Their sound went into all the earth: and their speech continually unto the ends of the world. Ps. 18:5
There’s a little bit of a mystery as to which text exactly this is a quotation from–it doesn’t correspond to the Nova Vulgata, and I am rummaging around on the Internet to see which earlier Psalter it’s from–but in any case, at the time I didn’t know about this oddity, but just found it a striking piece of mosaic art. (And Latin!) It is from the entrance to the Madonna Della Strada Chapel on the Lakeview campus of Loyola University, where I visited this past Monday.
Directly opposite this, flanking the other side of the doorway, is a corresponding piece with a quotation from a place both surprising and not –
It asks, ‘What region in the earth is this, not full of our pains?’ It is 1.460 of the Aeneid. Aeneas himself speaks this, when they stumble upon Tyre and find it, unexpectedly, a wealthy, regal land. Of course, Christians for millennia have found Vergil the most Christian of pre-Christian writers, and this is not a surprising pairing. It is quite beautiful, though.
Psalm 18 (if you’re looking that up on your own now, it’d be Psalm 19 in your copy of the Bible because of historical reasons) is probably one of the most generically quoted verses in the entire Psalter, except maybe Psalm 23, or 1. Here is the Knox translation, alongside the Vulgate, from New Advent:
2 See how the skies proclaim God’s glory, how the vault of heaven betrays his craftsmanship! 3 Each day echoes its secret to the next, each night passes on to the next its revelation of knowledge; 4 no word, no accent of theirs that does not make itself heard, 5 till their utterance fills every land, till their message reaches the ends of the world. 6 In these, he has made a pavilion for the sun, which comes out as a bridegroom comes from his bed, and exults like some great runner who sees the track before him. 7 Here, at one end of heaven, is its starting-place, and its course reaches to the other; none can escape its burning heat. 8 The Lord’s perfect law, how it brings the soul back to life; the Lord’s unchallengeable decrees, how they make the simple learned! 9 How plain are the duties which the Lord enjoins, the treasure of man’s heart; how clear is the commandment the Lord gives, the enlightenment of man’s eyes! 10 How sacred a thing is the fear of the Lord, which is binding for ever; how unerring are the awards which the Lord makes, one and all giving proof of their justice! 11 All these are more precious than gold, than a hoard of pure gold, sweeter than the honey, dripping from its comb. 12 By these I, thy servant, live, observing them how jealously! 13 And yet, who knows his own frailties? If I have sinned unwittingly, do thou absolve me. 14 Keep me ever thy own servant, far from pride; so long as this does not lord it over me, I will yet be without fault, I will yet be innocent of the great sin. 15 Every word on my lips, every thought in my heart, what thou wouldst have it be, O Lord, my defender, my redeemer!
The psalm begins with a description of the glory and splendour of God, as revealed in His creation–the passing of one day into the next through the night and one night into the next through the day, in that wondrous paradox of continuity and change, inspires King David’s awe at God’s creation. It is these days and nights whose sound ‘goes into all the earth’ and whose words ‘to the ends of the world’; and we see, even, why whoever chose the version with eloquia might’ve done so. The days and nights don’t really speak words, but they speak with an eloquence nonetheless, as if they had words but even better.
So the glory of God has been and is being declared to the ends of the earth, and so on. David goes on exulting in creation–God made a pavilion for the Sun which it is happy to run down, and the creation of God is all-encompassing, fair, universal. Then David turns, rather unexpectedly, to the law of the Lord, the ‘perfect law’ which ‘brings the soul back to life’. He sings that the law of God is beautiful, life-giving, excellent in so many ways, and the exultant, innocent happiness of these lines is impossible not to appreciate. One thing to take note of is the use of emundabor in 14–translated as “I will be innocent” loses an interesting nuance there. Those familiar with the Latin text Asperges me will probably recall now the line, et mundabor, ‘I will be cleansed’. Mundere is ‘to cleanse’: not to be innocent as if never stained, but really to be cleaned so as to be immaculatus, as the preceding line tells us. The happy use of mundabor here and in the Asperges is a beautiful point wherein we might see how the psalms foretell the salvation brought by the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, and His fulfilment of the law (cf. Matt 5:17).
Without going into too much detail, then, the psalm is about the beauty of the law of the Lord: how His creation speaks of His glory, proclaiming without words but with eloquence the beauty of His law and the delight of a man who, by His goodness, keeps it.
Looking back, then to the quotation of the Aeneid, ‘Where in this earth is this land, not full of our pains?’ we find a marvellous complement to the proclamation of God’s glory in Ps. 18.5. It’s true, and always has been, despite our tendency like Vergil and other pastoral writers to romanticise the old days when everything was happy and idyllic and the earth yielded up her fruits in joyful surrender. That has never been the case–from our first father, it has been true that ‘you will eat by the sweat of your brow’. The Trojans, fleeing from their fallen city, think that everything is soaked through with mire and blood and grime and sorrow. But Tyre! What a land! That is the sentiment therein.
But imagine: if these refugees of war found a land decked in earthly splendour (gold, new buildings, grand construction) to be such a wondrous apparition, how much more we, laden with the sorrows of a world that is fallen, at the entrance into the house of God! And unlike the temporary respite the Trojans find–spoiler for the Aeneid, I guess–in the delight of God’s law and the saving friendship of His Son, we might have life to the full, and one day hope to enter into the Kingdom of God. There, when He shall wipe away every tear, and death shall be no more, we may joyfully exult to have been brought into a land where our sorrows are no more.
the lexical form 