The Psalms
The dominant impression I get from reading the Psalms is one of antiquity. I seem to be looking into a deep pit of time, but looking through a lens which brings the figures who inhabit that depth up close to my eye. In that momentary proximity they are almost shockingly alien; creatures of unrestrained emotion, wallowing in self-pity, sobbing, cursing, screaming in exultation, clashing uncouth weapons or dancing to the din of strange musical instruments. Yet, side by side with this, there is also a different image in my mind: Anglican choirs, well laundered surplices, soapy boys’ faces, hassocks, an organ, prayer-books, and perhaps the smell of new-mown graveyard grass coming in with the sunlight through an open door. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, impression grows faint, but neither, perhaps, ever quite disappears. The irony reaches its height when a boy soloist sings in that treble which is so beautifully free from all personal emotion the words whereby ancient warriors lashed themselves with frenzy against their enemies; and does this in the service of the God of Love, and himself, meanwhile, perhaps thinks neither of that God nor of ancient wars but of ‘bullseyes’ and the Comics. This irony, this double or treble vision, is part of the pleasure. I begin to suspect that it is part of the profit too.
How old the Psalms, as we now have them, really are is a question for the scholars. I am told there is one (No. 18) which might really have come down from the age of David himself; that is, from the tenth century B.C. Most of them, however, are said to be ‘post exilic’; the book was put together when the Hebrews, long exiled in Babylonia, were repatriated by that enlightened ruler, Cyrus of Persia. This would bring us down to the sixth century. How much earlier material the book took in is uncertain. Perhaps for our present purpose it does not greatly matter. The whole spirit and technique and the characteristic attitudes in the Psalms we have might be very like those of much older sacred poetry which is now lost. We know that they had such poetry; they must have been already famous for that art when their Babylonian conquerors (see No. 137) asked them for a specimen. And some very early pieces occur elsewhere in the Old Testament. Deborah’s song of triumph over Sisera in Judges V might be as old as the battle that gave rise to it back in the thirteenth century. If the Hebrews were conservative in such matters then sixth century poems may be very like those of their ancestors. And we know they were conservative. One can see that by leaping forward six centuries into the New Testament and reading the Magnificat. The Virgin has something other (and more momentous) to say than the old Psalmists; but what she utters is quite unmistakably a psalm. The style, the dwelling on Covenant, the delight in the vindication of the poor, are all perfectly true to the old model. So might the old model have been true to one yet older. For poetry of that sort did not, like ours, seek to express those things in which individuals differ, and did not aim at novelty. Even if the Psalms we read were all composed as late as the sixth century B.C., in reading them I suspect that we have our hands on the near end of a living cord that stretches far back into the past.
In most moods the spirit of the Psalms feels to me more alien than that of the oldest Greek literature. But that is not an affair of dates. Distance in temper does not always coincide with distance in time. To most of us, perhaps to all of us at most times (unless we are either very uneducated or very holy or, as might be, both) the civilization that descends from Greece and Rome is closer, more congenial, than what we inherit from ancient Israel. The very words and concepts which we use for science, philosophy, criticism, government, grammar, are all Graeco-Roman. It is this, and not Israel, that has made us, in the ordinary sense, ‘civilized’. But no Christian can read the Bible without discovering that these ancient Hebrews, generally so remote, may at any moment turn out to be our brothers in a sense in which no Greek or Roman ever was. What a dull, remote thing, for example, the Book of Proverbs seems at a first glance: bearded Orientals uttering endless platitudes as if in a parody of the Arabian Nights. Compared with Plato or Aristotle—compared even with Xenophon—it is not thought at all. Then, suddenly, just as you are going to give it up, your eye falls on the words, ‘If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he be thirsty give him water to drink’ (xxv, 21). One rubs one’s eyes. So they were saying that already. They knew that so long before Christ came. There is nothing like it in Greek, nor, if my memory serves me, in Confucius. And this is the sort of surprise we shall often get in the Psalms. These strange, alien figures may at any moment show that, in spiritual descent (as opposed to cultural) it is they, after all, who are our ancestors and the classical nations who are alien. Conversely, in reading the classics we sometimes have the opposite surprise. Those loved authors, so civilized, tolerant, humane, and enlightened, every now and then reveal that they are divided from us by a gulf. Hence the eternal, roguish tittering about pederasty in Plato or the hard pride that makes Aristotle’s Ethics in places almost comic. We begin to doubt whether any one of them (even Virgil himself) if we could recall him from the dead might not, in the first hour’s conversation, let out something that would utterly estrange us.
