July 2024 Print

By Radulph of Rivo trans. by Zachary Thomas

Radulph of Rivo (c. 1350–1403) was a doctor of canon and civil law, dean of the cathedral chapter of Tongeren in modern Belgium, and a tireless reformer with close ties to the Carthusians and the Brethren of the Common Life. His tract On Praying the Psalter studies the tradition of psalmody in the Church and, relying on the testimony of many holy men and women, urges both laity and religious to pray it always and with deep fervor.

Chapter 18:

On the holy and catholic men who are most noted for praying the psalms.

The way of example is short, the way of instruction is long. Therefore, if the teachings are too prolix and tend to lengthen your journey, may the following examples guide you in the right way.

According to Isidore, history tells us that David was the first after Moses to sing psalms.¹ From boyhood, he was specially chosen by the Lord for this craft, and came to be known as the prince of cantors and the treasury of psalms. The Church uses his Psalter, enriched with the sweet melody of chant, in order to bend souls to compunction. In the primitive Church the psalms were sung with only a slight inflection of the voice, so that it was closer to speech than song. But for the sake of carnal—not spiritual—men in the Church, the custom of singing them was instituted, so that those whose hearts could not be pierced by words would be enticed by the sweetness of music.

For St. Augustine in his Confessions also approves the custom of singing in the Church:

I perceive that our minds are more devoutly and earnestly elevated into a flame of piety by the holy words themselves when they are thus sung, than when they are not; and that all affections of our spirit, by their own diversity, have their appropriate measures in the voice and singing, whereby, by some secret affinity, they are made more alive.²

Our Lord Jesus Christ and the holy apostles prayed the psalms often, and according to pious belief they and the glorious Virgin used psalms in their prayers. It is said that Our Lord prayed several psalms to the Father from the Cross.³ The holy fathers of the East, the cenobites and anchorites, performed the divine praises with psalmody both day and night, but before the number was set by an angelic revelation, some recited fewer and some more. But St. Ambrose, in the office that the Milanese observe, ordered the first part of the Psalter said every fortnight and the second one every week. “Then Pope St. Damasus,” according to the chronicles, “established that the psalms should be sung day and night in all churches and monasteries, and communicated this precept to bishops and priests. And at St. Jerome’s request, he ordered the Gloria Patri, which the Council of Nicea had composed, sung at the end of psalms” (D. 1, de cons., De hymnis).⁴

“For at Antioch in the days of the emperor Constantius, Flavianus and Diodorus, men of proven life and doctrine, were the first to arrange choirs divided into two sides that sang the psalms in alternation. The practice soon spread to the ends of the earth,” as Sigebert says in his Chronicles, for the year 382.⁵

Jerome relates in the Life of the St. Paula that consecrated virgins “sang the Psalter in order at morning, terce, sext, none, vespers, and midnight,” and that Paula and Eustochius, a mother and daughter, were so imbued with the psalms that they sang them not only in Latin and Greek but also in Hebrew.⁶ And, writing to the virgin Demetrias, he entreats her to regularly practice psalms and prayers at the same hours.⁷ And he writes to the monk Rusticus: “Let the Psalter book never fall from your hand or leave your sight. Learn it word for word. Pray without ceasing. Keep your mind alert and free of wandering thoughts. Let both soul and body stretch out to the Lord” (D. 5, de cons.).⁸ And St. Augustine, a mouthpiece for the Holy Spirit, whose doctrine “enlightens the whole Catholic Church,”⁹ according to some annotations on his Rule—some think it is part of the Rule he gave to three hermits from Mt. Pisano and Centumcellis, in chapter 6¹⁰—taught them to sing a number of psalms that varied according to the season, though this method is no longer in use; this is according to the Thousand Utterances, chapter Religioso.¹¹ This same Father ordered the members of the clerical monastery he set up to say the Psalter often, both out loud and silently, when in the Rule he writes: “When you pray to God in psalms and hymns, think over in your hearts the words that come from your lips.”¹² And he practiced what he preached.

