Canter Bridge

It is easy for the man or woman who is easily impressed by the majesty of deity or nature to conclude that humankind is a footnote. Man seems a mere scratch on a mountainside, woman a murmured vowel in an epic cantata that celebrates greatness as largeness.

It is true that biblical poetry is capable of celebrating Leviathan’s immensity at humanity’s cost. Yet only mankind is glorious in a way that imitates its Maker. Only man and woman stride like gods—admittedly small ones—across the landscape. Only human beings are easily mistaken for their Creator in a manner that honors rather than belittles the Designer of this oddly self-reflective species.

The eighth psalm is an ode to the Ruler’s majesty. ‘How majestic is your name in all the earth!’, the speaker exudes God-ward in the opening and closing lines of the hymn. There is no mistaking who occupies center stage in this singing out of creation’s architecture.

Yet God is not alone in the psalmist’s nocturnal survey of creation, the only ruler in a vast domain of celestial bodies and wildlife that share little except that they comprise the kingdom of those who are ruled.

God is not alone. He is accompanied by a creature who is crowned—the language is intentionally monarchical—with the Lord’s qualities and equipped to rule his world.

This, indeed, is where the reading of this psalm too easily lurches off the path into a pious reduction of what it means to be human that is quite far from the poet’s praise.

‘When I survey the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you’ve established’, the Psalmist offers in a careful circumscribing of the principle thought to follow, ‘What is man, that you remember him, and the son of man that you place your care upon him?’

The contribution of this Psalm to humanity’s quest to understand it is not a paean to the minuteness of mankind in the very large universe in which he wanders unnoticed. Far from it. The psalmist is actually marking out one of the great paradoxes, perhaps the greatest among them: Why does the Reigning Lord lavish such attention upon such a small and fragile creature.

The unspoken assumption is that he does just that. It is the motive for this divine obsession with woman and man that puzzles the psalmist, challenging all logic that equates importance with size, cruciality with majesty, and potency with power.

One is left to wonder, in the face of such a sung affirmation, just what there is in a man that would come near to monopolizing the attention of a Ruler who knows all things, both the large ones and the small.