Reflections on the Psalms Read online

  The second reason is more disquieting. If we are to excuse the poets of the Psalms on the ground that they were not Christians, we ought to be able to point to the same sort of thing, and worse, in Pagan authors. Perhaps if I knew more Pagan literature I should be able to do this. But in what I do know (a little Greek, a little Latin, and of Old Norse very little indeed) I am not at all sure that I can. I can find in them lasciviousness, much brutal insensibility, cold cruelties taken for granted, but not this fury or luxury of hatred. I mean, of course, where writers are speaking in their own person; speeches put into the mouths of angry characters in a play are a different matter. One’s first impression is that the Jews were much more vindictive and vitriolic than the Pagans.

  If we are not Christians we shall dismiss this with the old gibe ‘How odd of God to choose the Jews.’ That is impossible for us who believe that God chose that race for the vehicle of His own Incarnation, and who are indebted to Israel beyond all possible repayment.

  Where we find a difficulty we may always expect that a discovery awaits us. Where there is cover we hope for game. This particular difficulty is well worth exploring.

  It seems that there is a general rule in the moral universe which may be formulated ‘The higher, the more in danger.’ The ‘average sensual man’ who is sometimes unfaithful to his wife, sometimes tipsy, always a little selfish, now and then (within the law) a trifle sharp in his deals, is certainly, by ordinary standards, a ‘lower’ type than the man whose soul is filled with some great Cause, to which he will subordinate his appetites, his fortune, and even his safety. But it is out of the second man that something really fiendish can be made; an Inquisitor, a Member of the Committee of Public Safety. It is great men, potential saints, not little men, who become merciless fanatics. Those who are readiest to die for a cause may easily become those who are readiest to kill for it. One sees the same principle at work in a field (comparatively) so unimportant as literary criticism; the most brutal work, the most rankling hatred of all other critics and of nearly all authors, may come from the most honest and disinterested critic, the man who cares most passionately and selflessly about literature. The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation to lose your temper over the game. We must not over-value the relative harmlessness of the little, sensual, frivolous people. They are not above, but below, some temptations.

  If I am never tempted, and cannot even imagine myself being tempted, to gamble, this does not mean that I am better than those who are. The timidity and pessimism which exempt me from that temptation themselves tempt me to draw back from those risks and adventures which every man ought to take. In the same way we cannot be certain that the comparative absence of vindictiveness in the Pagans, though certainly a good thing in itself, is a good symptom. This was borne in upon me during a night journey taken early in the Second War in a compartment full of young soldiers. Their conversation made it clear that they totally disbelieved all that they had read in the papers about the wholesale cruelties of the Nazi régime. They took it for granted, without argument, that this was all lies, all propaganda put out by our own government to ‘pep up’ our troops. And the shattering thing was that, believing this, they expressed not the slightest anger. That our rulers should falsely attribute the worst of crimes to some of their fellow-men in order to induce others of their fellow-men to shed their blood seemed to them a matter of course. They weren’t even particularly interested. They saw nothing wrong in it. Now it seemed to me that the most violent of the Psalmists—or, for that matter any child wailing out ‘But it’s not fair’—was in a more hopeful condition than these young men. If they had perceived, and felt as a man should feel, the diabolical wickedness which they believed our rulers to be committing, and then forgiven them, they would have been saints. But not to perceive it at all—not even to be tempted to resentment—to accept it as the most ordinary thing in the world—argues a terrifying insensibility. Clearly these young men had (on that subject anyway) no conception of good and evil whatsoever.

  Thus the absence of anger, especially that sort of anger which we call indignation, can, in my opinion, be a most alarming symptom. And the presence of indignation may be a good one. Even when that indignation passes into bitter personal vindictiveness, it may still be a good symptom, though bad in itself. It is a sin; but it at least shows that those who commit it have not sunk below the level at which the temptation to that sin exists—just as the sins (often quite appalling) of the great patriot or great reformer point to something in him above mere self. If the Jews cursed more bitterly than the Pagans this was, I think, at least in part because they took right and wrong more seriously. For if we look at their railings we find they are usually angry not simply because these things have been done to them but because these things are manifestly wrong, are hateful to God as well as to the victim. The thought of the ‘righteous Lord’—who surely must hate such doings as much as they do, who surely therefore must (but how terribly He delays!) ‘judge’ or avenge, is always there, if only in the background. Sometimes it comes into the foreground; as in Psalm 58:9–10, ‘The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance . . . so that a man shall say . . . Doubtless there is a God that judgeth the earth.’ This is something different from mere anger without indignation—the almost animal rage at finding that a man’s enemy has done to him exactly what he would have done to his enemy if he had been strong enough or quick enough.

