St Athanasius of Alexandria: On Reading the Psalms.

J.A. McGuckin

[In: N. Dumitrascu (ed). The Fathers on the Bible. Routledge, London. 2023. pp. 1-12].

    

St. Athanasius of Alexandria (295 or 230 – 373) was one of the most influential bishops of one of the most important of all Christian intellectual centers in the ancient world. His predecessor in the city, the theologian Origen (c. 184-253), even though forced by episcopal pressure to leave his ancestral city in mid-career, had placed the Alexandrian Christian school internationally on a high-level footing and had been followed, relatively early on, after the time of the Alexandrian Archbishop Dionysius (190–265), by a series of highly sympathetic theologians who valued and used his work. Athanasius’ mentor and predecessor in the See of St. Mark, Alexander (250–327), who was to take Athanasius while still a deacon to be a protagonist with him at the Council of Nicaea (325), had indeed partly initiated the Arian crisis by debating with his own presbyter Arius the terms of the Son’s generation from the Father, on the lines of that unfinished aporia laid down by Origen that the Son was eternally born of the Father, yet as derived he was not unoriginated. Hammered at once more, between Alexander and Arius, the fault lines of that continued discussion ran off into controversies about the Son’s co-equal, or subordinate, ontological status, which impacted the entire Christian world, and would take more than a generation to resolve. When it did, in the Neo Nicene movement, one of the ways forward taken by Gregory the Theologian, was to hold up the life and work of Athanasius as a paradigm of pastoral and theological rectitude. Gregory’s Oration 21 is, in fact, the ancient ‘canonization sermon’ which seven years after his death calls Athanasius both the ‘pillar of the faith’ and gives him the enduring title of ‘the Great’.

    The shock waves caused by the great crisis before and after the Council of Nicaea made Athanasius’ canonical episcopal succession of Alexander a more complicated matter than it might otherwise have been. He was elected to the see on June 8th 329, after a highly traumatic and conflicted process, and more than a year’s hiatus after the death of his predecessor. His and Alexander’s theological arch-enemy, Eusebius of Nicomedia had just been released from his temporary exile and was bent on causing as much trouble for Athanasius as he could. Allied to this, the reconciliation Alexander had only recently made with the Melitian schismatics in Egypt had broken down in disarray after Athanasius’ election. Of the list of bishops Melitius had submitted to Alexander who would now acknowledge his episcopal authority, almost half had reneged on their agreement. The terms of the reconciliation dictated by the council of Nicaea (that the rival Melitian bishop in any given diocese should be subordinated to the local bishop who had already been appointed or recognized by Alexander) meant in effect that most Meletian hierarchs were entirely excluded from the process of the election of Athanasius.

    Athanasius, to continue his effectiveness for the Nicene cause on the international scene, desperately needed stability and wide support on the local Egyptian front. To achieve this the new and very young hierarch started to travel throughout the Egyptian countryside. Certainly, since the early third century, if not before, the Alexandrian church had been unusual in its format and institutional structures. Almost everywhere else in the Church, by this stage, regarded episcopal governance within a diocese as monarchical within collegial supervision. Each individual diocesan bishop was subject to the mind and governance of the synod of his local episcopal colleagues, headed by a senior bishop (or Archbishop). But it was the synod, not the Archbishop, which proceeded to moderate the individual local ‘monarchies’ by process of synodical control. Not so in Egypt, where the bishops of Alexandria (the country’s only major metropolis in the early Christian period) had accumulated such power and resources (principally of law and wealth and school) that every other country bishop throughout Egypt more or less played the role of the suffragan of the Alexandrian hierarchs, and were made to take personal oaths of loyalty to him at their consecrations.

    Knowing the sensitivities of his position, soon after his election, Athanasius decided he needed to secure the loyalty not only of the hierarchs whom he could count on, but also the favour of the common Christian people: chief among whom were the monks of Inner Egypt. Their spiritual reputations counted for much and could secure for Athanasius the stable base he needed. His first trip, of several, was in 330 to the Thebaid to call back to his allegiance the smaller number of monasteries who had seceded; and it was followed by a visit to Pentapolis in 332. From 330 onwards, Constantine’s court was applying pressure on him and in 331 he was summoned to answer charges before the emperor at Psamathia near Nicomedia. Meletian clergy had protested that in demanding they supply linen tunics for ecclesiastical use Athanasius had broken imperial law which made clothing imposts only permissible to the army commanders. The Melitian party present at Psamathia also sponsored the accusation raised against him by the dissident country priest Ischiras, that he had sent his cleric Macarius from Alexandria to break up his local community worship and, in the process, smashing his chalice. Athanasius was able to answer all the charges successfully, even managing to turn Ischiras back to his own side and encouraging him to write a letter asking to be readmitted to the mainline Alexandrian clergy.

    In the latter part of 332, however, the new leader of the Melitian schism, John Arkaph capitalized on the strange disappearance of bishop Arsenius of Hypselis (he had escaped from house arrest by one of Athanasius’ more zealous episcopal friends). Someone or other produced a dead man’s hand (they were often used in antique magic rituals) and putting two and two together, to make five, the rumour mill declared that Athanasius had taken Arsenius away into the desert to murder him. When John Arkaph formally raised this as a charge against Athanasius, the latter put together a search party of his deacons and was able to flush Arsenius out of hiding, and bring him before the magistrates, demonstrating that he still had two hands and had been hidden away by Melitian sympathizers from the outset. This was in some sense a point of respite for Athanasius, however temporary, for it brought about a formal letter of support for Athanasius from Constantine, as well as forcing an apology out of the embarrassed John Arkaph. But in 334 Athanasius received a summons from the Emperor to attend a new synod at Caesarea in Palestine, to prepare the ground for a major council planned to be held at Tyre in 335. This, the Tricennalia of Constantine, and thus ten years after Nicaea, was meant to be a ‘grand finale’ to the Nicene settlement and was to show how the imperial policy had brought a lasting peace to the international church.

    Athanasius, knowing that the preliminary processes were being orchestrated by Eusebius of Nicomedia, realized that it was in fact going to be a question of the rehabilitation of Arian theologies, and so he refused the imperial command to attend. When the council of Tyre finally opened it proved disastrous for Athanasius who came with 48 bishops, all of whom were forbidden to attend, while their Archbishop was deposed. This began the second series of struggles for his very existence as bishop theologian, one that would result in no less than five exiles from his see, several intruders positioned there in his place, and no lasting peace for Athanasius until he resumed his Alexandrian throne, for the last time, in 366, less than seven years before he was to die.

    Even from this very cursory review of his life and crises, it follows, then, that all of Athanasius’ writings, even those written before the Arian crisis broke, were produced in a context of no small ecclesiastical turbulence. In all the tensions arising from his conflicted election, from the ongoing resistance of the Melitian clergy, and from his imperial persecutions, the one safe audience he felt he could rely on was the monks of Inner Egypt. The majority of their monasteries had always been faithful to Alexander and himself. His composition of the Life of Antony, not merely an encomium of the ascetical lifestyle which his church had championed, and even exported widely, but also the formal text canonizing Antony as a saint worthy of veneration, would soon gain him overwhelming prestige in monastic circles.

    It is in this overarching context, writing with one eye on the favour of the monastics, that his composition of the text To Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms, ought to be located. This short treatise, focused on the use of the psalms and sent to a friend who was recuperating from illness, is in many ways a synopsis of the larger treatment of the psalms to which he gave considerable attention in the course of his theological writing, most notable his Expositions on the Psalms, whose fragments are now contained in Patrologia Graeca volume 27. The present essay will focus chiefly on the Ad Marcellinum, but some notice of the Expositiones is in order to contextualize his general approach. Gilles Dorival (1980) had set aside the numerous proofs from antiquity assembled by Montfaucon (1857) asserting the Athanasian authorship of the Expositiones. He found that the author had used not only Origen, but also Eusebius of Caesarea’s psalm commentary, a text issued in 330 (as Rondeau had earlier argued). Dorival went on to discover literary dependences even on Apollinaris, Didymus the Blind and Cyril of Alexandria, making him conclude, from his survey of the Catena evidence (where this ‘treatise’ largely resided in fragments) that the authors of the text in Migne were Evagrius and an unknown ‘Pseudo-Athanasius’ of the fifth century. Dorival’s very precise allocation of citations that he finds from later authors is, however, suspect in that almost all of them were close disciples of Origen, whose voluminous Psalm commentaries have themselves been scattered across the catenae. Citations of authors into the fifth century may thus largely be explained on the basis of the common reference to the great Alexandrian of the third century. Given that both Athanasius and Eusebius of Caesarea (the greatest Origenian disciple of the fourth century) were both quite explicitly referencing Origen in their respective works, we might apply the principle of Occam’s razor to much of Dorival’s authorial speculation.

