The Imprecatory Psalms and the Honesty of Lament

The Psalter contains verses that curse — that call down ruin on enemies and bless the one who dashes an infant against the rock. The Orthodox Church prays the whole Psalter, these verses included, and she prays them by a spiritual transposition inherited from the fathers: the “enemies” are read as the demons and the passions, and “the infants of Babylon” as the nascent evil thoughts, to be seized while small and dashed against Christ the Rock. This file sets out that reading and the honesty of the psalms’ lament and anger.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Problem of the Cursing Psalms

Scattered through the Psalter are the imprecatory verses — prayers that God destroy the psalmist’s enemies, that curse fall on the wicked and their children. The most severe are the close of Psalm 136 (137), “By the rivers of Babylon” — “O daughter of Babylon, wretched one, blessed shall he be who requiteth thee as thou hast requited us; blessed shall he be who taketh and dasheth thine infants against the rock” (Ps 136:8–9) — and the sustained curses of Psalm 108 (109), “Let his days be few… let his children be fatherless.” Psalms 68 (69) and 5 and others carry the same note. These verses pose a real difficulty: how can the Church, whose Lord commanded love of enemies and prayer for persecutors (Matthew 5:44), put such curses on the lips of her people?

The modern Western answer has often been simply to remove them: several twentieth-century Roman Catholic and Protestant office books excised the imprecatory psalms or bracketed their harshest verses from public recitation. The Orthodox Church has taken a different course. She prays the whole Psalter, Psalm 136 and Psalm 108 included, retaining the verses that the West set aside — and she prays them by transposing their sense, according to a reading as old as the desert (this contrast is a plain matter of the respective service books; the Orthodox Horologion and Psalter retain the imprecatory psalms in full).

Babylon’s Infants and the Rock That Is Christ

The classic patristic reading of Psalm 136:9 is ascetic and spiritual: it transposes the literal war against Babylon into the inner war against sin. “Babylon” — the name means “confusion” — is read as the realm of the passions, the disordered soul, the tyranny of evil; “the daughter of Babylon” is the sinful habit or the soul enslaved to it; and “her infants,” the little ones that are to be dashed against the rock, are the nascent evil thoughts (Greek logismoi) — the first small suggestions of sin, seized and destroyed while they are still “infants,” before they grow into consenting acts. And the rock on which they are to be dashed is Christ: “that Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). To “dash the infants of Babylon against the rock” is thus to destroy every evil thought at its first appearance by hurling it against Christ — the very discipline of watchfulness (nēpsis) that the ascetic tradition places at the heart of the spiritual life (this interpretation is a commonplace of the ascetic reading of the Psalter; it is developed in the desert tradition and in the monastic writers, and is summarized in the Fathers’ comments on Psalm 136).

The reading is well attested. It underlies the treatment of the evil thoughts in the Egyptian and Palestinian ascetic tradition (Evagrius, Cassian; see The Desert Fathers), and it is set down memorably in the West by St. Benedict, whose Rule, in its Prologue, cites Psalm 136:9 exactly this way: the good monk “seizes his evil thoughts, while they are still young, and dashes them against Christ” (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue; see St. Benedict of Nursia). St. John Cassian, who carried the desert’s teaching to the West, reads the psalms throughout as a manual of the inner combat and treats the enemies of the psalmist as the demons and passions that beset the monk (John Cassian, Conferences and Institutes; see St. John Cassian). The same key unlocks the other imprecatory psalms: the “enemies” whose destruction the psalmist prays are read as the demons and the sins that war against the soul, and the psalmist’s fierce zeal is the zeal of the ascetic who will make no peace with his passions. Prayed so, the cursing psalms become not a contradiction of the command to love enemies but its inward complement — implacable war on the evil within, that one may be at peace with every person without.

This transposition is not a modern embarrassment managed after the fact; it is the tradition’s own settled way of praying these psalms, rooted in the christological reading of the whole Psalter (see The Psalms as the Prayer of Christ). Because the psalms are the prayer of Christ and his Body against all that opposes God, their violence is redirected to its true object — the kingdom of sin and death that Christ came to destroy.

The Honesty of the Psalms

The imprecatory psalms belong to a larger feature of the Psalter that the tradition prizes rather than tempers: its unflinching honesty about the whole range of human experience before God. The psalms do not present a sanitized piety. They rage (“How long, O Lord?”), they despair (Psalm 87, the darkest of the Six Psalms of Matins, ends without consolation, “thou hast removed far from me friend and neighbour, and mine acquaintances because of my misery”), they protest and question and accuse; they voice grief, terror, loneliness, and anger, and they lay all of it before God without disguise. The Church prays these psalms too, and does not soften them — she reads Psalm 87 in the darkness at the opening of every Matins (see Which Psalms Anchor Which Services).

This honesty is itself a spiritual gift. St. Athanasius observed that the Psalter gives words to every condition of the soul, so that whatever a person feels — fear, affliction, even the impulse to curse — he finds in the psalms not a denial of the feeling but its truthful expression offered to God, and in that offering its healing (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus 15–27; trans. Gregg, 1980). The psalms teach that nothing in the human heart is too dark to be brought before God; that lament is a form of faith, and even anger, laid on the altar of the psalm, can be transfigured. The Church’s refusal to excise the hard psalms is thus of a piece with her whole understanding of prayer: she will not pretend before God, and she trusts the Psalter to carry the truth of the human condition — its violence and its despair included — up into the prayer of Christ, where it is judged, purified, and redeemed.

See Also

References

  • Athanasius of Alexandria. Letter to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms [PG 27:11–46]. Trans. Robert C. Gregg. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
  • The Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue (citing Psalm 136:9 of the evil thoughts dashed on Christ). Trans. in RB 1980, ed. Timothy Fry. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981.
  • John Cassian. The Conferences and The Institutes. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. ACW 57–58. New York: Newman Press, 1997–2000.
  • The Philokalia, vol. 1 (Evagrius, On the Eight Thoughts; the ascetic reading of watchfulness). Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1979.
  • The Psalter According to the Seventy. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1974; rev. ed. (Retaining the imprecatory psalms in full.)