Salmos 19
Gregory of Nyssa · Comentário Patrístico (catena)
Salmos 19:3
The accord and affinity of all things with one another that is controlled in an orderly and sequential manner is the primal, archetypal, true music. It is this music that the conductor of the universe skillfully strikes up in the unspoken speech of wisdom through these ever-occurring movements. — ON THE INSCRIPTIONS OF THE PSALMS 1:3.21
Salmos 19:4
Yet, how can such declaring and showing forth be other than words, and how is it that no voice addresses itself to the ear? Is the prophet contradicting himself, or is he stating an impossibility, when he speaks of words without sound, and declaration without language and announcement without voice? Or, is there not rather the very perfection of truth in his teaching, which tells us, in the words that I have quoted, that the declaration of the heavens and the word shouted forth by the day, is no articulate voice or language of the lips but is a revelation of the power of God to those who are capable of hearing it, even though no voice is heard?… The very heavens, he says in displaying the wisdom of him who made them, all but shout aloud with a voice, and, though without voice, proclaim the wisdom of their Creator. For we can hear as it were words teaching us: "O mortals, when you gaze on us and behold our beauty and magnitude and this ceaseless revolution, with its well-ordered and harmonious motion, working in the same direction and in the same manner, turn your thoughts to him who presides over our system, and, by aid of the beauty that you see, imagine to yourselves the beauty of the invisible Archetype. For in us there is nothing without its Lord, nothing that moves of its own proper motion, but all that appears or that is conceivable in respect to us depends on a Power who is inscrutable and sublime." This is not given in articulate speech but by the things which are seen, and it instills into our minds the knowledge of divine power more than if speech proclaimed it with a voice. — ANSWER TO EUNOMIUS' SECOND BOOK
Salmos 19:12
So wicked and hard to cure and strong are those things possessed in the depths of our souls that it is not possible to rub them out and to remove them through human efforts and virtue alone unless through prayer we take the power of the Spirit as an ally and, in this way, conquer the evil that is playing the tyrant within us, as the Spirit teaches us through the voice of David: "Cleanse me from my unknown faults." — ON THE CHRISTIAN MODE OF LIFE