  Different, certainly higher, a better symptom; yet also leading to a more terrible sin. For it encourages a man to think that his own worst passions are holy. It encourages him to add, explicitly or implicitly, ‘Thus saith the Lord’ to the expression of his own emotions or even his own opinions; as Carlyle and Kipling and some politicians, and even, in their own way, some modern critics, so horribly do. (It is this, by the way, rather than mere idle ‘profane swearing’ that we ought to mean by ‘taking God’s name in vain’. The man who says ‘Damn that chair!’ does not really wish that it should first be endowed with an immortal soul and then sent to eternal perdition.) For here also it is true ‘the higher, the more in danger’. The Jews sinned in this matter worse than the Pagans not because they were further from God but because they were nearer to Him. For the Supernatural, entering a human soul, opens to it new possibilities both of good and evil. From that point the road branches: one way to sanctity, love, humility, the other to spiritual pride, self-righteousness, persecuting zeal. And no way back to the mere humdrum virtues and vices of the unawakened soul. If the Divine call does not make us better, it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God. There seems no way out of this. It gives a new application to Our Lord’s words about ‘counting the cost’.

  For we can still see, in the worst of their maledictions, how these old poets were, in a sense, near to God. Though hideously distorted by the human instrument, something of the Divine voice can be heard in these passages. Not, of course, that God looks upon their enemies as they do: He ‘desireth not the death of a sinner’. But doubtless He has for the sin of those enemies just the implacable hostility which the poets express. Implacable? Yes, not to the sinner but to the sin. It will not be tolerated nor condoned, no treaty will be made with it. That tooth must come out, that right hand must be amputated, if the man is to be saved. In that way the relentlessness of the Psalmists is far nearer to one side of the truth than many modern attitudes which can be mistaken, by those who hold them, for Christian charity. It is, for example, obviously nearer than the total moral indifference of the young soldiers. It is nearer than the pseudo-scientific tolerance which reduces all wickedness to neurosis (though of course some apparent wickedness is). It even contains a streak of sanity absent from the old woman presiding at a juvenile court who—I heard it myself—told some young hooligans, convicted of a well-planned robbery for gain (they had already sold the swag and some had previous convictions ag
ainst them), that they must, they really must, give up such ‘stupid pranks’. Against all this the ferocious parts of the Psalms serve as a reminder that there is in the world such a thing as wickedness and that it (if not its perpetrators) is hateful to God. In that way, however dangerous the human distortion may be, His word sounds through these passages too.

  But can we, besides learning from these terrible Psalms also use them in our devotional life? I believe we can; but that topic must be reserved for a later chapter.

  IV

  DEATH IN THE PSALMS

  According to my policy of taking first what is most unattractive, I should now proceed to the self-righteousness in many of the Psalms. But we cannot deal with that properly until some other matters have been noticed. I turn first to a very different subject.

  Our ancestors seem to have read the Psalms and the rest of the Old Testament under the impression that the authors wrote with a pretty full understanding of Christian Theology; the main difference being that the Incarnation, which for us is something recorded, was for them something predicted. In particular, they seldom doubted that the old authors were, like ourselves, concerned with a life beyond death, that they feared damnation and hoped for eternal joy.

  In our own Prayer Book version, and probably in many others, some passages make this impression almost irresistibly. Thus in 17:14, we read of wicked men ‘which have their portion in this life’. The Christian reader inevitably reads into this (and Coverdale, the translator, obviously did so too) Our Lord’s contrast between the Rich Man who had his good things here and Lazarus who had them hereafter; the same contrast which is implied in Luke 6:24—‘Woe unto you that are rich, for ye have received your consolation.’ But modern translators can find nothing like this in the actual Hebrew. In reality this passage is merely one of the cursings we were considering in the previous chapter. In 17:13 the poet prays God to ‘cast down’ (in Dr Moffatt, ‘crush’) the ungodly; in verse 14, a refinement occurs to him. Yes, crush them, but first let them ‘have their portion in this life’. Kill them, but first give them a bad time while alive.

  Again, in Psalm 49, we have ‘No man may deliver his brother . . . for it cost more to redeem their souls; so that he must let that alone forever’ (7, 8). Who would not think that this referred to the redeeming work of Christ? No man can ‘save’ the soul of another. The price of salvation is one that only the Son of God could pay; as the hymn says, there was no other ‘good enough to pay the price’. The very phrasing of our version strengthens the effect— the verb redeem which (outside the pawnbroking business) is now used only in a theological sense, and the past tense of cost. Not it ‘costs’, but it did cost, more, once and for all on Calvary. But apparently the Hebrew poet meant something quite different and much more ordinary. He means merely that death is inevitable. As Dr Moffatt translates it: ‘None can buy himself off. Not one can purchase for a price from God (soul’s ransom is too dear) life that shall never end.’

  At this point I can imagine a lifelong lover of the Psalms exclaiming: ‘Oh bother the great scholars and modern translators! I’m not going to let them spoil the whole Bible for me. At least let me ask two questions, (i) Is it not stretching the arm of coincidence rather far to ask me to believe that, not once but twice, in the same book, mere accident (wrong translations, bad manuscripts, or what not) should have so successfully imitated the language of Christianity? (ii) Do you mean that the old meanings which we have always attached to these verses simply have to be scrapped?’ Both questions will come up for consideration in a later chapter. For the moment I will only say that, to the second, my personal answer is a confident No. I return to what I believe to be the facts.

