Prayer of the Saints - Lesson 4

Dr. James Houston

Prayer of the Saints

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Augustine’s Reflections on the Psalms and Teachings on Prayer

Lesson Transcript

We come now to our fourth lecture, which is on Augustine’s reflections on the Psalms and his teachings on prayer. As I was thinking what is an appropriate hymn, we really don’t have one by Augustine himself, but perhaps the sentiment of this hymn does echo some of his thoughts.

Renew your church, her ministries restore;

Both to serve and to adore.

Make us again as salt throughout the land,

And as light from a stand.

Mid’ sombre shadows of the night,

Where greed and hatred spread their blight,

O send us forth with power endued,

Help us, Lord, to be renewed.

And then he speaks in the hymn: Teach us your Word, reveal its truth divine.

And then the next stanza:

Teach us to pray, for you are ever near,

Your still, small voice, let us hear.

Our souls are restless till they rest in you…

That’s certainly Augustine.

This is the goal we will pursue…

Teach us to love, with strength of heart and mind,

Each and all, humankind.

Break down old walls of prejudice and hate,

Leave us not to our fate.

As you have loved and given your life

To end hostility and strife,

O share your grace from heaven above;

Teach us, Lord, how to love.

In many ways, we can compare Augustine with the Apostle Paul for both of them have a passion for the Church; both of them can see the Church is like a sick hospital where there are all sorts of patients that need healing. And both found that the combative attitudes that they had to face within the Church were really a great distress to them both. The other thing that we find comparable is that they both give us such intimacy of personal knowledge through their letters. We can’t imagine Paul without all his epistles; nor can we imagine Augustine without the voluminous letters that we have—over 450 of them, all reflections that he gives us on his life. And of course, as we shall see, one of the great things about the prayer life was that Augustine was so indebted to his reflections on the Psalter that were so much part of all his ministry. It’s impossible to give you a bibliography. As we’ve said before, anyone who claims that he’s read all the works of Augustine, or indeed anyone who can claim they’ve read all the commentaries on Augustine, they’re a liar. They’re so vast and so profound.

If some of you speak French or read French then there’s an excellent book by Monique Vincent called Saint Augustine, Maitre de Prière—Saint Augustine, the Master of Prayer, which was published in 1990 and it’s a very significant piece of research on Augustine’s prayer life. There’s, in fact, no book like it. On the other hand, if you simply want to have a 15-day retreat, there’s a whole series of interesting little books and Jaime Garcia has written a small book called 15 Days of Prayer with Saint Augustine. There are numerous others published by Liguori Press from the year 2000 onwards, that popularise the prayer life of Bernard, of John of the Cross, of Teresa of Avila. It’s really a valuable, little series of commentaries on classics of prayer. And then there’s a very scholarly work on Augustine’s prayerful ascent by Robert McMahon called Augustine’s Prayerful Ascent, that was published in 1989 by the University of Georgia Press. And then there’s a Harvard University Press book by Brian Stock called Augustine the Reader. In fact, there’s a whole dictionary of articles about many of the topics about Augustine that is also very helpful. But the book that I have found most helpful is Maria Boulding. She is a wonderful Catholic nun in England and she has got the most vivid translation that you can imagine—it’s highly skilled—on the homilies of what they call the Enarrationes of Augustine on the Psalms, of his sermons on the Psalms. So we owe her a great debt for giving us a wonderful treasury in five volumes that really should be in anyone’s library if they’re a serious Christian.

One of the things that we do find significant about Augustine is the vivid symbolism as well as the realism that he combines. Sometimes people who use symbolic language are too ethereal, but he’s both: so much grounded and is, at the same time, so ethereal in his prayer life and worship. We haven’t said this before, but you can think of the Psalter as the sewage system of Israel. It does all the cleaning up of all the emotional garbage. And there’s a sense in which Augustine faces this head-on as well in his sermons; and, of course, the realism of the fallen condition and, at the same time, the powerful desires that we have that can be so erotic and on the other hand that they can be so divine. So Augustine is prepared to open it all. He never represses: he redirects. So what Augustine is so helpful is, of course, to explore the whole power of desire. And of course, many of us really don’t grow in our faith because our desires are so repressed or depressed. So he’s a wonderful person to free your desires.

