Basil the Greaton the Psalms
Homily on Psalm 1 and Letter 207 · A South Florida Psalter Reader’s Edition
About This Reader’s Edition
Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–379), known as Basil the Great, was one of the most influential pastors and theologians of the fourth-century church. The two works gathered here show two complementary sides of his understanding of the Psalms. In his Homily on Psalm 1, Basil explains why God gave the Psalter to the church and why its words were joined to music. In Letter 207, written amid controversy, he describes how Christians in his own churches actually gathered to pray and sing the Psalms together.
This is a reader’s version rather than a new critical translation. The aim is to preserve Basil’s argument, images, theological emphases, and movement of thought while removing archaic English, simplifying difficult constructions, and supplying brief transitions where necessary. The underlying works are Basil’s Homily on Psalm 1 and Letter 207 to the clergy of Neocaesarea.
Why God Gave Us the Psalms
A Reader’s Version of Basil’s Homily on Psalm 1
Every part of Scripture has been inspired by God and is useful to us. But the different books teach us in different ways. The prophets announce what is to come. The historical books tell us what has happened. The Law teaches us how we should live. Proverbs offers counsel for ordinary life.
The Book of Psalms, however, gathers together what is useful from all of them. It foretells what is to come. It recalls the events of the past. It gives laws for life. It teaches us what we ought to do. In short, it brings together every kind of instruction and gives us a complete treasury for the soul.
The Holy Spirit knew how difficult it can be for us to receive instruction. We are often careless about what is good for us. We resist the very things that could heal us.
Think of a wise physician. When he must give bitter medicine to a sick person, he may coat the cup with something sweet so that the patient will willingly take what he needs. In much the same way, the Holy Spirit joined the delight of melody to the teachings of the Psalms. While we enjoy the beauty of the song, we receive the benefit of the words almost without realizing it.
This is why the Psalms are sung.
Most people do not leave church remembering a commandment from the apostles or a teaching from the prophets word for word. But the words of the Psalms are different. People sing them at home. They carry them into the marketplace. Someone who has become angry may begin singing a Psalm, and before long the melody itself begins to calm the disorder within him.
What a wise invention of the Holy Spirit! He found a way for instruction to become delightful. Through singing, his teaching is engraved more deeply into our souls.
A teaching that is forced upon us does not usually remain with us for long. But what we receive with delight and pleasure takes root. The melody causes the words to remain in the memory, and the truth carried by the words settles into the heart.
What, then, can the Psalms not give you?
They give you courage. They give you justice. They teach self-control. They give wisdom. They show you how to repent. They teach patience. They give you every good thing you can name.
In the Psalms you learn the knowledge of God. You hear prophecies concerning Christ. You learn of the resurrection. You learn about judgment. You hear the hope of glory. You encounter the mysteries of God.
Everything is gathered here, as though in one great treasury available to all.
And the Psalter does something else. It creates peace.
A Psalm quiets the soul. It brings peace to our restless thoughts. It restrains anger and brings our desires under control. It creates friendship. It reconciles those who have been separated. It can even turn enemies into companions.
For who can continue to regard another person as an enemy when the two of them have joined their voices together before God?
Psalm singing therefore gives us one of the greatest of all blessings: love. It invents a kind of bond that joins people together. It gathers a divided people into the harmony of one choir.
The Psalm drives demons away and brings the help of angels near. It is a weapon against the fears of the night and a rest from the labor of the day. It gives security to children, dignity to the old, comfort to the elderly, and beauty to women. It makes deserts into homes and teaches communities how to live together.
It is the first lesson for beginners and a continuing strength for those who have grown mature. It is the voice of the Church.
The Psalms make our celebrations bright. They produce the sorrow that leads us back to God. Even a hard heart can be moved to tears by a Psalm.
You can hear the Psalm everywhere.
At night people sing it. During the day they sing it. In their homes they sing it. In the public square they sing it. Those who have learned to live with the Psalms carry them with them wherever they go.
And something remarkable happens when we sing. The commandments of God do not merely remain outside us as instructions. We make the words our own. We take them onto our lips. We speak them before God.
This is the wisdom of the Spirit: he teaches us while we sing.
So the Psalter is not simply a collection of beautiful religious songs. It is a school for the soul. God has placed within it the truth we need, and he has wrapped that truth in music so that we will love it, remember it, repeat it, and finally be formed by it.