    Madame Rondeau’s study of the issue (1968) first raised the claim that the Athanasian text had used Eusebius of Caesarea, and if this is accepted then we have a fairly precise window for the work which is surely between 330 and the council of Tyre in 335, when there was a definitive break between Athanasius and Eusebius, whom he thenceforward classified as an enemy on the Arian side of the struggle. The Expositiones has tended to be placed, by recent historical scholars to around 370, but few seem to have taken in the literary arguments. After Rondeau, and noting the arguments of Dorival and Stead, Bouter’s more recent and full-scale analysis of the Expositiones has strongly argued a case for restoring the ascription of authorship to the real Athanasius. We should, however, take cognisance of Stead’s (1985) pertinent observation of the impact of the evidence of the Manuscript Vaticanus Graecus 754, which clearly shows two sources being combined to create a larger treatise in the Expositiones. The comments are listed in two different systems, one with minuscule setting out each psalm separately; and the other with uncial numeration, dealing with psalms in groups of 100 comments at a time. Vian (1982), followed by Stead (1985, p. 70) has argued, convincingly, that the minuscule series belongs to Evagrius of Pontus (another who himself used Origen’s psalm commentaries) while the Uncial series is indeed authentically Athanasian. As Stead remarked, the formal critical edition still needs to be issued, but anyone with Vian’s article and a blue pencil can mark off the genuine Athanasiana for themselves.

    Stead’s own article (1985) gives a good synopsis of the key components of the Athanasian treatise, as does that of Sieben (1973), while Bouter (2001) has certainly provided the first in-depth systematic analysis of the theological content. With the Expositiones now reassigned, together with the Epistle to Marcellinus, one can gain a strong impression of how Athanasius approached the psalm exegesis. It is also probable that we should relocate the psalm works more to the 330s (few have been able securely to locate the Ad Marcellinum to date). At this period in his life, he was just setting out to visit the monasteries of the Thebaid, in the cause of strengthening their allegiance to him, in the face of the Melitian challenges to his episcopal election.

In the Expositiones (and here I am indebted to Bouter) Athanasius continues that approach to exegesis (with which we can note he famously ends his De Incarnatione) one that sees the scripture as one single voice of God revealing his salvific plan to humanity, but in a revelation that requires ascetical conversion on the part of the hearer, so that he might receive the message clearly. This, of course, is entirely in accord with Origen’s principles of exegesis. Similarly as Origen set out, Athanasius insists that the careful exegete must identify the speaker in any given oracle or text. This clarification of prosopography was an element of the Hellenistic literary process already established at the Great Library of Alexandria, and Origen and Athanasius both show themselves to be literary commentators in a careful ‘scientific’ style. Athanasius advanced on Origen’s style here (and it becomes a chief characteristic of his overarching approach in the Expositiones) to make the speaker predominantly Christ, but Christ speaking in the name of all Mankind. Athanasius makes the Christocentric focus, where Christ tells Mankind of his salvific process, and calls them into it, much more stressed in ‘incarnational’ terms (where Origen had envisaged more a focus on the advent of the transcendent Logos to the world). He does this, in a sense, as part of the repairing he consistently makes to Origen’s Christology: making it more in line with Nicene standards. Athanasius also makes more use of the Psalm headers (tituloi, taken from the LXX). He sets them as ‘markers’ of the story of salvation. He argues that the Psalms of Degrees (Pss.119-133) are a generic account of the phases of salvation history in its historical (Pss.119-126) and religious (Pss.127-133) aspects. 

    Lastly, Athanasius consistently moves from symbol to symbol by means of word association linking various biblical texts together in an oracular set of connected illuminations. This too is a deeply Origenian style of exegesis. As Bouter notes, these various technical presuppositions of his approach correspond with the handbook of literary criticism (Progymnasmata) of Aelius Theonos and would have identified his work on the psalms to his contemporaries as that of a learned Alexandrian scholar. The overarching message of his Expositiones is that the Psalms call out as Christ’s own voice addressed to the world. The Saviour here speaks as the archetypal Man calling humanity back to himself in a covenant of salvation. Athanasius sees this appeal to the world to return to the union as further divided into two appeals: first that Mankind would rise to his stature in the Church, a New Israel gathering the worldwide faithful back to God; and thereafter the hope for regathering the Israelite people. The Church is the New Israel, the Jews, the Old. Athanasius has hopes that the final fulfilment of all salvation at the Eschaton would be preceded by the conversion of the Jews so that the Church would be the united fulfilment of humanity in Christ.

    Throughout the work there is an appeal to personal asceticism, the struggle of repentance that will make this great scheme of salvation in Christ effective on the personal level of the individual. This recurring theme makes it clear that for Athanasius the dogmatic works of his career are not a separate genre from the so-called ascetical works: but both are one and the same exercise in two closely related modalities: the metaphysical structures and the personal appropriations.

