Saint Augustine and the Psalter in the Light of Role-Psychology

Bibliographic Data

ID2514630
AuthorsHjalmar Sunden (corresponding author)
Year1987
Volume26
Issue3
Pages375
Publication date1987-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal for the Scientific Study of Religion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8294 • E-ISSN: 1468-5906
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1386440
OpenAlexW2314537118
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited1

In the life of St. Augustine there are two episodes which have been discussed and commented abundantly: the scene in the garden of Milan and the vision at Ostia. His reading of the Psalter at Cassiciacum, an important fact to judge from the 300-500 quotations from psalms that are to be found in Confessions, has, however, not received the attention it deserves. In Augustine of Hippo, Peter Brown (1967) gives an account of the activities of St. Augustine in the year 386, but has not found the Psalter-reading worthy of mention there (74). This omission is rather strange, for St. Augustine himself says that this reading was what most affected him in his days at Cassiciacum (see Knauer, 1955). The silence of Peter Brown is, however, comprehensible, for it seems that none of the learned scholars that are referred to in the edition of the Confessions published by the Bibliotheque Augustinienne has given it appropriate attention. Among the specialists engaged in the study of Augustine, no one seems to have confronted the far-reaching consequences of Psalter-reading. In the recent symposium on Augustine's Confessions published in the Joural for the Scientific Study of Religion (March, 1986), the silence on Augustine as the reader of the Psalms is almost total. In this state of affairs, I think I had better present at the beginning of this study a case, the case of the German author and poet Max Dauthendey, whose reading of two psalms totally changed his perception of the world. Dauthendey was on a journey in the South Seas when World War I broke out. He was a German and according to international law the Dutch had to take him into internment on Java, where he died in 1918. On the last pages of his Bible he had jotted down the following lines: Tosari Saturday June 30, 1917. In the morning this day when I read the Psalms of David numbers 50 and 60 an insight flashed upon me. I understood that there is a personal God. Three weeks before my fiftieth anniversary I got this What a splendid certitude about the goal entered today into my heart, into my spirit, into my body. God lives, He is a person, and everything lives through Him (Dauthendey, 1925: 526). This text has been commented upon by a learned German scholar, but curiously enough, the fact that it was after having read the two psalms of David that Dauthendey got what he himself has called a revelation, did not interest him. This fact gave me, on the contrary, a possibility to make clear the psychological aspect of what Dauthendey called a revelation

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · German · Linguistics · Literature · Reading (process) · SAINT · Silence · Theology · Augustinian Studies and Theology · Classics · History · Philosophy

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