The value of the Psalter

From Liturgical Notes, a reminder of the importance of the Psalms. The Psalms for many are an elusive part of the Bible not fully understood, but often considered beautiful or evocative. I wholeheartedly champion reading the Psalms and recommend Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon's Christ in the Psalms.

---

Since we make an undertaking before God as we sing, I shall meditate on your judgments, I shall not neglect your words, it is essential to our salvation that every Christian should observe these things, but more especially those who have been invested with priestly dignity. Therefore we decree that everyone who is to be advanced to the grade of bishop should have a thorough knowledge of the Psalter, in order that he may instruct all the clergy subordinate to him, to be initiated in that book.

- Second Council of Nicea, Canon 2

From Liturgical Notes...

St. Gregory the Great once refused to consecrate a man to the episcopate because of a certain inadequacy on the candidate's part; indeed, the same specific inadequacy would prevent the great S Gennadius Patriarch of Constantinople from ordaining any clerk. Such pontifical intransigence received conciliar endorsement: from Nicea II, not to mention Toledo VIII (653) and Oviedo (1050).

The inadequacy alleged? Not being able to repeat the entire Psalter by heart. And evidence survives, from throughout the first Christian millennium, from Palestine in the East (where S Jerome says that the common people sang them 'like pop songs' as they went about their labours) to the 'Celtic' West (S Patrick recited the Psalter daily), among all Christian classes, of the popularity of the Psalter and the ubiquity of its use both within and outside the Liturgy.

We are amazed at such feats of memory; and it is very useful for us all - but particularly academics, who can be so very narrow-minded - to recall the capacity of the memory in societies basically oral (this point pretty well subverts most of the 'New Testament Scholarship' of the twentieth century, from the Great Synoptic Non-Problem onwards). But I wish to make different points.

This use of the Psalter drives home the importance in the Christian life of being soaked, saturated in texts, so that they are part of one's being. That is why the cheerful twentieth century passion for 'Liturgical Reform', of the most radical kind, was so misplaced. And liturgical scholars need to be rather quicker at spotting echoes of the psalms in euchological texts. It is only in my seventh decade that I have become really aware how very many of the collects in the Latin Sacramentaries have a verse from a psalm as their starting-point.

But - most important of all - we need to recover a sense of the Christological meaning that Tradition sees in so many psalms*. They are not dusty old Jewish texts whose prominence in traditional worship is an embarrassment**. In some, we speak of Christ or to Him; in others, Christ Himself prays to the Father and we are incorporated into His Prayer.

* It is notorious that the first psalm in the book is taken Christologically by the Tradition; which is why modern 'translations' which obscure this are so reprehensible. 'Blessed is the Man' says the Hebrew, using the word which refers to the masculine human (ish). But the heretics render 'Blessed are they'. Curiously, when it is a matter of the Foolish Man saying in his heart that there is no God, heretical 'translators' sometimes lose their enthusiasm for gender-free language ... even though in this case there is no Hebrew justification for 'man'!

** There is a well-worn story of a Tractarian Vicar explaining to a recalcitrant yokel that the Psalter was the Early Church's Hymn Book, to be told that this was a very fine reason why we should be so glad of the demise of the Early Church.