Of course, I have to warn you that if the last lecture was intense, this is equally intense because you are entering into the consciousness of a profound thinker. We may call Augustine, in fact, the Father of Western Consciousness. And all our understanding of Western consciousness as distinct from, say, Asian consciousness, is the significance of Augustine. He’s the founding Father of Western Consciousness. So you could say that there are two huge landmarks in Western thinking. One is that of Augustine in the 5th century. The other is René Descartes in the 17th century. The consciousness of Augustine is the focal importance of desire. The consciousness of Descartes is the focal importance of thinking, of reason. You might say that Augustine would say, ‘I desire, therefore I am.’ Whereas, Descartes would say, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ This extraordinary desire is something that we therefore have to keep always in the back of our minds. But Augustine is too huge for us and so we can spend our whole life just dipping the toes in the edge of the sea as far as he’s concerned.

And so that’s perhaps putting some people off from ever contemplating using him, but I must say in our prayer breakfast group that I have with businessmen that we spent ten weeks last summer and each breakfast we were reading the Confessions. And when you read the Confessions by Maria Boulding, which she has done as well now, so we have a wonderful, lucid expression of the Confessions that is far better than any of the other scholarly works on this, some very good scholarly translations. She is so vivid. She makes it so alive.

Augustine, of course, lived a full life as we can imagine; yet he had unprepossessing beginnings. His father was probably what we might call a lower middle class bureaucrat in the employ of the municipal government of Thagaste in Bona today in Algeria. And it was a mixed family because his mother was a devout Christian, Monica, but his father, Patricius, was a pagan and it was only at his deathbed that he gave his life to Christ.

When we say that Augustine lived with a mistress, who he met in 371, until 389, we’re actually being unfair because there was no marriage in that period. So the very fact that she was faithful to him was really an act of marriage on her part. We have to realise sometimes the cultural context is not what we are imposing upon it and we certainly should not do that on their relationship. It was a real marriage he had. But even his mother, who was such a devout Christian, did not want him to go on living with her because Monica, as Christians often have, had mixed motives. We saw the mixed motive of Calvin’s father. The mixed motive of Monica was very similar. She wanted Augustine to be free to have a brilliant academic career and so she was looking for somebody that would give him status. And perhaps this is one of the things that so often is the problem with our parenting that we may think we know better than our children who should be their spouse. It’s very natural. So we have to bear in mind that this was part, also, of the problem of the ambiguity that Augustine lived with.

After a long struggle, as we think of his period of time when he went through many different experiences, to eventually have a religious conversion in 386 in Milan under the teaching of Ambrose and the friends that he cultivated, we realise that one of the important things very often about the conversion of those that we would love to see brought to Christ is let them have the right friends. Friendship is a great opening door for conversion. And so he had this remarkable conversion which is like that of the Apostle on the Damascus road. At the same time, the more we probe we realise that these forms of conversion were not necessarily the kind of individualistic conversion that we have today. There was progress, slow progress, in the change that took place. We might say it was the start of a process of conversion.

I remember when I was rather impatiently saying to Malcolm Muggeridge and when did you become a Christian? And he said, ‘Oh, you evangelicals. You have to know the date and the time.’ And, of course, he was then in his late 60s when he had a change of life. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘My dear boy, I had a mystical experience of Jesus when I was six years old, but I simply got waylaid for the rest of my life before I recovered that encounter with Christ.’ So this is a rebuke to us that the process of conversion is a mystery that is performed in our whole life. What Augustine knew from the beginning of his life was he had a praying mother. That was the beginning. It wasn’t a dramatic event, though he did have one later in his life. He had trained as a rhetorician because, obviously, like being a lawyer, a politician today, that’s the way to high success. And as a rhetorician he was able to use this, as we see later, for the Lord.

