In his Expositions of the Psalms, Augustine interpreted the psalter as the words of Christ and his church, speaking with one voice (See Cameron, “The Emergence of Totus Christus”). Jason Byasse (Praise Seeking Understanding) noted that, for Augustine, the psalms both expressed the emotional state of the church and provided the proper channels for those emotions to be turned to the pursuit of Christ. Because of the prevalence of material related to grief in the psalter, the Expositions on the Psalms are a particularly fruitful source for study of Augustine’s theology of suffering and grief.
Sarah Stewart-Kroeker (“Groaning with the Psalms”) and Michael C. McCarthy (“An Ecclesiology of Groaning”) have explored Augustine’s use of the language of groaning as it relates to the posture of the Christian towards the world and to the challenges of church life, but beyond these two articles, little work has been done on his approach to suffering and grief in his Expositions on the Psalms. Nicholas Wolterstorff (Justice: Rights and Wrongs), Sarah Catherine Byers (Perception, Sensibility, and Moral Motivation in Augustine), and James Wetzel (Augustine and the Limits of Virtue) have considered Augustine’s view of the emotions in relation to his ethics and his view of the will, but his Expositions of the Psalms have received little attention in these discussions. This study will seek to draw these conversations together, using Expositions to speak into discussions on Augustine’s view of grief.
Throughout the Expositions, Augustine assumed the reality of suffering in the life of a Christian, and he used the narrative of Scripture and the union between Christ and the Church to model, interpret, and respond to a variety of types of grief. In the proposed study, I seek to make use of recent work on Augustine’s hermeneutics (Cameron; Byasse), his view of the emotions (Susan Wessel, On Compassion, Healing, Suffering and the Purpose of the Emotional Life), and his approach to soul care (Paul Kolbet, Augustine and the Cure of Souls) to consider the way that Augustine treated grief and suffering in the Expositions. Drawing from his expositions of Psalms 42, 68, 76, and 101, as well as smaller sections from across the Expositions, I will highlight Augustine’s use of Scriptural narratives and totus Christus to interpret and recontextualize grief. For Augustine, I will suggest, grief provided an opportunity for the believer to come to trust in Christ, the ultimate source of sweetness, strength, and stability.