the Day of Judgement is an idea very familiar and very dreadful, to christians. 'in all times of our tribulation, in all time of our wealth, in the hour of death, and in the day of judgement, Godd Lord deliver us'. if there is any concept which cannot by any conjuring be removed from the teaching of Our Lord, it is that of
the great separation;
the sheep and the goats,
the broad way and the narrow,
the wheat and the tares,
the winnowing fan,
the wise and foolish virgins,
the good fish and the refuse,
the door closed on the marriage feast, with some inside and some outside in the dark.
we may dare to hope - some dare to hope - that this is not the whole story, that, as Julian of Norwich said,
'all is well and all manner of thing will be well'.
but it is no use going to Our Lord 's own words for thaqt hope. something we may get from St Paul: nothing, of that kind, from Jesus. it is from His won words that the picture of 'Doomsday' has come into christianity.
one result of this is that the word 'judgement' in a religious context immediately suggests to us a criminal trial; the Judge on the bench, the accused, the hope of acquittal, the fear of conviction. but to the ancient Hebrews 'judgement' usually suggested something quite different.
in the Psalms judgement is not something that the
164 conscience-stricken believer fears but something the downtrodden believer hopes for. God 'shall judge the world in righteousness' and 'be a defence for the oppressed' (ix, 8,9). 'Judge me, O Lord', cries the poet of Psalm 35. more surprisingly, in 67 even the 'nations', the Gentiles, are told to 'rejoice and be glad' because God will 'judge the folk righteously'. (our fear is precisely lest the judgement should be a good deal more righteous than we can bear.) in the jubilant 96th psalm the very sky and earth are to 'be glad', the fields are to 'be joyful' and all the trees of the wood 'shall rejoice before the Lord' because 'He cometh to judge the earth'. at the prospect of that judgement which we dread there is such revelry as a pagan poet might have used to herald the coming of Dionysus.
though our Lord, as I have said, imposed on us the modern, christian conception of the Day of Judgement, yet His own words elsewhere illuminate the old Hebraic conception. I am thinking of the Unjust Judge in the parable. to most of us, unless we had that parable in mind, the mention of a wicked judge would instantly suggest someone like Judge Jeffries: a roaring, interrupting, bloodthirsty brute, bent on hanging a prisoner, bullying the jury and the witnesses. our hope is that we shall NOT be judged by him. our Lord's Unjust Judge is a wholly different character. you want him to judge you, you pester him to judge you. the whole difficulty is to get our case heard. obviously what Our Lord has in view is not a criminal trial at all but a civil trial. we are looking at 'justice' from the point of view not of a prisoner but of a plaintiff: a plaintiff with a watertight case, if only she could get the defendant into court.
the picture is strange to us only because we enjoy in our own country an unusually good legal profession. we
165 take it for granted that judges do not need to be bribed and cannot be bribed. this is, however, no law of nature, but a rare achievement; we ourselves might lose it (shall certainly lose it if no pains are taken for its conservation) ; it does no inevitably go with the use of the english language. over many parts of the world and in many periods the difficulty for poor and unimportant people has been not only to get their case fairly heard but to get it heard at all. it is their voices that speak in the continual hope of the Hebrews for 'judgement', the hope that some day, somehow, wrongs will be righted.
but the idea is not associated only with courts of law. the 'Judges' who give their name to a most interesting historical book in the old Testament were not, I gather, so should consider judicial functions. indeed the book has very little to say about 'judging' in that sense. its 'judges' are primarily heroes. fighting men, who deliver Israel from foreign tyrants: giant-killers. the name which we translated as 'judges' is apparently connected with a verb which means to vindicate, to avenge, to right the wrongs of. they might equally well be called champions, avengers. the knight errant of medieval romance who spends his days liberating and securing justice for, distressed damsels, would almost have been, for the Hebrews, a 'judge'.
such a Judge - He who will at last do us right, the deliverer, the protector, the queller of tyrants - is the dominant image in the Psalms. there are, indeed, some few passages in which a psalmist thinks of 'judgement ' with trembling: 'enter not into judgement with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified' (143.2), or if thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to make what is done amiss: O Lord, who may abide it? (130.3) but the opposite
166 attitude is far commoner: 'Hear the right, O Lord (17,1), 'Be Thou my Judge' (26,1), 'Plead Thou my cause' (35,1), 'give sentence with me, O God' (43,1), 'arise, Thou Judge of the world' (94,2) it is for justice, for a hearing, far more often than for pardon, that the psalmists pray.
we thus reach a very paradoxical generalization. ordinarily and or course correctly, the jewish
thus in one sense we might say that jewish confidence in the face of judgement is a by product of jewish elf-righteousness. but that is far too summary. we must consider the whole experience out of which the self-righteous utterances grow: and secondly, what, on a deeper level, those utterances really mean.
the experience is dark and dreadful. we must not call it the 'dark night of the soul' for that name is already appropriate to another darkness and another dread, encountered
167 at a far higher level than (I suppose) any of the psalmists had reached. but we may well call it the Dark Night of the Flesh, understanding by 'the flesh' the natural man. for the experience is not in itself necessarily religious and thousands of unbelievers undergo it in our own time. it arises from natural causes; but it becomes religious in the psalmists because they are religious men.
