Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events,

visit us at Thomisticinstitute.org. So I'll dive right in with the introduction. The Psalms of

ancient Israel have a particular grace all their own, serving primarily as prayers of praise and lament, but also and importantly, as a mirror of the soul and a remedy.

Mirror of the soul in that the Psalms can help us better to truly see ourselves and understand the movements of our own hearts.

Why is it possible, Walker Percy asks, to learn more in 10 minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus,

which is 6,000 light years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck

with yourself your whole life.

It's this dilemma that I think the Psalms can help us with.

As St. Athanasius puts it, the Psalter contains within itself the movements of each soul. There are changes and adjustments,

written out and thoroughly portrayed, so that someone should wish to grasp himself from it as from an

image and to understand on what basis, on that basis, how to shape himself, it is written there.

The Psalms then are a mirror, but also a remedy,

and that they help heal and reorder the disorder desires of our souls

and even regulate our emotions.

The point of portraying the whole range of human spiritual

movements or emotions, Athanasius goes on to explain, is not simply poetic imitation,

memesis, but rather therapy. The person who recognizes his own inner state in the Psalms

can possess from this once again the image contained in the words,

so that he is not simply hear them and move on, but learns what one must say and do

...