December 1998 Issue

Each of the psalm's major themes, praise of God the creator, praise of God who works in history, and the wisdom of the one who worships God, is picked up in the lively poem Of God's Omnipotencie (1599) by the Scots poet Alexander Hume.¹ God is creator of all things: "The earth, the aire, the sea, and fire / Are subject all to his impire," which he continues to govern. God uses the stuff of the empire both to build up and destroy. Thus God rains down "brimstane and the burning fire... / For to consume into this yre / Baith Sodome, and Gomorrah towne," but from the same fire God "Preservèd safe the children three."

God is particularly concerned with the nourishment of those who follow, not only of the wanderers in the wilderness but of Elijah, charging the ravens to leave "their common prey / His sustenance for to provide." The knowledge of those who know God is particularly to be praised. All other knowledge is "bot ignorance." Its "facund eloquence / Replete with fekles fantasie." On the other hand, the "sonnes of light...knaw the trueth."

The most magnificent artistic rendition of the creation is surely the one Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But among the most interesting (not surprisingly) is the one Hieronymus Bosch painted on the outside leaves of the huge screen that contains The Garden of Earthly Delights. The painting is interesting not only because of its context—the pure creation contains within it the story of its fall—but for its own sake.

Bosch's universe, like that of Genesis, is three-tiered and self-contained. Below is the water, above the bowl that is the firmament. Clouds float above the land that rises out of the ocean. The land is rich with vegetation, some familiar, some the strange products of that country in which the artist's mind intersected with the symbols of his time. Above all, outside the sphere as if beyond space and time, God sits, calmly and quietly about the work of creation. Bosch's God is almost the opposite of Michelangelo's dynamic, muscular "man." Bosch clothes God in long flowing robes and high crown. God doesn't reach out: God sits quietly, creating with the merest wave of a hand and a word.

God's nourishment of God's people, particularly through the manna given in the wilderness, was a popular theme in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. There are painted versions of the story by Dirk Bouts (ca. 1464-1468), by Bacchiacca (ca. 1540), by Tintoretto (1591-1594), and by Nicholas Poussin (1639), among many others.

Perhaps the most interesting of these is that of Bouts. This is not a "costume piece." Rather the gatherers are depicted in the dress and style of Bouts' day. But they are most remarkable not for their dress, but for their serenity. These are not the people who railed at Moses, asking why God was starving them. These are the people who have come to know that God is present with them, always providing. They have discovered with the narrator of William Cowper's Joy and Peace in Believing ("Sometimes a light surprises...") that the wilderness can "bring with it nothing / But [God] will bear us thro'."

Tintoretto's Gathering is much more crowded and much busier than Bouts'. Indeed the gathering of the manna becomes almost secondary to the daily work that goes on around it: The seamstress at her sewing; the cobbler at his last; the washerwoman beating clothes against the rock; the spinster at her shuttle.

In contrast Tintoretto's depiction of Moses Striking Water from the Rock is highly dramatic. The water gushes forth as Moses clubs the large, overhanging boulder, and people and animals push forward to quench their thirst. God broods over all, muscular, dense, very much present, as different from Bosch's God of creation as we can imagine.

The "precepts" of God "are trustworthy," the psalmist sings, and "to be performed with faithfulness and uprightness." "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." George Herbert's (1593-1633) fine little poem Discipline agrees, though for Herbert God is to be "feared" not for God's wrath but for God's love. Still, obedience to God's will is first.²

It is the kind of single-mindedness that Mark Twain describes in Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar. For Twain it is the fool that says, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." For that is a way of saying also "Scatter your money and your attention." "[B]ut the wise man saith, `Put all your eggs in the one basket and—WATCH THAT BASKET.'"

One connection Psalm 111 has to Christmas is through Joseph, who makes the wise and proper response to God. Joseph is almost always absent in paintings of Mary and child. One exception is Michelangelo's first painting, the Doni Tondo.³ Here Joseph, depicted as a balding, graying, but still vigorous man of middle age, is both at the center of the picture and its frame. His knees frame Mary, who sits on the ground between them, but the complete attention of his upper body and his gaze is focused on the young Jesus. There indeed is the center of the wise one who fears God.

Richard Dietrich

1. Alexander Hume's "Of God's Omnipotencie" may be found in The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse, ed. by Donald Davie, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 47ff. William Cowper's "Joy and Peace in Believing" and George Herbert's "Discipline" are anthologized in the same volume, pp. 199 and 79 respectively.
2. Hieronymus Bosch's depiction of creation is reproduced in The Bible in Art: the Old Testament, introduction by Marcel Brion, notes by Heidi Heimann, (New York: Phaidon Publishers Inc., 1956), plate 1. Dirk Bouts' and Tintoretto's "The Gathering of the Manna" are both in the same volume, plates 108 and 105 (though there is a much better reproduction of the latter in Time-Life's The World of Titian by Jay Williams et al., New York, 1968, p. 164-165. Tintoretto's "Moses Striking Water from the Rock" is also found in The Bible in Art: the Old Testament, plate 111.
3. Michelangelo's "Doni Tondo," named for the family that commissioned it, is reproduced in The World of Michelangelo by Robert Coughlan et al., (New York, Time Inc., 1966), p. 62.