Advent Meditation: Advent Psalms and Antiphons
Advent Psalms and Antiphons, 2019
Part One:
Advent is the season of anticipation, of an awakening to God as Word and Light coming to us in the darkness of the year and in the darkness of our souls. In a way it is a wonderful pageant or parade of Word and Song which is intended to awaken us and to enfold us in the power and wonder of the Divine Word coming to us and ultimately dwelling with us in the intimacy of Christ’s incarnation, literally “the Word made flesh”. The word ‘advent’ means the ‘coming towards’ us, ad venio, of God and thus to his being with us. “O come, O come, Emmanuel”.
The Psalms are a critical feature of our liturgy and hymnody. And there are as well the various Antiphons, scriptural sentences, that are used with purpose to highlight certain seasonal themes, most poignantly, it seems to me in what are known as the Great ‘O’ Antiphons of Advent used with the Magnificat at Evening Prayer from December 16th to the 23rd, originally omitting St. Thomas’ Day on the 21st and adding later “O Virgo Virginum”. The Advent Antiphons anticipate with increasing intensity and expectation the meaning of Christ’s coming as the Babe of Bethlehem and the Crucified Lord of Calvary, as God and Man, as Lord and Saviour. They draw upon a rich range of imagery from the Hebrew Scriptures just as the Psalms, themselves a digest of the Hebrew Scriptures, are used to deepen our understanding of our life in Christ in the liturgy.
The Psalms of David are the Prayer Book and Hymnal of both Jews and Christians alike. Classified in the Jewish understanding as one of the Writings, as distinct from the Law and the Prophets, the Psalms embrace a wide range of poetic forms of expression. The Psalter serves as a way of praying the Scriptures. The Antiphons serve as an interpretive matrix for our reading and understanding of the Scriptures and the liturgical canticles, particularly, the Magnificat, as bracketed by the “O” Antiphons in Advent.
Among the many treatises of Augustine, one of the most instructive devotionally is his Enarrations or Expositions on the Book of Psalms. For the English reader, it was only translated in the 19th century as part of the project of recovering the Patristic heritage of the Church, an interest both in England and on the continent. E.B. Pusey, one of the outstanding figures of the Oxford Movement, provided in December of 1857 an advertisement for the translation into English of Augustine’s work on the Psalms. As he remarks,
St. Augustine was so impressed with the sense of the depth of Holy Scripture, that when it seems to him, on the surface, plainest, then he is the more assured of its hidden depth. True to this belief, St. Augustin pressed out word by word of Holy Scripture, and that, always in dependence on the inward teaching of God the Holy Ghost who wrote it, until he had extracted some fullness of meaning from it. More also, perhaps, than any other work of St. Augustin, this commentary abounds in those condensed statements of doctrinal and practical truth which are so instructive, because at once so comprehensive and so accurate.
This doctrinal and practical sensibility about the Psalms means that they are read in the light of a certain theology of Revelation. They are not read as a mine of historical information and they are not read ‘critically’ as that term has come to be used by the schools of biblical and historical criticism, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are read with a certain insight into the nature of scriptural revelation philosophically considered. In Augustine’s case, they are read from a Christian perspective as bearing constant testimony to Jesus as the fulfilling of the Law and as divine Truth present with us.