Towards judgment - An introduction to Psalm 4

Ms. Codex 1058 Glossed psalter
University of Pennsylvania Library

As I flagged on my post on the repeated psalms of the Office, I plan to provide some notes on Psalm 4, the first psalm of Compline in the Benedictine Office, here over the next few weeks.

November is the month when we particularly remember the dead, and so a particularly appropriate time to consider the psalms of Compline, since this hour treats sleep as a 'type' of death, inviting us to prepare for it by repenting of our sins and placing our trust in God.

Today, I will provide a general introduction to Psalm 4; subsequent posts will provide notes on each of the verses.

The psalm as a whole

The Latin of the psalm, along with the Douay-Rheims (Challoner) translation, is set out below.  The two recordings that follow allow you to hear it as used in Compline first at a normal pace, and then sung quite slowly, in the context of Tenebrae (Matins and Lauds) of Holy Saturday.

Psalm 4: Cum invocarem

Vulgate	Douay-Rheims
In finem, in carminibus. Psalmus David.	Unto the end, in verses. A psalm for David.
1 Cum invocárem exaudívit me deus justítiæ meæ: * in tribulatióne dilatásti mihi.	When I called upon him, the God of my justice heard me: when I was in distress, you have enlarged me.
2 Miserére mei, * et exáudi oratiónem meam.	Have mercy on me: and hear my prayer.
3 Filii hóminum, úsquequo gravi corde? *  ut quid dilígitis vanitátem et quæritis mendácium?	O you sons of men, how long will you be dull of heart? Why do you love vanity, and seek after lying?
4 Et scitóte quóniam mirificávit dóminus sanctum suum: * dóminus exáudiet me cum clamávero ad eum.	Know also that the Lord has made his holy one wonderful: the Lord will hear me when I shall cry unto him.
5 Irascímini, et nolíte peccáre: * quæ dícitis in córdibus vestris, in cubílibus vestris compungímini.	Be angry, and sin not: the things you say in your hearts, be sorry for them upon your beds.
6 Sacrificáte sacrifícium justítiæ, et speráte in dómino, * multi dicunt quis osténdit nobis bona?	Offer up the sacrifice of justice, and trust in the Lord: many say, Who shows us good things?
7 Signátum est super nos lumen vultus tui, dómine: * dedísti lætítiam in corde meo.	The light of your countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us: you have given gladness in my heart.
8 A fructu fruménti, vini et ólei sui * multiplicáti sunt.	By the fruit of their corn, their wine, and oil, they rest
9 In pace in idípsum * dórmiam et requiéscam;	In peace in the self same I will sleep, and I will rest
10 Quóniam tu, dómine, singuláriter in spe * constituísti me.	For you, O Lord, singularly have settled me in hope.

The title of the psalm

It is useful, I think, to start with a look at the title of the psalm, In finem, in carminibus. Psalmus David.

Most modern commentators reject the idea that either the numbers or titles of the psalms have any particular significance.  Few view them as part of canonical Scripture, seeing them instead as rather prosaic performance notes, or (a)historical claims for their context.

The Fathers, however, took a very different view, often providing extended commentaries on both their literal and spiritual their meanings: indeed St Gregory of Nyssa composed an entire treatise devoted to the titles of the psalms.

These spiritual meanings are, I think, often quite important for us to consider if we wish to understand the way the psalms are used liturgically, since they can sometimes help explain why a particular psalm was allocated to a particular day of the week or hour.

In the case of Psalm 4, for example, the Fathers generally interpreted 'To the end' (in finem) as referring to the world to come after the last judgment, and linked this to the psalm's references to peaceful rest, and thus to sleep as a foreshadowing of death.

The sixth century commentator St Cassiodorus, for example, suggested:

End does not mean here the decline of some object but the perfection of rungs of the spirit; as Paul says: The end of the law is Christ, unto justice to everyone that believeth? Christ is the glorious perfection of all good things. So the words, Unto the end, remind us that they are to be related to the Lord Christ, or as some prefer, we are to believe that they refer to us: Among whom the end of the world is come, as Paul further says… 

The second part of the title, In carminibus can be translated as "with instruments," which some interpreted as  symbolizing harmony of thought and action.  Cassiodorus continued:

A psalm, as we said earlier, is a musical instrument whose sound issues from its top and by which the divine praises were sung. A canticle sounded forth heaven's praise through human voices. The two are seen to be joined here because at the sacred sacrifices they were sounded with harmonious notes both on musical instruments and with choruses of singers.  So all these words remind us that this canticle will tell of the Lord Christ.

The reference to it being a psalm of David can be interpreted both a claim as to authorship, but also as pointing to its Christological content, since David is a 'type' of Christ.

Psalm 4 in the Office

The psalm is almost certainly one of the 'customary' psalms referred to in the Rule of St Augustine as used before bed, by virtue of verse 5's call for repentance before sleep.

St Basil, for example, attested to its use in the context of preparation for sleep (along with Psalm 90, the second psalm of the hour), commenting:

When the day’s work is ended, thanksgiving should be offered for what has been granted us or for what we have done rightly therein and confession made of our omissions whether voluntary or involuntary, or of a secret fault, if we chance to have committed any in words or deeds, or in the heart itself; for by prayer we propitiate God for all our misdemeanors. The examination of our past actions is a great help toward not falling into like faults again; wherefore the Psalmist says: ‘the things you say in your hearts, be sorry for them upon your beds.’ (Ps 4:5) Again, at nightfall, we must ask that our rest be sinless and untroubled by dreams....(The Long Rule)

St Benedict's decision to use it daily surely reflects the psalm's role in his own formation as part of the customary psalms before bed, and from thence, to the way it nicely reinforces some key themes of his Rule.

It is important, I think, to appreciate that this psalm (along with Psalm 90 that follows it) is, in many respects, a partner to Psalm 3, the psalm that opens the day in the Benedictine Office each day.

In Psalm 4 we go to bed, and hope for the rest granted by God; in Psalm 3 we rise again each day with Christ.

In both, sleep is presented as a type of death; with the hope of rising to eternal life.

This tension between the call to rise now, and fight the good fight in the here and now, and our hope of eventual peace and rest plays out throughout the Rule, but is set up in the Prologue.  The psalm also alludes to several other concepts which St Benedict particularly emphasizes in the Prologue to the Rule, such as enlargement of heart, the call to repentance, and our spiritual growth through perseverance in the face of difficulties.

Other liturgical uses of the psalm

Monastic: Compline, Holy Sat Tenebrae I, All Saints, Corpus Christi; Rom pre-1911: Compline; Roman 1911-62: Sunday Compline
Mass:  Lent I Tues, CO (1)

THE STRUCTURE OF THE PSALM

Before we look at the individual verses in detail, it is worth getting a bit of an overview of the content of the psalm.

Our dependence on God (verses 1-2)

The opening verses of the psalm are a reminder of our total dependence on God's help and forgiveness, and of the need to cultivate the right dispositions in approaching him.  It is deeply consonant with St Benedict's chapter on prayer in the Rule (RB 20), which reminds us of the chasm between us and God.

But this section of the psalm also points to the work God does within us as we progress in the spiritual life, 'enlarging [our hearts]' (v1) with grace so that we can 'run with unspeakable sweetness of love in the way of God's commandments'.

The call to repentance (verses 3-6a)

What do we have to do to achieve this?  The answer, according to the next set of verses, is to respond to the call to repentance.

How long, the psalmist asks, will we persist in sin?  In the Rule, St Benedict tells us that our lives have been extended specifically so that we can amend our ways, but we cannot afford to put off our repentance, since none of us know how long we have.

The psalm follows a logical progression in this section: first we hear God's reproach to his people, calling on us to repent (v3); then we are reminded that God will hear us when we call for his help, because through Christ we have the gift of grace (v4); we are then told to examine our consciences each night, repent our sins, and offer up to God our penances for them (verses 5-6).

The psalm also reminds us that righteous anger, directed at our own sins and those of others, has a proper role to play in the process of conversion.

God's gifts to those who serve him (verses 6a-8)

The next section of the psalm can be read two ways, both of which are valid interpretations,

One interpretation of this section sees the verses as contrasting the good things God offers us as our future reward over mere earthly pleasures.

The second, and better in my view, interpretation views it as exploring the rewards, the 'good things', God offers to those who serve him, those who repent from their sins and seek to offer him the sacrifice of justice.

The first reward, according to the Fathers, is the light of Christ saving us from the darkness, above all represented by the gift of baptism imprinted on our souls (v7).

The second is his grace through the sacraments: Verse 8's multiplication of grain, wine and oil can be interpreted as references to the Eucharist and Holy Unction.

Peace and our hope of heaven (verses 9-10)

The final verses of the psalm treat of what this process of repentance and the gift of grace wins us, namely an inner peace and joy (Verse 9) that allows us to sleep now, and face our death with equanimity, confident in our hope of heaven (verse 10).

The next post in the series provides notes on the Latin and meaning of verse 1 of Psalm 4.

Scriptural referneces and liturgical uses

NT References: Eph 4: 26;

Liturgical uses:

RB: Monastic:	Compline All Saints, Corpus Christi
Maurist	Sunday Compline
Thesauris schemas	A: Compline; B: Sunday Compline; C: Monday Compline wk 2 ; D: Compline
Brigittine	Sunday Matins
Ambrosian	Monday Matins wk 1
Roman	Pre-1911: Compline. Post 1911: Sunday Compline; Holy Sat Tenebrae 1970: Monday Lauds wk 1.
Mass propers (EF)	Lent I Tues, CO (1)

SOURCES FOR THE NOTES

Notes on the Latin

Matthew Britt, Dictionary of the Psalter,  originally printed 1928, Preserving Christian Publications 2007.

Charlton T. Lewis, Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, accessed via Perseus Digital Library

David Ladouceur, The Latin Psalter Introduction, Selected Text and Commentary, Bristol Classical Press, 2005.

Commentaries of the Fathers, theologians and saints

St Aloysius Liguori, The Divine Office: Explanation of the Psalms and Canticles, 1882.

Arnobius junr, Commentary on the Psalms, Patrologia Latina,  53:327-568.

St Augustine, Enarrations on the Psalms, J.E. Tweed (trans), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 8. Edited by Philip Schaff. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1888.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight.

St Augustine, Confessions (Bk IX), J.G. Pilkington (trans), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 1. Edited by Philip Schaff. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight.

St Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms volume 1, P G Walsh (trans),Ancient Christian Writers vol 51,  Paulist Press, 1990.

Gregory of Nyssa's Commentary on the Inscriptions of the Psalms. Introduction, Translation and Notes, Ronald E Heine (trans), Clarendon Press, 1995.

St Jerome, The Homilies of St Jerome, volume 1 (1-59 on the psalter), Sister Marie Liguori Ewald (trans), Fathers of the Church vol 18, Catholic University of America Press, 1964.

St John Chrysostom, Commentary on the Psalms vol 1, Robert Charles Hill (trans), Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1998.

St Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the book of psalms, John O'Sullivan (trans), Loreto Publications, 1999.

Theodoret of Cyrus, Commentary on the Psalms, Robert C Hill (trans), Fathers of the Church vol 101, Catholic University of America Press, 2000.

St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Psalms, Psalm 4 trans by Stephen Loughlin, Aquinas Translation Project.

Anthologies

Ancient Christina Commentaries on Scripture, Psalms 1-50, Craig A Blaising and Carmen S Hardin (eds), OT vol 7, 2008.

J. M. Neale, A Commentary on the Psalms from Primitive and Medieval Writers, Vol 1, 1869.


Modern commentaries

John Brook, The School of Prayer An Introduction to the Divine Office for all Christians, Liturgical Press, 1992.

The Navarre Bible, The Psalms and the Song of Solomon, Texts and Commentaries, Four Courts Press, 2003.

Patrick Henry Reardon, Christ in the Psalms, Conciliar Press, 2000.

Bruce K Waltke and James M Houston with Erika Moore, The Psalms as Christian Worship A Historical Commentary, William B Erdmans Publishing Company, 2010.

In praise of repetition - the daily psalms of the Benedictine Office

We live in the midst of a dementia epidemic: a disease characterised by forgetfulness, of the loss of memory.

We tend to think of this as primarily an affliction of the elderly.

But the more insidious form of dementia is that which afflicts our society as a whole: the great forgetting of traditions; the rejection of history and our past; and the insistence on a simplistic, half-baked and childish version of what it means to be a Christian rather than the authentic faith.

The great forgetting

For those afflicted by the physical disease - a disease which becomes terminal when the body ultimately forgets how to carry out basic functions such as swallowing - memory loss and its replacement by a half-real, half-confected past is not a choice, but a symptom of the disease.

The more serious form of this epidemic, though, is a dementia deliberately chosen: we live in a society that is deliberately trying to forget a past which it rejects as incompatible with modern 'rights' and 'values'; we live in a church where many, particularly in high places, seem hell-bent (and I use those words deliberately) on rejecting the churches traditions and even its fundamental teachings.

At one level there is nothing new in this: so many of the psalms lament the fact that so many attempt to forget about God, living as if he doesn't exist, or isn't watching and judging what they are doing: forgetfulness is, of course, inherent in the human condition.

At another level though, it is entirely new: are there any periods in history where religious sensibility of any kind has been so thoroughly rejected by the mainstream of society and its institutions?  And though the Church has had periods in the past when heresy has been widespread, and many of its popes, bishops and priests have been corrupt and depraved, has there ever been a time when they have tried to pretend that these things are perfectly normal and acceptable, even holy?

The antidote is repetition

Fortunately there is an antidote to this provided by St Benedict's arrangement of the psalter as set out in his Rule for the Divine Office.

For much of history, monks and nuns did not use Office books for the psalms, other than as a prompt to memory; instead they were required to learn the entire psalter by heart.  Despite this, pretty much every form of the Office that we know of, even those that mostly used the psalter in its numerical order, included at least a few psalms, such as Psalm 50 (the Miserere, Have mercy on me...) and Psalm 148-150 (the Laudate, or praising, psalms) that were repeated every day at particular hours.

The tradition has always held, in other words, that even things we know thoroughly still need to be brought to the front of our minds and repeated, their message reinforced regularly to be effective.

St Benedict's key messages

In the case of the Benedictine Office, ten psalms are said daily - a quarter of those said each day in the full version of his Office - and another nine are said five days a week.  That means that nearly half of the daily service, or 'pensum', is devoted to certain key themes and messages that St Benedict thought so important that we needed to be constantly reminded of them.

The psalms repeated daily in the Benedictine Office teach us to take to heart, amongst other propositions, that:

• God is our creator (Ps 94, 133, 148-150) and the one who sustains us and all life (Ps 3, 4, 90), and as such we owe a debt of praise to him (Psalms 50, 66, 133, 148-150);
• we are sinners, and must constantly repent our sins, and turn back to God (Ps 4, 50, 94);
• we are called to the spiritual battle, in which God will aid our fight (Ps 3, 90); and 
• if we are faithful to him, God will bless us with the good things we need (Ps 4, 66, 133).

Many modern arrangements of the psalter seek to eliminate the repetitions so treasured by our Holy Father.  And it is true that St Benedict does provide for other arrangements of the psalter in his Rule.  At various points of Benedictine history this permission has been utilised, for example to use the Roman arrangement of the psalter instead of the Benedictine.

But it does seem to me that to do is a rejection of a key source of St Benedict's implicit teaching, for the specifics of St Benedict's Office are, I believe, integrally linked to the teachings of the Rule.  It is also, I would suggest, deeply at odds with tradition, and the decision of most modern Benedictines  to abandon the Office prescribed by St Benedict altogether has had dire consequences for the health of the charism and of individual monasteries in my view.

Connecting to tradition

Some of the repeated psalms seem to reflect St Benedict's own crafting of the Office.  The clearest case is the use of the Gradual psalms at Terce to None on Tuesday to Friday, which both trace our ascent through humility, and end each hour with a reference to the peace and good things God offers to those who make this ascent.  Similarly, Psalm 94, said as the invitatory at Matins each day, contains a reference to  the Israelites' forty years in the desert.  It is probably not an accident then, that St Benedict sets forty psalms to be said each day, a number suggestive of penance, and the path to our own potential entrance to the promised land of heaven in the little sleep of death each night.

But many of the psalms St Benedict mandates to be said daily reflect traditions ancient even in his time.  The tradition of saying the Laudate psalms (Ps 148-150) each day, for example, is so universal that it is now thought to date back at least to the time of Jesus's earthly mission.  Similarly, the abolition of the daily use of Psalm 50, the Miserere, another ancient tradition, has surely helped feed the heresy of universal salvation so prevalent in our time.

I have previously provided notes on eight of the ten psalms said each day in the Benedictine Office (as well as the further nine said five days a week), and you can find links to them here.

I thought though that it was past time that I came back and completed this set though, so over the next few weeks, I plan to post notes on the first psalm of Compline, Psalm 4, and hopefully in due course Psalm 90.

The psalms of Compline

In both the Benedictine and pre-1911 form of the Roman Office, the psalms of Compline are the same every day of the week, making them easy to memorize and so an excellent starting point for those starting out on the Office.  And their use at this hour seems to be ancient indeed.

The first two psalms of Compline, Psalms 4 and 90, are both mentioned as the psalms to be said before bed by St Basil the Great, who was born around a century and a half before St Benedict.  And the last psalm of the hour, Psalm 133, has clearly established roots in the Temple liturgy for the ancient great feasts.

The notes provided here are intended both to help those learning the Office with the Latin of the psalms; to provide some insights into why St Benedict assigned the psalm to a particular place in the Office and what he might have wanted us to take from it by reference to the Patristic tradition of their interpretation that he would have been familiar with; as well as to draw on the best of the tradition after him to provide fodder for our meditation.

I'm trying out a new format in the notes which follow, and so would very much appreciate feedback on it, as well as on the content of the commentary, or your own insights into these psalms.

And the first post in the series is an introduction to Psalm 4.

Masterpost: Links to notes by Psalm number

Links to notes on the psalms by number (Scriptural order):

1*	2*	3*	4*	5*	6 *	7	8	9.1 9.2	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17 17	18	19	20
21	22*	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30*
31 *	32*	33	34	35	36	37*	38	39	40
41	42	43	44	45	46	47	48	49	50*
51	52	53*	54	55	56	57	58	59	60
61	62	63	64	65	66*	67	68	69	70
71	72	73	74	75	76	77	78	79	80
81	82	83	84	85	86	87	88	89	90*
91	92	93	94*	95	96	97	98	99	100
101*	102	103	104	105	106	107	108	109*	110*
111*	112*	113*	114*	115*	116*	117	118*	119*	120*
121*	122*	123*	124*	125*	126*	127*	128*	129*	130*
131*	132*	133*	134*	135*	136*	137*	138* 138*	139	140
141	142*	143 143	144 144	145	146	147	148*	149*	150*

*Includes verse by verse notes