    Within the turbulent context of Athanasius’ life which we have already noted, and his envisaged theological audience (Alexandrian), the appeal of any advocacy of the Psalter as a paradigmatic prayer book to clergy and laity, but especially to the monastic movement, is self-evident. Throughout the entirety of the Apophthegmata Patrum, taking such a text to stand for the core monastic mentality, it is the Psalms which are far and beyond the single most cited scriptural source. Such a work shows at one and the same time Athanasius’ status as Magister in both the dogmatic and ascetical domains and is a loudly implicit claim to authenticity as the rightful occupier of the thronos of Christian Alexandria in spite of the chief canonical claim raised by the Melitians against this; namely, that he was too young to accede. The monks had already taken the Psalter as the backbone of the system of daily offices of prayer that the majority of common life monasteries had adopted. Theodoret tells us that from early morning through to the late afternoon, in Syria, the monks vocalized the Psalm texts while working and walking for exercise. Cyril of Scythopolis adds that it was St. Sabba’s practice never to allow a young monastic to move from the coenobium to the Lavriotic lifestyle until he could command the entire psalter. This too was taken in several parts of the ancient church as a necessary qualification for ordination. As Brakke has observed, the recitation of the psalms was integral to the ascetic exercises of the early monks. As the recitation of the Psalms brings harmony to the mind and stability to the soul this in itself: ‘Is a verbal appropriation of the physical victory over the movements of the flesh that Christ won in his Incarnation’. This sense of coming to the ordering of the thoughts is a key aspect of much monastic teaching and corresponds exactly with Athanasius’ intent in his writing to Marcellinus, just as it did in the Expositiones. Regrettably, some of the English translations of the Ad Marcellinum widely available on the Internet have bowdlerized exactly this part of Athanasius’ argument where he speaks of how the psalms bring order and harmony into a disturbed soul. In the Ad Marcellinum, Athanasius returns to this point several times:

“Reason desires that the soul which possesses the mind of Christ (as the Apostle says) ought not to be subject to disordered anxiety, but should have this as our Guide which will bring order both to the affects of the soul, and control to the members of the body, like a lyre that has been well tuned. This is exactly what the Psalter does to a man.”

We do not know who Marcellinus was, but it was his illness that was the immediate occasion of Athanasius sending to him a treatise which became the closest thing he ever wrote to an actual commentary on scripture. This work is a very dense coverage of all the psalms, showing a close personal knowledge of their contents. It fits exactly within the theological prescripts shown in the Expositiones, thus further attesting to the authenticity of the Athanasian catena line demonstrated therein. This parallelism can be seen, theologically speaking, especially in the way Athanasius’ argument runs from the generic statement of salvation offered in Christ, who personally summates, and stands for, Mankind, to the particular sense of how this Christ-life is individually appropriated through the soul-ordering (τάξις) of personal ascesis.

    The structure of the Ad Marcellinum is relatively simple even though its coverage (for such an occasional letter) is immense. After a brief prolegomena in epistolary form (though the ‘letter’ soon emerges as a short treatise of practical ecclesiastical nature), there are two primary arguments, each one followed after its initial statement by a developed exposition of details supporting that statement. The third argument is added in the form of a set of practical reflections on the necessity for chanting the psalms in a style that does not alter the original text; and a final short postlude. A synoptic view of it can stand as follows:

Prolegomena: Commendation of Marcellinus in his trials and in his resolve to adopt a rule of scriptural study. [ch. 1].

Argument 1. General Overview of the Progress of Salvific Revelation. [ch.2].

All scripture is useful but the Psalms are a special treasure:

    (a) The Pentateuch deals with Creation. 

    (b) The Historical books deal with the offer of salvation to Israel. 

    (c) The Prophets speak of the coming of Christ: His Passion and Glory.

Development of Argument 1. [chs. 3–9].

All the various scriptural books are like gardens, each with their own respective fruit. But the Psalter is a garden that has its own special treasures and also all the fruits of the others in it.

Argument 2. Specifics of Salvific Revelation in the Individual Soul. [chs. 10–13].

    (a) The special grace of Spirit is given to the reader of the Psalms. The Psalter portrays all the lineaments     of the Soul for us to see and learn [ch. 10].

    (b) The words of the saints are here set out, but more so the Words of Christ himself which paradoxically     become our own words as we pray them: we thus enter into Christ mystically [ch. 11] 

    (c) Reprise of (a) above: the psalms become a mirror of the soul: our pattern of repentance [ch. 12]

    (d) Reprise of (b) above: by a special philanthropy Christ lays down his own words and life pattern for     us to follow. The Psalms give a sketch of it for us.

Development of Argument 2. [chs. 14–26].

