Praying the psalms, then, is a means of kindling love—a truth that St. Bonaventure saw with blinding clarity. If you ask how one can know God, wrote Bonaventure, seek the answer in God’s grace, not instruction; desire, not intellect; the spouse, not the teacher; God, not man; darkness, not clarity; not light but the raging fire that will bear you aloft.
In a striking passage in book 9 of the Confessions, Augustine recalls meditating on Psalm 4. He was staying at a friend’s villa near Milan while preparing for Baptism: “My God, how I cried to you when I read the Psalms of David, songs of faith, utterances of devotion which allow no pride of spirit to enter in . . . how they kindled my love for you.” They are sung all over the world, says Augustine, and there is no one “who can hide himself from your heat” (Ps. 19:6). He wished that others were nearby “watching my face and hearing my cries, to see what that psalm had done to me.”
When I first read that passage years ago, I was brought up short by the word “done.” Doing is not something we attribute to prayer; it implies action, not meditation. But praying the psalm did something to Augustine. The feelings expressed by the psalmist became his feelings. When the psalms are prayed, they don’t simply express something; they effect something, like an oath of office, or a couple’s wedding vows, or the words of consecration. The language is performative. Again, Augustine: “If the psalm is praying, pray yourselves; if it is groaning, you groan too; if it is happy, rejoice; if it is crying out in hope, you hope as well; if it expresses fear, be afraid. Everything written here is like a mirror held up to us.”
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