| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Gloria Patri at the end of a psalm
does not necessarily
imply approval of its sentiments.
The Gloria Patri:
Affirmation in joy and woe
By Roy Barkley
Some years ago I heard a nominal atheist accost a Catholic, and simultaneously the Church, on the “indiscriminate” use of the Gloria Patri after psalms. His question was, “Why do you recite the Gloria Patri at the end of pessimistic psalms like Psalm 88?” This psalm, the gloomiest of the lot, does seem to require some explanation: How does it fit in with any concept of God’s favor toward his servants? And if the recitation of the Gloria Patri at its end suggests that we despair, like the speaker in the psalm, the task of explanation is especially difficult. Psalm 88 ends, Job-like:
Thy wrath has swept over me;
thy dread assaults destroy me.
They surround me like a flood all day long;
they close in upon me together.
thou hast caused lover and friend to shun me;
my companions are in darkness (Psalm 88:16–18 [RSV]).
The questioner’s meaning was, How can one identify himself with such a record of pain and then pretend that everything is okay? Readers familiar with Voltaire’s Candide will remember the “philosopher” Pangloss, who, no matter what disaster was at hand, kept repeating like a parrot, “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” The questioner was accusing Catholics who pray the Divine Office of Panglossian optimism. He said, “No matter how crummy things are, you and those other religious birds say ‘Praise the Lord!’”
This man was accusing Catholics of a defect of gravity about the evil in the world—of lacking what the poet William Butler Yeats called the “vision of evil.” If it were true, this very serious charge would convict Catholics of a grave spiritual defect even in their prayers. Dietrich von Hildebrand describes that shallow “praise the Lord” attitude—an optimism immune to pain, a glib joviality that denotes disengagement from the real world—as a “sense of security” that must “collapse and depart, so as to clear the ground for true confidence in God.” Far from reflecting self-abandonment to God’s will, this “note of presumptuous platitude” actually prevents people from perceiving their genuine “metaphysical situation” and locks them in a “comfortable smugness masquerading as religiosity.”1 If he was right, the accuser had produced a serious indictment.
I do not think he was right. Nevertheless, his accusation led me to ponder the real relation between the Gloria Patri and the psalms of the office. The accusation was based on the assumption that the Gloria Patri expresses unqualified agreement with the psalm or approval of its sentiments. But the relation between the versicle and a psalm is much more complicated than this. First, it is variable, not simple, and it often involves an affirmation not visible on the surface of the psalm; second, it bespeaks a rhetorical situation in which the understanding of the original audience and that of the Christian audience are entirely different; and, third, this difference subsists in the fact that Christians read the psalms typologically, seeing in them a prescient, Spirit-guided account of Jesus Christ, who transcends both the Old Testament typology that refers to him and the human situation depicted in the psalm, whether of joy or woe.
What do we affirm when
we say the Gloria Patri?
Now to take these points in order. First, pace the accuser who brought the matter up, saying the Gloria Patri at the end of the psalm does not necessarily imply approval of its sentiments; it does, however, imply a variety of attitudes that the current Divine Office artificially limits. Before proceeding to the affirmations of the Gloria Patri, it is worth noting that the range of meaning in the psalms has been narrowed and obfuscated by modern changes. This has been done through a sort of busybody cleansing of supposedly unacceptable sentiments from the text. The curses sprinkled through the psalms, for instance, formerly compelled the Catholic reader either to endorse a virulently anti-Christian sentiment or to embrace some meaning not intended by the author. In our minds the accursed enemies that are so plentiful in the psalms became devils, for example, or one’s own evil inclinations, or some other entity that one could curse without violating Christian charity.2 But the translation used in the current Divine Office removed all that. For better or worse (worse, I believe), the psalms used now in the English-speaking world for the Church’s daily prayer are heavily bowdlerized. Thus the intention of the original author or speaker, who often presented problems to the Christian reader by expressing hatred for enemies, has been deliberately effaced. The resulting distortion has sometimes been great. The wonderful Psalm 139, for instance, muses on the omniscience of God, whose knowledge of the speaker’s physical and spiritual life is absolutely complete. But the point of that musing is to lead to a petition for God to “slay the wicked.” It is toward this end that the psalm reflects on God’s knowledge of the speaker’s mind. The speaker asks rhetorically, “Do I not hate them that hate thee, O Lord? And do I not loathe them that rise up against thee?” He actually considers this hatred to be one of the perfections of his life, and he cites it as evidence of his loyalty to God. He invites God to “search” him, to see that his enemies and God’s are identical—this is the whole point of the invocation—and to smite the miscreants. Remove the curse, as the editors of the current version have done, and you remove the very point of the psalm. Surely this censoring of Scripture is not good; surely it would be better to continue to make shift to understand the curses in some Christian way rather than cut them out and pretend that they were never there.
But even with this option—appropriation of an expression of hatred—removed, the range of relations between the subject matter of the psalms and the upbeat Gloria Patri is wide. At one pole is perfect concord. This is the situation that the accuser assumed and challenged. Psalm 100, for instance, is a pure song of praise directed toward the good Lord, whose “steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.” There could be no quibble over a subsequent “Praise the Lord.” In Psalm 57 the speaker recalls having lain “in the midst of lions.” But these enemies have become victims of their own violent plans, thus becoming exemplars of God’s retributive justice. Therefore, the psalmist sings exuberantly, “Be exalted, O God, above the heavens! Let thy glory be over all the earth!” The Gloria Patri is in such concord with these sentiments that it is almost superfluous.
But most of the time the use of the Gloria Patri does not represent an unmodified stamp of approval of the dramatic situation and sentiments in the psalm, with which the Christian reader usually must differ in some way. To choose one of the blander examples, consider the end of Psalm 120:
Too long have I had my dwelling
among those who hate peace.
I am for peace;
but when I speak,
they are for war!
The speaker (or singer), like so many speakers in the psalms, is lamenting his exile among the ungodly, who do not share his ethos. To say the Gloria Patri at the end of this psalm does not, of course, propose that belligerence is good or that exile among warmongers is desirable. Instead, we here affirm a contrasting good about which the speaker and God implicitly agree—that peace is good and to be sought. This is true, although the speaker clearly relishes the fiery retribution that is to fall upon his enemies—“a warrior’s sharp arrows, with glowing coals of the broom tree.” In order to affirm this contrasting good, we must step back from the mise en scčne of the psalm to a different rhetorical vantage point.
Psalms that require the Christian to do this are very numerous. A couple of other examples will suffice. In the case of such psalms as 38 and 42, one finds speakers who are smitten with injustice. They, like Job and so many of the characters of the Old Testament, are servants of the Lord who nevertheless find themselves in pain and misery—a clear conflict with the deuteronomic promise that God will reward his servants and punish the wicked. In Psalm 42, the speaker is mocked by his enemies, who see his misery as proof of God’s disfavor:
As with a deadly wound in my body,
my adversaries taunt me,
while they say to me continually,
“Where is your God?”
In Psalm 38, the speaker’s mind is clearly focused on the injustice with which he is treated:
Those who are my foes without cause are mighty,
and many are those who hate me wrongfully.
Those who render me evil for good
are my adversaries because I follow after good.
Although both of these psalms, like many others, end with an expression of hope, the hope is still to be realized; the remedy has not appeared. Therefore, far from expressing approval of the status quo, the Gloria Patri at the end expresses a desire and faith that the hope for relief will not be in vain.
In sum, when we Catholics say the Gloria Patri at the end of a pessimistic or accusatory psalm, we are prescinding from the poem’s mood or content. We are expressing a determination to “bless the Lord at all times” (Psalm 34:1), whether good or bad. With the versicle we acknowledge the objective goodness and praiseworthiness of God regardless of the bad situation or mood of gloom in the psalm, and regardless of its dark analogies in our own lives. We assert that as Catholics we know suffering to be real like that of Christ, but yet both sanctifying and transient. Our mood is like that of Habakkuk:
Though the fig tree do not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will joy in the God of my salvation (Hab.
3:17-18).
The rhetoric of praise
The principal terms of analysis in this section come from a seminal book of literary criticism, The Rhetoric of Fiction, by Wayne C. Booth.3 Though the subject of Booth’s book is literature, specifically fiction, the rhetorical schema for which he argues can be observed in almost any kind of writing. The Bible is not merely literary; but it is at least literary. The art of writing, even when guided by the Holy Spirit, involves certain literary constants.
Among these are an “implied author” who stands in contrast to the real author, and an “implied audience” that may radically differ from the actual audience. One may easily see that the implied author of Psalm 88, for instance, is not at all the same as the actual author. The actual author of this gloomy, pessimistic work may have been a happy family man who wrote psalms for liturgical performance; in his life, as contrasted to his art, he may have been perfectly content and perfectly confident in God. For him, this dark psalm may have been mainly a work of religious art in which the possibilities of human isolation and discouragement are expressed as an analogy to other people’s experience. In any case, he was not so disabled by adversity that he could not commit his thoughts artistically to writing; darkness was really not his only friend. The implied author, on the other hand —the author that we think of as we read—is closely identified with the speaker in the poem, whose life is so burdensome that he has apparently given up hope in God and embraced darkness as his “only companion.”
Throughout the psalms, the implied audience comprises religious Israelites who share the faith, joys, and pains of the implied authors. But this sharing does not necessarily extend to the relationship between the real audience and the real author. The actual author puts words into the mouth of a speaker who always differs from him, as a literary character differs from his creator; the resulting poetic work expresses attitudes and situations with which some, but not all, of a given audience can identify. The listeners to whom the implied author speaks form the implied audience. For even when the psalms were written, there were those in the audience who didn’t especially look forward to the coming of the Salvation of Israel, or who had not been rescued from death like King David, or who did not share the outlook, whether dour or exuberant, of the psalm at hand. The real link, then, is between the implied author and those who do identify with the contents of the psalm: this is the audience implied by the work. These terms are considered part of the study of rhetoric because they describe a complex of relationships among author, subject matter, and audience, and in so doing they indicate how the author wants to shape the response of the reader or listener—the essence of rhetoric.
An illustration from one of the complaining psalms will clarify the matter. In Psalm 44 the speaker (and implied author) recalls the favors God had formerly shown to the Israelites. But then he contrasts this blessed past with the miserable present, in which God has “broken us in the place of jackals, and covered us with deep darkness.” The present unsatisfactory situation has come about, he states, “though we have not forgotten thee, or been false to thy covenant.” He therefore implores God to act on his behalf. The argument of the psalm is clear: the speaker asserts the righteousness of his contemporaries in order to plead for God to fulfill the divine promise and prosper his servants. The psalm thus expresses the chief conflict of Old Testament theology, the contrast between what is just (God’s promise) and what is actually happening. This is what the implied Jewish author is concerned with. He expects his hearers to reflect on the nature of deuteronomic justice and the fact that God’s retribution to his true servants often seems lacking.
But the Catholic audience necessarily interprets this psalm differently. The speaker’s assertions of his own righteousness, for instance, hardly accord with the more developed Christian moral understanding that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). A true Christian’s sense of sin would make him unable to assert his own absolute faithfulness to the covenant. Hence his departure from the implied Jewish author. For another example, in the light of Christ’s resurrection and the history of martyrdom in the Church, the passages in this psalm on the death of God’s people take on new meaning: the speaker laments, “for thy sake we are slain all the day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” But to the Christian, for whom Christ’s faithfulness in the face of death is the pattern to which all God’s servants are called, death has a different, even a triumphal, meaning. Finally, like the ancient Children of Israel, Christians also accept the Old Testament promises of divine retribution, but modify them in the light of Christ’s merit and understand them as portending transnatural, not earthly, reward. Therefore, the understanding of the Christian audience is not at all presupposed by the original implied author, who implores God’s immediate help but without much evident optimism: “Why dost thou hide thy face? Why dost thou forget our affliction and oppression?”
In several ways, therefore, the Christian tradition deliberately “misreads” the psalms by relating them to theological developments that cannot have been in the minds of their authors, and by fitting the contents into a context that the authors could not have clearly foreseen. This alteration accordingly involves a rhetorical situation far removed from that of the original.
Christ is the answer
Indeed, the terms of the Gloria Patri itself express a radical departure from the point of view of the psalms and suggest the most fundamental difference in attitude toward the subject matter. This difference is that, for the Catholic, the persecuted figures in the psalms are no longer primarily characters of a specific historical situation such as the Babylonian exile or spokesmen for a vague hope of future well-being, but typological images associated with a specific Person, Jesus of Nazareth. The Trinitarian formula—“Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”—itself distances us from the ancient Jewish audience, which knows nothing of the Son or the Holy Spirit. As a result, the concrete situations in the psalms—sickness, persecution, poverty, and the questions about justice that they propose—become, in Augustinian terms, the littera upon which Christianity has constructed its own levels of profound meaning.