I do not at all mean that the Hebrews were just ‘better’ than the Greeks and the Romans. On the contrary we shall find in the Psalms expressions of a cruelty more vindictive and a self-righteousness more complete than anything in the classics. If we ignore such passages and read only a few selected favourite Psalms, we miss the point. For the point is precisely this: that these same fanatic and homicidal Hebrews, and not the more enlightened peoples, again and again—for brief moments—reach a Christian level of spirituality. It is not that they are better or worse than the Pagans, but that they are both better and worse. One is forced to recognize that, in one respect, these alien poets are our predecessors, and the only predecessors we can find in all antiquity. They have something the Pagans have not. They know something of which Socrates was ignorant. This Something does not seem to us to arise at all naturally from what else we can see of their character. It looks like something that has been given them from outside; in fact, like what it professes to be, a revelation. Their claim to be the ‘Chosen’ people is strong.
We may, indeed, be surprised at the choice. If we had been allowed to see the world as it was, say, in the fifteenth century B.C., and asked to guess which of the stocks then existing was going to be entrusted with the consciousness of God and with the transmission of that blood which would one day produce a body for the incarnation of God Himself, I do not think many of us would have guessed right. (I think the Egyptians would have been my own favourite.)
A similar strangeness meets us elsewhere. The raw material out of which a thing is made is not always that which would seem most promising to one who does not understand the process. There is nothing hard, brittle, or transparent about the ingredients of glass. Again, to come nearer to the present matter, do not our own personal ancestors, our family, seem at first rather improbable? Later, as we begin to recognize the heredity that works in us, we understand. But surely not at first. What young man feels ‘These are exactly the sort of people whose son (or grandson, or descendant) I might be expected to be’? For usually, in early life, the people with whom one seems to have most in common, the people who share one’s interests, the ‘men of one’s own totem’, are not one’s relatives, so that the idea of having been born into the wrong family is an attractive myth. (We are delighted when the hero, in Siegfried, forces the dwarf to confess that he is not his son.) The thing one is made out of is not necessarily like oneself (still less, like one’s idea of that self) and looks at first even more unlike than it really is. It may be so with the origins of our species. The Evolutionists say we descend from ‘anthropoids’, creatures akin to apes. Is it (at first sight) the descent we would have chosen? If an intelligence such as ours had looked at the pre-human world and been told that one of the species then in existence was to be raised to rational and spiritual status and at last behold its Creator face to face, would he have picked the winner? Not unless it realized the importance of its hand-like paws; just as one would not guess the ingredients of glass unless one knew some chemistry. So we, because of something we do not know, are bewildered to find the ancient Hebrews ‘chosen’ as they were.
From this point of view there is no better psalm to begin with than No. 109. It ends with a verse which every Christian can at once make his own: the Lord is ‘the prisoner’s friend’, standing by the poor (or friendless) to save him from unjust judges. This is one of the characteristic notes of the Psalms and one of the things for which we love them. It anticipates the temper of the Magnificat. It is hardly to be paralleled in Pagan literature (the Greek gods were very active in casting down the proud, but hardly in raising the humble). It will commend itself even to a modern unbeliever of good will; he may call it wishful thinking, but he will respect the wish. In a word, if we read only the last verse we should feel in full sympathy with this psalmist. But the moment we look back at what precedes that verse, he turns out to be removed from us by infinite distances; or, worse still, to be loathsomely akin to that in us which it is the main business of life to purge away. Psalm 109 is as unabashed a hymn of hate as was ever written. The poet has a detailed programme for his enemy which he hopes God will carry out. The enemy is to be placed under a wicked ruler. He is to have ‘an accuser’ perpetually at his side: whether an evil spirit, a ‘Satan’, as our Prayer Book version renders it, or merely a human accuser—a spy, an agent provocateur, a member of the secret police (v. 5). If the enemy attempts to have any religious life, this, far from improving his position, must make him even worse: ‘let his prayer be turned into sin’ (v. 6). And after his death—which had better, please, be early (v. 7)—his widow and children and descendants are to live in unrelieved misery (vv. 8–12). What makes our blood run cold, even more than the unrestrained vindictiveness, is the writer’s untroubled conscience. He has no qualms, scruples, or reservations; no shame. He gives hatred free rein—encourages and spurs it on—in a sort of ghastly innocence. He offers these feelings, just as they are, to God, never doubting that they will be acceptable: turning straight from the maledictions to ‘Deal thou with me, O Lord God, according unto thy Name: for sweet is thy mercy’ (v. 20).
The man himself, of course, lived very long ago. His injuries may have been (humanly speaking) beyond endurance. He was doubtless a hot-blooded barbarian, more like a modern child than a modern man. And though we believe (and can even see from the last verse) that some knowledge of the real God had come to his race, yet he lived in the cold of the year, the early spring of Revelation, and those first gleams of knowledge were like snow drops, exposed to the frosts. For him, then, there may have been excuses. But we—what good can we find in reading such stuff?
One good, certainly. We have here an uninhibited expression of those feelings which oppression and injustice naturally produce. The psalm is a portrait: under it should be written ‘This is what you make of a man by ill-treating him.’ In a modern child or savage the results might be exactly the same. In a modern, Western European adult—especially if he were a professing Christian—they would be more sophisticated; disguised as a disinterested love of justice, claiming to be concerned with the good of society. But under that disguise, and none the better for it in the sight of God, the feelings might still be there. (I am thinking of a total stranger who forwarded to me a letter written to her in denigration of myself by another total stranger, because, as she said, ‘she felt it her duty’.) Now in a case of what we ordinarily call ‘seduction’ (that is, sexual seduction) we should think it monstrous to dwell on the guilt of the party who yielded to temptation and ignore that of the party who tempted. But every injury or oppression is equally a temptation, a temptation to hatred, and in that sense a seduction. Whenever we have wronged our fellow man, we have tempted him to be such a man as wrote Psalm 109. We may have repented of our wrong: we do not always know if he has repented of his hatred. How do accounts now stand between us if he has not?
I do not know the answer to that question. But I am inclined to think that we had better look unflinchingly at the sort of work we have done; like puppies, we must have ‘our noses rubbed in it’. A man, now penitent, who has once seduced and abandoned a girl and then lost sight of her, had better not avert his eyes from the crude realities of the life she may now be living. For the same reason we ought to read the psalms that curse the oppressor; read them with fear. Who knows what imprecations of the same sort have been uttered against ourselves? What prayers have Red men, and Black, and Brown and Yellow, sent up against us to their gods or sometimes to God Himself? All over the earth the White Man’s offence ‘smells to heaven’: massacres, broken treaties, theft, kidnappings, enslavement, deportation, floggings, lynchings, beatings-up, rape, insult, mockery, and odious hypocrisy make up that smell. But the thing comes nearer than that. Those of us who have little authority, who have few people at our mercy, may be thankful. But how if one is an officer in the army (or, perhaps worse, an N.C.O.)? a hospital matron? a magistrate? a prison-warden? a school prefect? a trade-union official? a Boss of any sort? in a word, anyone who cannot be ‘answered back’? It is hard enough, even with the best will in the world, to be just. It is hard, under the pressure of haste, uneasiness, ill-temper, self-complacency, and conceit, even to continue intending justice. Power corrupts; the ‘insolence of office’ will creep in. We see it so clearly in our superiors; is it unlikely that our inferiors see it in us? How many of those who have been over us did not sometimes (perhaps often) need our forgiveness? Be sure that we likewise need the forgiveness of those that are under us.
We may not always receive it. They may not be Christians at all. They may not be far enough on the way to master that hard work of forgiveness which we have set them. Bitter, chronic resentment, unsuccessfully resisted or not resisted at all, may be burning against us: the spirit, essentially, of Psalm 109.
I do not mean that God hears and will grant such prayers as that psalmist uttered. They are wicked. He condemns them. All resentment is sin. And we may hope that those things which our inferiors resent were not really half so bad as they imagine. The snub was unintentional; the high-handed behaviour on the bench was due to ignorance and an uneasy awareness of one’s own incapacity; the seemingly unfair distribution of work was not really unfair, or not intended to be; the inexplicable personal dislike for one particular inferior, so obvious to him and to some of his fellows, is something of which we are genuinely unconscious (it appears in our conscious mind as discipline, or the need for making an example). Anyway, it is very wicked of of them to hate us. Yes; but the folly consists in supposing that God sees the wickedness in them apart from the wickedness in us which provoked it. They sin by hatred because we tempted them. We have, in that sense, seduced, debauched them. They are, as it were, the mothers of this hatred: we are the fathers.
It is from this point of view that the Magnificat is terrifying. If there are two things in the Bible which should make our blood run cold, it is one; the other is that phrase in Revelation, ‘The wrath of the lamb’. If there is not mildness in the Virgin Mother, if even the lamb, the helpless thing that bleats and has its throat cut, is not the symbol of the harmless, where shall we turn? The resemblance between the Magnificat and traditional Hebrew poetry which I noted above is no mere literary curiosity. There is, of course, a difference. There are no cursings here, no hatred, no self-righteousness. Instead, there is mere statement. He has scattered the proud, cast down the mighty, sent the rich empty away. I spoke just now of the ironic contrast between the fierce psalmists and the choir-boy’s treble. The contrast is here brought up to a higher level. Once more we have the treble voice, a girl’s voice, announcing without sin that the sinful prayers of her ancestors do not remain entirely unheard; and doing this, not indeed with fierce exultation, yet—who can mistake the tone?—in a calm and terrible gladness.
I am tempted here to digress for a moment into a speculation which may bring ease to us in one direction while it alarms us in another. Christians are unhappily divided about the kind of honour in which the Mother of the Lord should be held, but there is one truth about which no doubt seems admissible. If we believe in the Virgin Birth and if we believe in Our Lord’s human nature, psychological as well as physical (for it is heretical to think Him a human body which had the Second Person of the Trinity instead of a human soul) we must also believe in a human heredity for that human nature. There is only one source for it (though in that source all the true Israel is summed up). If there is an iron element in Jesus may we not without irreverence guess whence, humanly speaking, it came? Did neighbours say, in His boyhood, ‘He’s His Mother’s Son’? This might set in a new and less painful light the severity of some things He said to, or about, His Mother. We may suppose that she understood them very well.
I have called this a digression, but I am not sure that it is one. Two things link the Psalms with us. One is the Magnificat, and one, Our Lord’s continued quotations from them, though not, to be sure, from such Psalms as 109. We cannot reject from our minds a book in which His was so steeped. The Church herself has followed Him and steeped our minds in the same book.
In a word, the Psalmists and we are both in the Church. Individually they, like us, may be sometimes very bad members of it; tares, but tares that we have no authority to pull up. They may often be ignorant, as we (though perhaps in different ways) are ignorant, what spirit they are of. But we cannot excommunicate them, nor they us.
I do not at all mean (though if you watch, you will certainly find some critic who says I meant) that we are to make any concession to their ferocity. But we may learn to see the good thing which that ferocity is mixed with. Through all their excesses there runs a passionate craving for justice. One is tempted at first to say that such a craving, on the part of the oppressed, is no very great merit; that the wickedest men will cry out for fair play when you give them foul play. But unfortunately this is not true. Indeed at this very moment the spirit which cries for justice may be dying out.
Here is an alarming example. I had a pupil who was certainly a socialist, probably a Marxist. To him the ‘collective’, the State, was everything, the individual nothing; freedom, a bourgeois delusion. Then he went down and became a schoolmaster. A couple of years later, happening to be in Oxford, he paid me a visit. He said he had given up socialism. He was completely disillusioned about state-control. The interferences of the Ministry of Education with schools and schoolmasters were, he had found, arrogant, ignorant, and intolerable: sheer tyranny. I could take lots of this and the conversation went on merrily. Then suddenly the real purpose of his visit was revealed. He was so ‘browned-off’ that he wanted to give up schoolmastering; and could I—had I any influence—would I pull any wires to get him a job—in the Ministry of Education?
There you have the new man. Like the psalmists he can hate, but he does not, like the psalmists, thirst for justice. Having decided that there is oppression he immediately asks: ‘How can I join the oppressors?’ He has no objection to a world which is divided between tyrants and victims; the important thing is which of these two groups you are in. (The moral of the story remains the same whether you share his view about the Ministry or not.)
There is, then, mixed with the hatred in the psalmists, a spark which should be fanned, not trodden out. That spark God saw and fanned, till it burns clear in the Magnificat. The cry for ‘judgement’ was to be heard.
But the ancient Hebrew idea of ‘judgement’ will need an essay to itself.
II
The Day of Judgement is an idea very familiar, and very dreadful, to Christians. ‘In all times of our tribulation, in all time of our wealth, in the hour of death, and in the day of judgement, Good Lord deliver us.’ If there is any concept which cannot by any conjuring be removed from the teaching of Our Lord, it is that of the great separation; the sheep and the goats, the broad way and the narrow, the wheat and the tares, the winnowing fan, the wise and foolish virgins, the good fish and the refuse, the door closed on the marriage feast, with some inside and some outside in the dark. We may dare to hope—some dare to hope—that this is not the whole story, that, as Julian of Norwich said, ‘All will be well and all manner of thing will be well.’ But it is no use going to Our Lord’s own words for that hope. Something we may get from St Paul: nothing, of that kind, from Jesus. It is from His own words that the picture of ‘Doomsday’ has come into Christianity.
One result of this is that the word ‘judgement’ in a religious context immediately suggests to us a criminal trial; the Judge on the bench, the accused in the dock, the hope of acquittal, the fear of conviction. But to the ancient Hebrews ‘judgement’ usually suggested something quite different.
In the Psalms judgement is not something that the conscience-stricken believer fears but something the downtrodden believer hopes for. God ‘shall judge the world in righteousness’ and ‘be a defence for the oppressed’ (ix, 8–9). ‘Judge me, O Lord’, cries the poet of Psalm 35. More surprisingly, in 67 even the ‘nations’, the Gentiles, are told to ‘rejoice and be glad’ because God will ‘judge the folk righteously’. (Our fear is precisely lest the judgement should be a good deal more righteous than we can bear.) In the jubilant 96th Psalm the very sky and earth are to ‘be glad’, the fields are to ‘be joyful’ and all the trees of the wood ‘shall rejoice before the Lord’ because ‘He cometh to judge the earth’. At the prospect of that judgement which we dread there is such revelry as a Pagan poet might have used to herald the coming of Dionysus.
Though our Lord, as I have said, imposed on us the modern, Christian conception of the Day of Judgement, yet His own words elsewhere illuminate the old Hebraic conception. I am thinking of the Unjust Judge in the parable. To most of us, unless we had that parable in mind, the mention of a wicked judge would instantly suggest someone like Judge Jeffries: a roaring, interrupting, bloodthirsty brute, bent on hanging a prisoner, bullying the jury and the witnesses. Our hope is that we shall not be judged by him. Our Lord’s Unjust Judge is a wholly different character. You want him to judge you, you pester him to judge you. The whole difficulty is to get your case heard. Obviously what Our Lord has in view is not a criminal trial at all but a civil trial. We are looking at ‘justice’ from the point of view not of a prisoner but of a plaintiff: a plaintiff with a watertight case, if only she could get the defendant into court.
The picture is strange to us only because we enjoy in our own country an unusually good legal profession. We take it for granted that judges do not need to be bribed and cannot be bribed. This is, however, no law of nature, but a rare achievement; we ourselves might lose it (shall certainly lose it if no pains are taken for its conservation); it does not inevitably go with the use of the English language. Over many parts of the world and in many periods the difficulty for poor and unimportant people has been not only to get their case fairly heard but to get it heard at all. It is their voices that speak in the continual hope of the Hebrews for ‘judgement’, the hope that some day, somehow, wrongs will be righted.
But the idea is not associated only with courts of law. The ‘Judges’ who give their name to a most interesting historical book in the Old Testament were not, I gather, so called only because they sometimes exercised what we should consider judicial functions. Indeed the book has very little to say about ‘judging’ in that sense. Its ‘judges’ are primarily heroes, fighting men, who deliver Israel from foreign tyrants: giant-killers. The name which we translate as ‘judges’ is apparently connected with a verb which means to vindicate, to avenge, to right the wrongs of. They might equally well be called champions, avengers. The knight errant of medieval romance who spends his days liberating, and securing justice for, distressed damsels, would almost have been, for the Hebrews, a ‘judge’.
Such a Judge—He who will at last do us right, the deliverer, the protector, the queller of tyrants—is the dominant image in the Psalms. There are, indeed, some few passages in which a psalmist thinks of ‘judgement’ with trembling: ‘Enter not into judgement with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified’ (143, 2), or ‘If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss: O Lord, who may abide it?’ (130, 3). But the opposite attitude is far commoner: ‘Hear the right, O Lord’ (17, 1), ‘Be thou my Judge’ (26, 1), ‘Plead thou my cause’ (35, 1), ‘Give sentence with me, O God’ (43, 1), ‘Arise, thou Judge of the world’ (94, 2). It is for justice, for a hearing, far more often than for pardon, that the psalmists pray.
We thus reach a very paradoxical generalization. Ordinarily, and of course correctly, the Jewish and the Christian church, the reign of Moses and the reign of Christ, are contrasted as Law against Grace, justice against mercy, rigour against tenderness. Yet apparently those who live under the sterner dispensation hope for God’s judgement while those who live under the milder fear it. How does this come about? The answer, by and large, will be plain to all who have read the Psalms with attention. The psalmists, with very few exceptions, are eager for judgement because they believe themselves to be wholly in the right. Others have sinned against them; their own conduct (as they frequently assure us) has been impeccable. They earnestly invite the divine inspection, certain that they will emerge from it with flying colours. The adversary may have things to hide, but they have not. The more God examines their case, the more unanswerable it will appear. The Christian, on the other hand, trembles because he knows he is a sinner.
Thus in one sense we might say that Jewish confidence in the face of judgement is a by-product of Jewish self-righteousness. But that is far too summary. We must consider the whole experience out of which the self-righteous utterances grow: and secondly, what, on a deeper level, those utterances really mean.
The experience is dark and dreadful. We must not call it the ‘dark night of the soul’ for that name is already appropriate to another darkness and another dread, encountered at a far higher level than (I suppose) any of the psalmists had reached. But we may well call it the Dark Night of the Flesh, understanding by ‘the flesh’ the natural man. For the experience is not in itself necessarily religious and thousands of unbelievers undergo it in our own time. It arises from natural causes; but it becomes religious in the psalmists because they are religious men.
It must be confessed at the outset that all those passages which paint this Dark Night can be regarded, if we wish, as the expressions of a neurosis. If we choose to maintain that several psalmists wrote in, or on the verge of, a nervous breakdown, our theory will cover all the facts. That is, the psalmists assert as true about their own situation all those things which a patient, in a certain neurotic condition, wrongly believes to be true of his. For our present purpose, I think this does not matter much. Neurosis is a thing that occurs; we may have passed, or may yet have to pass, through that valley. It concerns us to see how certain believers in God behaved in it before us. And neurosis is, after all, a relative term. Who can say that he never touches the fringes of it? Even if the Psalms were written by neurotics, that will not make them wholly irrelevant.
But of course we cannot be at all sure that they were. The neurotic wrongly believes that he is threatened by certain evils. But another man (or the neurotic himself at another time) may be really threatened with those same evils. It may be only the patient’s nerves that make him so sure that he has cancer, or is financially ruined, or is going to hell; but this does not prove that there are no such things as cancer or bankruptcy or damnation. To suggest that the situation described in certain psalms must be imaginary seems to me to be wishful thinking. The situation does occur in real life. If anyone doubts this let him consider, while I try to present this Dark Night of the Flesh, how easily it might be, not the subjective impression, but the real situation of any one of the following:
1. A small, ugly, unathletic, unpopular boy in his second term at a thoroughly bad English public school. 2. An unpopular recruit in an army hut. 3. A Jew in Hitler’s Germany. 4. A man in a bad firm or government office whom a group of rivals are trying to get rid of. 5. A Papist in sixteenth-century England. 6. A Protestant in sixteenth-century Spain. 7. An African in Malan’s Africa. 8. An American socialist in the hands of Senator McCarthy or a Zulu, noxious to Chaka, during one of the old, savage witch-hunts.
The Dark Night of the Flesh can be objective; it is not even very uncommon.
One is alone. The fellow-recruit who seemed to be a friend on the first day, the boys who were your friends last term, the neighbours who were your friends before the Jew-baiting began (or before you attracted Senator McCarthy’s attention), even your connections and relatives, have begun to give you a wide berth. No one wishes to be seen with you. When you pass acquaintances in the street they always happen to be looking the other way. ‘They of mine acquaintance were afraid of me; and they that did see me without conveyed themselves from me’ (31, 13). Lovers, neighbours, kinsmen stand ‘afar off’ (38, 11). ‘I am become a stranger unto my brethren’ (69, 8). ‘Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me: and made me to be abhorred of them’ (88, 7). ‘I looked also upon my right hand and saw there was no man that would know me’ (142, 4).
Sometimes it is not an individual but a group (a religious body or even a whole nation) that has this experience. Members fall off; allies desert; the huge combinations against us extend and harden daily. Harder even to bear than our dwindling numbers and growing isolation, is the increasing evidence that ‘our side’ is ineffective. The world is turned upside down by bad men and ‘What hath the righteous done?’, where are our counter-measures? (11, 3). We are ‘put to rebuke’ (12, 9). Once there were omens in our favour and great leaders on our side. But those days are gone: ‘We see not our tokens, there is not one prophet more’ (74,10). England in modern Europe and Christians in modern England often feel like this.
And all round the isolated man, every day, is the presence of the unbelievers. They know well enough what we are believing or trying to believe (‘help thou my unbelief’) and regard it as total illusion. ‘Many one there be that say of my soul, There is no help for him in his God’ (3, 2). As if God, supposing He exists, had nothing to do but look after us! (10, 14); but in fact, ‘There is no God’ (14, 1). If the sufferer’s God really exists ‘let Him deliver him’ now! (22, 8). ‘Where is now thy God?’ (42, 3).
The man in the Dark Night of the Flesh is in everyone else’s eyes extremely funny; the stock joke of that whole school or hut or office. They can’t see him without laughing: they make faces at him (22, 7). The drunks work his name into their comic songs (69, 12). He is a ‘by-word’ (44, 15). Unfortunately all this laughter is not exactly honest, spontaneous laughter such as a man with some oddity of voice or face might learn to bear and even, in the end, to join in. These mockers do not laugh although it hurts him nor even without caring whether it hurts or not; they laugh because it will hurt. Any humiliation or miscarriage of his is jam to them; they crow over him when he’s down—‘when my foot slipped, they rejoiced greatly against me’ (38, 16).
If one had a certain sort of aristocratic and Stoic pride one might perhaps answer scorn with scorn and even (in a sense) rejoice, as Coventry Patmore rejoiced, to live ‘in the high mountain air of public obloquy’. If so, one would not be completely in the Dark Night. But the sufferer, for better or worse, is not—or if he once was, is now no longer—that sort of man. The continual taunts, slights, and humiliations (partly veiled or brutally plain according to the milieu) get past his defences and under his skin. He is in his own eyes also the object they would make him. He has no come-back. Shame has covered his face (69, 7). He might as well be a dumb man; in his mouth are no reproofs (38, 13). He is ‘a worm and no man’ (22, 6).