Psalm 41:8

Deep calleth on deep, at the noise of thy flood-gates. All thy heights and thy billows have passed over me. (Psalm 41:8 DR)

As humans, many of our memories are connected to other memories, and recollecting a past experience often brings to mind related (and sometimes seemingly unrelated) things which surround or encompass it. There can be a ripple effect in calling to mind the past which can stir up a tempest of memories, like waves rolling over each other as the breakers come to crash on the shore of recollection.

The Psalmist in his distress called to mind the land of Jordan and Hermoniim, the little hill, and for him these memories proved the means by which to recall the confidence and hope he had in Lord, even in the midst of the disquiet of his soul. The Jordan was the “descent” into Baptism, the remission of sins, and Hermoniim the anathematizing of his wayward heart and appetites, the putting off of sin so as to turn his will and face towards God. These are things he is calling to mind as having occurred in the past, and yet—as we all experience—there is often an anamnesis of sorts in this kind of recollection, in which the memory of the past is brought forward into the present.

It is this flood of recollection that takes on reality in his own heart and mind, which he describes as deep calling on deep, an exquisite poetical statement that embeds profundity within brevity. The Vulgate has abyssus abyssum invocat, which can be literally rendered as “abyss calls on abyss.” In modern English “abyss” tends to have a more mysterious and perhaps slightly negative connotation, as we tend to use “abyss” for something that is dark and unfathomable into which something is lost forever. Nor is this meaning necessarily absent from the Psalmist’s intent. However, the identity of this deep or abyss is not unanimously assigned, with divergent yet complementary readings replete throughout various commentators.

Arnobius the Younger reads this as mystically expressing the Blessed Trinity:

When deep calls on deep, the Son calls the Father from the depth of land and river, and you have opened the cataracts of heaven. As the Holy Spirit descends, the Father addresses the Son from the heights of the heavens. When he calls from deep to deep, the glory of the Lord comes to me. (Arnobius the Younger, Commentary on the Psalms, 42, ACCS.)

The idea here is that the Palmist is speaking in the person of Christ, and this passage thus mystically reveals the Trinitarian unity between the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Arnobius no doubt has in mind St. Paul:

But to us God hath revealed them, by this Spirit. For the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, but the spirit of a man that is in him? So the things also that are of God no man knoweth, but the Spirit of God. (1 Corinthains 2:10-11 DR)

St. Ambrose takes this as being a reference to the two Testaments:

Listen to this: “Deep calls on deep at the voice of Your floodgates.” Scripture of the Old Testament calls on Scripture of the New Testament for the consummation of holiness and the fullness of grace; it calls with the voice of grace and the overflowing of spiritual abundance. (St. Ambrose, Commentary on Twelve Psalms, 36.18, ACCS.)

Cassiodorus agrees with this and expands upon the idea:

Jordan, Hermoniim and Abyss invoketh abyss at the voice of Thy cataracts have together fashioned the figure of sardismos, which is always formed by a mixture of tongues. Jordan and Hermoniim are Hebrew names, abyss and cataracts Greek words, and invoke and voice are clearly Latin. So this figure here is splendidly fashioned by a mingling of tongues. By the two abysses he signifies the two Testaments, New and Old, which strengthen each other by mutual witness when the Old foretells the New and the New cites passages of the Old. So each invokes the other when by its affirmation it bears witness to the other. (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, 42, 8, Ancient Christian Writers)

In earlier rhetorical theory this usage of sardismos—which is the mingling of words of different languages in close proximity—was seen as a type of barbarism by masters such as Quintilian. But Cassiodorus uses it as a means of underscoring the deep and interpenetrating relationship between the Old and New Testaments. This is because the same Holy Ghost inspired the prophets and the apostles, and thus their unity sounds back from one to the other:

Elsewhere the Psalmist similarly says: Thy judgments are a great abyss. The Lord’s Testaments are indeed deep, for they dwell in the bosom of Wisdom itself, in the depth of truth. At the voice of thy cataracts denotes the prophets and apostles, for as a mass of water is vomited forth over cataracts, so the waters of the Lord welled forth from their mouths. We fittingly associate heights and billows with the Holy Scriptures; for it is the Scriptures which he earlier termed abysses, in which a billow of parables sports, one might say, and heights of feelings intensify through devoted scrutiny. So the just man says that these passed over him, for the eager student had immersed himself in knowledge of them. (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, 42, 8, Ancient Christian Writers)

