Thomas Aquinas as Reader of the Psalms (review)

Thomas Aquinas as Reader of the Psalms. By Thomas F. Ryan. Studies in Spirituality and Theology 6. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. 248pp. $40.00.

As the title suggests, Thomas F. Ryan's book emphasizes the importance of biblical commentary as a record of historical reader response and presents Saint Thomas's specific way of interpreting the Book of Psalms as a manifestation of his (and his audience's) Dominican spirituality. This is a very interesting study, valuable both for its direct, original contribution to Thomistic studies and for the larger questions it raises about the relationship between theology and spirituality.

Ryan's book focuses on Super Psalmos, a reportatio of expository lectures on the Book of Psalms that Thomas Aquinas (died 1274) delivered to Dominican students at the provincial house in Naples during the last years of his life (1272-1273). Neglected by scholars, Super Psalmos presents Christian doctrine in the form of a biblical commentary, a literary genre whose conventions differ considerably from those of the Summae for which Thomas is justly famous. Chapter One highlights two of these conventions: the Aristotelian prologue to Super Psalmos and Thomas's employment of divisio textus in the commentary as a whole. Chapter Two explores Thomas's use of scriptural quotations and questions in his interpretation of the Psalms, comparing them to those found in the third part of the Summa Theologiae, another of his late works. Much of Ryan's book (Chapters Three and Four) is devoted to a comparison of Thomas's treatment of the topics of Christ and prayer in the tertia pars of the Summa and in Super Psalmos. The comparison not only brings to the fore generic differences in the treatment of these two topics, but also helps Ryan to understand and to explain what Thomas means in the Prologue when he terms Christ "the material," and prayer "the formal" cause of the Psalter.

What does it mean to say that Christ is the subject matter of the Psalms? Ryan shows that the issue is complex, because Thomas's Christocentric assertions in the Prologue "do not always seem to be borne out in the commentary" (61), where Christ is in fact mentioned much less than one might expect, given Thomas's claim that the "content" of all the Psalms "is Christ" (61). Indeed, Thomas devotes "little time . . . to Christ's example in Super Psalmos" (120).

Clearly, Thomas's impulse is not to read the Psalms allegorically, as encoded prophecies of Christ that refer obliquely to him (although individual Psalms are exceptions to that rule); rather, Thomas views the Psalter as Christ's prayer book, in which Christ in his human nature sets an inspired example of prayer that people can choose to follow by making Christ's prayer their own. The Psalms are "'almost Gospel and not prophecy'" (14) for Thomas, because praying them with a properly disposed heart means praying in Christ's own spirit and thus leads "to deepened understanding of the God of Jesus Christ" (63), the God to whom Jesus prayed. The Psalms embody Christ's exemplarity, both as the Eternal Logos (Exemplar) who inspired David's words and as the historical Jesus (exemplum) who prayed the Psalms.

"Christ as matter and prayer as form of the Psalms must be intimately linked," Ryan reasons, concluding that "the Psalms are not simply about Christ or prayer but about Christ praying. . . . Thus the goal of Thomas's pedagogy is not simply to produce students who are Christlike, but students who are Christlike in prayer" (108). St. Thomas presents the Psalter as a book that teaches wisdom by providing "the words of prayer for seeking the gift of wisdom" (54). Ryan goes so far as to suggest that the Psalter was analogous in Thomas's view to the Pater Noster. Even as the Lord's Prayer "actually impinges on the one who prays, affects actions, and...