The Spiritual Journey of The Psalter

“First the Psalter separates us .. . from the attached evil to which we have been attached (chained). And thus it scrapes and polishes our understanding by means of more delicate teachings of ideas. Then, by means of the forms of virtue, it forms Christ in us, in accordance with whose image we existed in the beginning, and in accordance with which we again come to exist.”

St. Gregory of Nyssa, On The Inscriptions of The Psalms 11. 134

Here we see just a small section of St. Gregory of Nyssa’s commentary on the inscriptions of the psalms. In his vision the psalms are a spiritual journey beginning with the departure from evil, “Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of the sinners nor sat in the seat of the evil man” (Psalm 1) and ending with “Let everything that has breath praise the name of the Lord (Psalm 150). This sequence to the book of the psalms is the spiritual sequence of us all. The above passage gives a brief synopsis of what this looks like