Psalm 44:5

for thine is the kingdom

With thy comeliness and thy beauty set out, proceed prosperously, and reign. Because of truth and meekness and justice: and thy right hand shall conduct thee wonderfully. (Psalm 44:5 DR)

Commenting on this verse, St. Augustine notes a prophecy already fulfilled in his time that the Psalmist proclaims in this Psalm. Whereas the Psalmist calls for the reign to proceed prosperously as in the future, St. Augustine says it has already come to pass in the spread of the Gospel and the church throughout the whole world:

Do we not see it so? Is it not already come to pass? He has “sped on;” has “proceeded prosperously, and He reigns;” all nations are subdued unto Him. What a thing was it to see that “in the Spirit,” of which same thing it is now in our power to experience in the reality! At the time when these words were said, Christ did not yet “reign” thus; had not yet “sped on,” nor “proceeded prosperously.” (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 44, 11.)

This reign, however, is not the result of conquest as we humans understand it, nor of the sheer assertion of power, but it discovered in the truth and meekness and justice of Christ; as the prologue of St. John says, he was “full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14) This is the beauty and comeliness that draws the world to the truth and which conquers the devil. For just as natural beauty is the result of a certain proportionality in the body, so beauty in the soul is comprised of justice:

For, as ordinary beauty depends on a certain proportion of limb, and softness of complexion; thus the beauty of the soul is made up of justice, which is tantamount to the proportion of limb; and wisdom, which represents beauty of complexion; for it shines like light, or rather, as we read in Wisdom 7, “being compared with the light she is found before it.” The soul, then, that is guided in its will by justice, and in its understanding by wisdom, is truly beautiful. (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 44, 4)

This the the spirit that Jesus possessed in perfection, and is the means by which he conquered the devil and reigns over the hearts of men:

For Christ contended with the devil, not through his omnipotence, as he might have done, but through his wisdom and his justice; subduing his craft by the one, and his malice by the other… Christ, by his love, (which is the essence of true and perfect justice,) conquered the envy and malice of the devil, for he loved even his enemies, prayed on the very cross for his persecutors, chose to suffer and to die, in order to reconcile his enemies to God, and to make them from being enemies, his friends, brethren, and coheirs; and all that is conveyed in the expression, “in thy comeliness and thy beauty;” …and after having conquered and subdued the prince of this world, take possession of your kingdom, that you may forever after rule in the heart of man, through faith and love. (ibid.)

The devil only understands power in terms of force of might, the way he has taught humankind to conquer and to rule. This is why many church fathers saw the cross as a trap laid for the devil, in which he thinks that he has conquered Christ by means of sheer force. But there is deeper power, that of the creative force that brought all things into existence and sustains them in that—namely, God’s love—which overcomes the power of sin and the devil. In this manner Christ proclaims:

Now is the judgment of the world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself. (John 12:31-32 DR)

The Psalmist once again peers beyond veil and sees the victory of Christ through justice the beauty of his wisdom and love, the reign of Christ over all hearts which draws all hearts to him, until the consummation of all things:

They were then being preached, they have now been fulfilled: in many things we have God's promise fulfilled already; in some few we have to claim its fulfilment yet. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 44, 11.)

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In this animation I made use of a few different techniques and plugins. I began by finding a great looking crown and cut it out in Photoshop. I also found a good projection map of the earth’s surface that I could map to a sphere in After Effects.

I used the plugin Orb from Video Co-Pilot which is superior to the built in CC Sphere as it gives a lot more options in terms of texture and bump maps to achieve an even more realistic planetary surface. Having set up the various maps I then just simple rotated it a full revolution.

I also found a nice background texture and applied some pixel sorting to it just to give the background a bit of visual interest, and then did some simple looping animation on the crown’s position and rotation properties to finish it out.

Enjoy.

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View a higher quality version of this gif here: