Music and Mediation in St Gregory of Nyssa’s Commentary ‘On the Inscriptions of the Psalms’
By Father Matthew Baker In his On the Making of Man, St Gregory of Nyssa likened the human body to a kind of musical instrument, played upon by the mind of man. In the same work, he dismissed as pagan the idea of man as microcosm. Yet later, in his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, Gregory espoused precisely this notion of microcosm in order to express the mediatorial role of the human being between intelligible and