One of the things was, of course, that this was a period of the break up of the Roman Empire. It was, indeed, during his lifetime that the Visigoths entered into Rome. And so, often we have to realise that the context of who we are is so bound up with the cultural events of our time. And so when we see that Augustine’s whole political life, public life was always in controversy, it’s simply because the whole times were in disruption. And so there was controversy and there was fear everywhere at the time. And so it’s often in isolating the narrative of some person’s life that we may think that they’re very controversial. We have to realise it was the times that were controversial. And when we were discussing with a friend about whether Calvin was a cantankerous controversialist, we have to look at the times and realise what was going on in his time.

As far as his works are concerned, the Confessions are obviously best known because there he explores the interiority of the Christian life and opens us up to being self-conscious before God as no one had done so previously. But in The City of God, he’s focusing on something that’s very primary to his thought and that is how we direct our desires for the love of God or for the love of the world. And so the city of God is between the city of this Earth and the city that is celestial. We live with two loves: the love of self and the love of God. His other works: the Retractationes is a doctrinal study, while his commentaries on the Epistles and his extraordinary work De Trinitate on the Trinity are some of the great works of the bishop that have left their mark on the Church ever since. But we need to focus most of all on his exposition of the Psalms or the Enarrationes in Psalmos, which are the most extensive of all his works and which he spent 18 years working on them. And it was only at the end of that period that eventually he decided he would have to complete the whole Psalter, so very reluctantly he said oh well, I have to do Psalm 119 after all. For him that was a kind of Mount Everest of the Psalter. But he was the man fitted to rise to that height by giving us a commentary also on the Psalm as well. All of this he completed in 422. So now we focus on what really is the heart of his message, what was the key of the elements of his consciousness.

First of all, Augustine gives us a concept of an inner private space. Now even some of our learned Evangelical scholars, as one has written recently, they are saying that Augustine is more neo-Platonic than he’s Christian. I have to say my dear chap, you’re speaking a lot of nonsense. You don’t understand the context culturally in which he’s expressing this and so you get Christians who plaster each other by saying you’re a neo-Platonist. Do they understand what they’re talking about? You don’t use broad categories like that of anyone. You have to know the context of each one. You have to know the educational system of each one of us.

And what he is doing is exploring the interiority of the self in a way that is a polemic against Plotinus and his disciple Porphyry at the beginning of the 4th century, that lived a generation before Augustine. He’s not imitating them. He’s critiquing them. And so the fact that he uses their categories is for the purpose of a polemic. It’s not to say I’m a Plotinian. The new Platonic model is that you’re alone with the Alone—with a capital A—because of the inscrutable concept of the divine. Can you ever say that this is Augustine? Nonsense. Augustine wants the inner space of his life to be filled with God. It’s not an empty space. It’s not a Zen Buddhist space. It’s a space that is filled with the Love of God. So there’s the profound sense, though he’s influenced by the language and the categories of thought of neo-Platonism, actually saying he is the most effective polemicist against neo-Platonism that the Church has had. And the reason for this is that he could not have fought his battles against Pelagianism, which was saying that we have to add our own effort in order for the Gospel to be effectively communicated. Look at the whole picture. See things as broad categories. Don’t just pick on some small item and plaster him with defamation and caricature.

Of course, for Augustine, the Gospel was pure Grace. He was Pauline. It’s what we are focusing on today: the centrality of the cross that marks the life of every Christian. It’s saying God forbid that I should glory save in that cross. So if he had had mixed confusion about neo-Platonism in his inner consciousness, he could never have done this. Or again, we find that Augustine insists on the centrality of the doctrine of predestination. Long before Calvin, it’s Augustine who’s proclaiming the centrality of the fact that we’re being predestined in Grace. Again, he emphasises against the Donatists, the importance of Christian freedom. So predestination is not inhibiting Christian freedom. Again, it’s understanding these categories. What Augustine means by predestination: that it’s all from the Love of God that the whole destiny of the Church has originated and has its future.

So we might call Augustine not only the Father of Western Consciousness, he’s the Father of Christian Grace. He understands so profoundly the giftedness of the Christian life. So all in all, Augustine could not have been critical as he was of his own neo-Platonic culture in Plotinus and Porphyry if he himself had not had a very different understanding of what is this fear of God in our interiority. What he did believe was that many Platonic dicta, many of the concepts and language, could be consonant with the Christian faith. In other words, terms like ‘eternal truth’ or ‘eternal beauty’—the context that the Ideas beyond the Forms are really expressive of the Divine Mind.

