Prayer - Lesson 19

Professor James Houston

Prayer

th732-19

Augustine's Interpretation of the Psalms (Part 2)

Lesson Transcript

So we come now to the fifth interpretation that Augustine would give the Psalms. He sees that our prayer life in the Psalter is expressive of our union with the three persons of the Godhead as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And so in his homily on Psalm 85:1, he states that when we speak to God in prayer, we do not separate the Son from the Father and when the body of the Son prays, it does not separate itself from the Church. He's the saviour of our whole corporate body, the Church, as the Lord Jesus Christ. And that he who prays this does so by the inspiration and expression of the Holy Spirit, so it is the Holy Spirit that is praying in us and in response to being prayed by us. So we must recognise His voice is within our voice, His accents within ourselves, but the He is the triune mystery of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They're inseparable, as we tend to make them ourselves very often distinct. There is distinction, but there is profound union and communion of the one with the other.

And so finally, we speak of the Psalms as a prosopological exegesis. What do we mean by that? As we've seen, the word prosopon is the Greek for a person. That is to say, we apply the Psalms personally. We personally recognise that the Psalms are where we put ourselves into the Psalter. But not only me or you, but the whole Church is brought into the Psalter, so we interpret the whole Christ and the whole body of Christ within the Psalter. So in Psalm 91:1 as he reflects on he who dwells under the shadow of the Almighty will abide under the protection of the God of Heaven. He sees that this Psalm is personal and it's all humanity that are in Christ, that His assurance is, in this profound way, for us all.

One of the things that we should, however, recognise too that he is recognising is that there's an awful lot of sewage in our lives. And the Psalms are the sewage system of the Church. You’ve probably never heard that. But it's the cleansing of all the filth, of all the sinfulness, of all the corruption, of all the bad thinking and bad being that exists in our life. So yes, the Psalms are where we're cleansed. As we've seen in the exercise of Hesychia, all of us need to have this awareness. And so as he begins the Psalms, he begins by recognizing that this is what we need: to have clean hearts in the singing and the praising and the worshipping of our God.

But then he also sees that the Psalms are at the beginning of his Confessions as a great prayer of the cosmos. 'Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom is beyond reckoning. And so we men, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you - we who carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud.' Yet these humans, part of your creation as they are, still do long to praise you. You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have brought us near to you and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you. We know that wonderful phrase: God made us for himself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. And so Augustine sees that the purpose of God communicating His speech to us is for us to recognise that God is a summum bonum. He's the source of all goodness and that our lives are infinitely blessed by the joy of being in His presence to celebrate the bounty of His love.

One of the things that sometimes he's been criticised for by academic scholars is he doesn’t seem to have a plan. There seems to be no kind of structure in the way that we want to structure a book. But of course, the result is that an awful lot of the Confessions are spontaneous. They're just as they came flooding into his mind and so he put pen to paper. And I'm sure he must have kept more than one transcriber busy at a time. In fact, it was a common thing for a rhetorician to have two or three and one would write a sentence and the other would catch the next sentence, another one would catch the next, because no way could one transcriber get it all. It came like the Niagara Falls in the flow of language and speech. And so we find that this is what he himself realises is so pouring out.

So let me give you one of his prayers. 'O Lord, what is man that you care for him? Or the son of man that you think of him? Man is like a breath.' And here, of course, he's echoing the Psalmist all the time. His days are a fleeting shadow. But he goes on, 'But you O God are greatly to be praised. Great is your power and your wisdom, of which there is no limit. And man, who is part of your creation, wishes to praise you, man who bears about within himself his mortality, who bears about within himself testimony to his sin and testimony that you resist the proud. Yet man, this part of your creation, wishes to praise you. You arouse him to take joy in praising you…' Lord, grant me to know and to understand which is first, to call upon you or to praise you and also which is first, to know you or to call upon you to know me.

In other words, what basically he's saying: yes, there are these elements of petition and thanksgiving, but where do we start. Where do we give priority? Is it petitionary prayer or is it thanksgiving? I don’t think we can read the Psalms without realising that the noblest thing that we're ever called to do or to be in all the world is to praise the Lord, praise his holy name. Even the ancients had a view that there was music in the planets and the music of the planets is simply an echo of the Biblical understanding of what it is to praise the Lord. And so we praise Him with all that’s within us.

So at the end of his life, he's really told us he spent more than 30 years as a preacher, but he's discovered he's not the preacher. Christ is the preacher. He's saying all my life I've used my voice to praise the Lord, but it's really His voice that praises. He says I've been using all my interior life by which to know myself in the light of knowing You. This has been the pulse beat. Let me know Thee, O God. Let me know myself. But he realises the end is it's the knowledge that God gives us of Himself and the knowledge that He gives us of ourself is really what it's all about. And so You made us for Yourself. Our heart is restless till it reposes in You. And so prayer is that middle time and that middle bond between God and the soul.

Well, my dear brothers and sisters, you can spend your whole life reading Augustine. And perhaps as I conclude impromptu, let me just emphasise again that what Augustine is realising is that he's not the Western prophet of consciousness and therefore of self-consciousness. He's aware of the consciousness of God. And that’s what humility is: living in the consciousness of God. That’s all it is. Amen.