Praying the Psalms

This section treats not the mechanics of the office but the art of praying the psalms — how the tradition actually reads what it prays. The first file sets out the christological reading: the psalms prayed as the very prayer of Christ, through the ancient prosopological method and (reported from the West) Augustine’s totus Christus. The second faces the hardest question the Psalter poses — the imprecatory psalms, the curses and the “infants of Babylon” — and shows how the fathers pray them, alongside the psalms’ unflinching honesty about anger and lament.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Overview

The Psalter is not a comfortable book. It contains the heights of praise and the depths of desolation, and it contains verses that seem to curse — that bless the one who dashes an enemy’s infants against the rock. The Church prays all of it, and she has always known she cannot pray it naively. This section treats the interpretive practices by which the tradition prays the psalms as Christian prayer: the reading of the psalms as the words of Christ himself (the foundation of all Orthodox psalmody), and the ascetic and christological transposition by which even the imprecatory psalms become prayer against the passions and the demons rather than against human enemies. These are not evasions of the text but the tradition’s disciplined way of praying the whole Psalter with integrity.

Files

File Description
the-psalms-as-the-prayer-of-christ.md The christological reading; prosopological exegesis (who is speaking in the psalm?); Augustine’s totus Christus reported from the West; the psalms as Christ’s own prayer
the-imprecatory-psalms-and-the-honesty-of-lament.md The curses and “the infants of Babylon” read of the passions dashed on Christ the Rock; the honesty of anger and lament; why the Church prays the whole Psalter

See Also