The Fathers in Praise of the Psalms

No book of Scripture drew warmer praise from the Fathers than the Psalter. St. Athanasius’ Letter to Marcellinus calls the psalms a mirror of the soul and the one book whose words we take as our own; St. Basil’s Homily on Psalm 1 names the psalm the calm of souls and the epitome of all theology; St. Ambrose calls it the gymnasium of the soul. This file gathers the great patristic encomia and asks what they saw in the book.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Why the Fathers Singled Out the Psalter

The Fathers loved all of Scripture, but they praised the Psalter in a distinct register — not only as a source of doctrine but as a school of the soul. Three texts stand at the head of the tradition: St. Athanasius’ Letter to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms, St. Basil the Great’s Homily on Psalm 1, and St. Ambrose of Milan’s prologue to his Explanation of the Psalms. Between them they articulate what the Church has always sensed about the book: that it contains all of Scripture in little, that it is the mirror in which the soul sees itself, and that it is the medicine and gymnasium by which the passions are healed and the person formed for God.

Athanasius: The Psalms as Mirror and as Our Own Words

The single most influential patristic essay on the Psalter is the Letter to Marcellinus of St. Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373), written to a sick friend as a guide to reading and praying the psalms (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus [PG 27:11–46]; trans. Gregg, CWS, 1980). Athanasius makes two claims that have shaped all later Orthodox reflection.

First, the Psalter is an epitome of the whole of Scripture. It “possesses somehow the perfect image for the soul’s course of life,” gathering into itself the narrative of the historical books, the exhortation of the law, the announcements of the prophets, and the counsel of the wisdom writings, but casting all of it in the form of prayer and song (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus 2–8; trans. Gregg). Whatever the other books teach, Athanasius says, “in the Book of Psalms it is possible… to comprehend” the same, but as something to be prayed rather than only read.

Second — and this is the passage the tradition has most treasured — the Psalter is a mirror, and its words become the reader’s own. Athanasius writes that whereas most of Scripture speaks to us, in the Psalms the one who prays “as if they were his own words… recites these things, and… is deeply moved by them”; the psalms are “like a mirror” in which “the movements of our own souls are reflected,” so that a person, “perceiving how they are affected and being thus affected himself” by the psalm he sings, is given both a diagnosis of his condition and a pattern for its healing (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus 11–12; trans. Gregg, CWS, 1980). Elsewhere he offers a practical index, matching states of the soul — fear, despair, thanksgiving, repentance, persecution — to the particular psalms that give them voice (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus 15–26). The result is a spirituality of the Psalter as self-knowledge: to pray the psalms rightly is to have the disordered movements of the heart named, ordered, and offered up. This is the source of the whole Orthodox practice of the Psalter as the primary instrument of the examined and prayerful life (see The Psalms as the Prayer of Christ; Reading the Whole Psalter and the Cell Rule).

Basil: The Psalm as the Calm of Souls

St. Basil the Great (c. 330–379) opens his Homily on Psalm 1 with an encomium that has been quoted in the Orthodox tradition ever since. All Scripture is God-inspired and profitable, Basil grants, but the Book of Psalms is a common treasury of good doctrine that suits every condition. He writes:

“A psalm is the tranquillity of souls, the arbiter of peace, restraining the disorder and turbulence of thoughts, for it softens the passion of the soul and moderates its unruliness… A psalm forms friendships, unites the divided, mediates between enemies… What, indeed, can you not learn from the psalms?” (Basil, Homily on Psalm 1 2 [PG 29:209–228]; trans. Way, FOTC 46, 1963)

Basil’s central insight is pedagogical and pastoral: the Holy Spirit, knowing that human beings resist plain instruction and are slow to accept the toil of virtue, “mingled the delight of melody with doctrines,” so that under the sweetness of the sung psalm we might imperceptibly receive the benefit of the teaching — “just as wise physicians frequently smear the cup with honey when giving the more bitter medicines” (Basil, Homily on Psalm 1 1; trans. Way, FOTC 46). The psalm is thus catechesis that heals while it delights. Basil also gives an early testimony to congregational psalmody as a work of unity: he describes a great church singing the psalms together “with one voice,” young and old, rich and poor, made “one choir” by the psalm — an image the Orthodox office still embodies (Basil, Homily on Psalm 1 2; cf. Basil, Letter 207, on the psalmody of his churches).

Ambrose, Chrysostom, and the Chorus of Praise

The Western Fathers echo the same praise, and the Orthodox tradition receives them gladly (METHODOLOGY §4.1). St. Ambrose of Milan (c. 339–397), in the prologue to his Explanation of the Psalms, calls the Psalter the book in which “the profit of all is gathered together,” distinguishing it from the other Scriptures: “History instructs, the law teaches, prophecy announces, correction censures, morality persuades; in the Book of Psalms there is the profit of all these and a kind of medicine for the salvation of man” (Ambrose, Explanatio Psalmorum XII, prologue to Psalm 1). Ambrose famously asks, “What is more pleasing than a psalm?” (quid psalmo suavius?), and describes the whole people joined in the singing as “a great bond of unity” (Ambrose, Explanatio Psalmorum XII, prol.).

St. John Chrysostom (c. 349–407), the greatest preacher of the East, testifies to the sheer ubiquity of the psalms in Christian life: in the vigils, the funerals, the monasteries, the fields and the homes, “the first, the middle, and the last” is David — his psalms are sung by everyone, in every place and at every age (John Chrysostom, Exposition of Psalm 41 (42), opening; cf. his exegetical homilies on the psalms). Chrysostom’s remark captures the fact behind all these praises: for the early Church the Psalter was not a specialist’s text but the common possession and daily speech of the whole believing people (see The Psalter as the Church’s Prayerbook).

The Psalter in Later Orthodox Piety

The Fathers’ praise passed into the devotional idiom of the Orthodox peoples, above all the Slavs, for whom the Psalter (Slavonic Psaltir’) became at once the school primer, the daily rule, and the book read over the dead — so beloved that a warm affection for it, expressed in sayings that call the Psalter the Christian’s joy and consolation, runs through Russian spiritual literature, though such folk expressions cannot be pinned to a single patristic author and should not be quoted as if they were (see The Psalter for the Departed and the Slavonic Psalter). What can be pinned, and what the Church has carried unbroken from Athanasius and Basil, is the conviction that the Psalter is unlike every other book: the one Scripture that is itself prayer, the mirror of the soul, the medicine of the passions, and the epitome of all that God has revealed. It is this conviction that made the Psalter the skeleton of the whole daily office.

See Also

References

  • Athanasius of Alexandria. Letter to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms [PG 27:11–46]. Trans. Robert C. Gregg, Athanasius: The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
  • Basil the Great. Homily on Psalm 1 [PG 29:209–228]. Trans. Agnes Clare Way, Saint Basil: Exegetic Homilies. Fathers of the Church 46. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963.
  • Ambrose of Milan. Explanatio Psalmorum XII (Explanation of Twelve Psalms), prologue to Psalm 1 [CSEL 64].
  • John Chrysostom. Exposition of the Psalms (Expositiones in Psalmos) [PG 55].
  • Rondeau, Marie-Josèphe. Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier (IIIe–Ve siècles). 2 vols. Orientalia Christiana Analecta 219–220. Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute, 1982–85.