St. Augustine’s approach to the psalms is the most thoroughly and rigorously Christological hermeneutic we have from the early church. Other Christian interpreters apply such a hermeneutic occasionally, most often to “rescue” a psalm from theological trouble. Augustine always sees the psalm through the lens of the totus Christus, the whole Christ, head and members. In some psalms, Christ speaks in his “own” voice—especially in psalms that offer praise and adoration. In others he speaks in “ours,” especially those that confess sins. The hermeneutic can have a dramatic impact—as when he reads imprecatory psalms as prayers to turn enemies into friends.
What does he do with the psalms that would become the church’s seven great psalms of penitence? These should read simply enough as expressions of “our” distance from God and need for forgiveness, and suit his latter-career polemic against the Donatists and Pelagians quite well. But the literal, for Augustine, is not simply the literal as we or other ages in interpretive history would have it. The letter often refers, without allegorical embellishment, to Christ. What then does he make of a letter that needs no hard correction?