Reflections on the Psalms

by C.S. Lewis

There were in the eighteenth century terrible theologians who held that ‘God did not command certain things because they are right, but certain things are right because God Commanded them’. To make the position perfectly clear, one of them even said that though God has, as it happens, commanded us to love Him and one another, He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another, and hatred would then have been right. It was apparently a mere toss-up which He decided on. Such a view of course makes God a mere arbitrary tyrant. It would be better and less irreligious to believe in no God and to have no ethics than to have such an ethics and such a theology as this. The Jews of course never discuss this in abstract and philosophical terms. But at once, and completely, they assume the right view, knowing better than they know. They know that the Lord (not merely obedience to the Lord) is ‘righteous’ and commands ‘righteousness’ because He loves it (11:8). He enjoins what is good because it is good, because He is good. Hence His laws have emeth ‘truth’, intrinsic validity, rock-bottom reality, being rooted in His own nature, and are therefore as solid as that Nature which He has created. But the Psalmists themselves can say it best; ‘thy righteousness standeth like the strong mountains; thy judgements are like the great deep’ (36:6).1 Their delight in the Law is a delight in having touched firmness; like the pedestrian’s delight in feeling the hard road beneath h...