St. Bellarmine follows closer to what we will see from St. Augustine, assigning these deeps or abysses to being overwhelmed by the trials and temptations of this life which come against the just:

He goes on with an account of the dangers and temptations of this life, comparing them to an inundation, alluding to that of Noe. “Deep calleth on deep.” An immense mass of water came rolling over me, and the moment it passed, another came in succession, as if called by the first… This metaphor is used here to give an idea of the great dangers and temptations to which God will sometimes expose his elect. Men such as David, truly spiritual, alone are aware of the extent and magnitude of these temptations; for it is such people only know the boundless machinations of the enemy, and how grievous a matter it is to fall away from the grace of God. (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 41, 7.)

This reading accords with the prior temptations he has had to be disquieted within himself, for at the moment when he seems to have conquered his doubts and overcome those who ask him: Where is thy God?, another trial or temptation comes crashing upon him, as if he is at sea in a storm whose waves are incessant. This by itself is not meant to be a means to despair, but rather of further confidence in the Lord. On his own the Psalmist has come to see that he is not capable of maintaining his hope; if he were to survey only his experiences and memories he might lose all faith. But by fixing his eyes upon the Lord rather than on the deeps and the floods that surround him, he is enabled to pass through unscathed; in this manner all thy heights and billows have passed over me.

St. Augustine interprets the deep in two related yet distinct ways. The first is that this deep is man’s own heart, and the deep which calls to that heart is the preaching of the Gospel:

What abyss is this that calls, and to what other abyss? Justly, because the understanding spoken of is an abyss. For an abyss is a depth that cannot be reached or comprehended; and it is principally applied to a great body of water. For there is a depth, a profound, the bottom of which cannot be reached by sounding…

What then is the abyss that calls, and to what other abyss does it call? If by abyss we understand a great depth, is not man’s heart, do you not suppose, an abyss? For what is there more profound than that abyss? Men may speak, may be seen by the operations of their members, may be heard speaking in conversation: but whose thought is penetrated, whose heart seen into? What he is inwardly engaged on, what he is inwardly capable of, what he is inwardly doing or what purposing, what he is inwardly wishing to happen, or not to happen, who shall comprehend? I think an abyss may not unreasonably be understood of man, of whom it is said elsewhere, Man shall come to a deep heart, and God shall be exalted. If man then is an abyss, in what way does abyss call on abyss? Does man call on man as God is called upon? No, but calls on is equivalent to calls to him. For it was said of a certain person, he calls on death; [Wisdom 1:16] that is, lives in such a way as to be inviting death; for there is no man at all who puts up a prayer, and calls expressly on death: but men by evil-living invite death. Deep calls on deep, then, is, man calls to man. Thus is it wisdom is learned, and thus faith, when man calls to man. The holy preachers of God's word call on the deep: are they not themselves a deep also? (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 41, 12)

As St. Augustine considers his own soul and that of other men, he notices that there is an interior depth that cannot be fathomed by the outward expressions of words or actions. There is an abyss in the understanding that is sometimes not even known to the person himself; in fact, as we speak to each other and immerse ourselves in knowledge and understanding we come to greater understanding not only of the minds of others, but even of our own. We speak off-handedly about coming to find out who we are, but there is a profound truth in this, for the interior depths of our own souls are not so superficial as to be readily discoverable even by ourselves. It is this abyss within ourselves that is thus called to by the Gospel, for the Word of God as being the very words of the Infinite Creator calls to the deeps within the human soul so as to fill it:

Do not you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as not to be seen through by him in whom it is? How profound a depth of infirmity lay concealed in Peter, when he knew not what was passing in himself, and rashly promised to die either with or for his Lord! How profound was the abyss; yet was that abyss bare to the eyes of God! For that which he knew not of within himself, Christ forewarned him of. Every man then, though holy, though righteous, though advancing in many things, is still a deep; and he is calling on a deep when he is announcing any point of faith, any point of the truth, for the sake of eternal life. But it is then that the deep is useful to the deep called upon, when it is done with the voice of Thy water-spouts. Deep calls to deep: man wins his fellow-man, but not with his own voice, but with the voice of Thy water-spouts. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 41, 13)

The second interpretation is that the deeps are the judgments of God that are mighty and great against sin, the first deep being the punishment of mortality for Original Sin, and the second deep being the threat of the fires of hell. The thought here is that the wound of Original Sin as felt in the mortality of the flesh calls to the deep of future judgment by being a foretaste, as it were, of that punishment, just as mortal death is a figure of spiritual death. This then becomes the source of his disquietude:

I am bound to be humble. For I am horribly afraid of Thy judgments; intensely do I fear Thy judgments. Therefore is my soul disquieted on account of myself. And what judgments of thine are they that I have feared? Are those judgments slight ones? They are great ones, severe, hard to bear; but would they were all. Deep calls to deep with the voice of Thy water-spouts, in that Thou threatenest, Thou sayest, that there is another condemnation in store even after those sufferings. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 41, 13)

This is brought to bear by the heights and billows that have passed over, which correspond to the deep which calls to deep:

All Your overhangings and Your waves have come upon me. The waves in what I already feel, the overhangings in that You denouncest. All my sufferings are Your waves; all Your denouncements of judgments are Your overhangings. In the waves that deep calls; in the overhangings is the other deep which it calls to. In this that I suffer are all Your waves; in the severer punishment that Thou threatenest, all Your overhangings have come unto me. For He who threatens does not let His judgments fall upon us, but keeps them suspended over us. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 41, 14)

The necessity of humility is brought to the fore yet again, for the purpose of Baptism and the cleansing of sin is not a license to sin, but rather a freedom from it. The wounds of concupiscence remain after Baptism, our appetites drawing us back to the life from which we were called, but the Psalmist chooses to remember that cleansing from sin so that he does not fall into it again. The inevitable death of the mortal body is a reminder of the consequences of sin; in this manner God’s judgments are always hanging over us, and thus serve as a figure of what happens when we reject God in choosing sin, for spiritual death results.

St. Peter was called out into the deep by our Lord, and as long as he kept his eyes fixed upon the Savior he was able to pass over the billows of the sea. But once he took more account of them than his faith in our Lord, those same billows began to pass over him.

Thus the Psalmist earlier recalled his hope and confidence in God. The trials and tribulations of this life are like a roiling sea whose waves will continually pass over us and eventually drown us. But in faith and in cooperation with God’s grace we can be lifted out of them, as it were, so that the deeps of our mortal condition and future judgment which call to each other become instead the promise of eternal life and the hope of the Gospel in which the charity of God is poured forth into our souls in Baptism, so that the infinite depth of God comes to fill the depths of the soul of the one who trusts in him; as the Psalmist says elsewhere:

In thee, O Lord, I have hoped, let me never be put to confusion: deliver me in thy justice, and rescue me. Incline thy ear unto me, and save me. Be thou unto me a God, a protector, and a place of strength: that thou mayst make me safe. For thou art my firmament and my refuge. (Psalm 71:1-3 DR)

Imbued with this this confidence, the trials and sufferings of this world which pass over us as rolling waves become opportunities for grace, as God provides these periods of testing that we might be brought to even greater depths of union with Him:

But inasmuch as You sit at liberty, I have thus spoken unto my soul. Hope in God: for I will confess unto Him. My God is the saving health of my countenance. The more numerous my sufferings, the sweeter will be Your mercy. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 41, 14)

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For this aniamtion I found a nice closeup waterfall image from Unsplash and used a couple instances of loopFlow on it to create the cascading water effect. I then brought in the text and arranged and added a bit of animation using a looping wiggle expression because I wanted to be efficient I am lazy. I then added Shadow Studio each text piece to create the glowing shadows and then Deep Glow for the glow.

I finished up this project with some noise and color correction.

Enjoy.

View a higher quality version of this gif here: