Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine. By JASON BYASSEE.

Abstract

Maria Boulding's remarkable recent translations of Augustine of Hippo's expositions of the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos) in the series published by New City Press have opened up this rich if dauntingly massive set of texts to a new generation of readers and interpreters. Jason Byassee offers a perceptive and engaging reading of the Enarrationes that aims not only to explore Augustine's work but, as importantly, to school the Church's pastors and teachers in habits of allegorical reading, with the conscious aim of helping people to live flourishing and faithful lives of Christian discipleship. As the title of the book suggests, the reading of Scripture is not a matter of dispassionate investigation, but of praise seeking understanding. Members of Augustine's congregation in Hippo love to sing the Psalms. Their bishop's sermons seek to make specifically Christian sense of words that are already known and appreciated. Such sense can be made when the Psalms are read christologically. The unity of Christ and the Church, of head and members in the totus Christus, is what Michael Cameron calls the ‘hermeneutical centre’ of the Enarrationes. Augustine derived from the (lapsed) Donatist Tyconius the idea that unpromising texts from the Psalter can be made patient of a christological interpretation by attributing them sometimes to Christ, the head, and at others to his body, the Church (and increasingly to both speaking together). Because the Psalms speak the words of the one Christ, both head and members, the Christian who chants them is him/herself caught up into Christ by doing so: ‘we are within his body, we are members of it, and we find ourselves speaking these words’ (En. Ps. 37.6). Thus, as Byassee eloquently argues, ‘the Psalter functions in a way analogous to Christ. It not only depicts, but also effects, the divine kenosis and human theosis that is at the heart of scripture’ (p. 203).