DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW?

 

 

Houtōs oun proseuchesthe humeis: pater hèmōn ho en tois ouranois, hagiasthètō to onoma sou; elthetō hè basileia sou; genèthètō to thelèma sou, hōs en ouranōi kai epi tès gès; to arton hèmōn ton epiousion dos hèmin sèmeron; kai aphes hèmin ta opheilèmata hèmōn, hōs kai hèmeis aphèkamen tois opheilètais hèmōn; kai mè eisenegkèis hèmas eis peirasmon, alla hrusai hèmas apo tou ponèrou. Ean gar aphète tois anthrōpois ta paraptōmata autōn, apèsei kai humin ho patèr humōn o ouranios. Ean de mè aphète tois anthropōn ta paraptōmata autōn, oude ho patèr humōn aphèsei ta paraptōmata humōn.

 

⁹ thus therefore pray ye: `Our Father who [art] in the heavens, hallowed be Thy name.

¹⁰ `Thy reign come: Thy will come to pass, as in heaven also on the earth.

¹¹ `Our bread for the day give us to-day.

¹² `And forgive us our debts, as also we forgive our debtors.

¹³ `And do Thou not force us into a testing, but deliver us from the evil, because Thine is the reign, and the power, and the glory -- to the ages. Amen.

¹⁴ `For, if ye forgive men their false steps He also will forgive you -- your Father who [is] in the heavens;

¹⁵ but if ye do not forgive men their false steps, neither will your Father forgive your false steps.

 

What is there to say about this prayer that has not been said a million times or more? That it is useful to remember that basileia reflects a condition (“reign”) more than a place (“kingdom”); that Greek readers would have read “may [what is] thy will come to pass” rather than “be done”; that they would have read epiousion as a very rare word for “for the coming day”; that opheilèmata are debts while paraptomata are false steps or payment errors; that peirasmos is more a test, an assay, than a seductive temptation; that, once again, ponèron is “bad” or “wicked” rather than “evil”, and that the genitive case after apo, “from” may refer to a person or to a thing: “from the wicked one” or “from what is wicked”.

            On the other hand, it is interesting to put it in the context of the Sermon on the Mount so far. In the immediate context, it is the outcome of the discussion on prayer, and may thus be thought of as a blueprint for what we should murmur to the Father behind the closed door of our inmost room. And yet notice that throughout it is placed in the first person plural: even alone, we are part of the Father’s family, and even our singular prayer reflects our siblinghood therein.

            In the context of the Sermon as the new Torah, the completed Torah, the most salient aspects of the prayer are perhaps its inwardness and its polyvalence. Inwardness, because it gladly recognises our weakness and our dependence, for forgiveness and even for simple nourishment (the daily bread reminds us also of the manna that Israel received in the wilderness); polyvalence, because unlike many prayers in the Old Testament, this prayer is not a request for one specific thing but covers every aspect of our relation to our Father: adoration (hallowing), hope (the reign), obedience (His will), dependence (bread), penitence (forgiveness), weakness (do not test us as Thou didst the great ones like Job), protection (the wicked one, wickedness).

            No wonder that it has remained the prayer for Christians. It was very surprising to a number of us to see Pope Francis’s boldness in changing the wording of the penultimate petition to “let us not enter into temptation”, and doing so in a way that neither restored the original nor made the translation any clearer. In the Greek, the act we ask to be spared is an action by God, not merely a permission by God for an act of our own. It is God who might eisenengkein us to a testing, and roots of that verb are those of “forcing” and “into”. It would have been better for His Holiness to have concentrated on the peirasmos rather than on the verb.

            And for those who thrill to the idea of reading, and hearing, the original words Yeshua pronounced, above is the reconstructed written version in Jewish Aramaic of the 1^st century; below is the transliterated Aramaic text; and a reading can be heard here. 

Abbun d'bishmayya

yitqadesh shmakh

titey malkhutakh

tihey re`utakh

heykhma debishmayya

keyn af be’ar`a

lachman deme’ar`a

hab lan yoma deyn umachra

ushbaq lan chobayn

heykhma de’af shebaqnan lechayyabayn

we’al ta`eylan lenisayuna

ela atseylan min bisha

 

ADVENT 2 - ODD OPTATIVES

While it is tempting to write about St Nicholas – because the Eve of his feast is a traditional Dutch version of Father Christmas, when children get a visit from the Saint in episcopal robes and receive their presents --, I did promise to pursue the odd optatives in the Lord’s Prayer for a bit.

It has always struck me as peculiar that the first three petitions are couched in the language of a wish rather than in that of a prayer. ‘Hallowed be thy Name, thy Kingdom come, thy Will be done’: may all this happen, we appear to be saying, rather than putting a direct request as is normal in a prayer.