The Christian audience, unlike most of the ancient Jewish audience, knows the Messianic answer to the question of delayed justice. A few of the psalms express faith in ultimate justice. The speaker in Psalm 49, for instance, states confidently, “God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me.” But for the most part, the justice sought is both earthly and unrealized. This situation brought the greatest difficulty for ancient Jewish believers. The speakers have, they assert, tried to serve God, and yet they have not thrived. The preponderant earthliness of deuteronomic retribution makes the problem inevitable for Job and for the psalms: If God prospers the righteous, then why do his servants suffer?
The answer is a Messiah who suffered all the ancient wrongs visited upon the prophets and yet triumphed with the Father’s help. Because of his resurrection such a Savior, certainly different from the Messiah expected by most ancient Jews, becomes a figure of hope for the Christian. Paradoxically, this is true especially in his pain and death. On the cross Jesus quotes the forlorn outcry of Psalm 22—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—and, in so doing, calls us by his self-identification with the suffering spokesmen of the psalms to see in these figures types of himself. In Jesus, therefore, the Christian audience recognizes the preeminent model of triumph over adversity, of the transformation of suffering into victory. Because of him, suffering has value. Without him, it is a meaningless enemy to be snuffed out by euthanasia. Because of Christ’s victory, so difficultly and painfully won, we know that we must let nothing shake our faith in God’s ultimate mercy toward those who love him. We no longer worry so much about earthly retribution—we no longer think that the fear of God brings temporal prosperity—but look forward in hope to the merciful judgment vouchsafed us in Christ. “In relation to God . . . who is goodness and mercy . . . our trust must be absolute; the possibility of its being dislodged by any kind of experience whatsoever must be precluded axiomatically.”4
In Booth’s rhetorical terms, Christ has irreversibly shaped the implied Christian audience, which looks for authorial guidance not only to the historical milieu of the psalms’ origin but to the literate Catholic tradition of scriptural exegesis. Such reading with the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit. In his light, the suffering characters of the psalms become figures of Christian inspiration with a significance beyond any that the actual authors could have foreseen.
How do we as Christians then interpret such works as the dark Psalm 88? We see them as adumbrations of Christ’s suffering and therefore as models for a hope that may lie, for the moment, totally hidden beneath the surface. Such models are an inspiration “in those moments of complete inner darkness in which we feel as though we were forsaken by God.”5 The Church invites us to use Psalm 88 in this way by, for instance, making it part of the daytime prayer for Good Friday. Such a use enables us, not to ignore our sufferings or escape from them, but to understand how they epitomize the human situation that Christ entered and redeemed by his own suffering.
For a modern historic example of this use, consider the case of Cardinal Mindszenty. As the horrors of the Hungarian Communist gulag closed in upon this holy prelate, he sought refuge in the prophetic words of Psalm 88. His tormentors tried to force him to sign a false confession: “For the third time they demanded my signature—without success. For the third time they tried to thrash it out of me with the rubber truncheon, wielded with undiminished force, to the accompaniment of yammering laughter from the spectators.” (Who can miss the analogy with the mocking of Christ?) And then, “The psalms I had prayed in the breviary for so many years came to my lips. . . . ‘(I might) as well lie among the dead, men laid low in the grave, men thou rememberest no longer, cast away, now, from thy protecting hand.’”6 This noble use of the psalms by an uncompromising hero of Christian virtue, who saw Jesus both in the ancient text and in his own modern passion, rightly makes us exclaim: “Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto!”
1 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ (Chicago: Franciscan Herald
Press, 1948), p. 158.
2 See. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1958), Chapter 2.
3 University of Chicago Press, 1961.
4 Hildebrand, p. 162; italics in original.
5 Ibid., p. 172.
6 József Cardinal Mindszenty, Memoirs (New York: Macmillan, 1974), p. 96.
Dr. Roy Barkley, a deacon of the Diocese of Austin, Texas, has a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Catholic Alcoholic and Catholic Ministry to the Addicted. Dr. Barkley’s last article in HPR appeared in February 1999.
Back to Catholic Information Center's Periodicals