Yes, these are concepts shared between neo-Platonists and Christianity, but at the same time he shows us how different he is from the neo-Platonists by writing The City of God. Because in chapters eight and nine to ten in The City of God what Augustine does is to confront the pagans at the height of really the most remarkable thinking that they’d had, but to indicate there’s nothing that is instinctively divine within our lives—we’re sinners. It’s only by the grace of God that we can have communication with Him. We don’t have a potency that links us to God, as neo-Platonism would suggest. In other words, neo-Platonism would argue that as iron fillings are to the magnet, so the human mind is to the mind of God: there’s a kind of innate magnetic potency between the one and the other. That is totally a no-no for Augustine. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the holiness of God and the sinfulness of the human heart.

And so he denies the doctrine of reminiscence, that we have a kind of memory of God that is echoed deep within us and we just need to recover that memory. You see, neo-Platonism is one of the features of today’s new spirituality when the assumption is that the closer you go inside yourself, the closer you get to God. No, said Augustine. The closer you go inside yourself, the more you find God relevant for your needs as a sinner. It’s not because of the potency of the divine within you that you find God; it’s because you become much more aware and reflective on your interior life how much you need Him as a sinner. And so instead of the doctrine of reminiscence, which is Plato’s doctrine, Augustine’s Christian doctrine is illumination. We need revelation. We need God’s Word from outside us to enter into the depth of our being. Within the darkness inside, we need the illumination of His Word.

And of course, this is why the Psalms became so profoundly significant for Augustine. It was their interior illumination that lighted up the interiority of his heart in the heart of the Psalms. So he sees the central importance that the Psalmic revelation of this relationship illuminates our interior life. Again, a Platonist would never, could never, accept the Resurrection because the Resurrection is the resurrection of the body and for a Platonist it’s the escape from the body that is all important. Now, there have been excessive ascetic movements, as with the Desert Fathers and especially the Eastern World of the Syriac Church, which had the most extreme forms of asceticism. That, you say, that’s neo-Platonism. That’s not Augustine. Because this despising of the body or even punishing the body, the deprivation through starvation of the body or sleeplessness, all of these things did have a polemic intent among some of the Desert Fathers. They got abused. They were exaggerated.

And this is what happens to good things: we exaggerate them. And then we distort the message that we should have from them. And so for Augustine, the body has a central place within our lives. It was Christ who took upon himself a body. And this body is an instrument of the presence that is available to the other. That’s why you have a body. Your body is to enable you not to be a ghost. The purpose of the body is to be available in the service of God. And so you are to present your body, a living sacrifice, and your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. So Augustine has a very healthy view of the body compared with some of the teaching of his time.

And now a final thing that we find that Augustine is contradicting neo-Platonism is on the subject of happiness as a summum bonum: the absolute good. This absolute good that the Platonic philosophers were yearning for is certainly that God has placed desire within our hearts. And so we have this wonderful statement at the beginning of The Confessions: God made us for Himself and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in God. So yes, God has set infinite desire within a limited framework and we will go on restlessly living through life unless those desires are directed God-ward. So what Augustine sees very clearly is the bankruptcy of Platonism, or indeed of neo-Platonism, to satisfy the heart’s desire. That’s the very nature of idolatry, which is the futility of finding desire in creaturely things instead of the Creator Himself.

I have seen too often the tragedy of squabbling among faculty in the seminary as to so-and-so being neo-Platonic. They have no clue what they’re saying. But to plaster one of their colleagues and to do so publicly is a shame on seminary education. And it’s happening today. And I can speak with great experience of how wicked it really is. It’s in the light of these things that we see that Augustine sees this inner, private space, this inner world of representations as space for God, as space for the truth of God within us. You find this echoed in the Confessions Book X, Section 17, line 26. We can turn within this space to look for God: Confessions VII, 10:16. What Augustine is recognising is that the inward life has vast storehouses of memory that it has gained of images of the outer world. It’s like saying that your heart is like a digital camera that’s got stored up within it all sorts of photographs that it’s snapped here and there and everywhere. All these impressions of the senses are now stored up there to be sorted out in this vast inner storehouse that we call memory.

