The Disunity and Unity of the Psalter in the Fathers

Origen, Eusebius, Didymus, Diodore, and Gregory of Nyssa—among other Christian interpreters of the psalms—stand in a tradition of envisioning the Psalter as a theological unity. These claims to the unity of the book of Psalms come about through struggling with its disunity, which appears in many cases to be a problem that needs solving. Not all come to similar conclusions as to the mechanism of this unity. Still, its coherence as divine revelation is clearly established at the latest by the time of Gregory of Nyssa's writing of his In inscriptiones Psalmorum. Further, this unity of the Psalter is conceived of as primarily Christian, rather than simply something inherited from Hellenic (mostly Neoplatonic) understandings of literary unity.