Psalm 8:8

under His feet

Thou hast subjected all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen: moreover the beasts also of the fields. (Psalm 8:8 DR)

The Psalmist goes on to further elaborate on the reality of the Incarnation of our Lord, as His being crowned with glory and honor and set over all of God’s works is a de facto demonstration of His eternality and divinity, for only that which superior to God’s works—and is thus logically not in His Person part of those works—can be set over them. The Psalmist now uses the language of “all things” being subjected under His feet, which is the Psalmist’s way of describing His divinity in terms of eternal and rightful rule. Elsewhere we read:

The Lord said to my Lord: Sit thou at my right hand: Until I make thy enemies thy footstool. (Psalm 109:1 DR)

St. Paul quotes this passage form Psalm 8:8 to demonstrate Christ’s divinity as veiled in His humanity in the Incarnation:

“Thou hast subjected all things under his feet.” For in that he hath subjected all things to him, he left nothing not subject to him. But now we see not as yet all things subject to him. But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour: that, through the grace of God, he might taste death for all. (Hebrews 2:8-9 DR)

St. Paul’s exegesis of this passage is that “all things” means “all things,” as earlier (cf. Hebrews 2:5) he notes that this subjugation of “all things” was not to the angels, but rather that the angels are logically included in “all things,” as he argues earlier:

For to which of the angels hath he said at any time, “Thou art my Son, to day have I begotten thee?” And again, “I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son?” And again, when he bringeth in the first begotten into the world, he saith: “And let all the angels of God adore him.” And to the angels indeed he saith: “He that maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire.” (Hebrews 1:5-7 DR)

The adoration of our Lord Jesus Christ by the angels as prophesied in the Psalms is further proof of His divinity and thus rule over “all things,” for two reasons:

1. Angels are the highest of created being

2. Only God is worthy of adoration

St. Paul thus shows—using the words of the Psalmist—that our Lord doesn’t occupy some middle ground between God and angels, as if He were some sort of demi-god, but rather that He is God Himself.

St. Augustine perceives a possible objection, in that the things which the Psalmist describes seem to be rather ordinary aspects of creation, rather than representative of “all things:”

For, leaving the heavenly excellencies and powers, and all the hosts of Angels, leaving even man himself, he seems to have put under Him the beasts merely… (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 8, 12.)

As he begins to interpret this passage and the following, he reminds his readers of the figure of the winepresses from the opening passage (the superscription). In that figure was the distinction between those in the Church are who the juice from the grapes and those who are the husks; in other biblical figures this would be the wheat and the tares or the wheat and the chaff. Following this hermeneutic he sees the various animals mentioned as representing various kinds of rational beings, both human and angelic.

The sheep and oxen, therefore, are the holy men in the Church and the righteous angels:

…[U]nless by sheep and oxen we understand holy souls, either yielding the fruit of innocence, or even working that the earth may bear fruit, that is, that earthly men may be regenerated unto spiritual richness. By these holy souls then we ought to understand not those of men only, but of all Angels too, if we would gather from hence that all things are put under our Lord Jesus Christ. (ibid.)

That these holy souls yield the “fruit of innocence” or work the earth that it may “bear fruit” is related to his reading of the winepresses from the opening passage. He also sees angels as related to sheep in seeing the human soul as the “lost sheep” from the parable of our Lord, in that 99 remaining sheep (in this case the angels) are left in the mountains so that this soul (that is , mankind) may be sought out. It is the location (the mountains or higher regions) of these remaining sheep (that is, the angels) that provides him this interpretation. He sees this confirmed in the expansion of the thought as the Psalmist mentions “oxen”:

For as regards the oxen, this sentence is easily dispatched; since men themselves are for no other reason called oxen, but because by preaching the Gospel of the word of God they imitate Angels, as where it is said, “You shall not muzzle the ox that treads out the grain.” [1 Timothy 5:18] How much more easily then do we take the Angels themselves, the messengers of truth, to be oxen, when Evangelists by the participation of their title are called oxen? (ibid.)

St. Augustine gets as this somewhat obliquely in noting that St. Paul is applying the injunction of not muzzling an ox while it is treading grain to the apostles’ right to receive compensation for their labors in preaching and evangelizing and ruling the church. And since angels (which means messenger) are the preeminent messengers of truth (cf. Hebrews 2:2-3), the apostles participate in that “angelic” ministry. By reasoning in reverse, then, we can get from the apostles as “oxen” to the angels who are the archetype of “oxen-ness” in this manner (that is, the function and office). The “sheep and oxen” thus stand for all the holy souls in the Church and holy angels in Heaven, as St. Augustine concludes:

“You have put under” therefore, he says, “all sheep and oxen,” that is, all the holy spiritual creation; in which we include that of holy men, who are in the Church, in those wine-presses to wit, which are intimated under the other similitude of the moon and stars. (ibid.)

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I liked the idea of going off the image of things being under feet, and so I decided to go somewhat literal with this. I found a nice image of this shoe and cut it our in Photoshop, which the Background removal tool made pretty quick work of, although it always seems to have a little bit of trouble with the soles of shoes, for whatever reason, and I almost always have to go in and manually clean it up a bit. Silly robots.

In After Effects I simply created a looping animation of some slight Position and Rotation changes, keeping them pretty slight. I offset the two sets of keyframes to give a bit more of an organic floating feeling.

Next I applied Shadow Studio 3 to the shoe for some interesting effects and applied a little looping wiggle to the source point. I brought in a background texture and applied loopFlow to that to give the background a bit of movement. I added in some text and copied the shadow effect from the shoe to give some depth to the text.

Pretty simple, but fun.

Enjoy.

View a higher quality version of this gif here: