Catholic Commentary
First Refrain: Self-Exhortation to Hope
5Why are you in despair, my soul? Why are you disturbed within me? Hope in God! For I shall still praise him for the saving help of his presence.
Psalms 42:5 presents the psalmist addressing his own soul in despair, using the Hebrew word shāḥaḥ (bow down) to depict spiritual prostration under crushing emotional and circumstantial weight. The self-interrogatory question "Why?" functions as a challenge to consistency, where the rational, faith-formed self confronts the emotionally overwhelmed self, establishing that despair can be resisted through repeated acts of self-exhortation grounded in hope in God.
The psalmist does not flee despair—he confronts it directly, speaking to his own soul like a commander calling troops back into formation: "Why are you collapsed? Hold your position in God."
Catholic tradition finds in this verse a rich theology of spiritual desolation and the virtue of hope. St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, identifies the divided voice of this verse as the tension between the "old man" and the "new man" within the baptized soul — the flesh inclining to despair, the spirit commanded toward hope. Augustine hears Christ himself speaking through the psalm: as the Head addresses the Body in its suffering, so the whole Christ (Christus totus) commands his members not to abandon trust even in the darkest night.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 20) identifies despair as one of the two sins against the theological virtue of hope (the other being presumption). Despair, for Aquinas, consists in the soul's abandonment of the possibility of reaching God. This verse, in Catholic reading, is therefore a prophylactic against a mortal spiritual danger — the psalmist, by questioning his own despair, enacts precisely the resistance to this sin that Aquinas commends.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that hope is "the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit" (CCC 1817). The psalmist's self-exhortation is a lived exercise of this virtue — not a feeling cultivated, but an act of the will made against the current of feeling. St. John of the Cross, in his Dark Night of the Soul, would later identify precisely this experience — the withdrawal of consolation, the soul bent low — as the purifying action of God, and the response of hope amid desolation as the soul's cooperation with divine transformation.
Contemporary Catholics face what might be called secular and interior exiles: seasons of aridity in prayer, the silence of God during illness or grief, loss of faith's emotional warmth, or distance from the sacraments. This verse speaks with startling directness to those experiences. The psalmist does not instruct us to manufacture consolation or pretend suffering is absent. He models something harder and more honest: confronting the soul's despair as a fact, naming it clearly, and then — refusing to let it have the last word.
Practically, this verse invites Catholics to develop the habit of interior self-address in prayer. Rather than fleeing from desolation or drowning in it, one can pray this refrain literally: Why are you in despair, my soul? — letting it function as a kind of spiritual alarm that recalls the will back to faith. The Ignatian tradition of spiritual direction draws heavily on this dynamic: consolation and desolation are real movements, but neither is permanent, and the soul in desolation is urged to hold fast to the resolutions made in consolation. Psalm 42:5 is the scriptural heartbeat of that counsel. Reciting this refrain daily — in the morning, before liturgy, in moments of anxiety — can become a small but powerful act of theological resistance.
Commentary
Psalms 42:5 — "Why are you in despair, my soul?"
The verse in Hebrew reads mah-tishtōḥaḥî napshî — literally, "Why do you bow down, O my soul?" The root shāḥaḥ carries the physical image of being bent low, prostrated, or crushed under weight. This is not a mild sadness but a posture of collapse — the soul folded in on itself, pressed toward the earth. The psalmist, almost certainly a Levite or temple musician separated from Jerusalem and the sanctuary (see vv. 1–4, 6), gives voice to an experience of profound spiritual dislocation.
What is theologically arresting here is the self-address. The psalmist does not speak to God (not yet, though that comes in vv. 9–10) nor to his enemies. He speaks to himself — specifically to his nephesh, the Hebrew word for soul that encompasses the whole animating interior life: emotion, will, desire, and the seat of relationship with God. This is a moment of interior bifurcation: the rational, faith-formed self confronts the emotionally overwhelmed self and refuses to accept despair as the final word.
The question "Why?" (mah) is not a request for information but a challenge to consistency. It is as if the psalmist is saying: "Your despair is unreasonable given what you know to be true." This move — from feeling to knowing, from experience to faith — is the structural hinge of the entire psalm. The refrain does not resolve the tension; it names and resists it. That the same refrain appears again in v. 11 (and in Psalm 43:5) shows this is not a single crisis overcome but a recurring battle requiring repeated acts of self-exhortation. Spiritually, the soul must be addressed again and again.
The phrase "put your hope in God" (the continuation of this verse in most manuscripts and translations) functions as the answer implied by the question. Hope (yāḥal) in Hebrew is not optimism about circumstances but a confident, active waiting upon God — a leaning of the whole self into divine fidelity. Even when the Temple is inaccessible, even when the taunts of enemies ring in one's ears ("Where is your God?" v. 3), the soul is commanded to hold its position in God.
Typologically, the refrain resonates across salvation history. The soul bowed down in the "land of the Jordan and of Hermon" (v. 6) evokes Israel's experience in exile, crushed beneath foreign powers, and the individual believer's own interior exiles — seasons when consolation is withdrawn and only raw theological conviction remains. The refrain is thus a microcosm of Israel's entire spiritual biography: suffering that is real, lament that is honest, and hope that refuses extinction.