Psalms 36:1–4

Psalms 36:1 — "A revelation is within my heart about the disobedience of the wicked" The Hebrew phrase ne'um-pesha' larasha' is strikingly unusual: the word ne'um ("oracle" or "utterance") is almost exclusively reserved in the Old Testament for divine pronouncements ("Thus says the LORD"). The psalmist audaciously borrows prophetic language to describe what God has disclosed to him within his heart (beqereb libbi) — the interior sanctuary where divine truth is received. This is not merely personal observation but quasi-prophetic discernment. The subject is pesha', a weighty word meaning rebellion or transgression — not mere error, but willful rupture from God, the root of which (Heb. rasha', "wicked") designates someone fundamentally opposed to God's order. The psalmist does not describe the wicked man from the outside; rather, he has been given interior sight into what drives him. This verse sets the epistemological framework: genuine knowledge of evil comes not from worldly acuity but from divine illumination within.

Psalms 36:2 — "For he flatters himself in his own eyes" The Septuagint renders this as hoti edoliothe enōpion autou tou heurein tēn anomian autou, suggesting the wicked man deceives himself so thoroughly that he cannot even find (i.e., recognize) his own sin. The mechanism of wickedness is therefore self-delusion. Hehelihq (to make smooth, to flatter) names the interior operation: the wicked person speaks softly to himself, smoothing over his own iniquity. "In his own eyes" (be'enav) emphasizes the closed, self-referential nature of this blindness — there is no appeal to a transcendent standard. Augustine, commenting on this verse, identifies this as superbia (pride), the primal sin: the refusal to see oneself before God (coram Deo) and instead to establish the self as its own tribunal. The "fear of God" is explicitly absent (v. 2b in fuller texts), and its absence is the very condition that makes self-flattery possible.

Psalms 36:3 — "The words of his mouth are iniquity and deceit" The interior corruption of verse 2 now erupts into language. The Hebrew 'aven u-mirmah (iniquity and deceit/fraud) identifies two dimensions of corrupt speech: 'aven suggests emptiness, vanity, and moral worthlessness — speech that has no purchase on reality; mirmah is calculated deception, the deliberate misleading of others. For the psalmist, speech is diagnostic: it reveals the interior state of the soul. This anticipates Christ's teaching that "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks" (Mt 12:34). The movement from inner blindness to corrupt speech illustrates how sin colonizes the faculty of communication — one of humanity's most God-like capacities (God himself speaks creation into being). The cessation of wisdom and the abandonment of goodness (implied in "he has ceased to act wisely and do good," present in some versional traditions) is the spiritual consequence.

Psalms 36:4 — "He plots iniquity on his bed" This verse captures the full occupation of the wicked: even rest becomes a workshop of evil. Yachshov 'aven al-mishkavo ("he devises iniquity on his bed") — the bed, the place of sleep and contemplation, the space of Psalm 4:4 ("commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still"), is here perverted into a planning room for sin. The wicked man does not rest from sin; he organizes it. 'Aven again appears, underlining continuity with verse 3: the iniquity spoken is now the iniquity planned. The typological sense points to the contrast with the righteous person of Psalms 1 and 119, who meditates on Torah day and night — the wicked man's nocturnal meditation is its exact inversion. Spiritually, this verse reveals that sin, once welcomed, restructures the entire rhythm of human existence, even its most intimate and private moments.

Catholic tradition reads Psalm 36:1–4 as a theological anatomy of sin illuminated especially by the doctrine of concupiscence and the loss of the donum rectitudinis — the original uprightness lost at the Fall. The Catechism teaches that original sin has left human nature "wounded in its natural powers, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin" (CCC 405). The portrait in these verses is the lived consequence: a person whose intellect is darkened (self-flattery, verse 2), whose will is disordered (plotting, verse 4), and whose speech is corrupted (verse 3) — precisely the threefold wound catalogued in Catholic moral theology as affecting intellect, will, and appetite.

Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, identifies verse 2 as the portrait of the soul that has made itself its own god — the Adamic temptation of Genesis 3:5 ("you will be like God, knowing good and evil") replayed in every sinner who becomes self-referential. Thomas Aquinas, following this line, notes in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, q. 77–78) that sin always begins with a disordered judgment about the good — the intellect deceived before the will acts.

Pope John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor (§32) references the darkening of conscience as a central moral danger: when the conscience becomes merely the echo of self-interest rather than a witness to truth, it ceases to function as the vox Dei (voice of God). Verse 1's ne'um — the prophetic oracle within the heart — is precisely the counter-image: the conscience rightly formed is one that receives divine truth, not one that flatters itself.

For contemporary Catholics, these four verses function as an examination of conscience rendered as art. The psalmist's portrait invites a sober self-scrutiny: Where am I flattering myself? The culture of affirmation — social media metrics, algorithmic validation, therapeutic self-talk divorced from moral truth — creates the precise conditions verse 2 describes. The wicked man is not necessarily a monster; he is someone who has simply stopped measuring himself against anything beyond himself.

Practically, verse 4 ("he plots iniquity on his bed") has renewed urgency in an age when smartphones have made the bed literally a portal to temptation and moral compromise. The ancient vice of nocturnal rumination over sin has found new technological expression.

The antidote the Catholic tradition offers is not merely willpower but the practice verse 1 models: receptivity. The psalmist does not generate insight by effort; he receives it (ne'um — oracle). The disciplines of Lectio Divina, the Examen of St. Ignatius, regular Confession, and Eucharistic adoration are precisely the practices by which a Catholic cultivates the interior stillness in which God's truth about the self can be honestly received — transforming the bed from a workshop of sin into the sanctuary of Psalm 4:4.