Proclaimer Blog
Athanasius on the unique place of the psalms
Here's some church history to gladden your Monday morning. It's from Athanasius' letter to Marcellinus. Marcellinus has been ill, and using his illness “to study the whole body of the Holy Scriptures and especially the Psalms. Of every one of those… you are trying to grasp the inner force and sense. Splendid!”
The uniqueness of the Psalms
- Athanasius describes each book of the bible as “like a garden which grows one special kind of fruit; by contrast, the Psalter is a garden which, besides its special fruit, grows also those of all the rest.”
- Of the uniqueness of the Psalter, he also writes this: “besides the characteristics which it shares with (the other bible books), it has this peculiar marvel of its own, that within it are represented and portrayed in all their great variety the movements of the human soul. It is like a picture, in which you see yourself portrayed, and seeing, may understand and consequently form yourself upon the pattern given.” In it “you learn about yourself. You find depicted in it all the movements of your soul, all its changes, its ups and downs, its failures and recoveries.”
- Then he goes on to “yet another strange thing about the Psalms”, which is that we not only hear “the words of holy men as belonging to those who spoke them”, but “it is as though it were one’s own words that one read; and anyone who hears them is moved at heart, as though they voiced for him his deepest thoughts.” So, in the Psalms, “the reader takes all its words upon his lips as though they were his own, and each one sings the Psalms as though they had been written for his special benefit, and takes them and recites them, not as though someone else were speaking or another person’s feelings being described, but as himself speaking of himself, offering the words to God as his own heart’s utterance, just as though he himself had made them up.”
- What is more, when one sings them, “he cannot help but render them in such a manner that their words go home with equal force to those who hear him sing, and stir them also to a like reaction” – whether it be repentance, hope and trust, joy, lament, praise, or whatever. So “just as in a mirror, the movements of our own souls are reflected in them and the words are indeed our very own, given to us to serve both as a reminder of our changes of condition and as a pattern and model for the amendment of our lives.”
- Also, the Psalms help us more deeply to understand Christ, for “before He came among us, He sketched the likeness of this perfect life for us in words, in this same book of Psalms”.