24 March 2022

PSALMS

 Dear me; the room was warm and I was tired and, in mid-psalm, my breviary (Burns Oates and Washbourne 1946; nice engravings by Reynolds Stone) slipped from my fingers ...

Worse: I have been saying the Divine Office since the 1950s, and there have been previous occasions when the loving arms of Morpheus etc. etc..

There are dodges one can employ to combat this weakness of our ... well; mine, anyway ... fallen Flesh. Arrogantly (for my clerical readers are undoubtedly holier men than I am) I venture to suggest one dodge which has been useful to me. I apologise if it appears more Academic than Devotional. That is another of my failings ...

In the Psalms, there is often a distinction between Dominus when it represents the tetragrammaton YHWH; and, on the other hand, the quite distinct term Deus

Dominus-YHWH is precise and delimited and even, one might dare to say, local. It refers to my God, the God of Israel. It does not refer to any old god like the unreal impostures or demons which the Gentiles worship. It excludes any syncretistic nonsense about all gods being really, underneath it all, essentially the same. It is not a friendly term for such present-day syncretists as Freemasons or Bergoglians (vide Aslan and Tash in The Last Battle).

So one will quite often find Dominus-YHWH closely associated with the Temple, with Sion; with Jerusalem.

And, linked with it or not very far away in the text, one will very often find references to His Name. Because, of course, that Name is YHWH=Dominus. Perhaps we may even be informed that His Name dwells in Sion or in His Temple.

We know Who is the New Temple replacing the old. That is a piece of typology which (even in terms of the crudest 'Enlightenment' historicism) seems reliably to go back to the words of the Word Himself (compare Mark 14:57-59 and John 2:19-22). The Breviary Office for the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, with elegant associative confusion, takes up Old Testament texts referring to the Tetragrammaton and makes them refer to the Name Yesh-wah.

And is quite right to do so!

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