So the inner life is very much more than introspection. The inner life for Augustine is a journey, a journey towards God. So the more inwardly we’re focused, the more we are, in fact, homo viator, the human being as a traveller. We’re moving inwardly. But that is not just Platonic movement. It’s very different, as we’ve seen. Likewise, Augustine can speak of illumination. It’s like a piston: an inner dynamism of Christian reflection that is both in and up. Inwardly, we can look at our own cognitive powers, the ability to ruminate, to meditate, to reflect, to understand, to remember. We have all of these abilities of memory and of mind or intellect and will to exercise us. But we also have the gift of grace to look up. We also have the awareness of the revelation of God that has come to us in the incarnation. So Augustine makes a huge distinction between turning inwardly and looking upwardly. So you see, this is the fallacy of the Cartesian self and the foolishness of some of our secular colleagues who have sometimes described that Augustine is the father of Cartesian self. Nonsense.

This whole theme of the greatness of Augustine standing over against the Cartesian self is still a huge controversy among secular humanists. So what Augustine is saying is that the primacy of the Platonic self is not innate about having the divine within. The primacy of the Platonic self is the result of the Fall. It’s a manifestation of alienation between the human being and God. And so because of that alienation it results in blindness, not illumination, to the ways of God. So those are some of the thoughts before we enter more fully into the consciousness of Augustine, his understanding of interiority.

But then also we have to understand his appreciation and understanding of love. He uses amor as a general word for love, but he also uses the word caritas, which we often associate with charity and love of others. And thirdly, he uses delectio, which is delighting in the thing that we love. He uses all these three words as expressive of the profoundest reality of the human consciousness, of being human. But of course, these can be good or they can be evil. So what is so critical about loving is that you are discerning what is the object of your attachment. Is the love a virtue, or a vice? It depends which direction you’re moving. So he argues that every virtue is a form of love as every vice is a misuse of love.

So to take the Stoic virtues, he talks about temperance, seeking love for love’s sake. That is to say, we have an object that is beyond simply the acquisition of comfort or the acquisition of passion. So moderation and balance is needed to enable us to have a much more full-orbed understanding of what love is about. Or indeed, fortitude is expressive of a love that’s capable of enduring much for the sake of the beloved. So that during our Christian life, we realise that we need an awful lot of fortitude in our Christian ministry as we get all sorts of blows and disappointments and betrayals and misunderstandings. We need that constancy that helps to sustain us in our love of others as in our love of the Lord. Justice is love which does not desire to retain for itself, but equally shares with others so that we love in righteousness, not in preference.

Basically, what Augustine is saying is that there’s all the difference in the world between the love of God and the love of self. In fact, the love of self is an aberration of what love should be because love, in its true sense, is moving outside of ourselves in selflessness to be aware of the presence of the other and to give love to the other. So this profound clash between self-love and the love of God is what, basically, Augustine is sharing with us. In his commentary on the Epistle of John, he says anyone who does not possess love is actually denying the incarnation. That’s quite a statement. The incarnation is the manifestation of the love of God and to deny that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son is really not to understand love at all.

I had the privilege a few years ago of meeting some of the senior vice-presidents of Chinese banks. There were 12 of them. And they came to our home in Vancouver to learn about the banking system of Canada and the friend that brought them together was a Christian so he suggested that, as part of entering into Canadian culture, they might come to our home to have dinner with us. What they didn’t expect was when they asked me well, we understand that you are Christians here in Canada, of course, they didn’t know how secular we were. ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘We are Christians.’ They said, well, in summary, ‘What is it to be a Christian?’ I said, ‘To be a Christian is to have love in your home, for love is of God.’ Wow! Well, by the end of the week, two of the bankers had become Christians. Because they’d never heard the message that love is appropriate for love between husband and wife and love of parents for their children. They were on the edge of divorce, was one couple from Shanghai, and now God restored them.

