Reflections on the Psalms

by C.S. Lewis

The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express that same delight in God which made David dance.

‘SWEETER THAN HONEY’

do—it will

What is being compared to gold and honey is those ‘statutes’

‘Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery’—I can understand that a man can, and must, respect these ‘statutes’, and try to obey them, and assent to them in his heart. But it is very hard to find how they could be, so to speak, delicious, how they exhilarate.

strawberries—can these find the prohibition of adultery or of theft at all like honey? They may obey, they may still respect the ‘statute’. But surely it could be more aptly compared to the dentist’s forceps or the front line than to anything enjoyable and sweet.

obeyed the Law; in other words, to the ‘pleasures of a good conscience’.

In 1:2 we are told that the good man’s ‘delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law will he exercise himself day and night’.

To ‘exercise himself’ in it apparently does not mean to obey it

but to study it, as Dr Moffatt says to ‘pore over it’. O...

The man who ‘pores upon it’ is obeying Joshua’s command (Josh. 1:8), ‘the book of the Law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night.’ This means, among other things, that the Law was a study or, as we should say, a ‘subject’; a thing on which there would be commentaries, lectures, and examinations.

When the subject is sacred, proud and clever men may come to think that the outsiders who don’t know it are not merely inferior to them in skill but lower in God’s eyes; as the priests said (John 7:49), ‘All that rabble who are

Meanwhile the ‘weightier matters of the Law’, righteousness itself, shrinks into insignificance under this vast overgrowth, so that the legalists strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

the Law, like the sacrifice, can take on a cancerous life of its own and work against the thing for whose sake it existed.

this poem is not, and does not pretend to be, a sudden outpouring of the heart like, say, Psalm 18. It is a pattern, a thing done like

embroidery, stitch by stitch, through long, quiet hours, for love of the subject and for the delight in leisurely, disciplined craftsmanship.

may be the delight in Order, the pleasure in getting a thing ‘just so’—as in dancing

The Order of the Divine mind, embodied in the Divine Law, is beautiful.

On three occasions the poet asserts that the Law is ‘true’ or ‘the truth’ (86, 138, 142). We find the same in 111:7, ‘all his commandments are true’. (The word, I understand, could also be translated ‘faithful’, or ‘sound’;

There are many rival directions for living, as the Pagan cultures all round

When the poets call the directions or ‘rulings’ of Jahweh ‘true’ they are expressing the assurance that these, and not those others, are the ‘real’ or ‘valid’ or unassailable ones; that they are based on the very nature of things and the very nature of God.

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...

I have said there is a problem here, but there are really two. One is social and almost political. It may be asked whether that state of society in which rascality undergoes no social penalty is a healthy one; whether we should not be a happier country if certain important people were pariahs as the hangman once was—blackballed at every club, dropped by every acquaintance, and liable to the print of riding-crop or fingers across the face if they were ever bold enough to speak to a respectable woman. It leads into the larger question whether the great evil of our civil life is not the fact that there seems now no medium between hopeless submission

I am concerned here only with the problem that appears in our individual and private lives. How ought we to behave in the presence of very bad people?

There comes of course a degree of evil against which a protest will have to be made, however little chance it has of success.

Where towns are few and very small and where nearly everyone is on the land, one is not aware of any special thing called ‘the country’. Hence a certain sort of ‘nature poetry’ never existed in the ancient world till really vast cities like Alexandria arose; and, after the fall of ancient civilisation, it never existed again until the eighteenth century.

Homer can enjoy a landscape, but what he means by a beautiful landscape is one that is useful—good deep soil, plenty of fresh water, pasture that will make the cows really fat, and some nice timber. Being one of a seafaring race he adds, as a Jew would not, a good harbour.

give us, far more sensuously and delightedly than anything I have seen in Greek, is the very feel of weather—weather seen with a real countryman’s eyes, enjoyed almost as a vegetable might be supposed to enjoy it. ‘Thou art good to the earth . . . thou waterest her furrows . . . thou makest it soft with the drops of rain . . .

creation, in any unambiguous sense, seems to be a surprisingly rare doctrine; and when stories about it occur in Paganism they are often religiously unimportant, not in the least central to the religions in which we find them.

The real point is that the myths, even in their own terms, do not reach the idea of Creation in our sense at all. Things ‘come up out of’ something or ‘are formed in’ something.

To say that God created Nature, while it brings God and Nature into relation, also separates them. What makes and what is made must be two, not one. Thus the doctrine of Creation in one sense empties Nature of divinity.

Gratitude to God, reverence to Him, obedience to Him, I thought I could understand; not this perpetual eulogy. Nor were matters mended by a modern author who talked of God’s ‘right’ to be praised.

it is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men.

The healthy and unaffected man, even if luxuriously brought up and widely experienced in good cookery, could praise a very modest meal: the dyspeptic and the snob found fault with all. Except where intolerably adverse circumstances interfere, praise almost seems to be inner health made audible.

think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.

The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever’. But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.

When we carry out our ‘religious duties’ we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that when at last the water comes, it may find them ready.

long before we come to the Psalms or the Bible, there are good reasons for not throwing away all second meanings as rubbish.

even

‘the Word of God’ in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.

God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this. For we are mortals and do not know what is best for us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done— especially when we cannot, for the life of us, see that He has after all done it.

Two figures meet us in the Psalms, that of the sufferer and that of the conquering and liberating king. In 13, 28, 55, or 102, we have the Sufferer; in 2 or 72, the King. The Sufferer was, I think, by this time generally identified with (and may sometimes have originally been intended as) the whole nation, Israel itself—they would have said ‘himself’. The King was the successor of David, the coming Messiah. Our Lord identified Himself with both these characters.

We think of the Resurrection and Ascension (rightly) as great acts of God; less often as the triumph of Man. The ancient interpretation of Psalm 8, however arrived at, is a cheering corrective.