On Prayer 18.1–23.5

Having said enough on these matters, according to the grace given us by God through his Christ, as far as we were able (and would that it were also in the Holy Spirit; whether it is so, you will judge when you read this treatise), and having examined the problem of prayer, we shall now come to the next contest, wishing to consider the prayer outlined by the Lord and with how much power it is filled.

And first of all it must be observed that Matthew and Luke would seem to most people to have recorded the same prayer, given as a pattern of how we ought to pray. Matthew's words run thus: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name; your kingdom come; your will be done, as in heaven so also on earth; give us today our daily bread; and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors; and do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” Luke's thus: “Father, hallowed be your name; your kingdom come; give us each day our daily bread; and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us; and do not bring us into temptation.”

To those who suppose this it must be said, first, that the words, even if some of them are close to each other, appear to differ in others, as we shall show when we examine them; and second, that it is not possible for the same prayer to have been spoken both on the mountain, where “seeing the crowds he went up,” when “after he sat down his disciples came to him, and he opened his mouth and taught them” (for in Matthew it is found recorded in the sequence of the account of the beatitudes and the commandments that follow), and also “as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased,” to one “of his disciples” who asked to be taught “to pray, as John also taught his disciples.” For how could the same words have been spoken as a continuous discourse without any previous question, and also have been given at a disciple's request? But perhaps someone might say to this that the prayers are equivalent, spoken as one, sometimes in a continuous discourse and sometimes to another of the disciples who asked, who was probably not present when he said what is in Matthew, or had not retained what was said long before. But perhaps it is better to consider the prayers different, having some parts in common. And having searched in Mark too, in case such an equivalent prayer recorded there should escape us, we found not a trace of a prayer in it.

Since, as we have said above, the one who prays must first be settled and disposed in a certain way and then pray, let us look, before the prayer found in Matthew, at the words spoken about it by our Savior, which run thus: “When you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room and shut your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees you in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not babble as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, then; for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this.”

In many places, then, our Savior is seen opposing love of glory as a destructive passion; and he has done so here too, turning us away from doing the work of hypocrites at the time of prayer. For it is the work of hypocrites to wish to show off before men their piety or their generosity. We ought rather, remembering the words, “How can you believe, when you receive glory from men and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?”, to despise all glory from men, even if it is thought to come for something good, and to seek the proper and true glory from him who alone glorifies the one worthy of glory in a manner befitting himself, beyond the worth of the one glorified. So even what would have been thought good and praiseworthy is defiled, when we do it “that” we may be glorified “by men” or “that” we may be seen “by men”; and therefore no reward from God follows for us for it. For every word of Jesus is free of falsehood, and, if one must speak forcibly, becomes still freer of falsehood when it is spoken with his customary oath. And he says the same about those who seem to do good to their neighbor for human glory, or who pray “in the synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by men”: “Truly I say to you, they have their reward.” For just as the rich man in Luke received “good things” “in his” human “life,” and because he had received them was no longer able to obtain them after the present life; so the one who has received his “reward,” if he gives anything to anyone or in prayers, since he sowed not “to the Spirit” but “to the flesh,” “will reap” “corruption” but will not “reap” “eternal life.” And he sows “to the flesh” who gives “alms” “in the synagogues and in the streets, that” he may be glorified “by men,” with a trumpet “before” him, or who loves to stand and “pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that,” being seen “by men,” he may be thought pious and holy by those who have seen him.

But also everyone who travels the broad and spacious way that leads to “destruction,” which has nothing straight or direct but is altogether crooked and full of corners (for the straight line is very much broken on it), stands in it not well, praying “at the street corners”; through love of pleasure he comes to be not in one but in several streets, in which those who die “like men,” because they have fallen from divinity, glorify and call blessed those who are held among them to act impiously in the streets. And there are always many who appear in prayer to be “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,” who in the midst of banquets and drinking bouts insult prayer in their drunkenness, truly “standing at the street corners” and praying. For everyone who lives for pleasure, having loved the spacious way, has fallen from the narrow and hard way of Jesus Christ, which has not the slightest bend and no corners at all.

And if there is a difference between church and synagogue (the church in the proper sense having no “spot or wrinkle or any such thing,” but being holy and without blemish, into which neither the one “born of a prostitute” enters, nor the one “crushed” or “cut off,” nor even the Egyptian or the Edomite, unless sons are born to them and by the third generation they can barely be fitted into the church; nor the “Moabite” and “Ammonite,” unless the tenth generation is completed and the age is ended; while the synagogue was built by a centurion, who did this in the times before Jesus' coming, when he had not yet been testified to have such “faith” as the Son of God had not found “even in Israel”), then the one who loves “to pray” “in the synagogues” is not far from “the street corners.” But the saint is not such; for he does not love to pray (φιλεῖ) but loves (ἀγαπᾷ) to pray, and not “in synagogues” but in churches, and not “at the street corners” but on the straightness of the narrow and hard way, and not to be seen “by men” but to appear “before the Lord God.” For he is a male who understands “the acceptable year of the Lord” and keeps the commandment that says, “Three times a year all your males shall appear before the Lord God.”

The word “be seen” must be listened to carefully, since nothing that merely appears is good, being as it were in seeming and not in truth, deceiving the imagination and not reproducing things accurately and truly. Just as actors of certain plays in the theaters are not what they say, nor are they the character whose mask they wear and are seen to be; so all who put on the appearance of the good in seeming are not righteous but actors of righteousness, and they too play their parts in their own theater, “the synagogues and the street corners.” But the one who is not an actor, but has put off everything alien, and prepares himself to please in a theater exceedingly greater than all those mentioned, enters into his own “inner room,” shutting himself in with the treasure “of wisdom and knowledge” in the riches stored up there; and not leaning outward at all, nor gaping at the things outside, and having shut every “door” of the senses, so that he may not be drawn by the senses nor their images intrude into his mind, he prays to the Father who does not flee nor forsake such a secret place but dwells in it, with the Only-begotten present with him. “I,” he says, “and the Father will come to him and make our dwelling with him.” And it is clear that if we pray in this way, we shall make intercession with the righteous one not only as God but as Father, who does not abandon his sons but is present in our “secret place” and watches over it and increases what is in the inner room, if we shut its “door.”

But when we pray, let us not babble (battologein) but speak of God (theologein). We babble when, without examining ourselves or the words of prayer we send up for blemishes, we speak of corrupt deeds or words or thoughts, which are base and blameworthy, foreign to the incorruption of the Lord. The one who babbles in prayer is already in the worse of the synagogue conditions we have described, and on a way harder than that of the street corners, keeping not even a trace of the pretence of good. For according to the words of the gospel only “the Gentiles” babble, who have not even an idea of great or heavenly requests, sending up every prayer about bodily and external things. So the one who asks for things below from the Lord who dwells in heaven and above the heights of the heavens is like a babbling Gentile.

And it seems that the one who uses many words babbles, and the one who babbles uses many words. For nothing material and bodily is one; but each of the things thought to be one is split, cut up, and divided into many, having lost its unity. For the good is one, but shameful things are many; the truth is one, but falsehoods are many; true righteousness is one, but many dispositions imitate it; the wisdom of God is one, but many are the wisdoms “of this age” and “of the rulers of this age,” which are coming to nothing. And the Word of God is one, but many are the words foreign to God. For this reason no one will escape “sin” “in a multitude of words,” and no one who thinks he will be heard “for his many words” can be heard. Therefore our prayers must not be like those of the Gentiles who babble, or use many words, or do whatever they do “after the likeness of the serpent.” For the God of the saints, being “Father,” “knows what” his sons “need,” since these things are worthy of the Father's knowledge. But if someone does not know God, he does not know the things of God either, and he does not know “what” he “needs”; for what he thinks he needs is mistaken. But the one who has contemplated the better and more divine things he lacks, which are known to God, will obtain what he has contemplated, things known to the Father even before he asks. Having said these things about what is said before the prayer in Matthew, let us now look at what is shown in the prayer itself.

“Our Father in heaven.” It is worth examining the so-called Old Testament more carefully, to see whether one can find in it anywhere a prayer of someone calling God “Father”; for we have examined it as far as we could for the present and have not found one. We do not say that God is not called Father, or that those thought to have believed in God were not named sons of God; but that we have not yet found in prayer the boldness proclaimed by the Savior to name God “Father.” That God is called Father, and those who have come to the Word of God sons, can be seen in many places, as in Deuteronomy: “You forsook God who begot you, and forgot God who nourishes you,” and again, “Is not he himself your father, who acquired you and made you and created you?”, and again, “Sons in whom there is no faith”; and in Isaiah, “I begot sons and raised them up, but they rejected me”; and in Malachi, “A son will honor his father, and a servant his master. And if I am a father, where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is my fear?”

And even if God is called Father, and those begotten by the word of faith in him are called sons, the firmness and unchangeableness of sonship is not to be seen among the ancients. At any rate the very passages we have cited show that those called sons were blameworthy; since, according to the apostle, as long as “the heir is a child, he differs in nothing from a slave, though he is lord of all, but is under guardians and stewards until the time appointed by the father.” And “the fullness of time” is present in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, when those who wish receive adoption as sons, as Paul teaches in these words: “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received the spirit of adoption, in which we cry, Abba, Father”; and in the Gospel according to John: “But to all who received him he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name.” And because of this “spirit of adoption” we have learned in the catholic letter of John about those born of God that “everyone who is born of God does not commit sin, because his seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he has been born of God.”

If, however, we understand what is meant by “When you pray, say: Father,” as it is written in Luke, we shall hesitate to address this word to him unless we have become true sons, lest besides our other sins we also become liable to a charge of impiety. What I mean is this. Paul says in the First Letter to the Corinthians: “No one can say, Jesus is Lord, except in the Holy Spirit; and no one speaking in the Spirit of God says, Jesus is accursed,” calling the same Spirit both Holy Spirit and Spirit “of God.” But what it means to say “Jesus is Lord” “in the Holy Spirit” is not at all clear, since countless hypocrites utter these words, and still more heterodox people, and sometimes even demons, overcome by the power in the name. No one, then, will dare to declare that any of these says “Jesus is Lord” “in the Holy Spirit.” Therefore they could not even be shown to say “Jesus is Lord”; only those say “Jesus is Lord” who say it from their disposition, in serving the Word of God and proclaiming no other as lord besides him in whatever they do. And if such are those who say “Jesus is Lord,” perhaps everyone who sins, cursing the divine Word by breaking the law, has cried out by his works, “Jesus is accursed.” Just as, then, such a person says “Jesus is Lord,” and the one disposed in the opposite way “Jesus is accursed,” so “everyone who has been born of God” and does not commit “sin,” because he shares in the seed of God, which turns him from every sin, says by what he does, “Our Father in heaven,” the Spirit himself bearing witness “with their spirit” “that” they are “children of God” “and heirs” of him and “fellow heirs” of “Christ,” since, suffering with him, they reasonably hope also to be glorified with him. And so that such people may not say “Our Father” by halves, together with their works their heart too, the source and beginning of good works, believes “unto righteousness,” and in harmony with these their mouth confesses “unto salvation.”

Every deed, then, and word and thought of theirs, formed by the only-begotten Word according to himself, imitates the image “of the invisible God” and has come to be “after the image of the Creator,” who makes “his sun rise on the evil and the good” and sends rain “on the just and the unjust,” so that there is in them “the image of the heavenly,” who is himself the image of God. The saints, then, being an image of an image, the image being the Son, receive the imprint of sonship, becoming conformed not only to the “body of glory” of Christ but also to him who is in “the body.” And they become conformed to him who is in “the body of glory” by being transformed “by the renewal of the mind.” If such people say with their whole being, “Our Father in heaven,” clearly “he who commits sin,” as John says in the catholic letter, “is of the devil, because the devil has sinned from the beginning.” And just as the “seed” of God, abiding in the one who has been born “of God,” is the cause of his being unable to “sin,” for one formed according to the only-begotten Word, so in everyone who commits “sin” there is the “seed” of the devil, as long as it is present in the soul, not allowing the one who has it to do right. But since “for this purpose the Son of God was revealed, to destroy the works of the devil,” it is possible, by the coming of the Word of God into our soul, when the works “of the devil” have been destroyed, for the evil “seed” planted in us to be wiped out, and for us to become “children of God.”

Let us not think, then, that we are taught to say words at some time set apart for prayer; but if we understand what we examined earlier about praying “without ceasing,” let our whole life, as we pray “without ceasing,” say, “Our Father in heaven,” having its “citizenship” not at all on earth but in every way “in heaven,” which are the thrones of God, because the kingdom of God is established in all who bear “the image of the heavenly” and for this reason have become heavenly.

