Reading the Whole Psalter and the Cell Rule

The Orthodox tradition reads the Psalter not in fragments but whole — through all 150 psalms in the course of a week in the standard Typikon, and twice each week in Great Lent. Beyond the choir, the Psalter is the backbone of the monastic cell rule, memorized by the desert fathers and prayed daily by monastics ever since, and it stands in a close and ancient relationship with the Jesus Prayer, especially in the Paisian revival. This file follows the Psalter as a rule of life.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (with monastic and Russian emphases)

The Whole Psalter, Week by Week

The governing principle of Orthodox psalmody is completeness: the Church prays not a selection of favourite psalms but the whole Psalter, in order, on a repeating cycle. In the standard (neo-Sabaite) Typikon the 150 psalms, distributed as the twenty kathismata, are read straight through in the course of one week, the kathismata parcelled out between Vespers and Matins across the seven days according to a fixed seasonal table (the Typikon, chapter 17, “On the kathismata throughout the year”; Getcha, The Typikon Decoded, SVS Press, 2012). During Great Lent the pace doubles: the whole Psalter is read through twice each week, additional kathismata being added at the Hours as well as at Vespers and Matins, so that the fast is saturated with psalmody (the Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, 1978, on the Lenten distribution; hub, Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle).

This discipline of reading the whole book expresses the conviction, set out by St. Athanasius, that every psalm has its use and its hour, and that the Christian is to submit to the whole range of the Psalter’s states — its joy and its desolation, its praise and its penitence, even its hardest cries — rather than choose only the psalms that suit his mood (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus 11–26; and see The Psalms as the Prayer of Christ). To pray the Psalter whole is to be enlarged by it.

The Cell Rule

Outside the appointed services, the Psalter is the heart of the monastic cell rule (Slavonic kelейnoe pravilo) — the personal rule of prayer that a monastic keeps privately, in the cell, beyond what is prayed in church. From the beginnings of monasticism the Psalter was its ground. The Egyptian and Palestinian fathers knew the Psalter by heart and recited it continuously at their manual labour and through the watches of the night (John Cassian, Institutes II–III, on the Egyptian psalmody; see The Desert Fathers); the Life of St. Anthony and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers assume the memorized Psalter as the very texture of the ascetic’s day. To “know the Psalter” — to have all 150 by heart — was long the mark of a formed monk, and the reception of a novice often included his learning it.

The Russian monastic and startsy tradition kept this alive and taught it to the laity in measure. St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, in The Arena, devotes a chapter to the cell rule and insists that the Psalter and the Jesus Prayer together form its substance, to be kept faithfully and without self-will (Brianchaninov, The Arena: An Offering to Contemporary Monasticism, trans. Lazarus, Jordanville, 1991, chs. on prayer and the cell rule; and see St. Ignatius Brianchaninov). St. Seraphim of Sarov gave his Diveyevo nuns a short, memorizable rule for those who could not read the full office, and St. Theophan the Recluse repeatedly counsels the reading of the Psalter as the staple of private prayer, adapted in quantity to each person’s strength (Theophan the Recluse, in The Art of Prayer, comp. Chariton, trans. Kadloubovsky and Palmer, 1966; see Orthodoxy: The Prayer Rule; St. Seraphim of Sarov; St. Theophan the Recluse). The principle, common to them all, is that of the office in miniature: a daily portion of the Psalter, prayed with attention, is the layperson’s and the monk’s share in the Church’s ceaseless psalmody.

Psalmody and the Jesus Prayer

The Psalter and the Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” — are the two great poles of Orthodox private prayer, and the tradition holds them in a deliberate relationship rather than in competition (see The Jesus Prayer). Historically the Jesus Prayer arose in the same desert monasticism that memorized the Psalter, and the two were practised together: vocal psalmody for the appointed hours and the shared office, the short repeated invocation for the times of labour, travel, and the intervals between. A long tradition permits the Jesus Prayer, reckoned on the knots of a prayer rope, to stand in for the office when books, literacy, or circumstance make the full psalmody impossible — a given number of prayers and prostrations substituting for each service — so that the unlettered monk and the shepherd on the hills might still keep the Church’s rule (this substitution is provided for in the monastic Typika and Horologia, e.g. the appendix “for those who cannot read”; see Brianchaninov, The Arena).

This relationship was renewed in the eighteenth-century revival associated with St. Paisius (Velichkovsky) (1722–1794), the Moldavian-Ukrainian elder who gathered and translated the writings of the hesychast fathers, producing the Slavonic Dobrotolubiye (the Slavonic Philokalia, 1793) and restoring the practice of the Jesus Prayer, under a spiritual father and within the discipline of psalmody and the fathers’ reading, to the Slavic monastic world (see The Philokalia; Mount Athos). Paisius and his disciples did not set the Jesus Prayer against the Psalter but embedded it in the whole ascetic tradition of which the Psalter was the foundation: the psalms feeding the mind with the words of the Spirit, the Jesus Prayer gathering the mind into the heart. The two together — the Psalter’s fullness of scriptural prayer and the Jesus Prayer’s single-pointed invocation — are the classic shape of the Orthodox life of prayer, and the office and the cell rule are where they meet (see The Psalms as the Prayer of Christ).

The Psalter as Formation

Underlying all of this is the understanding that the Psalter forms the one who prays it. To pray the whole Psalter, repeatedly and by heart, is to have one’s inner speech gradually replaced by the words of the Spirit — so that, in the fathers’ hope, the psalms rise unbidden in the heart, and the Christian comes to think, grieve, rejoice, and repent in the Psalter’s own words. This is why the tradition prizes not the understanding of the psalms only but their memorization and repetition: the Psalter is meant to be so deeply learned that it becomes the person’s own voice, exactly as St. Athanasius said it should — the words we take up “as being our own words” (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus 11). The cell rule is the workshop of that formation, the place where the public office of the Church becomes the private substance of a soul.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. Letter to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms [PG 27:11–46]. Trans. Robert C. Gregg. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
Getcha, Job. The Typikon Decoded. Trans. Paul Meyendorff. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012.
The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978.
Brianchaninov, St. Ignatius. The Arena: An Offering to Contemporary Monasticism. Trans. Archimandrite Lazarus. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1991.
Theophan the Recluse, St. The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology. Comp. Igumen Chariton of Valaam. Trans. E. Kadloubovsky and E. M. Palmer. London: Faber & Faber, 1966.
John Cassian. The Institutes. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. ACW 58. New York: Newman Press, 2000.