The Letter to Marcellinus

St. Athanasius’s Letter to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms is the classic Christian account of the Psalter as the prayer-book of the whole soul. Its governing image — that the Psalms “become like a mirror” to the one who sings them, reflecting back his own inner states — and its practical, situation-by-situation guidance on which psalms to use have shaped Orthodox psalmody to the present day.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Occasion and Form

The Letter to Marcellinus is addressed to a Christian named Marcellinus who, recovering from illness, was devoting his enforced leisure to the study of Scripture and especially the Psalms. Athanasius writes to him relaying the teaching of “an old man” — a literary device through which the bishop sets out a complete spirituality of the Psalter (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus; trans. Gregg, CWS). The work is short, warm, and intensely practical: it is at once a theology of the Psalms and a manual for their devotional use.

Its standard modern English translation is that of Robert C. Gregg, published together with the Life of Antony in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (Paulist Press, 1980) — the same volume that gathers Athanasius’s two great works of spiritual direction.

The Psalter as a Mirror of the Soul

The letter’s central and most-quoted insight is that the Psalms differ from the rest of Scripture in a particular way: where the other books speak to the reader, the Psalms give the reader his own words to speak. They contain, Athanasius says, the full range of the soul’s movements — repentance, distress, fear, hope, thanksgiving, exultation — so that whoever prays them finds his own condition already articulated and, in articulating it, is healed and ordered.

This is the source of the famous mirror image. In Gregg’s translation Athanasius writes that the words of the Psalms “become like a mirror to the person singing them, so that he might perceive himself and the emotions of his soul, and thus affected, he might recite them” (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus 12; trans. Gregg, CWS, p. 111). The Psalter does not merely describe the spiritual life from outside; it hands the one who prays a glass in which to recognize himself, and then the very language in which to bring that self before God. To sing the Psalms is therefore to be both diagnosed and remedied: the soul sees its own face and is conformed to what it sings.

Psalm-by-Psalm Pastoral Assignments

The practical heart of the letter is a long section in which Athanasius matches particular psalms to the particular circumstances of life — a kind of spiritual prescription. Whatever the soul’s condition, he insists, “you will find instruction concerning it in the divine Psalms” (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus; trans. Gregg, CWS). He then runs through the situations a Christian meets and names the psalm or psalms proper to each: which to sing in persecution, which when beset by enemies or plots, which in affliction and which when the affliction lifts, which for repentance and confession of sin, which in thanksgiving when prayer has been heard.

So, for example, he assigns the psalms of confession of sins (including Pss 9, 74, 91, 104–107, 110, 117, 135, 137 in the Septuagint numbering), and directs that when one’s prayer has been answered one should give thanks with Psalm 76 (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus; trans. Gregg, CWS). The effect is to present the Psalter as a complete repertoire of prayer adequate to every human circumstance — nothing in the soul’s experience falls outside it. (Note the LXX numbering throughout, which runs one behind the Hebrew/Masoretic from Psalm 9/10 onward; cf. Holy Scripture on the Septuagint as the Church’s Old Testament.)

Place in Orthodox Psalmody

The vision of the Letter to Marcellinus is fundamentally the Orthodox understanding of the Psalter in practice. In Orthodox worship the Psalms are the single most pervasive element: the entire Psalter (the 150 psalms divided into twenty kathismata) is appointed to be read through in the course of each week, and twice weekly in Lent, in the cycle of the Hours and Vespers and Matins. The faithful encounter Scripture above all through this continual praying of the Psalms, and the individual’s prayer rule characteristically draws on selected psalms for morning and evening and for particular needs.

Athanasius’s letter gives this practice its rationale. The Psalter is appointed so constantly precisely because, as he argues, it furnishes the words for every state of the soul; the Christian who prays the kathismata is doing exactly what the letter describes — looking into the mirror of the Psalms and learning to bring the whole of himself before God. On the structure and discipline of this daily psalmody, see Orthodoxy Guide: The Prayer Rule.

The Appendix Tradition in Orthodox Psalters

The Letter to Marcellinus has a concrete afterlife in the physical books of Orthodox prayer. From at least the eleventh century, abbreviated forms of the letter were attached to manuscript psalters as a preface or appendix, adapted to serve as a practical guide to the recitation of the psalms — telling the user which psalm answers to which need (Ekblad and others have documented this prefatory use in Byzantine psalters of the period). The tradition has continued: many printed Orthodox psalters (such as the widely used Holy Transfiguration Monastery Psalter According to the Seventy) carry, among their appended materials on how to read the Psalter, matter descended from or modeled on Athanasius’s letter — chiefly the schedule of which psalms to read in which circumstances. The bishop’s pastoral assignments have thus become, in effect, part of the apparatus by which Orthodox Christians are taught to pray the Psalter.

See Also

References

  • Athanasius of Alexandria. The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus. Trans. Robert C. Gregg. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. (Letter to Marcellinus, esp. §§10–12 and the section of psalm assignments.)
  • Athanasius of Alexandria. Epistula ad Marcellinum de interpretatione Psalmorum [PG 27:11–46].
  • The Psalter According to the Seventy. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1974 (and later printings). (Appended materials on the reading of the Psalter.)
  • Kolbet, Paul R. “Athanasius, the Psalms, and the Reformation of the Self.” Harvard Theological Review 99 (2006): 85–101.