Catholic Commentary
Warning Against Arrogance and Earthly Pride
4I said to the arrogant, “Don’t boast!” I said to the wicked, “Don’t lift up the horn.5Don’t lift up your horn on high. Don’t speak with a stiff neck.”6For neither from the east, nor from the west, nor yet from the south, comes exaltation.7But God is the judge. He puts down one, and lifts up another.
Psalms 75:4–7 records a divine warning against arrogance and boasting, declaring that no human power from any earthly direction can determine ultimate exaltation. God alone is the perpetual judge who actively raises up and brings down individuals, rendering all worldly posturing meaningless in light of divine sovereignty.
God has already decided who deserves elevation—and it's never the one doing the boasting.
Psalms 75:4 — "I said to the arrogant, 'Don't boast!'" The speaker here is ambiguous in a theologically rich way. The Hebrew superscription links the psalm to Asaph, a Levitical singer appointed by David (1 Chr 16:5), yet the surrounding context (vv. 2–3) has God speaking in the first person. Most Church Fathers, including Augustine in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, understood this as the voice of God speaking through the prophet-psalmist — a pattern consonant with Israel's understanding of inspired scripture as divine address. The word rendered "arrogant" (Hebrew: hôlĕlîm) carries the sense of those who act presumptuously, boasting without grounding in reality. The command "Don't boast" (al-tāhillû) is not a gentle suggestion but a divine decree. Boasting here is the outward symptom of an inward disorder — a refusal to acknowledge creatureliness and contingency before the Creator.
Psalms 75:5 — "Don't lift up your horn on high" The "horn" (qeren) is one of Scripture's most evocative images of power. Drawn from the animal world — the ram or wild ox whose horns determine its dominance — it becomes a shorthand for human strength, dignity, and authority. To "lift the horn" is to assert one's superiority, to posture with arrogance. The added phrase "on high" (bammārôm) intensifies the image: this is not merely earthly confidence, but a reaching toward heaven itself — a pride with cosmic pretension echoing the Tower of Babel (Gen 11) or the king of Babylon in Isaiah 14. The repetition from verse 4 (two parallel warnings) follows the rhetorical pattern of Hebrew poetry, hammering the prohibition home with increasing weight.
Psalms 75:6 — "For neither from the east, nor from the west..." This verse is the hinge of the argument. The "for" (kî) introduces the theological reason behind the prohibition. The verse is elliptical — the text as received omits explicit mention of "the south," which has led to minor textual discussion, but the rhetorical sweep is clear: no compass point on earth, no human quarter, no geopolitical force can be the true source of exaltation. Ancient Near Eastern kings boasted of their conquests from every direction; the psalmist deflates the entire geography of human ambition. Neither military campaigns from the east (Assyria, Babylon) nor naval power from the west (the Sea Peoples, later Rome) can determine ultimate destiny.
Psalms 75:7 — "But God is the judge" This is the psalm's axial declaration. The Hebrew kî-ĕlōhîm šōpēṭ — "for God is judge" — is not merely a statement about a future tribunal but an assertion about the present ordering of reality. The verb šōpēṭ (participle form) describes an ongoing, continuous action: God is judging, perpetually and actively. It is God who "puts down one and lifts up another" (the continuation in v. 7b–8). This divine prerogative of exalting and humbling is a cornerstone of biblical theology from Hannah's song (1 Sam 2:1–10) to the Magnificat (Lk 1:46–55). No earthly power stands outside this jurisdiction.
Typological and Spiritual Senses The Fathers saw in this psalm a type of Christ's final judgment. St. Augustine reads the "horn" lifted on high as both the pride of the wicked and, inversely, the "horn of salvation" (Lk 1:69) raised by God in Christ — the one true exaltation that is not self-sought but divinely given. The Davidic-Asaphite tradition also looks forward to the Messianic King who judges with equity (Ps 72), finding its fulfilment in the One who declared, "The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son" (Jn 5:22).
Catholic tradition illuminates these verses with particular depth through its integrated understanding of pride as the root sin and divine judgment as an act of mercy as much as justice. The Catechism of the Catholic Church identifies pride as one of the capital sins — indeed, the first among them — defining it as "an undue self-esteem or self-love, which seeks attention and honor and sets oneself in competition with God" (CCC 1866, cf. 2094). Psalm 75:4–5 is a scriptural diagnosis of exactly this disorder.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 162), treats pride (superbia) as the "queen of all vices," the sin by which the creature refuses to submit to God as the source of all good. The psalmist's image of the horn lifted "on high" precisely captures Aquinas's definition: pride is the appetite for one's own excellence in inordinate defiance of one's proper order under God.
Pope Benedict XVI, in his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy and numerous homilies, returned often to the theme that secular power — however geographically vast or militarily dominant — operates within limits set by God's providential governance. This is the theological substructure of Catholic Social Teaching's insistence that all earthly authority is derivative and accountable (cf. Gaudium et Spes §74).
The Church Fathers also connected verse 7's divine judgment to the sacramental economy: it is God alone who, through the Church's ministry, genuinely "raises up" the sinner in absolution and "casts down" the proud through the convicting work of grace (cf. St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Psalms). Judgment is not merely eschatological — it is present in every act of grace and every hardening of the unrepentant heart.
Contemporary Catholic life unfolds within a culture saturated with what these verses diagnose as the "lifted horn" — the relentless performance of status, achievement, and self-promotion across social media, professional life, and even parish and ecclesial circles. Psalm 75:4–7 offers not an abstract rebuke but a practical reorientation: before God, the metrics of worldly elevation are simply irrelevant. Neither career success nor theological credentials, neither social influence nor even visible ministry accomplishments can substitute for humble submission to the God who judges.
Practically, a Catholic meditating on these verses might examine their prayer life: Do I approach God as one who has "earned" a hearing, or as a creature utterly dependent? The tradition of the Examen, developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola, is precisely calibrated to strip away self-congratulatory narratives and surface the subtle "horn-lifting" of daily pride. These verses can also serve as a daily antidote for those in leadership — in business, education, politics, or the Church — who are tempted to conflate institutional success with divine approval. The reminder that "God is the judge" frees us from the exhausting work of judging ourselves by human comparison, and calls us instead to the liberating simplicity of holy accountability before God alone.