Lewis on the Psalms

When Clive Staples Lewis, 59, England's top amateur theologian, reread the psalms, he was bothered by the cursing. In 109, for instance, the psalmist prays that an ungodly man may rule over his enemy and that Satan may stand at his right hand, that his enemy's ""prayers be turned into sin," that the enemy's days be few and his job be given to someone else, that when he is dead his orphans be beggars, that no one should pity him, and that God always remember against him the sins of his parents. Even more "devilish," says Anglican Lewis, is the verse in the beautiful 137th Psalm in which "a blessing is pronounced on anyone who will snatch up a Babylonian baby and beat its brains out against the pavement."

What, asks Lewis, are Christians to make of such vitriol? In his provocatively chatty Reflections on the Psalms (Harcourt, Brace; $3.75), the wise and witty Oxford don argues that such embarrassments should not simply be ignored. Remembering that all Holy Scripture is "written for our learning" and that "Our Lord's mind and language were clearly steeped in the Psalter," Lewis prefers to make "some use" of the curses. One of their uses, he found, is to call attention to the same hatreds in modern man's own heart--"we are, after all, blood brothers to these ferocious, self-pitying, barbaric men." Another use: they serve as a reminder that the higher one is, the more one is in danger of falling. "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 ... 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." Finally, says Lewis, the violently angry passages of the psalms evoke God's implacable anger toward sin (if not toward the sinner); the "relentlessness of the Psalmists" is at least preferable to moral indifference masquerading as charity.

Risky Claim. Lewis also noticed the psalms' attitude toward God's judgment of men. Christians tremble at the thought (or should); Judgment Day is "that day of wrath, that dreadful day." But the psalmists looked forward to it joyfully. The reason for the difference, says Lewis, is that "the Christian pictures the case to be tried as a criminal case with himself in the dock; the Jew pictures it as a civil case with himself as the plaintiff. The one hopes for acquittal, or rather for pardon; the other hopes for a resounding triumph with heavy damages."

The claim to be right is spiritually risky --"it leads into that typically Jewish prison of self-righteousness which Our Lord so often terribly rebuked." But we have no right to assume "that the Psalmists are deceived or lying when they assert that, as against their particular enemies at some particular moment, they are completely in the right. Their voices while they say so may grate harshly on our ear and suggest to us that they are an unamiable people. But ... to be wronged does not commonly make people amiable."

Wanted: Pariahs. The psalms condemn not only doing evil, but also consenting to it, and this is a precept C.S. Lewis feels is sadly in the discard today. "It may be asked," he writes, "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."

In fact, one of the troubles of the times may be that people take too little of the law into their own hands--"There seems now no medium between hopeless submission and full-dress revolution. Rioting has died out. moderate rioting. It can be argued that if the windows of various ministries and newspapers were more often broken, if certain people were more often put under pumps and (mildly--mud, not stones) pelted in the streets, we should get on a great deal better."

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