Brian Daley, “Is Patristic Exegesis Still Usable?: Reflections on Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms,” Communio 29 (Spring 2002) 185-216. 204-211

[...] 2. Patristic Exegesis of the Psalms

For the early Church, the Book of Psalms was clearly one of the most important and familiar books of the Bible. Early Christian com­mentaries on the Psalms easily exceed in number those on any other book of the Old or New Testament; we still possess partial or complete sets of homilies or scholarly commentaries on the Psalms—sometimes more than one set—by at least twenty-one Latin or Greek Patristic authors, and this interest did not abate in the medieval Church. The main reason, undoubtedly, was the fact that the Psalms were in constant use, both in public worship and in more private forms of prayer and meditation. How the Christian liturgical use of the Biblical Psalms began remains a matter of scholarly debate.[1] By the mid-fourth century, at any rate, a synod at Laodicaea in Phrygia could lay down as a canon, "It is not permitted that privately composed psalms or non-canonical books be read out in Church, but only the canonical books of the New and Old Testament."[2]

With the meteoric rise of monasticism and ascetical piety during the fourth century, the recitation and chanting of the Psalms grew to be the mainstay of Christian daily prayer, both private and communal; "meditation" – the quiet, ruminative "chewing" on the words of the Psalms – was recommended by many spiritual guides as the most effec- [end of p. 204] tive spiritual weapon against inner demons, a medicine for diseased thoughts.[3] The desert monks seem to have learned large portions of the Psalter, in some cases even the whole of it, by heart, and to have prayed the Psalms constantly as they worked. Epiphanius of Salamis, the pugnacious defender of orthodoxy of the late fourth century, is said to have chided a Palestinian abbot for allowing his monks to restrict their psalmody to three canonical hours, "for the true monk should have prayer and psalmody in his heart with no interruption."[4]

Basil of Caesaraea prefaced his homily on Psalm 1—which was probably conceived as the beginning of a continuous series—with a celebrated encomium on the powers of the Psalter to change the human heart and shape Christian community. In Basil's view, it is the role of poetry and music in the Psalms that gives them their distinctive power, and makes their teaching—which they share with the rest of the Bible—uniquely accessible:

When the Holy Spirit saw that the human race was guided only with difficulty toward virtue, and that, because of [end of p. 205] our inclination toward pleasure, we were neglectful of an upright life, what did he do? The delight of melody he min­gled with the doctrines, so that by the pleasantness and softness of the sound heard we might receive without perceiving it the benefit of the words, just as wise physi­cians who, when giving the fastidious rather bitter drugs to drink, frequently smear the cup with honey.[5]

The fullest and most original ancient Christian explanation of the peculiar character of the Psalter, within the books of the Bible, is undoubtedly Athanasius' Letter to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms, a work so highly valued in antiquity that it was included in the early-fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus of the Greek Bible, as the introduction to the Book of Psalms. Athanasius presents his essay as embodying the teaching he received from "a scholarly old man,” [6] a geron—presumably meant to be an abba from the Egyptian desert; by this device, he situates his own explanation of the peculiar character and "grace" of the Psalter within the thought-world of the monastic use of Scripture. Athanasius begins by suggesting, as Basil would soon do, that the actual thematic content of the Psalms is not different from that of the other books, but rather "contains in itself what is found in all of them, like a garden, and expresses them in song."[7] Whatever the rest of the Bible has to offer—narratives of God's great deeds of the past, prophetic warning, moral teaching, even foreshadowings of Christ—can be found, in poetic form, in the Book of Psalms. What is distinctive about the Psalter in relation to other books, is its more personal, emotional element, which allows the reader to identify the message with him or herself: "it contains within itself the movements of each soul, their changes and adjustments, written out and thoroughly portrayed, so that if someone should wish to grasp himself from it, as from an image, and to understand on that basis how to shape himself, it is written [end of p. 206] there.”[8] The point of portraying the whole range of human spiritual "movements" or emotions, Athanasius goes on to explain, is not simply poetic imitation, mimesis, but therapy; the person who recognizes his own inner state in the Psalms "can possess from this, once again, the image contained in the words, so that he does not simply hear them and move on, but learns what one must say and do to heal one's disordered feelings."[9] The Psalms, in other words, do not simply command us to repent of our sins, to bear suffering patiently, or to praise God for his gifts; they actually give us the words by which we can say and do these things for ourselves.[10]

For this, once again, is the curious thing about the Psalms: that in reading the other books lectors tend to proclaim the sayings of the holy authors, whatever subjects they are talking about, as concerning those about whom the books are written, and listeners understand that they themselves are different people from those dealt with in the text ... But while the person who takes up this book will certainly marvel, in the same way as in other books, at the prophecies concerning the Savior, and will make an act of adoration and read on, still he will read out the rest of the Psalms as if they are his own words; and the one who hears them will be deeply moved, as if he himself were speaking, and will be affected by the words of these songs as if they were his own.[11]

Athanasius's argument, in this central section of his work, is that in becoming "like a mirror to the one singing them,”[12] the Psalms not [end of p. 207] only lead us to deeper knowledge of ourselves, but change us in the process, acting as a providential corrective to the imbalance of our desires and emotions. In hearing and singing them as our own prayers, in recognizing our present needs and deepest longings in them, we allow them subtly to reshape our inner life to conform with God's own Word; "for what Psalm-singers express in words can become forms and models of ourselves." And Athanasius recognizes in this mimetic, modeling role of the Psalms an anticipation of the Incarnation: just as the Word, in becoming one of us, not only taught us how to live by his words, but "did what he taught," providing us with a living image of "perfect virtue" in his own life,