When the Father of the saints is said to be “in heaven,” we must not suppose that he is circumscribed by a bodily shape and dwells “in heaven”; for then God would be found to be contained, and less than the heavens, since the heavens would contain him. We must be persuaded rather that by the ineffable power of his divinity all things are contained and held together by him. And in general, the expressions that, taken literally, seem to simpler people to say that God is in a place, must be reinterpreted in a way fitting to great and spiritual conceptions of God, such as these in the Gospel according to John: “Now before the feast of the Passover, Jesus, knowing that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the end”; and a little after, “knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God”; and after other things, “You heard me say to you, I am going away, and I am coming to you. If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father”; and again after other things, “But now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, Where are you going?” For if these are to be taken in a local sense, clearly so too must this: “Jesus answered and said to them, If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.”

But these things do not happen through a local movement of the Father and the Son to the one who loves Jesus' word; so neither are the former to be taken in a local sense. Rather, the Word of God, condescending to us and humbled, as regards his own dignity, when he is among men, is said to pass “out of this world to the Father,” so that we too may behold him there in his perfection, returning from the emptiness among us, in which “he emptied himself,” to his own “fullness”; where we too, using him as our guide, shall be filled and set free from all emptiness. Let the Word of God, then, leave the world and go away “to him who sent” him, and let him go “to the Father.” And let us seek to understand in a more mystical way also the words at the end of the Gospel according to John, “Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father,” when we understand the Son's ascent “to the Father” in a manner more worthy of God, with holy clarity, as an ascent in which the mind ascends rather than the body.

I think I have examined these things together with “Our Father in heaven” in order to remove the base conception of God held by those who think he is “in heaven” in a local sense, and to allow no one to say that God is in a bodily place (for it follows from this that he is also a body), from which follow most impious doctrines: to suppose that he is divisible, material, and corruptible; for every body is divisible, material, and corruptible. Or let them tell us, not with empty imaginings but claiming to understand clearly, how it is possible for it to be of a nature other than material. And since many passages of the Scriptures written before Christ's bodily coming also seem to say that God is in a bodily place, it does not seem out of place to me to set out a few of them too, in order to remove every distraction from those who, through simplicity, confine the God over all, as far as they can, in a small and narrow place. First, in Genesis, it says, “Adam” and Eve “heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the paradise in the evening; and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the face of the Lord God in the midst of the tree of the paradise.” We shall say to those who do not wish to enter the treasures of the text, and do not even knock at its “door” at all, whether they can show that the Lord God, who fills “heaven and earth,” who, as they suppose, in a rather bodily way uses “heaven” as a throne and “the earth” as a footstool “for his feet,” is contained by a place so small in comparison with the whole heaven and earth that the paradise they suppose to be bodily is not filled by God but is so much greater than he in size that it holds him even as he walks, his “voice” being heard from the tread of his feet. And still more absurd, on their view, is that Adam and Eve, ashamed before God because of the transgression, hid “from the face of God in the midst of the tree of the paradise.” For it is not said that they wished to hide in this way, but that they actually “hid.” And how, on their view, does God ask Adam, “Where are you?”

We have discussed these matters more fully in examining the passages in Genesis; but now too, so as not to pass over so great a problem entirely in silence, it will be enough to recall the words, “I will dwell among them and walk among them,” said by God in Deuteronomy. For such as is his walking among the saints, such also is his walking in paradise; every sinner hides from God, flees his visitation, and withdraws from boldness; for so also “Cain went out from the face of God and dwelt in the land of Naid opposite Eden.” As, then, he dwells in the saints, so also in heaven: either in every saint who bears “the image of the heavenly,” or in Christ, in whom are all who are being saved, the “lights” and stars of heaven; or he dwells there because of the saints in heaven, according to the words, “To you I have lifted up my eyes, you who dwell in heaven.” And the saying in Ecclesiastes, “Do not hasten to bring out a word before the face of God; for God is in heaven above, and you on earth below,” means to show the distance between those who are in the body “of humiliation” and the one who is with the angels and holy powers exalted by benefit and by the Word, or with Christ himself. For it is not absurd that he himself should properly be the throne of the Father, called heaven in a more allegorical sense, and that his church, called earth, should be “the footstool of his feet.”

We have added, then, a few passages of the Old Testament that are thought to present God as in a place, in order to persuade the reader in every way, according to the power given us, to understand the divine Scripture in a loftier and more spiritual way when it seems to teach that God is in a place. It was fitting to examine these together with “Our Father in heaven,” which as it were separates the being of God from all created things; for on those in which he does not share, a certain glory of God and his power, and, so to speak, an emanation of the divinity, comes to be.