The Psalms as the Prayer of Christ

The deepest layer of the Orthodox reading of the Psalter is christological: the psalms are prayed as the very prayer of Christ. The ancient Fathers read them by the prosopological method — asking, at each psalm, whose is the “person” or voice that speaks — and heard in many of them the voice of the Messiah, of the Father addressing the Son, or of the Church united to her Head. The Western tradition summed this in Augustine’s totus Christus, “the whole Christ, head and body,” praying the psalms. This file sets out how the tradition hears Christ in the Psalter.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Christ the Key to the Psalter

The Orthodox Church prays the psalms as Christian, not merely as Israelite, prayer, and the ground of that reading is Christ’s own use of the Psalter. The risen Lord opened the disciples’ minds to understand “all things which were written… in the psalms concerning me” (Luke 24:44); he prayed the psalms in his agony and death (Ps 21:1 on the Cross, Matthew 27:46; Ps 30:6, Luke 23:46); and he taught that David “in spirit” called the Messiah “Lord” (Ps 109:1; Matthew 22:43–45). The apostolic preaching followed him, reading Psalms 2, 15, 109, and others as prophecies of Christ’s resurrection and enthronement (Acts 2:25–35; 4:25–26; Hebrews 1:5–13; see The Psalter as the Church’s Prayerbook). For the Church, then, Christ is the key to the Psalter, and to pray the psalms is to enter his own prayer.

The Prosopological Method

The Fathers developed a precise instrument for this reading, which modern scholarship, following Marie-Josèphe Rondeau, calls prosopological exegesis (from Greek prosōpon, “person, face, character”). Faced with a psalm, the interpreter asks: whose is the voice speaking here? — for the “I” of a psalm is not always David in his own person. Sometimes it is David; sometimes the prophet speaks in the person (prosōpon) of the coming Christ; sometimes the Father is heard addressing the Son, or the Son the Father; sometimes the voice is that of the Church, or of the individual believer united to Christ (Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier (IIIe–Ve siècles), 2 vols., OCA 219–220, 1982–85, the standard study of the method). The method is not arbitrary allegory but a disciplined attention to voice and address, and it is one of the oldest tools of Christian exegesis.

Its roots are in the second century: St. Justin Martyr already reads whole psalms as spoken by Christ or by the Father to Christ (Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, on Psalms 21 and 109). It was elaborated by Origen and Eusebius of Caesarea, and it structures the great psalm-commentaries of the fourth and fifth centuries — those of St. Athanasius, Didymus, St. Basil, Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and St. Cyril of Alexandria (Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier, 1982–85). St. Athanasius’ Letter to Marcellinus gives the method a practical form for the ordinary reader: he supplies an index of which psalms answer which needs of the soul, and marks those in which “the Saviour is signified” — the psalms of the Passion (21), the Resurrection (15), the Ascension and the Kingdom (23, 46, 109) — so that the reader may pray them knowing whose voice he is joining (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus 5–8, 15–26; trans. Gregg, 1980). Even the Antiochene exegetes, cautious of allegory and insistent on the historical David, retained a christological core: Diodore and Theodore restricted the number of directly messianic psalms but affirmed that a class of psalms speaks properly of Christ (see the Antioch–Alexandria discussion in The Orthodox Scriptures).

The Whole Christ: Augustine’s Totus Christus

The Western tradition gave this christological reading its most famous formula, and the Orthodox knowledge base receives it gladly as good theology, reporting it in its own terms (METHODOLOGY §4.1). In his vast Expositions of the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos), St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) reads the Psalter as the prayer of the totus Christus — “the whole Christ, Head and body,” Christ together with his Church. Christ prays the psalms, Augustine teaches, sometimes in the person of the Head (as God, or as the sinless man), and sometimes in the person of the Body, taking upon his lips the words of his members — even their confession of sin and their cries of abandonment — because Head and Body are one Christ, and “when the members speak, Christ speaks” (Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, e.g. on Psalms 30 and 62; the totus Christus is the governing principle of the whole work). Thus the psalm of desolation is prayed by Christ in the voice of his suffering members; the psalm of penitence is offered by the Head who bore the sins of the Body; the psalm of praise rises from the whole Christ to the Father. Augustine’s formula names what the Eastern prosopological reading also practised: that the psalms are the prayer of Christ inseparably from the prayer of the Church that is his Body.

Praying with the Voice of Christ

This is not a matter of exegetical theory only but of how the psalms are prayed in the office. The liturgical use of the psalms is saturated with the christological reading: the prokeimena, antiphons, and verses selected for the feasts are chosen because the tradition hears Christ in them — Psalm 117 at Pascha (“This is the day which the Lord hath made”), Psalm 109 at the Ascension, Psalm 2 and Psalm 71 at the Nativity. When the Church prays “The Lord is my light and my saviour” (Ps 26) or “My God, my God, look upon me” (Ps 21), she prays with the voice of Christ and, in him, finds her own voice taken up and redeemed. This is the answer to a question the Psalter naturally raises — how a Christian is to pray, as his own, words written a thousand years before Christ by an Israelite king. The answer of the tradition is that in Christ these words have become the Church’s own: Christ has made David’s prayer his prayer, and in Christ it becomes ours (see Orthodoxy: Christology; The Fathers in Praise of the Psalms).

The christological reading is also what makes it possible to pray the whole Psalter — including its darkest and hardest psalms — as Christian prayer. If the psalms are the prayer of Christ and his Body, then the psalm of the abandoned (Ps 87) is prayed in union with the Christ who was forsaken, and even the psalms that seem to curse can be read within the mystery of Christ’s own struggle against evil — which is the subject of the next file (see The Imprecatory Psalms and the Honesty of Lament).

See Also

References

  • Rondeau, Marie-Josèphe. Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier (IIIe–Ve siècles). 2 vols. Orientalia Christiana Analecta 219–220. Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute, 1982–85.
  • 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.
  • Augustine of Hippo. Expositions of the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos) [PL 36–37; CCSL 38–40]. Trans. Maria Boulding, Works of Saint Augustine III/15–20. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000–2004.
  • Justin Martyr. Dialogue with Trypho. In ANF, vol. 1.
  • Daley, Brian E. “Is Patristic Exegesis Still Usable? Some Reflections on Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms.” In The Art of Reading Scripture, ed. Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.