All Things Expounded

“To be sure, a special circumstance influenced the Church in incoporating the Psalter into her official prayer. Certain heterodox influences, especially Gnostic ones, were inflitrating the faithful; and these innovators gladly used songs to inject their poison. Marcion spread a Psalter of his own composition. And Barsdesanes, a heretic of the second century, published a tendentious edition of the 150 Psalms which was spread far and wide through the Syriac church. The Manicheans and Arius successfully used the same tactics. Thus, in the first centuries, heterodoxy was spread in song.

The Church set up a dike, the Psalter of Israel, against invasion. At such a juncture, the deliberate choice of Hebrew prayer was pointedly a reaction. It is, therefore, an error to interpret the permanance of the Psalter in our liturgy as a sign of conservatism and of routine, the simple survival of an ancestral practice.

This faraway history enlightens us to the constant tradition of the Church, and in particular, to its tenacious resistance to counsel, however urgent, that the well-intention faithful have never ceased to lavish on her. From time to time, her children have indeed pressed their mother to retire the Psalter as a collection of outmoded and non-Christian, and to fashion a younger collection of spiritual songs, better adapted to the spirit of the Gospel and more in harmony with the aspirations of today. But Mater Ecclesia, without excluding eventual accommodations, persists in drawing from the ‘waters of Siloe that flow gently’: she refuses to slake her thirst at the ‘river’ which unloosens ruin (Is. 8:6 ff). She mistrusts oversimplified and hazardous solutions.”

(The Songs of the People of God by Charles Hauret, p. 23-24)