Rachele Ricceri: Self-representation and Personal Poetry: the Psalms in Gregory of Nazianzus' Poems

In the framework of patristic literature, the poetic production of Gregory of Nazianzus is an excellent example of Christian appropriation of both the biblical and the classical heritage. In a well-known poem, namely II,1,39 On his own verses, Gregory of Nazianzus refers to the poetic nature of some books of the Bible (v. 82), along to the salvific power of David’s lyre (v. 89), sketching the central role of poetry in the Christian strive for salvation. The reading of this programmatic poem is a valuable starting point to assess the influence of the Psalms as poems on Gregory’s poetry.This paper aims to analyze the use of the Psalms in Gregory’s poems, by looking at how some keywords and recurrent psalmic motifs appear in this impressive poetic corpus. Psalm echoes are widely present in Gregory’s poems. My paper will show how these allusions can shed light on the self-representation that Gregory deliberately shapes and offers to his readers.Gregory’s poems, especially the ones commonly labelled as Poemata de seipso show indeed an utter personal character, which can often be interpreted as the voice of a universal I, rather than the representation of a concrete autobiographical experience. The parallel reading of some passages from the so-called autobiographical poems by Gregory and their biblical hypotext will contribute to understand to which extent personal references are actually to be considered as self-expression and how much Gregory relies on the Psalms model to compose this peculiar kind of poems.