C.S. Lewis on the Imprecatory Psalms, Pt I

It is said that actions speak louder than words. But no doubt we'll find that our words speak loud enough. Jesus once said, "I say to you that, every careless word that men shall speak, they shall render account for it in the day of judgment." This is enough to make the best among us shudder. Our words are in fact a kind of action (Jas.3:2-13), a deed, either good or bad. And these verbal 'actions' impact our hearers profoundly (e.g., 1Tim.4:16). There is, therefore, a certain, awful weightiness to our words, even where they are spoken lightly. And so Peter instructs, "If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God." And James tells us, "Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers." Our judgment will be more strict.

For we all stumble in many ways. If anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to bridle the whole body as well.

If we all stumble, then we all stumble in our speech: "no one can tame the tongue, it is a restless evil and full of deadly poison!"

All of us then will undoubtedly regret some of the words we've spoken or written during our short sojourn on this earth. And almost certainly, there will be more than we now realize. Praise God that, to quote James again, "mercy triumphs over judgment"!

Some men of course speak better than others. C.S. Lewis is a man who, in more ways than one, has spoken better than most in our age. Martin Luther once charged Erasmus of using his golden-tongue in an unworthy endeavor: shoveling, um..."scheisse," I believe is the technical term in the German. Dr. Lewis, however, used his admirably, shoring up the biblical and rational foundations of the Christian West with great wit and wisdom. But I wonder which words he now regrets?

I recently re-read Lewis' remarks on the imprecatory psalms in a chapter from his insightful little book, Reflections on the Psalms, entitled "The Cursings." In it, he writes:

In some of the Psalms the spirit of hatred which strikes us in the face is like the heat from a furnace mouth. In others the same spirit ceases to be frightful only be becoming (to a modern mind) almost comic in its naivety... One way of dealing with these terrible or (dare we say?) contemptible Psalms is simply to leave them alone. But unfortunately the bad parts will not "come away clean"; they may, as we have noticed, be intertwined with the most exquisite things...At the outset I felt sure, and I feel sure still, that we must not either try to explain them away or to yield for one moment to the idea that, because it comes in the Bible, all this vindictive hatred must somehow be good and pious. We must face both facts squarely. The hatred is there - festering, gloating, undisguised-and also we should be wicked if we in any way condoned or approved it, or (worse still) used it to justify similar passions in ourselves.

Lewis goes on to offer what he feels is profitable in these otherwise contemptible psalms of Israel. He offers the following suggestions as to their potential usefulness for the Christian:

1) They reveal, and thereby expose in our own hearts, the natural if dangerous reaction of man to injustice. Beyong giving us insight into ourselves, however, they illustrate the depth of impact our sin has on the other, our victims, in tempting them through our injustice to such raw resentment and bitterness. Their vehemence and vindictiveness, in other words, both highlight our own hidden violence, and reveal the dark fruits born within those we violate. In this sense, then, their bad example serves us as a warning.

2)The very depths of their depravity speaks to the great heights of their spirituality. As he writes, "It seems that there is a general rule in the moral universe which may be formulated 'The higher the more in danger'... 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... The Jew sinned in this matter worse than the Pagans not because they were further from God but because they were nearer to Him." In other words, if the Jewish psalmist vented his rage at wicked men, it was because he appropriately grasped that there is such a thing as evil, which was supremely hateful to God (even if he hated the evil-doer whom God Himself loved).

However, I think here, in his attempt to salvage such "devilish" poetry, "hideously distorted by the human instrument," as nevertheless God's Word, Lewis is at his least compelling. Certainly there are very many great insights along the way (e.g., "If the divine call does not make us better, it will make us worse"); but in the end, his rationalizations for redeeming these 'hateful' little songs appears rather thin and contrived. It is, to be sure, a hodgepodge of impressions, as Lewis honestly wrestles with what to do with these controversial words of Holy Scripture. However, perhaps he would have been wiser to do as the psalmist did in 73, and kept it to himself: "If I had said, 'I will speak thus,' I would have betrayed your children," (v.15). Or, at least kept it to himself until he understood fully the "final destiny" of the wicked in light of God's majesty and holiness (v.17).

In particular, I wonder if C.S. Lewis' assessment of these psalms (he cites Ps.109, 69:23; 143:12; 139:19; 137:9; and 23:5) is accurate from the outset? Are these in fact the embarrassing expressions of crass hatred and vindictive appeals for personal revenge, that he claims? Have the psalmists of Israel mispoke? Are their maledictions a slip of an otherwise pious tongue? This is what I'd like to explore in the next post...