38 pages • 1-hour read
Reflections on the Psalms
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Themes
Praise as a Natural Response to Divine Glory
The Psalms are in large part hymns of praise to God, and in Chapter 9, Lewis outlines an explanation of praise in the Psalms. At first Lewis was perplexed by the Psalms’ emphasis on praising God, which seemed to show God in a self-aggrandizing, but he eventually became convinced that praise is a natural human response to goodness in the world. Human beings rejoice in what they love and value, and they urge others to rejoice in it too. Since God is “supremely Valuable,” Lewis reasons that people would want to praise him even more intensely than they do earthly things. In other words, while praising and worshiping God may at first seem like “duty,” it is ultimately a form of natural “delight.”
Lewis bases his argument on the analogy between God and objects of enjoyment, such as nature, art, or food. Not only do people enjoy these things, they also want others to share in the pleasurable experience. Praise is thus far from being mere “compliment” or “approval”—i.e., something separate from the act of enjoyment. Rather, declarations of praise complete, and thus are intrinsic to, the enjoyment. The Psalmist calls on the reader or hearer to join in praising God for his works in creation as well as his mercy, power, and other intangible qualities. In this way, the Psalmist gives reasons to praise God and evidence for why He is worthy of praise.
Further, Lewis argues that praise and worship are not only reactions to divine goodness; they are also a means by which God reveals himself to humanity. Participating in public worship in the Temple, the Psalmists “saw God” and found delight in the divine presence, then expressed these experiences in the Psalms. In this way, Lewis circles back to his discussion in Chapter 5 about beauty and joy as signposts to God. Such experiences are manifestations of God because they flow from God’s identity as the all-powerful source of life and beauty. David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant is a powerful symbol of the delight that, for the Psalmists, was inseparable from divine praise and worship. Music, festivity, and agriculture were closely related to worship and expressed the delight that the ancient Jews found in their religion.
The Tension Between Divine Justice and Human Vengeance
In Chapters 2 and 3, Lewis confronts the “spirit of hatred” present in some of the Psalms, seeking to reconcile this with the Psalms’ being a moral guide for Christians. He explains the Psalmists’ anger in terms of a passion for justice, with God being seen as the embodiment of that virtue. On an imaginative level, the Psalmists see themselves as innocent victims hoping for vindication from God, the just Judge, in court. This is in contrast to how modern Christians typically view God’s judgment: in light of the Final Judgment rather than a more immediate earthly trial. While Christians see themselves as guilty parties hoping in God’s mercy, the Psalmists saw themselves as innocent plaintiffs hoping for God’s vindication and the evildoer’s punishment.
The Psalms emphasize personal responsibility in the present life; at the same time, some express the desire for justice as a bitter or violent desire for vengeance. The Psalmists’ emphasis on justice sometimes leads to an attitude of self-righteousness and moral superiority toward the Psalmist’s “enemies.” In this way, a tension is implied in the Psalms between divine justice and human vengeance. However, because the Psalmist usually implores God to carry out the avenging, it is implied that vengeance is the prerogative of God alone.
Lewis finds value in both the Jewish and the Christian views of justice. While Christianity sees humans as subject to an ultimate, divine, standard of justice, the Psalms put justice on a more everyday context. The “cursing” psalms have value in that they represent the voice of the “little person” seeking justice and remind readers of the need to act justly according to human laws. Lewis makes a key distinction between “righteousness” and “being in the right”: while no human being can claim total righteousness before God, it is possible to be in the right in a particular case, as depicted in many of the Psalms.
Along these lines, Lewis places these Psalms in their historical context. He urges Christian readers to sympathize with the wrongs imposed on the ancient Jews, seeing the cursing psalms as the “natural result of injuring a human being” (24). Because the cursing psalms reflect weaknesses that are common to human nature, Lewis proposes that Christians use them as allegories and examine how they relate to the present day.
Metaphor and Imagery as Vehicles of Faith
One of the guiding principles of Reflections on the Psalms is that the Psalms should be seen first and foremost as poetry: literary compositions that, like secular poems, make full use of imagery and metaphorical language to convey emotion. That the Psalms are the inspired word of God implies that God has expressed his message through human language and sentiments. Unless the Psalms—and the Bible as a whole—are read in a literary context, readers will “miss what is in them and think [they] see what is not” (3). As the most noticeable example of this, Lewis cites the Psalms’ use of parallelism (see Terms), in which similar or contrasting ideas are repeated for rhetorical effect. Much of the Psalms’ religious meaning comes from the use of this and other literary techniques, notably imagery and metaphor.
Throughout the book, Lewis highlights the Psalms’ use of metaphor and imagery to embody religious ideas. Chapter 2 explains the Psalms’ view of justice as being grounded in an imaginative picture of a court case with God as the presiding judge. Chapter 12 suggests seeing the “enemies” in the “cursing” psalms as symbols for sinful habits to help soften their harsher aspects and make them spiritually useful. Such allegorical readings of the Psalms are traditional in Christian theology, even more so in the case of psalms regarded as relating to the Messiah. Messianic concepts in the Psalms are often tied to imagery of kings, priests, battles, and weddings—images that, in Christian tradition, describe Jesus’s nature and mission.
The use of sensory imagery is key to the Psalms’ description of the experience of the divine. God’s power is depicted as being manifest in the wind, storms, sea, and other natural forces. The longing for God is likened to the thirst of a deer for flowing water. God’s law is described as “sweeter than honey” and more desirable than gold. The visual and aural majesty of the Temple liturgy informs the Psalmists’ descriptions of God’s presence. In contrast to Greek culture’s emphasis on abstract thought, Jewish culture was more concrete and image-oriented. The images helped to convey the values of the culture and were inseparable from the ideas they described.
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