Since I never have an original idea, I assumed that others must have noticed the same thing; and, indeed, when I started looking I found a rich literature on the subject, which I will only touch on lightly here, on the Second Sunday in Advent. Let’s begin with the Catholic Catechism, which is (as one would expect) stoutly declarative on the topic:

2807 “The term ‘to hallow’ is to be understood here not primarily in its causative sense (only God hallows, makes holy), but above all in an evaluative sense: to recognize as holy, to treat in a holy way. And so, in adoration, this invocation is sometimes understood as praise and thanksgiving.⁶⁶ But this petition is here taught to us by Jesus as an optative: a petition, a desire, and an expectation in which God and man are involved. Beginning with this first petition to our Father, we are immersed in the innermost mystery of his Godhead and the drama of the salvation of our humanity. Asking the Father that his name be made holy draws us into his plan of loving kindness for the fullness of time, "according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ," that we might "be holy and blameless before him in love."⁶⁷

2808 “In the decisive moments of his economy God reveals his name, but he does so by accomplishing his work. This work, then, is realized for us and in us only if his name is hallowed by us and in us.”

This is interesting, but no reasoning is given (normal, in a catechism), and no. 2808 seems rather circular.

For a 20^th-century Calvinist view, I went to Karl Barth. In The Christian Life he wrote extensively and brilliantly on the optatives. About these petitions, especially the first, Barth says that a) we can, when praying ‘Hallowed be thy name’, only fold our hands and trust God to fulfil it; yet at the same time b) we cannot escape our own responsibility, as really pressing God with this petition involves being ‘startled and disquieted’ and involving ourselves both in earnest prayer and committed ethical action.

This too is interesting and ethically admirable, but I am not sure why the petition is startling and disquieting, nor why the consequences he lists follow logically.

By this time, I was starting to wonder about the optative, and thought I would pursue it in terms of the New Testament’s Greek. So I found a fascinating and lively Hellenist blog (BGreek), where the subject had also been discussed. The Hellenists concluded that it was not an optative but an imperative (as in ‘Let there be light!’). That, as one of them pointed out, makes the petitions extremely powerful. Then another said that the 3^rd person aorist imperative was standard in Greek prayers. And a further person then pointed out that Jesus uses the same form when he is healing someone (e.g. Mt 8:13). NB: As someone else pointed out, the aorist implies that the object of the prayer is a one-time happening rather than an ongoing process.

This was exciting, though it didn’t really clear up my confusion: the imperative, again, is not obviously a prayer.

However, a Church Father agreed: Origen, in De Oratione (‘Origen On Prayer’ CCLE) in his 2^nd chapter on the Lord’s Prayer (ch. 14), also claims – arguing against Tatian -- that it is an imperative on the order of ‘Let there be light!’.

In the case of the First Petition, there is also the whole subject of the Name, on which the consensus seems to be that God’s Name is coextensive with His nature. Matthew Henry refers to ‘God’s Name, that is, God Himself’. There is also a passage from Ezekiel 36:22ff.: ‘Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord GOD: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. I will sanctify [= hallow] my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them; and the nations shall know that I am the LORD, says the Lord GOD, when through you I display my holiness before their eyes. I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land.' (NRSV) This led someone to write that ‘we are making a virtue of necessity’ when we pray this, as God has said He will do it Himself anyway.

Why Jesus put them in the optative we will never know; not down here, anyway. That he did so is, I think, beyond doubt: someone on the Hellenist blog pointed out that Matthew was a Mokhes, or douanier, an excise man, and that as such he was used to making shorthand notes, which he would then later elaborate in Greek and send to Rome with the tax receipts; hence his version of Jesus’ words has good authority, whereas Luke confessedly wrote from hearsay.

So where does this leave us, and the optatives? All the answers above are enlightening in some ways, but do not seem to me to answer the original question: how can such optatives be a prayer? The slightly circular no. 2808 of the Catholic Catechism, I think, comes closest. Perhaps the way in which this first half of the Pater Noster can be a prayer, a beseeching, is in the following sense: ‘Father, grant us the grace to hallow thy Name; grant us the strength to help thy Kingdom come; grant us the discernment to do thy Will on earth -- as the angels and saints do it in Heaven.’

TEMPTATION?

A friend asked me what I thought of the new French translation of the Lord’s Prayer that, at the end, reads ‘Ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation’ (Do not let us enter into temptation) rather than ‘Ne nous soumets pas à la tentation’ (Do not subject us to temptation). The reason for this, I have since read, is to let the text reflect the fact that God cannot be, or be thought of as, a tempter. However, the Greek text reads kai mè eisenengkès hèmas eis peirasmon; the verb is a non-temporal aorist of phero, which when it refers to persons means to lead or to bring along with one; and peirasmos is a test or experiment. So however admirable the new translation’s aim is, I’m not sure it clears up the ancient mystery of this phrase in the prayer. 

St Augustine is not much help here: St Thomas Aquinas a little more. The basic idea seems to be that occasionally God tests a person, or allows a person to be tested: Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is an example of the first, God’s permission to Satan to test Job, of the second. Satan’s temptation of Eve may or may not have been permitted by God. Melanchthon in the Loci Communes said, ‘The hardening of Pharaoh's  heart is a Hebrew figure of speech which signifies permission, not an efficient will; as, Lead us not into  temptation, means, permit us not to be led into  temptation."’
In any case, as someone put it, it seems to be such a scenario that Jesus is thinking of when He includes this petition in the prayer. And the fact that it is there at all may reflect His understanding that most of us would not feel (or, indeed, be) up to the heroic resistance of an Abraham or a Job.

What strikes me most about such an inquiry is the depths and breadths contained in that prayer. Each clause can introduce and sustain hours of meditation, all of them enriching.