For the same reason, even before his life among us, he made this resound from the lips of those who sing the Psalms. Just as he revealed the model of the earthly and the heavenly human being in himself, so also anyone who wishes can learn in the Psalms about the motions and conditions of souls, and can find in them the remedy and corrective measure for each of these motions.[13]

Towards the end of the treatise, Athanasius draws on^- Hellenistic music theory to argue that the reason the Psalms are sung, and not simply read—besides the fact that this adds "breadth" and solemnity to our praise of God—is to enable them to create a harmony and order in our inner selves that parallels the harmony the Logos, as creator and sustainer, perpetually secures in the nniverse.[14]

For just as we recognize the thoughts of the soul, and signify them through the words [of the Psalms] we utter, so the Lord wishes that the song that springs forth from the words should be a symbol of spiritual harmony in the soul, and has decreed that the Odes be sung to melodies, and the Psalms also be chanted musically.[15] [end of p. 208]

Athanasius's treatment of the Psalms—as a God-given means of restoring the vital inner balance of the human person through images of both the diseased and the reformed self assimilated by means of words, ideas, and music—remains largely concerned with their effect on the individual, especially on the individual monk living in a community of prayer, introspection and ascetic struggle. In Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos, on the other hand, we find ourselves in a more diverse and more explicitly ecclesial context. Although Augustine himself lived, after his baptism, virtually for the rest of his life in a community—first with other servi Dei, later with his own clergy—his interpretation of the Psalms, like that of Hilary and probably that of Ambrose, was mainly offered in the context of liturgical preaching, before "ordinary" Christian congregations: his own at Hippo Regius, and those other congregations to which he was often invited as preacher, especially that of the Provincial basilica at Carthage. The Psalms on which he preaches seem at times to have been part of a seasonal lectionary cycle, at times to have been specifically chosen, individually or as a series, as occasional texts.

Augustine's own spiritual vocabulary, in fact, seems to have been shaped by the Psalter from his earliest days as a committed Christian. The Psalms provide many of the themes and phrases that form the complex literary tissue of the Confessions, for instance; Henry Chadwick, in the perceptive introduction to his translation of the work, remarks that, from the first paragraph on, "Augustine can express Neoplatonic themes in language which sounds like a pastiche of the Psalter."[16] In describing his own spiritual transformation during his withdrawal at Cassiciacum in the months before his baptism, Augustine reflects, in Book IX, on the new, ardent voice the Psalms provided for his own "burning" conversations with God, and calls them "songs of faith, sounds of devotion that banished heaviness of spirit;"[17] one of the effects of his decision to enroll for baptism, in fact, he seems to suggest, [end of p. 209] was his new sensitivity to the consoling effects of the Psalms, and to their ability to heal the "swelling tumor of pride" in a way that Neopla­tonic philosophy, for all its speculative power, had never been able to do. Yet this highly personal relationship to the Psalms generally yields place, in the verse-by-verse commentaries Augustine wrote or preached as bishop, to a more public, collective reading that consistently focuses the audience's attention on a more complex understanding of the speaker of the Psalms: as Christ, key to all Christian understanding of the Scriptures, and as the Church, his body, in whom and for whom he continues to pray.[18]

In the opening paragraph of his homily on Psalm 40 (41), for instance—one of the prayers of a person in distress which was apparently delivered in Carthage on the feast of some martyrs, Augustine begins by observing that it is appropriate that "we hear some­thing in this Psalm which pertains to [Christ's] passion."

We have often observed (he continues), and we have no hesitation in repeating what it is useful for you to keep in mind, that our Lord Jesus Christ often speaks on his own that is, in his own person, as our head—and often in the person of his body, which is ourselves and his Church. But he does so in such a way that the words are spoken as if by one person's mouth, that we might understand that head and body exist together in integral unity, and are never separate from each other—like that marriage bond, of which it is written, "They shall be two in one flesh." If, then, we recognize two in one flesh, let us recognize two in one voice![19] [end of p. 210]

In his homily on Psalm 85 (86), Augustine puts this identification of Christ, David and ourselves in the Psalter in still more dramatic terms:

God could give no greater gift to the human race than to make his Word, by whom he created all things, their head, and to join them to him as his body, so that he might be both Son of God and Son of Man, one God with the Father, one human being with humanity. So when we speak to God in prayer, we do not separate him from his Son; and when the body of the Son prays, its head does not separate himself from it; rather, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is himself the single Savior of his body, who both prays for us, prays in us, and is prayed to by us. He prays for us as our priest; he prays in us as our head; he is prayed to by us as our God. Let us, then, recognize our voices in him, and his voices in us.[20]

With a restless, interactive rhetorical brilliance typical of his preaching style, Augustine develops, in these and many similar passages, a hermeneutical principle that was to remain dominant in later Western interpretation of the Psalms through the time of the Reformation,[21] rooted in the central Christian doctrine of the Incarnation: the speaker of these Scriptural prayers, providentially given to us by the Spirit to be the voices by which we speak to God, is at once the "original" author (David or some other Biblical figure), the private user—pouring out his or her anguish or exultation in phrases both universally human and strikingly concrete—the Church as a unified liturgical subject, and Christ Jesus, the Word made flesh, who has himself cried out to God in abandonment[22] and who now stands gloriously in the presence of God as our intercessor, and in the midst of the Church as its Lord[23] As Scriptural prayer, constantly in use by Christians in both private and public set­tings, the Psalms were traditionally seen in the West, from Augustine to Luther and beyond, as both peculiarly in need of such explanation and peculiarly open to such an approach. [end of p. 211]