his own house, hoping that the king's wrath would be changed through repentance.

And moving from place to place, he went now here, now there, wandering among strangers out of sheer helplessness.

For it was not spoken at the time when these things happened; rather, the text brings forward — for the intensifying of the wonder — the fact that it was he who suffered those things who spoke these words.

For it would be clear to the more diligent [students] that this history is a prophecy of the dispensation concerning the Lord.

There were demons in Saul the tyrant;

these the one anointed to kingship drives away, working terror against them by means of the instrument of the harp.

After this, the one plotted against by Saul is sought upon the bed, and he is not found; instead of him, the bed holds cenotaphs and the liver of goats.

But it is surely evident toward what end the sequence of the history, conveyed through these riddles, is looking.

And that the harp is the human instrument, while the song that comes from it is the Word made manifest to us through him who became flesh — whose work it is to make vanish the derangement caused by demons, so that the gods of the nations may no longer be demons.

But that king who has the demons within himself, when the spirits withdraw at the song of him who tuned the instrument for this purpose, strikes him with the spear (and the spear is wood armed with iron); but instead of him, the wall receives the spear.

By "the wall" we understand the earthen structure through which we come to know the body, around which we see the wood of the cross and the iron [nails].

For the divinity does not consist in the cross and the nails.

For we know that God did not make death, but that the king of wickedness, who deprived himself of life, became the father of death.

For through the envy of the devil death entered [the world];

and death reigned from Adam until the Law — a reign that the apostle wills should no longer hold sway in us, in our mortal body.

He, then, who tasted death on behalf of all comes to be in the house of her who was born of the Saul we have understood [allegorically]; and her name is Michal.

And what is signified by this name pertains to kingship, because up until then sin held reign over [our] nature.

But having come to be there, he himself goes out through the window;

and the window signifies the return again to the light of him who showed himself to those sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death.

And his cenotaphs are seen upon the bed.

For the angel, too, says to those seeking the Lord in the tomb:

"Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen."

Those who sought the Lord saw the tomb in which he had been buried empty of the body that was sought;

only the burial-linens were in it.

But since the wounded wall — which we understood in place of the body — has no blood, so that the most vital element of what is understood [to pertain] to the mystery, through which we were ransomed (I mean the blood), might not be omitted, this [blood] is found in the cenotaphs;

for among the inward parts, the liver alone is the source and workshop of blood, without which it is impossible for the nature of blood to be constituted.

The blood — since the liver is in the cenotaphs — the blood, too, is not lacking to the turning-away of death that came about for human nature;

and the kind of animal whose liver was taken is one appointed for the propitiatory sacrifices offered for sins.

And not only this, but from the same kind [of animal] it is also taken for the Passover;

and Moses says that this animal must be made to bear away the sin of the people, when it is divided into a twofold function,

and when two he-goats are set forth by the casting of lots, the one is dedicated to God, while the other is sent away into the wilderness bearing the sin.

On account of all these things, then, and things of this kind, the liver of this animal was taken up as an indication of the blood, through which the warding-off of death came about for those who were sick unto death, through the resurrection of our Lord from the dead — which the cenotaph signifies.

But it would now be time to run briefly also through the sense contained in the psalm itself, which is as follows:

The prophecy divides the discourse [into two parts]:

for the one part is on our behalf, addressed to God, being brought forward out of what is common to [our] nature;

while the other is addressed to us, from him who took up the suffering on our behalf.

The words that are on our behalf, then, are these:

"Deliver me," he says, "from my enemies, O God, and ransom me from those who rise up against me, and from those who work iniquity, and from men of blood, who hunted my soul and set upon me violently, though they had suffered no prior wrong from us."

For I have not sinned against them in anything, nor has any lawlessness been wrought by us to the harm of the enemies, on account of which they might be provoked.

Our first course was without lawlessness.

"But behold," he says, "all these things, of what sort they are."

See, and give heed, to visit [me],

and do not, out of benevolence, delay the vengeance against those who have transgressed.

"For do not pity," he says, "all those who work lawlessness."

Then he transfers the discourse to the higher person, and speaks as though from the person of him who heard the prayer, saying that these enemies will turn back to their own evening,

which is nothing other than that they will be driven together into the outer darkness.

For evening becomes both the beginning and the mother of darkness.

For to those who have no provision for salvation, there will necessarily follow the misery that comes from a famine of good things.

Thus the rich man was famished in Hades, being destitute of the divine dew;

and because he was unprepared with such a good, he was consumed by the flame.

But also, "they will encircle the city," he says.

which seems to me to suggest some such sense as this:

Since everything useless and to be cast away, as regards the use of the living, is thrown outside the city — whether some dead and decayed thing, or some foul-smelling dung — around which, under the compulsion of hunger, dogs are found living off the filth cast out from the city, through this the discourse, teaching the difference between those who live in virtue and those who live in vice, signifies [its meaning] in the riddle of the city.

By "city" he means the seemly and well-ordered commonwealth that has been founded by virtue;

while "the things outside the city" denote the vice observed as its opposite, in which is found every castoff of the more refined life — that is, foul-smelling sin — composed both of the corruption of bodies and of filthy dung.

Therefore, the inhabitant of the city is the great and precious thing — the truly human being, who through his life has conformed his form to the character impressed upon [his] nature from the beginning.

But the one who dwells among the things outside the city is a dog and not a man, so that it is evident to everyone how one must distinguish dogs from those who are human by nature — not, I mean, by the outward form of bodily shape, but by the difference in [manner of] life.

For the inhabitant of the virtuous city is truly a man;