Well, the husband of one of these bankers was the vice-president of—what’s the company in Germany that’s got into trouble?—Volkswagen. He was the vice-president of production for Volkswagen. And a few months later, he phoned me up and he said, ‘My wife’s changed. What have you done?’ He said, ‘I only have a day in Vancouver, so as soon as I can get out of the board meeting, can I see you?’ and so, again, I was able to tell him, well, there’s only one simple explanation. What’s happened in your family is that your wife has discovered that God is love. That’s all it is. I didn’t need to say any more. And now, by God’s grace we know that they’re in a house church. And, like Cinderella, their marriage is happy ever after. We hope it is. But this is a kind of thing that is so Augustinian. It’s a state of self-love, which is a state of being lost in God’s creation. It’s a state of having a loss of memory and a loss of memory in the sense of being a loss of the awareness of God. But it’s this self-love that makes the city of man. And so when he’s describing the city of God, he’s describing about the city that is founded on love. And so in The City of God chapter 14, paragraph 23, Augustine speaks self-love despite God is ignoring the love of God and it’s that that makes the earthly city. Love of God, despite oneself, makes the heavenly city. You may say the heavenly city has been created by the selflessness of divine love, while the city of this world loves itself so much that it will always despise God. The eternal city that loves God so much will always despise itself.

Well, there’s a lot more profundity that we can have exploring this, but let’s now pass on to saying more about his awareness of memory. He doesn’t mean by memory having a good memory or being able to memorise. In a sense, memory is a moving target for his thinking for he never stops reflecting more and more deeply upon it. So we might call it in the Latin memoria to distinguish it from this elusive word ‘memory’. It’s certainly the faculty to share, to teach others from one’s own observations of life. Yes, of course, we do need to have a good memory when we’re teaching and describing or citing articles that a student should read. That’s one role of memory. We do share knowledge with others. We do know that it’s expressive of wisdom, of the right things to remember. But it’s much more than this. The memory that we most have is the richness of the experiences of God in our life. We have a good memory when God becomes so capaciously active in our interior life. That’s what we mean by memory, for Augustine.

Likewise, another element of his consciousness is about reason, ratio. The faculty to apprehend outside objects, but it’s also necessary for faith and love. And so for Augustine, he sees that just as in the mystery of the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there’s a sense in which we have a kind of Trinitarian psychology, that there’s an interpenetration within our lives of remembering and understanding and loving. And so he relates remembering with the Father who’s the initiator and source of all that came into being; so ‘remember your Creator in the days of your youth’ we’re reminded by Ecclesiastes. Of understanding, because really we don’t understand God without the incarnation. We don’t understand God without Jesus Christ. And loving, because it’s the love of God that is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. It’s the Holy Spirit that would remind us of the love of God every day. So he sees a kind of Trinitarian anthropology within this threefold awareness of our consciousness. Augustine sees that reason is an instrument of the intelligence we have, but it needs to be directed or redirecting.

Reasoning is like seeing. And this, like William Blake describes, we don’t only see with the eye, which is the instrument of reasoning about things, we see through the eye. That is to say, we have motives for what we’re seeing. It’s what Lewis once did when he was in a garden shed and he saw a crack in the plank of the roof and this beam of light was shining. And so he knew that by seeing along that, he could see outside the hut. That’s what it is to see with, as well alongside with. Where’s it coming from? Is what Lewis was seeing about the light. It’s coming from outside, of course. So Augustine would agree that our perceiving is guided by our conceiving. Reasoning is guided by faith. The priority of illumination that comes from God by His revelation is the key. So if somebody is reasoning without faith then they become bogged down by what we might call rationalism or intellectualism. We need a check on absolutising our reasoning faculty.

So in this regard Augustine was not a rationalist. He sees it’s trusting and believing in God that is the primary importance. And so he makes a distinction between trusting and believing. To trust is to trust the visible, the tangible. To believe is to trust the invisible, the intangible. We believe in God because no man has seen God at any time. But the evidences are all there for believing, nevertheless. And so one of the favourite verses that Augustine lived with is Isaiah 7:9: unless you believe, you will not understand. It’s, of course, an echo of what Anselm was to say later.

