Psalm 8:10

the condescension of glory

O Lord our Lord, how admirable is thy name in all the earth! (Psalm 8:10 DR)

The final verse of this Psalm is an exact repetition of the opening verse, and although the Douay-Rheims substitutes “whole” for “all” there, the Vulgate renders both in the same manner. These two verse thus serve as a sort of bookend or container to the entire, framing all the contents and directing them from start to finish.

The Psalmist began with this acclimation of praise to God and then progressed to detail the reason for such praise that build upon each other through salvation history:

1. God’s glory in creation

2. The revelation of that glory in the Scriptures

3. The Incarnation

4. The revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ as true God

5. The foundation of the Church

All of these things serve to “fill out,” as it were, the the admirable nature of the name of the Lord as far as the revelation of His glory is concerned. There is an irony of sorts in that in the midst of this surpassingly great revelation there is also tremendous condescension, and not simply in the Incarnation. For God is infinite, eternal, etc., and utterly inscrutable in respect to His essence. We can only know the Divine nature through His effects, and are prevented by the natural limitation of created being of beholding it. Had God so chosen, He could have been unknowable through His effects, particularly by not creating rational beings who could at least come to a negative knowledge of Him. But the very existence of rational beings with minds capable of grasping universals and conceptualizing infinity (even though unable to contain it) demonstrates God’s desire that we know Him.

A twisted rationality might see God’s demonstrations of His power and majesty as ego-centric, but seen in this light it is a form of humility that our Lord reveals in the Transfiguration, where the humility of the emptying of the Incarnation and the infinite fullness and wonder of the eternal Godhead is seen after the veil is lifted, as it were. God’s condescension to reveal even a bit of His splendor is a grace He affords to His creation that it might behold Him and know and love Him. Our Lord in His Incarnation manifests this fully and—marvel beyond marvels—incorporates us into His own divine life (cf. 2 Peter 1:5).

All of this is wrapped up in this wonderful Psalm, and it is no wonder that the Psalmist feels the need to repeat the opening acclimation of praise as the end takes us back to the beginning:

Let us repeat then the last verse, which is also put at the beginning of the Psalm, and let us praise God, saying, “O Lord our Lord, how wonderful is Your name in all the earth!” For fitly, after the matter of the discourse, is the return made to the heading, whither all that discourse must be referred. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 8, 13.)

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I found this great photo of a cloud-capped mountain and thought it would serve well as a base for this animation. I added in the text on two separate layers, using Thunderhouse Pro which is a pretty fun font; perhaps not useful all the time, but definitely sometimes!

I added Shadow Studio 3 to both text layers and adjusted the colors to have the shadows acting more as glows. I blended both of these text layers into the background to get some nice coloring.

I then applied some pixel-sorting to on an adjustment layer to affect everything below it, keeping it a little more subtle than usual. Next I added some slight hold wiggle to the position of the text to give them some jumpiness. Then I duplicated those text layers and brought them above the adjustment layer so the pixel sorting wouldn’t affect them. I removed the shadows and duplicated the background layer twice and matted them to these new text layers. I then changed the blending of the duplicated images to have them bleed through into the background and create the coloring of the text. Fortunately the wiggle effect changes seeds with every duplicated layer, so it created a quick and dirty chromatic aberration.

Enjoy.

View a higher quality version of this gif here: