Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
12.
Who are represented in this psalm as appealing for God’s ‘ancient mercies
’?
The rest of the psalm runs like this: ‘Lord, where are your mercies of ancient times, which you promised to David, swearing an oath on your truth? Remember, Lord, the insult offered to your servants, the insult of many peoples that I took to heart, the insult whereby your enemies, Lord, have taunted you, whereby they have taunted the transformation of your anointed.’ Now the question can justly be raised whether this represents the complaint of those Israelites who longed to receive the fulfilment of the promise made to David; or is it rather the appeal of the Christians, who are Israelites not by physical
descent but by spiritual kinship? Now these words, as we know, were said or written in the time of Ethan, from whose name the psalm received its title; and this was the time of David’s reign. It follows that it would not have been put in this form, ‘Lord, where are your mercies of ancient times, which you promised to David, swearing an oath on your truth?’ unless this prophecy assumed the person of those who were to come long afterwards, for whom the period when those promises were given to David would be ‘ancient times.’ It can, indeed, be taken as meaning that many nations, when they were persecuting the Christians, taunted them with the passion of Christ, which the Scripture calls his ‘transformation’, because by dying he became immortal. The ‘transformation’ of Christ can also be taken, on this line of interpretation, as a reproach to the Israelites; for Christ was expected to come as their saviour, but in fact he became the saviour of the Gentiles, and many nations who have believed in him through the new covenant make this a reproach to the Israelites, who continued in the old. This would give point to the words, ‘Remember, Lord, the insult offered to your servants’, since if God does not forget those servants, but takes pity on them instead, they themselves will come to believe, after this reproach.
Still, the first interpretation I suggested seems the more appropriate. For the cry, ‘Remember, Lord, the insult offered to your servants’, is incongruous if it is put into the mouths of Christ’s enemies, suffering reproach because Christ has abandoned them and gone over to the Gentiles; for such Jews are not to be called ‘servants of God.’ On the other hand, these words are fitting for those who, when they endured oppressive persecutions for Christ’s name, could recall that a kingdom on high had been promised to David’s line, and in their longing for it could make their appeal, not despairing, but seeking, searching, and knocking, in these words: ‘Lord, where are your mercies of ancient times, which you promised to David, swearing an oath on your truth? Remember, Lord, the insult offered to your servants, the insult of many peoples that I took to heart’ – that is, which I patiently endured in my inner being – ‘the insult whereby your enemies, Lord, have taunted you, whereby they have taunted the transformation of your anointed’ – supposing it to be a destruction rather than a transformation. Then what does ‘Remember, Lord’ mean except this: ‘Remember to have mercy, and in return for the humiliation patiently endured, repay me with the exaltation which you promised to David, swearing by your truth’?
On the other hand, we may assign these words to the Jews, since an
appeal could have been made by those ‘servants of God’ who, after the sack of the earthly Jerusalem, before the birth of Jesus Christ in human form, were taken into captivity. We should then interpret ‘the transformation of the anointed’ in this sense, that it was not an earthly, material happening, such as was seen during the few years of Solomon’s reign, that was to be awaited with faith, but a heavenly, spiritual felicity. The heathen nations had no idea of such happiness at that time, when they were exulting over God’s people and taunting them in their captivity. But what else were they insulting but ‘the transformation of the anointed’, reviling, in their ignorance, those who knew the truth? That is the reason for the concluding words of the psalm, which follow this verse: ‘The blessing of the Lord for ever. So be it! So be it!’ These words are eminently suitable for the whole people of God who belong to the Heavenly Jerusalem, whether among those who were hidden in the time of the old covenant, before the revelation of the new, or among those who, after its revelation, are clearly manifested as belonging to Christ. And we may be sure that ‘the blessing of the Lord’ on David’s line is not something to be hoped for a limited period, like that which was seen in the days of Solomon; it is something to be expected to last for all eternity; and in the supreme certainty of that hope we have the words, ‘So be it! So be it!’
This repeated phrase is a confirmation of that hope. David, then, understands this, when he says, in the second book of Kingdoms, from which we have digressed to deal with this psalm, ‘You have spoken on behalf of your servant’s house for a distant future.’ Again, when he says, a little farther on, ‘Now begin, and bless the house of your servant for all eternity… ’
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the reason is that he was then about to have a son through whom his posterity would be traced down to Christ, and thanks to Christ his house was destined to become eternal, and to be the house of God. It is the house of David because of its descent from him; but it is also the house of God because it is God’s temple, built not of stones, but of human beings, for the people to dwell there for ever with their God and in their God, and for God to dwell there with his people and in his people. Thus God will fill his people and the people will be full of their God, when God will be all in all,
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being himself our prize in peace, as he is our strength in war. For this reason Nathan’s words, ‘the Lord will bring you news that you will build him a house’, were afterwards repeated in David’s statement:
‘For you, Lord omnipotent, the God of Israel, have made a revelation to your servant, saying that I shall build you a house.’
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Now we build this house by living good lives, and God also builds it by helping us so to live. For ‘unless the Lord builds a house, those who build it have laboured to no purpose.’
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When the final dedication of this house arrives, then will come the fulfilment of what God said to Nathan in this passage, ‘Then I shall establish a place for my people Israel; and I shall set them there, and they will dwell by themselves, and shall be disturbed no more. And the son of wickedness will not continue to humiliate them as he has done from the start, from the time when I set up judges over my people Israel.’
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13.
Can we suppose that the promised peace became a reality in
the time
of Solomon?
Anyone who hopes for so great a blessing in this world and on this earth has the wisdom of a fool. Can anyone really imagine that this blessing was fully granted in the peace of Solomon’s reign? No doubt the Scripture paints a glowing picture of that peace by way of a prophecy of an ideal, a foreshadowing of what was to be. Yet Scripture is careful to forestall the question of fulfilment under Solomon. It does this in the passage where, after the statement that ‘the son of wickedness will not continue to humiliate them’, those words are immediately added, ‘as he has done from the start, from the time when I set up judges over my people Israel.’ Now before the beginning of the rule of kings, judges had been appointed over that people from the time when they received the land of promise. The ‘son of wickedness’, namely the foreign enemy, certainly humiliated them, during those periods in which we are told that intervals of peace alternated with times of war. And yet during that era we find periods of peace more prolonged than the peace which Solomon enjoyed during the forty years of his reign. For example, under the judge named Ehud there were eighty years of peace.
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So we must never imagine that it was Solomon’s time that was predicted in this promise, not to speak of the reign of any other king; for none of the other kings reigned in such peace as Solomon. Yet that people never possessed the kingdom so securely as not to fear subjugation by their enemies; in fact, such is the instability of human affairs that no people has ever been allowed such a degree of tranquillity as to remove all dread of hostile attacks
on their life in this world. That place, then, which is promised as a dwelling of such peace and security is eternal, and is reserved for eternal beings, in ‘the mother, the Jerusalem which is free.’
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There they will be in truth the people of Israel; for the name ‘Israel’ means ‘seeing God.’
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It is in the longing for this reward that we must lead devout lives, guided by faith, during this troublesome pilgrimage.
14.
David’s careful arrangement of the psalms to give a mystical significance
In the course of the temporal history of the City of God, David at first reigned in the earthly Jerusalem, which was a shadow of what was to come. Now David was a man highly skilled in songs, a man who loved the harmony of music. But David was not the ordinary man for whom music is merely for pleasure; for him it served the purpose of his faith. He used it in the service of his God, the true God, by giving a mystical prefiguration of a matter of high importance. For the concord of different sounds, controlled in due proportion, suggests the unity of a well-ordered city, welded together in harmonious variety. Indeed, almost all his prophecy is in the psalms, and the book called Psalms contains a hundred and fifty of them. Some people have it that only those of the psalms which are inscribed with David’s name were composed by him. Others suppose that none were his work except those which are headed ‘Of David himself; while those who have in their titles the note ‘For David himself were composed by others in a manner appropriate to David’s personality. But this suggestion is refuted by the statement of the Saviour himself in the Gospel, where he says that David, inspired by the Spirit, said that Christ was his Lord, since the 109th psalm begins thus: ‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, till I put your enemies as a stool for your feet.” ’
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And this psalm certainly does not have ‘Of David himself’ in its title. Like the majority of the psalms it has ‘For David himself.’
For my part, I find more credible the judgement of those who attribute all the 150 psalms to David’s authorship, and consider that he also supplied the prefatory notes to some of them, giving the names of other men who stood for something relevant to the subject, whereas he decided that the others should not have the name of any man in their titles. Similarly, it was at the inspiration of the Lord that he made his arrangement of diverse material, an arrangement which is
not without purpose, obscure though the purpose may be. No one should, be led to reject this hypothesis by the fact that we find inscribed above some of the psalms in this book the names of some prophets who lived a long time after the reign of David,
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and that the contents of these psalms give the appearance of having been uttered by them. For the prophetic spirit was not incapable of revealing to King David, when he was prophesying, those names of prophets to come, and of ensuring that something appropriate to their personalities should be sung prophetically. In the same way the birth and reign of King Josiah, which was then more than 300 years in the future, was revealed together with his name, to a prophet, who also predicted his future achievements.
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15.
This book cannot include all the prophecies of Christ and his Church in the psalms
I am aware that what is now expected from me in this part of my book is an explanation of David’s prophecies in the psalms about Jesus Christ and his Church. In fact, although I have done this in respect of one psalm, I am prevented from meeting the apparent demands of this expectation by the abundance of matter rather than the lack of it. For I am prevented from including everything by my intention to shun prolixity; on the other hand, I am afraid that if I select a limited number of points, I may seem to many who are versed in the subject to have omitted more essential matter. Again, the evidence adduced needs to be corroborated by the context of the whole psalm, at least to the extent of showing that there is nothing there to refute it, even if every detail does not support it. Otherwise I might seem to be collecting short excerpts suitable to a chosen theme, using the method of a cento, where selections are taken from a long poem not written on the subject in hand, but about something else, something very different.
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Now to be able to demonstrate this in every psalm, the whole of it has to be explained; and this is no small task, as can be seen from the works of other authors and from my own, in which I have done just this. Anyone who has the wish and the capacity may read those books; he will discover the large number and the
great importance of the prophecies uttered by David, who was both king and prophet, about Christ and his Church, that is, about the king and the community which he founded.
16.
The witness, direct and
allegorical, to
Christ and his Church in Psalm
45
Though there may be direct and clear prophetic statements on any subject, allegorical statements are inevitably intermingled with them, and it is those especially that force upon scholars the laborious business of discussion and exposition for the benefit of the more slow-witted. However, some of these point to Christ and his Church at first glance, as soon as they are uttered, although some details are less easily intelligible and are reserved for exposition at leisure. An example can be taken from the same book of Psalms: