Reviewed by: Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine David Vincent Meconi S.J. Jason Byassee. Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007 Pp. xiv + 290. $32 (paper). The most extensive of all of Augustine’s works is his Enarrationes in Psalmos, which spans almost more than double in length than any other single treatise. It also took him the longest time to produce, from 392 up through 418. Carefully crafting and preaching his way through all 150 psalms, Augustine focused on the songs of David because therein “we see Christ, there we understand Christ” (cf. en. Ps. 44.16; 96.2; 98.1). Only recently, however, have students of Augustine come to appreciate the intricate and sophisticated methodology and hermeneutic running throughout this commentary. Sr. Maria Boulding has produced the most recent English translation in six volumes and excellent works by such scholars as James Babcock (The Christ of the Exchange: A Study in the Christology of Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos; University Microfilms [1972]) and Michael Fiedrowicz (Psalmus vox totius Christi: Studien zu Augustinus “Enarrationes in Psalmos” [1997]) have rightly treated the Christology holding together Augustine’s much-beloved Psalter. Jason Byassee is the assistant editor of The Christian Century and his recent Praise Seeking Understanding serves as a volume in Eerdmans’s Radical Traditions series, which proposes a renewed appreciation and application of “scriptural faith in contemporary life.” Divided into five main chapters, Byassee shows Augustine’s allegorical approach to scripture in general and also the beautiful treatment this yields in the psalms in particular. Byassee opens by appraising the present-day scholars who have in some way dealt with Augustinian allegory: Stephen Fowl and David Dawson, David Steinmetz, Nicholas Lash, Andrew Louth, Lewis Ayres, and Robert Wilken. Against the unhistorical and myopic approach to the living word of God as found in the historical-critical method, Byassee enlists such bright lights of Christian creedal orthodoxy to show that allegory has a place not only in the heart of the ecclesia but in the mind of the academy as well. “It (i.e., allegory) cannot be dreamed up by a scholar in a carrel, nor understood by someone outside of the reading practices that make it intelligible. It has to be taught, over the course of years, by one expert to another, as part of the growth in grace intrinsic to Christian living” (53), and this is precisely what Byassee’s monograph sets out to do. Chapter Two, “Christology and Exegesis,” reveals how Augustine’s purpose for elucidating the Psalms is ultimately transformative and Byassee does an excellent job in showing how a kenosis-theosis strategy runs throughout the macrostructure of the Enarrationes. That is, the Christ typologically revealed throughout the praise of Israel became human so humans could become godly, and within such “great exchange” language, Byassee accordingly spends much time on analyzing the essential themes of such an admirabile commercium, the dynamics of the Christus totus, and other aspects of what he nicely calls the “theotic movement” throughout the commentaries. Chapter Three turns to “Beauty and Exegesis” and acts as the justification on why those who engage the psalms are [End Page 160] be deified: the Son is the absolute forma Dei, the beauty of the Father and the Spirit and in becoming human, he aims to draw all humans back into the same Trinitarian life. Echoing previous work by Carol Harrison and Michael Hanby, Byassee argues that the human soul “is only rightly related to God and others when infused with caritas, which is, for Augustine, the very love between the Father and the Son that is the Holy Spirit” (104) and thus continues this theme of the centrality of deification by maintaining that the reader of scripture is not only drawn to the beauty of the inner-Trinitarian life but is only fully human when filled with such divine life. Given the obvious source of the scriptural passages in question, it is only fitting that Byassee take up the question of how the actual people of Israel are represented in Augustine’s exegesis of their own writings. In “Allegory and the Jews” Byassee proves perhaps overly...