it must be confessed at the outset that all those passages which paint this Dark Night can be regarded, if we wish, as the expressions of a neurosis. if we choose to maintain that several psalmists wrote in, or on the verge of, a nervous breakdown, our theory will cover all the facts. that is, the psalmists assert as true about their own situation all those things which a patient, in a certain neurosis is a thing that occurs; we may have passed, or may yet have to pass, through that valley. it concerns us to see how certain believers in God behaved in it before us. and neurosis is, after all, a relative term. who can say that he never touches the fringes of it? even if the psalms were written by neurotics, that will not make them wholly irrelevant.
but of course we cannot be at all sure that they were. the neurotic wrongly believes that he is threatened by certain evils. but another man (or the neurotic himself at another time) may be really threatened with those same evils. it may be only the patient's nerves that make him so sure that he has cancer, or is financially ruined, or is going to hell; but this does not prove that there are no such things as cancer or bankruptcy or damnation. to suggest that the situation described in certain psalms must be imaginary seems to me to wishful thinking. the situation does
168 occur in real life. if anyone doubts this let him consider, while I try to present this Dark Night of the Flesh, how easily it might be, not the subjective impression, but the real situation of any one of the following:
1. a small, ugly, unathletic, unpopular boy in his second term at a thoroughly bad English public school.
2. an unpopular recruit in an army hut.
3.a Jew in Hitler's Germany.
4. a man in a bad firm or government office whom a group of rivals are trying to get rid of.
5. a Papist in 16th century england.
6. a Protestant in 16th century spain.
7. an African in Malan's africa.
8. an american socialist in the hands of Senator McCarthy or a Zulu, noxious to Chaka, during one of the old, savage witch-hunts.
the Dark Night of the Flesh can be objective; it is not even very uncommon.
ONE IS ALONE. (mine)
the fellow-recruit who seemed to be a friend on the first day, the boys who were your friends last term, the neighbours who were your friends before the Jew-baiting began (or before you attracted Senator McCarthy's attention), even your connections and relatives, have begun to give you a wide berth.
no one wishes to be seen with you.
when you pass acquaintances in the street they always happen to be looking the other way.
'they of mine acquaintance were afraid of me; and they that did see me without conveyed themselves from me' (31,13) overs, neighbours, kinsmen stand 'afar off' (38,11). 'I am become a stranger unto my brethren' (69,8) 'Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me: and made me to be abhorred of them' (88,7) 'I looked also upon my right hand and saw there was no man that would know me'. (142,4)
sometimes it is not an individual but a group ( a religious
169 body or even a whole nation) that has this experience.
members fall off;
allies desert;
the huge combinations against us extend and harden daily.
harder even to bear than our dwindling numbers and growing isolation, is the increasing evidence that 'our side' is ineffective. the world is turned upside down by bad men and 'what hath the righteous done? , where are our counter-measures? (11,3) we are 'put to rebuke' (12,9) once there were omens in our favour and great leaders on our side. but those days are gone: 'we see not our tokens, there is not one prophet more' (74,10) england in modern europe and christians in modern england often feel like this.
and all round the isolated man, every day, is the presence of the unbelievers.
they know well enough what we are believing or trying to believe ('help Thou my unbelief") and regard it as total illusion. 'many one there be that say of my soul, there is no help for him in his God' (3,2). as if God, supposing He exists, had nothing to do but look after US! (10,14) but in fact, 'there is no God' (14,1) if the sufferer's God really exists 'let Him deliver him' now! (22,8) 'where is now thy God? (42,3)
the man in the Dark Night of the Flesh is in everyone else's eyes extremely funny; the stock joke of that whole school or hut or office. they can't see him without laughing: they make faces at him (22,7). the drunks work his name into their comic songs (69,12). he is a 'by-word' (44.15). unfortunately all this laughter is not exactly honest, spontaneous laughter such as a man with some oddity of voice or face might learn to bear and even, in the end, to join in. these mockers do not laugh ALTHOUGH it hurts him nor even without caring whether it hurts or not; the laugh BECAUSE it will hurt. any humiliation of miscarriage of his is jam to them; they crow over him when he's down -
'when my foot slipped, they rejoiced greatly against me' (38,16)
if one had a certain sort of aristocratic and Stoic pride one might perhaps answer scorn with scorn and even (in a sense) rejoice, as Coventry Patmore rejoiced , to live 'in the high mountain air of public obloquy'. (def. morally perverse..) if so, one would not be completely in the Dark Night. but the sufferer, for better or worse, is not - or if he once was, is now no longer - that sort of man. the continual taunts, slights, and humiliations (partly veiled or brutally plain according to the milieu (def, latin, medius, middle; the social setting) get past his defences and under his skin. he is in his own eyes also the object they would make him. he has no come-back. shame has covered his face (69,7). he might as well be a dumb man; in his mouth are no reproofs (38,13). he is 'a worm and no man' (22.6).
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