The Psalms Are a Mirror for the Soul

Athanasius of Alexandria once wrote a letter to a Christian named Marcellinus who had been sick. Marcellinus had apparently made good use of his illness. With time on his hands, he had been reading through the Scriptures and giving particular attention to the Psalms, trying to understand the meaning of each one. Athanasius was delighted. He loved the Psalms himself and decided to pass along what an older teacher had once taught him about this remarkable book.

What follows is one of the most beautiful explanations of the Psalms from the early church. Athanasius believed that the Psalter contained something of the whole Bible within itself. Creation is there. Israel’s history is there. The Law and the prophets are there. Most importantly, Christ is there. Yet Athanasius believed the Psalms had another peculiar gift. In them we also encounter ourselves.

Christ in the Psalms

Athanasius begins in a place that may surprise modern readers. Before he says much about using the Psalms in our own prayers, he spends considerable time showing Marcellinus how completely the Psalms proclaim Christ.

He does not mean simply that a handful of individual verses can be applied to Jesus. Athanasius sees the whole story of Christ anticipated across the Psalter. Psalm 45 speaks of the Son and his coming in the flesh. Psalm 2 describes the nations conspiring against the Lord and his Anointed. Psalm 22 speaks in the voice of the suffering Savior, even describing pierced hands and feet and the casting of lots for his clothing. Psalm 16 speaks of his resurrection; Psalms 24 and 47 of his ascension; Psalm 110 of his enthronement at the Father’s right hand. The Psalms look ahead to Christ’s suffering, resurrection, kingdom, judgment, and the gathering of the nations.

For Athanasius, then, the Psalms are not primarily songs about our religious experience. They are first part of God’s revelation of Jesus Christ.

But his argument gets even more interesting. Athanasius says that before Christ came in the flesh, God had already given us in the Psalms a kind of verbal portrait of his perfect human life. Then Christ came and lived that life before us. The Psalms had sketched the picture; Jesus embodied it.

That is a fascinating way to think about the Psalter. When we encounter the righteous man, the suffering servant, the faithful king, the one who trusts God completely and delights to do his will, we are not simply being handed a collection of disconnected moral examples. We are being prepared to recognize Christ.

This helps explain why the Psalms can become our prayers. We are not merely borrowing David’s words. We are learning the words of the life that finds its perfection in Jesus.

A Mirror for the Soul

Only then does Athanasius turn to what may be his most famous insight about the Psalms. Other parts of Scripture tell us what Abraham did, what Moses said, what the prophets proclaimed, or what the apostles experienced. We read those things as events that happened to other people.

The Psalms are different. When we read them, Athanasius says, we find the movements of our own souls laid out before us.

Anyone who has spent much time praying through the Psalter knows exactly what he means. There is joy here, but also fear. There is gratitude and anger, confidence and confusion, repentance and hope. There are days when the psalmist cannot stop singing and days when he can barely lift his head. There are moments when God seems astonishingly near and others when the first question out of his mouth is, “How long, LORD?”

This is why Athanasius calls the Psalter a kind of mirror. The Psalms do not allow us to approach God as people we pretend to be. They teach us to come before him as the people we actually are.

Yet the Psalms do more than identify what is happening inside us. They teach us what to do with it. The fearful person is given words for fear. The guilty person is taught how to repent. The grateful person learns thanksgiving. The suffering person is given words of lament. The discouraged person is taught to hope.

There is almost nowhere the human soul can go where the Psalter has not already been.

The Psalms Train the Soul

This is where the two parts of Athanasius’s argument begin to come together. If the Psalms reveal the shape of the perfect life in Christ, and if they also reveal the actual condition of our souls, then praying the Psalms brings those two realities into contact.

We see ourselves as we are, and we learn to become like Christ.

This is especially clear when the psalmist speaks to his own soul. “Praise the LORD, my soul.” The psalmist is not waiting to see what his soul happens to feel that morning. He addresses it. He reminds it. He calls it to attention and directs it toward God.

There are mornings when that is exactly what we need. We do not always wake up overflowing with praise. We forget God’s benefits. We become anxious. We grow discouraged. Our desires become disordered and our attention wanders. The Psalms give us words with which to gather ourselves again before God.

Athanasius even connects this with singing. We sing the Psalms not because music makes the words prettier, but because singing helps bring the scattered parts of the person into harmony. Mind, body, desire, memory, and voice are brought together and directed toward God. Athanasius pictures the soul almost like an instrument being brought back into tune.

This turns our normal way of thinking about singing almost upside down. We tend to think that we sing because we are joyful, thankful, confident, or hopeful. Certainly we do. But sometimes we sing because we need to learn joy. We sing because we need to remember. We sing because fear has become louder than faith.

Christ Before Us, Christ Formed in Us

This may be the deepest insight in Athanasius’s letter. The Psalms are not simply a catalog of human emotions, and they are not merely a collection of predictions about Jesus. They bring Christ and the human soul together.

In the Psalms we hear beforehand the voice and life of the Savior. Then, as we make those same words our own, our lives begin to take the shape of his.

Athanasius believed Christ himself is the perfect pattern. Everything we see scattered through the Psalter—trust, righteousness, courage, mercy, suffering, obedience, praise—appears fully in him. The Psalms drew the portrait in words; the incarnation showed us the portrait in flesh.

And now the Psalms teach us to live in him.

That is a much larger vision of Psalm singing than simply adding some ancient songs to our worship. We are taking into our mouths words that proclaim Christ, words that expose our hearts, and words given by God to bring those hearts into harmony with him.

Perhaps that is why the Psalms have endured as the prayer book of the church. We come to them carrying whatever happens to be in our souls that day. Fear. Joy. Sin. Gratitude. Anger. Hope. Confusion. Praise. The Psalms are large enough to receive all of it.

But they do not leave us where they find us.

They keep putting Christ before us, until increasingly the words of the Psalms become our words, his life becomes the pattern of our lives, and our scattered souls learn to sing in tune with him.

Read Athanasius for Yourself

There is much more in Athanasius’s Letter to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms than we can explore here. He walks through scores of individual Psalms, suggests Psalms for different seasons of life, reflects on why God gave these words to us in song, and explains how Christians can make them their own in prayer.