Now let us turn to the opening words of the Psalm: “Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly.”
The Psalter begins by setting blessedness before us. Like the foundation of a house, the keel of a ship, or the heart within a body, this brief beginning supports what follows. Since many struggles and labors will appear in the Psalms, the promised blessedness is shown first so that hope of the good things prepared for us may strengthen us to endure.
The order of the verse also matters. Three acts are set before us to guard against: walking in the counsel of the ungodly, standing in the way of sinners, and sitting in the seat of destructive people. The sequence is not accidental.
First comes counsel; then the will is strengthened; finally a person becomes settled in what has been chosen. What begins in the mind can become a fixed way of life.
Therefore blessedness begins with purity of mind. The inward decision is the root of outward action. If the heart admits unbelieving thoughts about God—whether he governs all things, whether there is judgment, whether he rewards each according to his deeds—then one has already begun to walk in the counsel of the ungodly.
Blessed, then, is the one who does not admit such doubts about God, who does not grow weak because of present circumstances, but waits for what God has promised and refuses to entertain disloyal suspicion toward the Creator.
But blessedness is more than avoiding evil. The blessed person delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night.
Meditation means more than occasionally thinking about God’s words. The person described here has made God’s instruction a constant companion. It accompanies him through the day and remains with him in the night.
The Psalm compares such a person to a tree planted beside streams of water. The tree has a dependable source of life. It bears fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.
So too the person rooted in God’s word receives life from a source deeper than changing circumstances. Fruit appears in its proper time because the life of God has been steadily nourishing the soul.
The wicked are not like this. They are like chaff driven by the wind. Chaff has no root, no weight, no enduring life. It moves wherever the wind carries it.
therefore places two ways before us: rootedness and restlessness, fruitfulness and emptiness, the way of life and the way that finally disappears.
The Lord knows the way of the righteous. This does not mean merely that God is aware of it. Scripture speaks of God’s knowledge as his loving recognition and care. God knows those who belong to him. He watches over their way.
But the way of the wicked perishes because it has no lasting foundation.
When the Church Sings the Psalms
A Reader’s Version of Basil’s Letter 207 to the Clergy of Neocaesarea
A Note on the Setting
Letter 207 was not written as a treatise about worship. It comes from a complicated church conflict, and that setting matters for understanding what Basil says about the Psalms.
Neocaesarea was an old and notably conservative Christian community. Its great third-century bishop, Gregory Thaumaturgus—Gregory the Wonderworker—was remembered with enormous reverence. By Basil’s time, roughly a century later, the clergy of Neocaesarea appealed strongly to the traditions they believed Gregory had handed down. Basil’s opponents therefore accused him not simply of theological error but of introducing innovations into Christian life and worship.
One of those supposed innovations concerned psalmody. The dispute was not a simple argument between people who sang Psalms and people who did not. Psalms already belonged to Christian worship. The objection concerned Basil’s manner of singing them and the larger ascetical pattern in which that singing took place: Christians gathering during the night for prayer and confession, dividing into groups to sing Psalms back and forth antiphonally, sometimes responding to a single leader, and alternating extended psalmody with prayer until dawn.
The Neocaesareans apparently regarded practices like these as departures from the tradition of Gregory. Basil challenges that claim. He asks how they can be certain that Gregory did not know such practices, and he points out that they themselves observe customs that had developed since Gregory’s day. More importantly, Basil insists that his form of common psalmody is not an isolated invention. He names churches across Egypt, Libya, Palestine, Arabia, Phoenicia, Syria, and the Euphrates region where vigils, prayers, and common Psalm singing were honored.
That geographical argument is important. Basil is not claiming that every Christian congregation everywhere worshiped in precisely the same way. Fourth-century Christian worship was not yet liturgically uniform. Local traditions remained powerful. Basil’s point is that the practice condemned as a novelty in Neocaesarea had already become widespread across much of the eastern Christian world.
The controversy over psalmody was also connected with a larger controversy over Basil’s ascetical movement. Basil was encouraging communities of Christians to order their lives around prayer, Scripture, disciplined living, work, generosity, and continual praise. His opponents regarded some of these communities and practices with suspicion. Thus the question of how Psalms were sung became part of a larger argument about tradition, innovation, Christian formation, and even Basil’s Nicene theology.
