Letter to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms

Athanasius of Alexandria wrote this short letter to a man named Marcellinus who was recovering from illness and had used his convalescence to study Scripture, the Psalms above all. Marcellinus wanted to understand what he was reading, and Athanasius answers not with his own exegesis but by reporting what he had once heard from an elderly man devoted to the Psalter. The Epistula ad Marcellinum was valued early and widely: it was copied as a preface to the Psalms in the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, one of the great complete Greek Bibles, and it survives among Athanasius's Greek works.

The argument begins by placing the Psalter inside the whole canon. The Psalms, Athanasius says, are like a garden in which the fruit of every other book grows: the creation of Genesis, the exodus, the law, the kingdoms, the prophets are all sung again here. But the Psalter has a grace the other books lack. Where the rest of Scripture tells the reader what to do or what happened, the Psalms give the reader words to say. One who hears the Psalms recognizes the motions of his own soul in them and takes them up as his own speech, so that the book becomes a mirror in which a person sees himself and learns to pray. Athanasius pairs this with a Christological reading: the Psalms foretell the Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension, and the Lord himself speaks through them. He then offers a long practical guide, matching particular psalms to particular situations: being pursued, giving thanks, confessing sin, facing enemies, praising at the Sabbath, needing courage. He explains why the Psalms are sung rather than merely read. Melody is not for pleasure; it expresses and produces harmony in the soul, so that the person who sings rightly orders his thoughts like a well-tuned instrument. The letter ends with a warning not to replace the inspired words with more elegant phrases of one's own, because the demons are driven away by the words themselves, not by human cleverness.

The letter has endured because it states, more plainly than almost any other patristic text, why Christians pray the Psalms rather than simply study them, and it has shaped monastic and liturgical practice ever since. Its claim that the Psalter voices every condition of the human heart, and does so in the mouth of Christ, is the root from which later theologies of the Divine Office grow.

Who should read this: anyone who prays the Psalms daily and wants to know what the practice is for, pastors and lay readers introducing others to the Psalter, and students of early Christian spirituality seeking a brief primary source. It is not a verse-by-verse commentary, and readers wanting historical-critical treatment of the Psalms or Athanasius's doctrinal polemics should look elsewhere.