Another theme that we should include in the consciousness of Augustine is the theme of otium. That’s to say, otium is leisure time. What is leisure time? Well, leisure time is time for recollection, time for reflection. It’s time to look back on the road that we’ve travelled as homo viator. It’s actually what’s needed in a faculty that you give them a sabbatical. And so this too was a very practical emphasis that he had: that, in fact, otium is time for contemplation, to stop being Martha and learning to be Mary. But it’s all a mixed life. That’s what Augustine recognised. It’s the kind of thing that a recent Archbishop of Westminster said very wisely: no one can afford to live in the market place of life who doesn’t spend time in the desert. You need the solitude. You need the silence of life. You need the withdrawal in otium time to be able to be more useful to the world, where you come from your knees from the presence of the Lord to do your busy life. It’s the marriage of Leah and Rachel; it’s the union of Peter and John. And these archetypes are all used by Augustine to reflect on why we need a mixed life. We can’t afford to live temporally without the perspective of the eternal. We need to have a bifocal view of life. That’s what it is.

So now we come to an understanding of Augustine’s living interpretation of the Psalms. He says I live with a Psalmist. And so as he walks and runs and shouts for joy, he tells us in the Confessions Book IX, paragraph 4, line 8 how loudly I cried unto you, my God, as I read the Psalms of David: songs full of faith, outbursts of devotion with no room in them for the breath of pride. How loudly I began to cry out to you in those Psalms, how I was inflamed by them for love of you and fired to recite them to the whole world, were I able, as a remedy against human pride. You see how central the Psalmist is his companion.

Like the rest of us, you start nibbling into the Psalms. You can’t comprehend them all at once. So he started by writing notes on the first 32 Psalms and it was later, having made these notes, that he then plunged into the rest. And he sees how the Psalms contrast the intelligence with which humans are endowed to sing praises of God with the birds’ songs, which are inarticulate. And yet he’s seeing how the Psalmist is enabling us to articulate in our prayers and our worship of God. You might say that the Psalms are our tutor in our first steps of prayer. And then he began to have favourite statements that he embedded in his life, like Psalm 89:15: Blessed are the people that understand the reason for His joy. Or again, in Psalm 47:7: Sing Psalms to Him with understanding. And really what he’s saying is you have to use the Psalms to understand the motives of your heart. But you have to expose your mind to the way the Psalms are guiding you.

And so he then began to step further and further in celebrating. And one of the things, of course, as a rhetorician, he discovered is how rhetorical the Psalms are. The poetry is so wonderful. And he saw that there’s a unity in all their poetry that’s prophetic. And that really, the Psalms are the kind of climax, prophetically, of the Scriptures. That we’re understanding the full drama of God’s salvation. And he sees that the Psalms are looking to a future. They’re representing a prophecy of a new Covenant that Christ’s love and redemptive work will reveal. So one of the key verses that Augustine has for his prophetic understanding of the Psalter is Psalm 102:18. He says let this be written for another generation. He sees in his comment that this is written for yet future times. It’s to foretell the New Testament, but it’s written in the lifetime of people still in the Old Testament, but they’re looking forward. And, of course, he sees that the new is going to reiterate, as it does so frequently in the New Testament. So he sees the Psalmist as a prophet. He sees that they’re all predicting Christ as the future.

And thirdly, Augustine is realising that this actualising interpretation of the Psalms is for our benefit today. So in his treatise De Doctrina Christiana he says the key to Biblical exposition is to see how we understand these things pastorally. Oh, that we would be so pastorally minded in our theological education! And he sees that the Psalms are the voice of the whole body of Christ, with Christ and his people. He sees how Christ identifies himself with us and that therefore this is what the Psalms are about: the body of Christ. And it’s the body of Christ that is singing. It’s you and it’s me. And this voice of the body is really at the core of much of his emphasis. And of course, he’s also indicating that the Psalter is providing us with a new song. The old song of the sinner, of the natural human being in our destitution and our old way of life is now entering with a new song. And so in his commentary on Psalm 32:3, he says strip off your oldness now. You’re now beginning to have a new song. You’re a new person with a new covenant with a new song. But, of course, we sing this with our lives, not just with our tongues.

