The Psalter for the Departed and the Slavonic Psalter

Two customs above all embedded the Psalter in the life of the Orthodox peoples. The Psalter is read continuously over the body of the departed from death until burial, and in monasteries the “unsleeping Psalter” is chanted without ceasing for the living and the dead. And in the Slavic lands the Psalter — with the Book of Hours — was the very primer from which the faithful learned to read, so that to become literate was, quite literally, to learn the Psalter. This file follows the Psalter to the deathbed and the schoolroom.

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

The Psalter over the Departed

When an Orthodox Christian dies, the Psalter is read beside the body. From the moment of death until the funeral, the custom — especially strong in the Russian and Slavic tradition — is that the Psalter be read continuously over the departed, the kathismata following one upon another day and night, interrupted at each division by prayers for the repose of the soul (the rite is provided in the liturgical Psalter and the funeral books; see Hapgood, Service Book; and hub, Orthodoxy: Eschatology, on Russian eschatological piety). Family, friends, and readers take turns at the reading, so that the body is never left without the psalms, and the departed is accompanied, as it were, by the same prayer he prayed in life. The practice joins the Psalter to the whole Orthodox care for the dead — the commemorations of the third, ninth, and fortieth days, the sorokoust or forty-day cycle of remembrance, and the memorial services (pannikhidy) — all of which rest on the belief that the prayers of the living avail for the departed (see Orthodoxy: Eschatology; METHODOLOGY §4.1: the Church’s prayer for the dead is presented as her teaching, distinct from the Roman doctrine of purgatory).

Why the Psalter, of all books, for the dead? Because it is the book of the whole human condition before God — of the soul in the depths crying to be heard (Ps 129), of trust in the God who leads through the valley of the shadow (Ps 22), of the hope that the departed will yet praise the Lord in the land of the living (Ps 114–115). To read the Psalter over the dead is to lend the departed the Church’s own voice for the passage he can no longer make in his own words, and to keep the living in prayer and vigil rather than in mere mourning.

The Unsleeping Psalter

The monastic tradition extended this continuous psalmody into a permanent institution: the “unsleeping Psalter” (Greek akoimētos, “unsleeping”; Slavonic neusypaemaya Psaltir’), the ceaseless reading of the Psalter by relays of monks so that the psalms are never silent, day or night, year upon year. Monks read in shifts around the clock, each taking a stretch of kathismata and inserting the commemorations of the living and the departed who have been entrusted to the community’s prayer. The custom recalls the ancient Akoimētai, the “Sleepless Ones,” a fifth-century Constantinopolitan monastic movement organized precisely for unceasing liturgical prayer in rotating choirs (the Akoimētai are attested in the fifth-century sources and the Life of St. Alexander the Sleepless). To have one’s name inscribed for commemoration at the unsleeping Psalter of a monastery is, in Orthodox piety, among the surest of the Church’s prayers — the psalms offered for one continuously, without pause, as long as the reading endures.

The Slavonic Psalter

Among the Slavs the Psalter attained a place in the common life that went beyond even its liturgical and funerary use: it became the book of literacy itself. The Psalter was among the very first books rendered into Slavonic — the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century translated the Psalter along with the Gospels and the liturgical texts, and it circulated in Slavonic from the beginnings of Slavic Christianity (see Orthodoxy: The Byzantine Church, for the Cyrillo-Methodian mission). Copied more often than any other book, owned where nothing else was owned, and known by heart across the Orthodox Slavic world, the Slavonic Psaltir’ became the staple of both church and home.

Above all, it became the schoolbook. For centuries in Rus’ and the other Slavic Orthodox lands, the standard course of learning to read ran from the alphabet primer (azbuka) to the Book of Hours (Chasoslov) and then to the Psalter (Psaltir’): a child learned his letters, then learned to read on the fixed texts of the Hours, and then read the Psalter — so that the acquisition of literacy was, quite literally, the learning of the Church’s prayer, and the first coherent book most Russians ever read was the Psalter (this is a commonplace of the histories of early Slavic and Russian literacy and education; see, e.g., Simon Franklin, Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300, Cambridge University Press, 2002, on the Psalter and Horologion in reading instruction). The consequence ran deep: generations grew up with the psalms as the very substance of their reading, phrases of the Psalter woven into ordinary speech, and the whole book carried in the memory of even the unlettered, who had heard it in church and at every graveside. The Psalter was not, for such a culture, a specialist’s text but the common inheritance and the first literature of the whole people.

The Following Psalter

The intimacy of the Psalter with the office is embodied in a book widely used in Slavic and Greek practice: the Following Psalter (Greek Psaltērion meta tēs akolouthias; Slavonic Psaltir’s vosledovaniem, the “Psalter with the sequel”). This volume binds together in one book the liturgical Psalter and the essentials of the Horologion — the psalms with their kathismata and the fixed order of the daily services — sometimes with the troparia, the paschal service, and other frequently needed material added. It is, in effect, a portable office: with a Following Psalter a reader has both the psalmody and the framework to pray Vespers, the Hours, Compline, and the Midnight Office, whether in choir or in the cell (the Following Psalter as a standard book of Slavic and Greek use; see The Horologion and the Psalter). Its very existence testifies to the truth this collection has traced from the beginning: that for the Orthodox Church the Psalter and the office are not two things but one — the Psalter being the office’s substance, and the office the Psalter prayed in its appointed hours.

References

Hapgood, Isabel Florence. Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church. Various editions. (The rite of reading the Psalter over the departed and the funeral services.)
Franklin, Simon. Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
A Psalter for Prayer. Trans. David James. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications, 2011. (Includes the offices for the departed and prayers accompanying the reading of the Psalter.)
The Psalter According to the Seventy. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1974; rev. ed.
On the Akoimētai (“Sleepless” monks): the fifth-century Life of St. Alexander the Sleepless and the standard studies of early Constantinopolitan monasticism.