Totus Christus

Blessed is the person who has not gone astray in the council of the un-godly. This statement should be understood as referring to our Lord Jesus Christ, that is, the Lord-Man. Blessed is the person who has not gone astray in the council of the ungodly, as did the earthly man who con-spired with his wife, already beguiled by the serpent, to disregard God’s commandments. He will be like a tree planted alongside the running waters. This may re-fer to Wisdom itself, who deigned to assume humanity for our salvation, so that it is the human Christ who is planted like a tree by the running waters; for what is said in another psalm, the river of God is brimming with water (Ps 64:10 (65:9)), can also be taken in this sense. . . .That tree, therefore, is our Lord, who draws those who are in the way from the running waters, that is, from the peoples who sin.[1]

–St. Augustine, Exposition of Psalm 1

Augustine of Hippo converted to Christ in the early fall of 386 and was baptized the following Easter of 387 just before the death of his mother, St. Monica.  Only a few years later, in 391, Augustine was ordained to the priesthood, a position he did not desire, but he interpreted the events surrounding his ordination as God’s will and thus submitted to the role of Church ministry for the rest of his life.  Immediately following his ordination in 391, Augustine insisted on a sabbatical for him to better learn the Scriptures.  At that time, he turned primarily to Matthew, Paul’s letters, and the Psalms.

Augustine’s work in the Psalms persisted from c. 392 until the early to mid 420s, providing us a window into the development of Augustine’s thought, especially his hermeneutical approach and theological priorities.  I once heard an Augustine scholar remark, “A thousand dissertations are waiting to be written on Augustine’s work in the Psalms.”Augustine viewed the Psalms as the totus Christus—the whole Christ. Share on X

Despite the ocean of insights available in Augustine’s Expositions of the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos), this essay will only consider three aspects of the Bishop’s writing and preaching observed from his Expositions of the Psalms. These aspects are instructive for understanding Augustine’s thought broadly, and illuminate our own reading and teaching of the Psalms for today.

First, Augustine viewed the Psalms as the totus Christus—the whole Christ.  While not formally trained in the Scriptures or in a particular hermeneutical school, Augustine defaulted to the view that the whole of Christian Scripture is about Jesus.  And nowhere is this more on display than in the Psalms.  Jason Byassee urges that Augustine’s Expositions of the Psalms “should be seen…as Augustine’s most important Christological work.”[2] During the more than thirty years that Augustine read and taught on the Psalms, he completed at least one exposition or homily on every Psalm in the Psalter.  Interestingly, Psalm 119 (118 in his numbering) he saved for last, “…not so much because of its formidable length” as he explains in his introduction to the thirty-two homilies he delivered on the Psalm, “[but] because of its profundity, which few can fathom.”  In Psalm 119, a Psalm that incorporates a stanza for every letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the eternal Son is on full display as the One who is our “Wisdom” and “Way.”

Second, Augustine sought to expose the movement of the Psalms, not just the meaning.  As a professional rhetorician, Augustine appreciated how words moved the soul.  And, in the Psalms, the soul’s movement is no mere by-product of Hebrew poetry—it is constitutive of the text and part of the very purpose of Scripture to lift our souls in contemplation of God as the Spirit moves us toward the Father through the Son.  This section from Exp. Ps. 83 illustrates the point;

These virtues are granted to us now in a valley of weeping, but from them we progress to a single virtue. And what will that be? The virtue of contemplating God alone. . . .We shall pass, then, from these many virtues of action to that one virtue of contemplation, by which we are empowered to contemplate God, according to the scriptural word, In the morning I will stand before you, and contemplate you (Ps 5:5 (3)). . . .And what does “contemplating” imply? The God of gods will be seen in Zion. By the God of gods we should understand the Christ of Christians. . . .But when all the neediness of our mortality is over and done with, he who is God with God, the Word with the Father, the Word through whom all things were made, will show himself to the pure-hearted. Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God (Mt.5:8).The Psalms serve as an epicenter of Spirit-inspired movement of the soul, accounting for the whole range of human emotion, all of which is made perfect in Christ. Share on XThe God of gods will be seen in Zion.[3]

Augustine speaks of the importance of such movement as part of proper “eloquence” for preaching in book four of his On Christian Teaching (De Doctrina Christiana).  The Psalms serve as an epicenter of Spirit-inspired movement of the soul, accounting for the whole range of human emotion, all of which is made perfect in Christ, the true blessed man of Psalm 1, as seen in the opening quote above.

Third, in keeping with the first two, the overarching goal of biblical interpretation, not least in the Psalms, was wisdom, who is Jesus.  New readers to Augustine’s Expositions of the Psalms may be struck by how often the Bishop speaks of “wisdom” and “way”.  Wisdom plays a prominent role in Augustine’s thought, for ultimately wisdom is the Incarnate Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col. 2:3).  Augustine’s view of reality locates divine wisdom (sapientia) at the top of the metaphysical ladder and knowledge (scientia) at the bottom. This is not to minimize knowledge, but to indicate that knowledge functions as a signpost pointing us upward toward the Wisdom of God in Christ.  In Jesus, all the treasures of knowledge and wisdom are found, meaning that all of creation—seen and unseen—hold together in the One who is Wisdom in the flesh.  Jesus is thus the lynchpin of all creation, for by Him—God in the flesh—everything in creation, whether seen or unseen, holds together.  Thus, as the Psalms move and inform us, the goal is always to pursue and embody wisdom, to walk in His way, and to be restored to our true nature in Christ.

Endnotes

[1] Expositions of the Psalms; The Works of Saint Augustine, A Translation for the 21st Century, ed.John E.Rotelle (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 2000).

[2] Jason Byassee, Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine, (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2007) 59.

[3] Exp. Ps. 83, 11.

Image credit: Thomas Bekken Aschim (tbaschim).