The reader should therefore listen to Letter 207 on two levels. It gives us unusually vivid evidence for how Christians in Basil’s churches actually prayed and sang the Psalms. But it also allows us to watch a fourth-century debate about whether a developing form of worship could be both relatively new in a particular locality and nevertheless faithful to the wider tradition of the Church.
Editorial noteThe following Reader’s Version preserves Basil’s own argument and voice while condensing portions of the letter that do not bear directly on psalmody. The historical setting remains outside the source-text layer above.
To the clergy of Neocaesarea,
You seem to have united against me. All of you have followed those who are leading this opposition, and for a time I thought it would be best simply to remain silent. I would write no letters, begin no conversations, and quietly bear my grief.
But there are times when silence in the face of false accusations does harm. I do not write because I need to win an argument or defend my honor. I write because lies, when left unanswered, can spread and injure people who believe them.
So I must speak.
Some among you have accused us of dangerous teaching and have tried to frighten people about our practices. There have even been accusations about the communities of men and women who have devoted themselves to prayer.
Let me tell you what I actually desire for such communities. I rejoice to see men and women whose citizenship is in heaven, who have learned to discipline their desires, who are not consumed with anxiety about food and clothing, and who give themselves attentively to the Lord. They continue in prayer day and night. Their mouths are not filled with idle talk; they continually sing praise to God. And they work with their own hands so that they have something to share with those who are in need.
Now let me answer the particular accusation concerning our singing of Psalms, since this seems especially useful for frightening people who do not know the facts.
You criticize our Psalms and the manner in which we sing them because our practice differs from the custom familiar to you. But what we do is not an isolated invention. Similar vigils, prayers, and forms of common psalmody are practiced among the churches of God in many places.
Among us, the people rise while it is still night and go together to the house of prayer. There, with sorrow, tears, and confession, they pray before God. After these prayers they rise and begin to sing the Psalms.
Sometimes the congregation divides into two groups. They sing the Psalms back and forth to one another, one group answering the other. In doing this they strengthen their attention to the words of Scripture while also training their hearts to remain attentive and undistracted.
At other times, one person begins the song and the rest of the congregation responds.
And so the night passes through a rich variety of psalm singing, with prayers offered between the Psalms.
Then, as dawn begins to break, everyone joins together. As though they were one mouth and one heart, the whole congregation raises a Psalm of confession to the Lord. And each person makes the words of repentance his or her own.
If you reject us because we worship in this way, then you will have to reject Christians throughout the world. You will have to reject the Egyptians, the Libyans, the Thebans, the Palestinians, the Arabians, the Phoenicians, the Syrians, those living along the Euphrates—in short, all those churches where vigils, prayers, and the common singing of Psalms are honored.
Some of you answer, “But these practices were not followed in the days of the great Gregory.” By Gregory you mean Gregory Thaumaturgus, the revered former bishop of your church whose memory you guard so carefully.
But how do you know that he rejected practices like these? What reliable witness can establish exactly how psalmody was practiced in his day?
But you yourselves use practices that were not followed in Gregory’s time. I do not say this to condemn you; I would gladly see every one of you imitate the holiness for which he was remembered and live in tears and continual repentance. We too continually pray for forgiveness, but we offer our supplication not merely in words composed by human beings, but in the sayings given by the Spirit.
And what proof do you have that Gregory rejected our manner of psalmody? Many of the customs you now practice were not his customs. Gregory would not cover his head in prayer; he avoided oaths; he would not call his brother a fool; anger, bitterness, slander, envy, pride, and falsehood found no place in him; and he would not stand at the altar before being reconciled to his brother.
If you imitate these things, then you truly show yourselves disciples of that disciple of the Lord. Otherwise, take care that while disputing about the manner of singing Psalms you do not strain out a gnat and neglect the greater commandments.
This controversy has forced me to say more than I wanted. My desire is not to prolong our conflict. I can overlook personal injuries. But matters concerning the faith cannot simply be ignored. Do not abandon the truth about God. Do not deny Christ. Do not twist the words of Gregory to support teachings he never held.
As long as we have breath and are able to speak, we cannot remain silent when the souls of God’s people are in danger.
Now take these words onto your own lips.
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