  It seems quite clear that in most parts of the Old Testament there is little or no belief in a future life; certainly no belief that is of any religious importance. The word translated ‘soul’ in our version of the Psalms means simply ‘life’; the word translated ‘hell’ means simply ‘the land of the dead’, the state of all the dead, good and bad alike, Sheol.

  It is difficult to know how an ancient Jew thought of Sheol. He did not like thinking about it. His religion did not encourage him to think about it. No good could come of thinking about it. Evil might. It was a condition from which very wicked people like the Witch of Endor were believed to be able to conjure up a ghost. But the ghost told you nothing about Sheol; it was called up solely to tell you things about our own world. Or again, if you allowed yourself an unhealthy interest in Sheol you might be lured into one of the neighbouring forms of Paganism and ‘eat the offerings of the dead’ (Ps. 106:28).

  Behind all this one can discern a conception not specifically Jewish but common to many ancient religions. The Greek Hades is the most familiar example to modern people. Hades is neither Heaven nor Hell; it is almost nothing. I am speaking of the popular beliefs; of course philosophers like Plato have a vivid and positive doctrine of immortality. And of course poets may write fantasies about the world of the dead. These have often no more to do with the real Pagan religion than the fantasies we may write about other planets have to do with real astronomy. In real Pagan belief, Hades was hardly worth talking about; a world of shadows, of decay. Homer (probably far closer to actual beliefs than the later and more sophisticated poets) represents the ghosts as witless. They gibber meaninglessly until some living man gives them sacrificial blood to drink. How the Greeks felt about it in his time is startlingly shown at the beginning of the Iliad where he says of men killed in battle that ‘their souls’ went to Hades but ‘the men themselves’ were devoured by dogs and carrion birds. It is the body, even the dead body, which is the man himself; the ghost is only a sort of reflection or echo. (The grim impulse sometimes has crossed my mind to wonder whether all this was, is, in fact true; that the merely natural fate of humanity, the fate of unredeemed humanity, is just this—to disintegrate in soul as in body, to be a witless psychic sediment. If so, Homer’s idea that only a drink of sacrificial blood can restore a ghost to rationality would be one of the most striking among many Pagan anticipations of the truth.)

  Such a conception, vague and marginal even in Paganism, becomes more so in Judaism. Sheol is even dimmer, further in the background, than Hades. It is a thousand miles away from the centre of Jewish religion; especially in the Psalms. They speak of Sheol (or ‘hell’ or ‘the pit’) very much as a man speaks of ‘death’ or ‘the grave’ who has no belief in any sort of future state whatever—a man to whom the dead are simply dead, nothing, and there’s no more to be said.

  In many passages this is quite clear, even in our translation, to every attentive reader. The clearest of all is the cry in 89:46: ‘O remember how short my time is: why hast thou made all men for nought?’ We all come to nothing in the end. Therefore ‘every man living is altogether vanity’ (39:6). Wise and foolish have the same fate (49:10). Once dead, a man worships God no more; ‘Shall the dust give thanks unto thee?’ (30:10); ‘for in death no man remembereth thee’ (6:5). Death is ‘the land’ where, not only worldly things, but all things, ‘are forgotten’ (88:12). When a man dies ‘all his thoughts perish’ (146:3). Every man will ‘follow the generation of his fathers, and shall never see light’ (49:19): he goes into a darkness which will never end.

  Elsewhere of course it sounds as if the poet were praying for the ‘salvation of his soul’ in the Christian sense. Almost certainly he is not. In 30:3, ‘Thou hast brought my soul out of hell’ means ‘You have saved me from death.’ ‘The snares of death compassed me round about, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me’ (116:3) means ‘Death was setting snares for me, I felt the anguish of a dying man’—as we should say, ‘I was at death’s door.’

  As we all know from our New Testaments Judaism had greatly changed in this respect by Our Lord’s time. The Sadducees held to the old view. The Pharisees, and apparently many more, believed in the life of the world to come. When, and by what stages, and (under God) from what sources, this new belief crept in, is not part of our present s
ubject. I am more concerned to try to understand the absence of such a belief, in the midst of intense religious feeling, over the earlier period. To some it may seem astonishing that God, having revealed so much of Himself to that people, should not have taught them this.

  It does not now astonish me. For one thing there were nations close to the Jews whose religion was overwhelmingly concerned with the after life. In reading about ancient Egypt one gets the impression of a culture in which the main business of life was the attempt to secure the well-being of the dead. It looks as if God did not want the chosen people to follow that example. We may ask why. Is it possible for men to be too much concerned with their eternal destiny? In one sense, paradoxical though it sounds, I should reply, Yes.

  For the truth seems to me to be that happiness or misery beyond death, simply in themselves, are not even religious subjects at all. A man who believes in them will of course be prudent to seek the one and avoid the other. But that seems to have no more to do with religion than looking after one’s health or saving money for one’s old age. The only difference here is that the stakes are so very much higher. And this means that, granted a real and steady conviction, the hopes and anxieties aroused are overwhelming. But they are not on that account the more religious. They are hopes for oneself, anxieties for oneself. God is not in the centre. He is still important only for the sake of something else. Indeed such a belief can exist without a belief in God at all. Buddhists are much concerned with what will happen to them after death, but are not, in any true sense, Theists.