De Civitate Dei
from Gerard O'Daly's analytic work
Augustine's The City of God: Reader's Guide
section of Chapter 9, on Civ. Dei Books 15 - 18
The Psalms are a primary prophetic
text. Their poetry, with its "rational
and proportional concord of different
sounds," is like the unity of a well-
ordered city (Book 17 #14). Augustine
stresses that any symbolic interpretation
of the Psalms depends upon an under-
stannding of the individual context of
the whole Psalm: otherwise exegesis
will come to resemble a selection of
individual verses to form a cento (17.15).
His discussion of some Psalms in the
following chapters of De Civ. Dei can
hardly be said to put his principle into
practice, for he proceeds no differently
than in the rest of book 17, selecting those
passages that he can relate to Christ.
The Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach,
which despite scholarly doubts, were,
as Augustine tells us, regarded by the
Western Church as word written by
Solomon, likewise contain prophecies
about Christ's Passion and the future
faith of the nations, and these books
are no less prophetic than the canonical
works attributed to Solomon (I.e. Proverbs,
Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs/Solomon ).
Page 210 of O'Daly's book (Oxf.Univ.Press,
2020).
No comments:
Post a Comment