Reflections on the Psalms

Lewis considers what the Psalmists meant when they referred to God’s law and commandments as “sweeter than honey” and as the source of “delight”—a question that to him was “at first very mysterious” (55). For ancient Jewish scholars, the Mosaic Law was a subject of study much as “history, or physics, or archeology” (56) are for a student today, and a source of pride and pleasure. However, this could lead to a misplaced professional pride and conceit, looking down on outsiders as ignorant and inferior, as well as to the Law taking on a “cancerous life of its own” by breeding a “vast overgrowth” of legalism.

However, the Psalms show readers “the good thing of which this bad thing is the corruption” (58). Psalm 119 is a poem that, through its intricately patterned structure, expresses following God’s law as “the delight in Order, the pleasure in getting a thing ‘just so’” (59). At its best, this attitude is not “priggery” or “scrupulosity” but rather “the language of a man ravished by a moral beauty” (60).

When the Psalms declare that the Law is “true” or “the truth,” they are recognizing that the Law is good because God is good; the Law is rooted in God’s own nature and thus has “intrinsic validity, rock-bottom reality” (61). The Jews may have also perceived the Law as “sweet” in contrast with surrounding pagan practices, which included such “appalling” features as child sacrifice. Lewis finds the perfect expression of the idea in Psalm 19, which he also finds to be “the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world” (63).

To conclude, Lewis speculates that as Christianity finds itself increasingly opposed to other, “cruel” worldviews that “ignore all individual rights” (64), Christian ethics will stand out all the more for its “sweet reasonableness,” just as the Jewish Law did for the Psalmists. However, this also opens the door to self-righteousness and pride.

The Psalms warn not only against doing evil, but against connivance or complicity with evil and evildoers. While this attitude of moral purity can lead to an attitude of prideful “Pharisaism,” i.e., being self-righteous or hypocritical, it does nevertheless point to a real problem: “How ought we to behave in the presence of very bad people?” (68).

This problem sometimes manifests itself in “band-wagoning,” where someone develops a desire to associate with important yet wicked people. The reason Christians should resist such a desire is not that they are “too good” for such people but because they are “not good enough” to cope with the temptations and problems that might result—notably, the temptation to “condone, to connive at […] to ‘consent’” (71) to evil.

Life often places readers in such company whether they want it or not. They are made party to gossip and malicious talk, or to talk against virtue and decency. If they tacitly go along, they are implicitly denying Christ; if they express objection and disagreement, they appear self-righteous. Lewis advises either silence or disagreement expressed in the spirit of rational debate. In matters of grave moral import, a protest becomes imperative: The Psalms speak frequently against the “sins of the tongue” (75), which makes those psalms very relevant to Lewis’s era.

Lewis identifies two factors in the Psalmists’ culture that determine their approach to nature. First, the ancient Jews were peasants or farmers who lived close to the soil. Second, they believed in a creator God who was distinct from his creation. The first factor can be seen in the vivid nature description in the Psalms. The belief in creation has three results that can be seen in the Psalms, results that make Judaism unlike other ancient religions (none of which had anything like a doctrine of creation in the Jewish sense). First, the doctrine of creation separates and distinguishes God from creation, making it impossible to treat nature as divine. Secondly, at the same time, it makes nature into “an index, a symbol, a manifestation, of the Divine” (81). This is more so than in paganism, where the many gods that filled nature were themselves created beings. In Judaism, nature revealed the existence of the uncreated God, the source of all.

Thirdly, the doctrine of creation means that nature can be seen “not as a mere datum but as an achievement” (83). God’s works have his truth, solidity, and reliability. Fourthly, and most surprisingly, seeing creation as God’s handiwork means that even parts of nature that are “useless or hurtful or wholly irrelevant to man” (84) are honored, making human beings and all other creatures kin to one another.

Lewis digresses to discuss a piece of evidence that he believes connects nature poetry with the doctrine of creation. Scholars have argued that the Hymn to the Sun attributed to the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten may reflect a form of religion that influenced Jewish monotheism. While Lewis stops short of postulating a direct connection, he affirms that a similar attitude toward nature allowed Akhenaten to write similar nature poetry to the Psalms. The “full and abiding development” (89) of creation theology remains Jewish. Indeed, Lewis argues that the more concrete religious experience of the Jews provided a better “ground” for religious development than the exalted but abstract nature-rooted monotheism of Akhenaten.