Athanasius offers a veritable Typikon of which psalms are appropriate to use for which liturgical moment, or which condition in which the soul finds itself. This vade mecum of which Psalm to employ prepares the reader like a course in appropriate oratory before approaching a King.

Argument 3. Practical afterthoughts on the use of Psalms in the Church. [chs. 27–28].

The Psalms ought to be sung not said, and this because:

    (a) This is how they were first conceived by the saints who wrote them.

    (b) Singing makes us commit our full powers and focus.

    (c) Singing has a unifying and harmonizing effect on our spirit.

    (d) Whoever sings well tunes up their soul in the process.

Conclusion [chs. 30–33]

    (a) The Psalms are a garden for all to find there what they need spiritually.

    (b) But they must not be altered as compositions: but kept as the saints originally composed [ch. 31].

    (c) God will give grace and assistance to all who pray the Psalms. Their chanting puts demons to flight.           [chs. 32–33].

    We learn from the prologue that Marcellinus is recovering from an unspecified debility, and Athanasius has sent this letter to him as a work of consolation and encouragement. Kannengiesser describes it as the composition that ‘more than any other of his writings…illustrates his attitude to the Bible’. From the outset, we learn that the letter is meant to encourage Marcellinus in his ascetical struggle: a notable theme of antique philosophy and Christianity alike: the rendering into harmony of one’s belief and moral practice. This concern to render harmonious may also be contextualized in Athanasius’ concern to forge a stronger bond between Alexandria, the great city, and the desert inhabited by monks. Anxious in case any schism happens between the two (something the Melitians threatened as far as he was concerned) Athanasius wishes to point out that this life of ascesis is central both to urban Christians and desert monks alike. In this strategy, he called the urban ascetics of Alexandria to his side (especially the numbers of female ascetics already present there since before the time of Antony) making the basis of a strong alliance between the chief episcopal see and the network of urban ascetics who – apart from any spiritual allegiance they might have felt towards the desert monks – were also important to the inner desert ascetics who needed the favour of the urban Christians to market their wares and financially support themselves. 

    Athanasius uses clearly recognizable sophistic terms telling Marcellinus that fashioning his life according to the psalms will be an essential part of his ‘care for the self’ (προςέχω σεαυτοῦ) and that his immersion in the psalms will be a tool to re-model himself (τυπω ἑαυτὸν). Whether Marcellinus is an actual monastic or an Alexandrian lay zealot is not clear; but it is clear that the treatise, once composed, would not only appeal to the monastics (proving Athanasius’ credentials as a true ascetic himself) but would have a lively uptake in the urban Christian circles of Alexandria, demonstrating his capacity as a spiritual guide to the Church members, and as a worthy sophist to the Alexandrian scholars.

    The treatise, in short, serves as a practical handbook. Before he assigns particular psalms to various theological demonstrations, personal occasions and festal (liturgical) celebrations, Athanasius has made the key point that the overarching purpose of the Psalter’s use in the Church is that the soul will repent, and find an order (τάξις) for the soul, by following the footsteps of the saints who mirrored there all human life. But the saints are not, in this case, mere moral examples for Christians. Athanasius follows Origen’s insistence that it is Christ Himself who speaks as the main voice through the Psalter; giving the clearest indication of the final plan of salvation (outside of the Gospels). In assigning such detail as to appropriate usage of the Psalter, it is clear that the treatise turns from a generic reflection into an early form of Typikon for the Alexandrian church. The Typikon remains to this day in the eastern Churches, a genre of liturgical literature that is required in every sacristy of every church; and this aspect surely accounts for the great popularity of this Athanasian text in antiquity: something which Athanasius may have already had in mind as a strategy to ensure the work’s command of a wide and authoritative circulation. Unfortunately, some of the English translations of the Ad Marcellinum, especially those widely available on the Internet, have deliberately abbreviated the extent of the psalms that Athanasius lists, offering only a (very) select abbreviation. Evidently, the concept of the liturgical Typikon has here fallen victim to the haste of the paraphraser.

    The Christocentric mysticism and ascetic power of the Ad Marcellinum demonstrate it as clearly an Athanasian treatise that bridges the all-too-common, but inappropriate, classification of his writings into dogmatic or ascetical treatises: a false division that has also, too often, been used to make dubious assumptions about historical datings. Here, in the Ad Marcellinum, just as in the Expositiones, in the hands of a masterly patristic theologian we are shown how scriptural theology, Christological dogma, soteriological hope, and ascetical endeavour, are all one and the same Spirit-driven impulse that forms the Church into the image and likeness of the Saviour, and thus remakes a pattern for a New Humanity.

Bibliography

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