And then fourthly, Augustine is seeing that history itself is both exemplary and typological, that the events that we have in the Old Testament like the Exodus and the wandering in the wilderness and the destruction of the temple are all prefiguring the future events of the incarnation. But all of us go through our Exodus. All of us go through our wilderness experiences. We’re all anticipating entering into the Promised Land. And I was very bravely seeing how a Christian business executive has written a book on using the diagram of the Exodus, the wanderings and the Promised Land for business practice today. So you see how sneaky a Christian could be and because our secular society is so ignorant they say where did you get that from? Well, they haven’t read the Bible, of course. Well, that’s Augustinian thinking.

He also recognises then that our prayer life should be expressive of our union with the three persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and in his homily on Psalm 85:1, he states that when we speak to God in prayer, we do not separate the Son from God the Father, or the Son from the Holy Spirit.

And finally, there is what we might call the prosopological exegesis. Now, that’s a big word Prosopon. What does it mean? It simply means that we’re doing all this personally. We personalise the Psalter by putting ourselves in the Psalter. But in personalising, the person is not an individual. The individual is the self for the self in the self. The person is the one for the other. It’s alterity. And again, my son is using this in business practice. Where did you get that idea from Chris? Well, you don’t tell them it comes from the Trinity. But it’s daily practice. And as a senior executive has to think of his colleagues. He has to think of the whole employment in the company. He has to think of the clients. He has to think of branding. So you simply use all these Biblical categories, but you employ them in secular language that’s suited for the business place, you see. That’s what you do. Well, that’s Augustinian thinking.

Well, I wonder whether we’re getting exhausted, or whether there’s more that we should say? I think we can overstate what we’ve been emphasising. But what he’s telling us is you really have to live in the world. You have to live in your culture. You have to think through it. And you have to use language that the secular culture is comfortable with. And that’s why Augustine never stopped growing in his own identity. When we’re immature, we articulate immaturely and we pray immaturely. When we grow older, we become wiser. We become richer in our faith. And likewise, when we become seniors or elders in the life of the Church, we realise that we’re speaking, as John does in 1 John, that yes, there’s a place for children. Yes, there’s a place for young men in the endeavours of faith. But yes, there’s a place for fathers who’ve seen Him from the beginning. So may God continue to encourage us as we reflect on the marvellous prayer life of Augustine.

I could have said more about the petitionary aspect of his prayer life, which we haven’t done because another exploration that could be made is simply seeing how Augustine is petitionary as the Lord’s Prayer is petitionary from beginning to end. But we can oversatuate our minds. Yes, we have to raise then what are some of the discussion questions that we might have as we reflect on Augustine? First of all, as John Burnaby did in a classical work called Amor Dei, The Love of God, cite from your own experience of your readings of Augustine how he’s totally saturated with the love of God. How do you think such experiences of the love of God penetrated his whole being?

Secondly, think of the balance and the symmetry that is required for the beauty of the Christian life. One of the marks of aesthetics is symmetry. There’s a beauty that we find in Augustine’s profile of the Christian, how he balances reason and the emotions, the will and the desires and so many, many other ways in which he’s always seeing things bifocally and never with one idea dominating any other. And like later manifestations of the transfiguration, the beauty of God is the symmetry of God. Yes, He’s God. Yes, He’s human.

A third thing which we haven’t talked about very much, but which is so characteristic of the faith of Augustine is it’s so intrinsically relational. And the more intrinsically relational you are, the more you cultivate friendship. Augustine’s life was filled with friends. It’s so natural for us to have friends. It’s expressed the Imago Dei. How does friendship cultivate Godliness as we see illustrated in Augustine?

And you see it’s all of these things, finally, that enrich him prayerfully. So see how prayer is the embrace of all these different elements of being human. That’s Augustinian.

And I would say what I’ve found most profound about Augustine above everything else is his humility. You would think with all his intellect, with all his amazing capacities, that there would be some element of hubris. But not at all. He says the greatest boldness for us to disclose the nature and the claims of God is to do so in utmost humility. What a contradiction to our way of life.