Salmos 79
Gregory of Nazianzus · Comentário Patrístico (catena)
Salmos 79:4
If you shut the heavens, who will open them? And if you let loose your torrents, who will restrain them? It is an easy thing in your eyes to make some people poor and others rich, to make some alive and to kill others, to strike some with illness and to heal others. Whatever you do according to your will is perfect. You are angry, and we have sinned, someone said long ago, in making confession. Now it is time for me to say the opposite, "We have sinned, and you are angry"; therefore "we have become a reproach to our neighbors." You turned your face from us, and we were filled with dishonor. But stay, Lord; cease, Lord; forgive, Lord; deliver us not up forever because of our iniquities, and let not our chastisements be a warning for others, when we might learn wisdom from the trials of others. — ON HIS FATHER'S SILENCE, ORATION 16:12
Salmos 79:5
Some things mentioned in the Bible are not factual; some factual things are not mentioned; some nonfactual things receive no mention there; some things are both factual and mentioned. Do you ask for my proofs here? I am ready to offer them. In the Bible, God "sleeps," "wakes up," "is angered," "walks" and has a "throne of cherubim." Yet when has God ever been subject to emotion? When do you ever hear that God is a bodily being? This is a nonfactual, mental picture. We have used names derived from human experience and applied them so far as we could, to aspects of God. His retirement from us, for reason known to himself into an almost unconcerned inactivity, is his "sleeping." Human sleeping, after all, has the character of restful inaction. When he alters and suddenly benefits us, that is his "waking up." Waking up puts an end to sleep, just as looking at somebody puts an end to turning away from him. We have made his punishing us, his "being angered"; for with us, punishment is born of anger. His acting in different places, we call "walking," for walking is a transition from one place to another. His resting among the heavenly powers, making them almost his haunt, we call his "sitting" and "being enthroned"; this too is human language. The divine, in fact, rests nowhere as he rests in the saints. God's swift motion we call "flight;" his watching over us is his "face";12 his giving and receiving is his "hand." In short every faculty or activity of God has given us a corresponding picture in terms of some thing bodily. — ON THE HOLY SPIRIT, THEOLOGICAL ORATION 5[31].22