For we know that, just as he “baked sweet breads” for us “out of the Savior’s words” in his evangelical books, so he often sang the psalms with his mouth, when he “mixed us an elixir of life” out of the psalms’ nectar in his Fifties, as sung in his hymn.¹³

The fondness which this holy Father had for the psalms is illustrated in the same Fifties, the longest of all his works and also the sweetest to taste. So he relates in Confessions 9.4 that studying the psalms filled him with a sweet emotion. Also at the end of On the Christian Life he exhorts a sister “above all else to meditate on her Lord’s commandments without ceasing” and “to apply herself constantly to prayers and psalms so that as far as possible, she should always be found either reading or praying.”¹⁴ And we read in his Life that “he ordered the Davidic psalms, those few that are about penance, written and posted on the wall, and as he lay dying he used to gaze upon them and weep abundant and endless tears.”¹⁵ Bernard in the Form of Honest Living: “Turn your heart ever to psalmody, unless you are rapt up to something higher.”¹⁶ Likewise: “May sleep overtake you ruminating the psalms, so that you dream of yourself saying them.”¹⁷ The priest St. Goar, as we read, “finished the whole Psalter every day and celebrated Mass every day except Good Friday.”¹⁸ The Greeks, as I heard from the Basilian monks in Rome, go through the Psalter every week or every fortnight, depending on the season.

Charles IV of illustrious memory, Emperor of the Romans, desiring to establish the laus perennis in Prague, the metropolitan church of his Bohemian kingdom, ordered a number of clergy deputed to the task by turns, once they had said the seven hours of the day office, the offices of the Dead and the Blessed Virgin, and their daily masses at the appointed times, to chant the Psalter for the rest of the day and night without interruption. Notice that this ecclesiastical emperor could discover no more fitting praises than in the continuous cantillation of psalms.

Priests are required to assign penances according to the quality of the delict, not according to their fancy, but as written in the Penitential, which states that for the incapable, the penance of days of bread and water can be redeemed by psalms, such that for a one-day fast of bread and water, fifty psalms can be sung genuflecting in a church, for a week of bread and water, three hundred psalms, and for a month, one thousand two hundred. That is why in former days the Psalter was heavily copied everywhere and many people used it. But as various indulgences were conceded, these penances began to be relaxed, and the Roman Penitential goes the furthest, so that today Psalters are the most useless of books. Further, in processions and litanies the Romans, according to ancient custom, and the other nations implore the divine mercy by reading psalms.

As Walafrid Strabo writes in On the Beginnings 26, “Concerning our forebears’ habit of chanting or singing psalmody from memory, the Roman bishops until fairly recently and those who preceded them less than two hundred years ago record it as a rare and remarkable thing. For Hormisdas, 54th in the succession, organized the clergy and taught them with psalms. Leo II (r. 682–83), the 83rd, and after him St. Benedict (d. 547), and likewise his near-contemporary Sergius (r. 687–701), 82nd in the succession, are said to have flourished in psalmody and the science of chant. But about Gregory III (r. 731–41) it is reported as a thing unheard of and novel for men to know the psalms by memory. Hence we can deduce that few of our forefathers learned the Psalter this way. Rather, the Psalter and other scripture were memorized in part, and in part inserted into the offices for repeated reading. This is apparent upon close inspection of the written evidence.”¹⁹

Stand at the crossroads and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls (Jer. 6:16). For the traveler is usually led astray by new things, not what is old.

Endnotes

¹ Isidore of Seville, On the Church Offices 1.5.

² Augustine, Confessions 10.33.

³ Honorius Augustodunensis, Jewel of the Soul 1.83.

⁴ Walafrid Strabo, On the Beginnings and Growth of Ecclesiastical Things 26. The citation is from Gratian’s Decretum, in the section on the sacraments (‘de consecratione’).

⁵ Sigebert, Chronicles, year 382.

⁶ Jerome, Letter 108 to Eustochius the virgin.

⁷ Jerome, Letter 130 to Demetrias.

⁸ Jerome, Letter 125 to Rusticus the monk.

⁹ 8th Responsory from the Common of Apostles.

¹⁰ Augustine, Second Rule 1.

¹¹ Bartholomew of Urbino, A Thousand Utterances of Truth.

¹² Augustine, Rule 3.

¹³ Hymn Magna pater Augustine.

¹⁴ Augustine, On the Christian Life 45.

¹⁵ Posidius, Life of St. Augustine 31.

¹⁶ Arnulf de Boeriis, Mirror of Monks 1.

¹⁷ Bernard Sylvestris, The Form of Honest Living 9.

¹⁸ Life of St. Goar

¹⁹ Translator’s note: The practice of memorizing the psalter was far more widespread than Walafrid suggests, especially in the High Middle Ages.