Psalm 38:12

the webs we weave

Thou hast corrected man for iniquity. And thou hast made his soul to waste away like a spider: surely in vain is any man disquieted. (Psalm 38:12 DR)

The Psalmist now sets forth the medicinal nature of God’s chastisement of us for our sins which is meant not exclusively as a punishment but also as a corrective to the lures of our appetites for the things of this world. In the moment of the chastisement it hardly seems pleasant, as St. Paul says:

Now all chastisement for the present indeed seemeth not to bring with it joy, but sorrow: but afterwards it will yield, to them that are exercised by it, the most peaceable fruit of justice. (Hebrews 12:11 DR)

The Vulgate uses exercitatis, which has largely the same meaning as its English cognate exercise. The analogy is fitting, for even on the natural level any sort of physical or mental exercise requires effort, pain, time and repetition. We do not achieve mastery of anything without these components of exercise, and the same is true of the spiritual life. The chastisements that we receive for our sins and as part of God’s disciplining of us are meant to train us in righteousness—to flex our moral muscles, as it were, so that they can grow stronger, gain endurance, etc.

For the Psalmist the correction supplied is juxtaposed with the precipitating reason: our souls waste away to nothing in the pursuit of the pleasures of this life, which is indicated by the final clause which expands in parallelism upon the figure of the spider. Just as the spider crumbles into dust, so the disquietude that we experience is pursuing the goods of this life is as much vanity:

What consumes away sooner than the spider? I speak of the creature itself; though what can be more liable to consume away than the spider's webs? Observe too how liable to decay is the creature itself. Do but set your finger lightly upon it, and it is a ruin: there is nothing at all more easily destroyed. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 38, 18.)

I’m not sure I’ve ever set my finger lightly upon a spider, but I’ll take St. Augustine’s word for it! Nevertheless, there is perhaps an even more penetrating meaning to the figure of the spider and its web, as St. Augustine briefly touches. For there is a certain beauty and strength to the spider’s web; it is a marvel of natural engineering and is wonderful to behold as the dew glistens on it in the morning light. And as far as the properties of the web are concerned—in relation to other things of its size—it is extremely strong. The spider itself seems a paragon of industriousness, working tirelessly to spin both its home and its means of sustenance every morning.

Yet for all its beauty and strength and industry it is here today and gone tomorrow. The web is easily broken by a brush of the hand and all the efforts of the spider are in vain. St. Robert Bellarmine sums up this irony:

For the sins just named you have corrected the sinner in your wrath, and wasted away his soul like a spider, whose whole time is taken up in weaving webs to catch flies, and is, in the meantime, itself dried up and perishes. Thus the souls of the carnal, by the just judgment of God, are perpetually laboring in acquiring the things of this world, and in such labor waste all their understanding and intellect, whence the soul becomes so dried up and exhausted of the moisture of divine grace, as never to think of its salvation, or to be moved by the slightest desire of eternal happiness; as an antidote against which aridity the prophet asks, in Psalm 62., “Let my soul be filled as with marrow and fatness.” He concludes by saying, surely in vain is any man disquieted. Any man whose soul wastes away like a spider, is disgusted without cause, labors in vain, is needlessly troubled, for “what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his soul?” (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 38, 10-11.)

God’s corrective chastisement of us for our sins is thus an extreme mercy, as this medicinal scourge is meant to wake us from our stupor in which we are wasting away in a miasma of sin, drawn into a torpor of obeying whatever our appetites demand. But all the things that are in this world are vanity, and it is thus useless to become disquieted about them or to spend our lives in pursuing them. Like the spider’s web they can seem beautiful and strong, but such attributes are only apparent, as they easily break and are blown away by the winds:

Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, is the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life, which is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the concupiscence thereof: but he that doth the will of God, abideth for ever. (1 John 2:15-17 DR)

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I found this interesting image of a guy praying or standing in contemplation or in sorrow; it’s an ambiguous posture which I thought would work well. There was a also some nice contrast between the figure and the background, which had the result of making it appear even more nebulous.

I added in some background textures and gave them some wiggle hold on the Position and Rotation to make the background feel unsettled and disquieted, which I thought would be appropriate. I also added in the text layers and duplicated them to emphasize the disquietude feeling and applied a camera shake over everything to increase the unsettled feeling.

Enjoy.

View a higher quality version of this gif here: