Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
separated from us in sight, He is connected to us in love. Now because the whole Christ is the Head and His Body, let us hear in all the Psalms the voice of the Head in such a way that we also hear the voices of the Body. He does not want to speak separately from us just as He does not want to be separated from us, for He said: "Behold, I am with you until the end of ages" (Mt 28:20). If He is with us, He speaks in us, He speaks about us, He speaks through us, for we too speak in Him. And because we speak in Him, for that reason do we speak the truth.69
Two in One Voice
In his earliest commentaries on the Psalms, Augustine tended to follow Tyconius's distinction more woodenly, carefully and sharply distinguishing the different voices of Christ and of Church.70 But as Michael Cameron has pointed out, Augustine gradually came to "telescope" these voices, hearing them not as separate, but as the single voice of the whole Christ.71 This is illustrated in the following passage. This "single voice" perspective had major consequences for both his Christology and his ecclesiology. Here he uses the Head/Body scheme to stress how the Church's feelings of anguish become Christ's feelings of anguish, implying that the work of Christ's redemptive suffering continues and is experienced even now, even though the risen humanity of Christ is in heaven. From Expositions of the Psalms 142:
(3) Our Lord Jesus Christ is both Head and Body. He who deigned to die for us also wanted to speak in us. He made us His members. Sometimes, therefore, He speaks in the person of His members; other times, in His own person as our Head. He has some things which He says without us; we can say nothing without Him. The Apostle says: "that I may fill up what was lacking in the afflictions of Christ in my flesh" (Col 1:24). Note what Paul says: "that I may fill up what was lacking," not in my "afflictions," but in "Christ's"; and not in Christ's "flesh," but in "mine." Christ is still suffering, he says, not in His own flesh, that He ascended into heaven with, but in my flesh, which still labors hard on earth. Christ, as Paul says, is still suffering in my flesh: "I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me" (Gal 2:20). If Christ were not suffering real affliction in His members, that is, His faithful, Saul on earth would not have been able to persecute Christ seated in heaven. In fact, Paul openly explains
69. En. Ps. 56.1 (CCL 39:693–95); my trans. Cf. en. Ps. 62.2 (CCL 39:794–95). For an overview of Augustine's hermeneutics of the Psalms, see Michael Fiedrowicz, "General Introduction," Exposition of the Psalms (1–32), WSA III/15 (2000): 13–66; on prosopological exegesis, see pp. 50–60.
70. For example, en. Ps. 3.1–10 (CCL 38:7–13). 71. On the totus Christus, see Michael Cameron, "Enarrationes in Psalmos," AugEncy, 292–93.