As a literary scholar, C.S. Lewis’s principal concern in his “Reflections on the Psalms” is to vindicate the Psalms as poetry and, therefore, vehicles of beauty, delight, and even (as he boldly puts it) “mirth.” These are things which, Lewis says, modern humanity needs badly.

One of the great constants in my life has been the Book of Psalms. From the time I discovered them at a young age and started using them to pray with, the Psalms have become daily companions. They are now so deeply ingrained in me that when I pray spontaneously, I often take my cue from their language, cadences, and imagery. For me, life without the Psalms would be unthinkable.

I like to think that similar feelings prompted C. S. Lewis to devote one of his later works to this most popular book of the Bible. Reflections on the Psalms (1958) is, as Lewis admits, not a comprehensive or even scholarly analysis of the Psalter, but a series of chapters dealing with selected themes in the Psalms following Lewis’s taste and inclinations. As a literary scholar, Lewis’s principal concern is to vindicate the Psalms as poetry and, therefore, vehicles of beauty, delight, and even (as he boldly puts it) “mirth.” These are things which, Lewis says, modern humanity needs badly. So, while Lewis does confront the moral problems suggested in the Psalms—notably the tension between divine justice and human vengeance, and the danger of self-righteousness and spiritual pride—Lewis perceives, correctly I think, that such problems have been sufficiently dealt with from pulpit and editorial, and that what we need far more today is the sheer delight that the Psalms can give. In the chapter “The Fair Beauty of the Lord” Lewis starts with the image of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant as emblematic of the spontaneous, joyful nature of ancient religion, a quality that characterized Judaism no less than the pagan religions. Lewis goes so far as to say that “the most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express that same delight in God which made David dance.”

That delight was, as Lewis is at pains to remind us, centered in specific places and acts. Ancient Jewish religious life was, from the time of Solomon onward, centered in the Temple in Jerusalem. Temple rites and feasts are implicitly reflected in many of the Psalms. “These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival”; and elsewhere we hear of clashing cymbals, blasting trumpets, and maidens playing tambourines. For the Psalmists, participating in the Temple liturgy (in which the Psalms formed a part) was literally the means by which they “saw God’s face,” experienced the divine presence. The ritual and the sensory experiences of the liturgy were, for the Psalmist, inseparable from communion with God. This was true of ancient man in general but even more so of ancient Jewish man, who lived in a culture more embodied, differently expressed, from the abstract rationality of Greek thinkers. When the Psalmist says that he longs to see God’s face, he is speaking in terms of a very specific experience of Temple worship in which God was believed to be manifested. David’s dance before the Ark of God’s presence speaks to this attitude of uninhibited joy in the Lord.

There is a wide gap between this and what modern Western man is accustomed to thinking of as religiosity, Lewis suggests. We engage in “dutiful” churchgoing and “laborious” saying of prayers. To a modern rationalist, the sacramentalism of the ancient Jews—the idea that God’s presence resided in a sacred chest—registers as mere superstition. But while we have “spiritualized” religion to a fault, the ancients had what Lewis calls a veritable “appetite for God” that found a channel in music and dancing as well as fervent prayer. It was by no means “spiritual” in a narrowly restricted sense but took in all of reality.

Perhaps more than any other biblical book, Psalms embodies these aesthetic aspects of scripture. Lewis devotes a chapter to the Psalms and nature, homing in on the ancient Jews as a nomadic and agricultural people, a people close to the land, for whom “the countryside” was more or less equivalent to “the world.” (Lest we forget, cities in ancient times were nowhere near the size and scale of cities today.) As a result, Lewis finds, the Psalms give voice to a more vivid and tactile sense of nature than can be found in any other ancient literature. This comes about because of, not in spite of, the Jewish insistence that Nature is not to be deified. For the very reason that God is separate from his creation, the Psalmists are able to develop a whole repertoire of manifestations of God in nature, from the unshakable mountains to the roaring of the sea and the bountiful rain that renews the earth such that the grain and the valleys “shout and sing together for joy.” The Psalmist’s longing for God is likened to a deer seeking flowing streams of water, while God’s law is “sweeter than honey” and “more desirable than gold.” Whether derived from nature or the liturgy, the imagery of the Psalms conveys the values of the Psalmists’ culture and—Lewis insists on this—were the medium through which the Psalmists actually experienced the divine presence. The imagery, whether in Creation or worship, is not mere window dressing but the very means by which God communicates himself to humanity.

In scripture God’s message is filtered through human thought and sentiment, with all of its fallibility. The images are not simply information or data but to a great degree the substance of what is being conveyed. In the Psalms and the Bible generally, the medium is the message. The main poetic device of the Psalms that Lewis highlights, one that (perhaps providentially) survives translation, is parallelism—a device that creates continuity of thought, aids in memorability, and serves the artistic ideal of unity-in-variety.

Still other dimensions of beauty and imagery in the Psalms are opened up from the existence of second or hidden meanings, usually Messianic in nature, that Christian tradition has discovered in the sacred poems. The Lord’s anointed one appears variously in the guise of a king coming to power (in a beautiful coronation ode), a conquering warrior, a righteous judge, a loving bridegroom, a guiding shepherd, the servant who suffers for his people, and a mediating priest—a set of images that enrich and balance our view of who Christ is, particularly when integrated into the liturgy for various seasons. By becoming embedded in a new context different from the original one—a reinterpretation begun by Jesus himself, and thus bearing the highest possible authority—the Psalms become truly multilayered artworks. Because scripture’s composition is guided by the hand of God, any scriptural text may have extra meanings of which the human authors were not aware. As Lewis points out, second meanings, omens, and prophetic events are experienced in ordinary life, and given the divine authorship of the Bible we should expect to find them there on any page.

To think, as some do, that the Bible does not address the subject of beauty is seriously to miss the point. The Bible has no treatise on aesthetics, true, but to expect the ancient Jews to think in a logically analytical fashion like the ancient Greeks is to bark up the wrong tree. At a fundamental level beauty is what the whole Bible is all about; it permeates the narrative, rather than being analytically separated out from truth or salvation. We can take scripture merely as instruction, but this is to limit one’s appreciation and understanding of the holy writings. Scripture is essentially literary composition, and thus something that can convey aesthetic qualities. Lewis implies that scripture is the meeting place between the divine and the human, simultaneously the word of God and a reflection of human nature. Because God embodies perfect beauty, we should not be surprised to see beauty embodied in the Bible. Particularly in the Psalms, we find theology clothed in the most exquisite poetic speech. In helping us to read the Psalms as poetry, Lewis is opening our faith up to a richer, more humanistic dimension.

The unity of “medium” and “message” in the Psalms comes to the fore in Psalm 119, a great acrostic poem praising the beauties of the Law. Lewis argues that the psalm’s intricate structure expresses and embodies the Psalmist’s loving and disciplined following of the details of the Law of Moses—a way of reproducing “the Order of the Divine mind” in daily life. In reading this psalm, we realize that what begins in painstaking “duty” concludes in sheer “delight,” the end for which all things were created.

I’m sure many would agree with me when I say that I pray the Psalms because I crave a lyrical form of prayer. The Psalms demonstrate that prayer can indeed be a vehicle of beauty in one’s life. Their richness reveals itself along life’s timeline, as we discover that there is a psalm to fit every mood and state of the soul. Are you joyful? Sorrowful? Angry at sin’s corruption? Hopeful for God’s deliverance? Filled with wonder at Creation? There is a psalm for that, and much, much more.

Finally, as Lewis reminds us, the Psalms were originally songs—not just poetry, but poetry united to music. The Greek name for the book, Psalmoi, translates the Hebrew Tehillim (songs of praise) and derives from psallein, to pluck a stringed instrument—befitting David, the legendary harpist-king who is the Psalms’ traditional author. Even today, in the intonation of a synagogue cantor or in the Roman liturgy, set to Gregorian chant, the Psalms can still be experienced for what Lewis believed they were at heart: sacred song and the poetry of the soul.

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The featured image is “Psalms of David,” illustration by Owen Jones for the 1845 illustrated and illuminated version of the Book of Common Prayer. This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.