Catholic Sensibility

Catholics believe that we can learn more about the Gospel by paying close attention to the lived experience of the Church, or, as one Orthodox theologian has better put it, “the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church.” This means that we can deepen our praying of the Our Father by looking at the Lord’s Prayer in tradition. (I will be here indebted to the Anglican bishop Kenneth W. Stevenson.) Already by 1662, the Lutheran scholar and pastor Janis Reiters could publish a collection of translations of the Lord’s Prayer into no less than forty languages – Talmida will be happy to note that his first text was in Hebrew, but Reiters included everything from Danish to Old Slavonic to Latin and Greek, before finally ending with Old Prussian. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. As you should know, we already read different versions of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew (6:9-13) and Luke (11:24) that show the different emphases of the two Gospels. The Matthean version seems to have become the more common – the late first/early second century Didache includes a prayer very close to Matthew’s and this text became standard for Greek speaking churches. Some of my Catholic readers might have had the experience of praying the Lord’s Prayer with Protestants who immediately followed “deliver us from evil” with the doxology, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever.” An early form of the doxology (without mention of the “kingdom”) is already in the Didache; the exact doxology appears in the late fourth century, only to eventually disappear in the West until the Reformation. As you might expect, parts of the Lord’s Prayer prove to be a bit tricky to translate. What does one do with “ton epiousion arton”? Syriac liturgies will speak of the “bread of our need.” Latin liturgies will instead speak of “daily” (quotidianum) bread, which perhaps nicely holds together different possible meanings – “for today” as well as “for the coming day.” And what does one do with the claim that God can actually “lead us into temptation”? Syrian Christians use a version of the Lord’s Prayer that reads “don’t let us enter into temptation,” and Tertullian and Cyprian used a version that read “do not suffer us to be led” (ne patiaris) into temptation, instead of the more active “do not bring us” (ne inferas) that would be preferred by St Augustine. Later on, Henry VIII insisted on “suffer us not to be led,” and Thomas Cranmer had to dutifully wait until the “Supreme Head” of the Church of England died before putting “lead us not” into the Prayer Book. Present-day scholars, I think, would tend to side more with the Syrians, Cyprian, and Henry VIII on this “temptation” question. And from where do we get “trespasses”? William Tyndale’s translation of 1534 spoke of “trespasses” and “them that trespass against,” and his language would be incorporated into the Prayer Book. Miles Coverdale, in his 1536 version, went for the more pedestrian “debts” and “debtors.” Of course, I might also here note the rich tradition of intentional paraphrases of the Lord’s Prayer for private devotion. Here is St Francis and John Wesley, for instance. One thing on which we would all agree concerning the Lord’s Prayer is that it should be, well, prayed. The Didache tells us to pray it three times daily. But it isn’t until the late fourth century that we can say that the Lord’s Prayer was being used in baptismal and Eucharistic liturgies. Then, the Antiochene Apostolic Constitutions tells the newly-baptized Christian to recite the prayer upon coming from the font. This practice is also seen in Armenian and Syrian Orthodox rituals. Cranmer’s Prayer Book has the entire congregation reciting the Lord’s Prayer after a baptism. The Jesuit liturgist Robert Taft tells us that it was the sense of unworthiness that the reciter of the Lord’s Prayer has to face that initially warranted the Our Father’s introduction in Eucharistic liturgies. In the West, usually only the priest would recite it, and the Rule of St Benedict has the monastic superior saying the prayer by himself at Lauds and Vespers. But across the Alps and throughout the East everyone would usually join in. The English Prayer Books used the Lord’s Prayer twice at the Eucharist – at the beginning, following medieval custom, and immediately after the sacrament, following the baptismal practice. The Anglicans were here unconsciously replicating the usage of the Assyro-Chaldean Liturgy, but the double-usage did not please the early Baptists, who kept Christ’s warning to “use not vain repetitions” very close to their hearts indeed. Today, the revised liturgies of Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, and most Presbyterians all have a popular recitation of the Lord’s Prayer before communion. We might think about saying it, if only to ourselves, after communion as well. Well, what are we praying for when we recite the Lord’s Prayer? St Augustine, following Cyprian, claimed that there were seven petitions – three heavenly (name, kingdom, and will), four earthly (bread, forgiveness, temptation, and deliverance). Eastern writers generally collapsed temptation and deliverance together, making a grand total of six petitions. John Calvin also identified six petitions – the first three have to do with God’s glory, the last three are about what we need. In 1649, the Anglican divine Jeremy Taylor wrote the world’s first (but certainly not last!) devotional life of Christ. Taylor also enumerated six petitions – in the first, the soul “puts on the affections of a child,” in the second “the duty of the subject,” then “the affection of a spouse,” “the affections of a poor and indigent beggar,” “a delinquent and penitent servant,” “a person in affliction and distress,” and “a person in affliction and danger,” respectively. Many commentators, including Taylor, suggested that “daily bread” included a desire for the Eucharist. The main thing that historical exegetes, ranging from the Catholic Raymond Brown to the Lutheran Oscar Cullman, have more recently taught us is that the Lord’s Prayer has an eschatological thrust. “Daily bread” is the bread of the Kingdom of God; “temptation” is the test we will all face on the Day of Judgment. I really should let Bishop Stevenson have the last words – “The historian will enjoy looking afresh at the past in order to understand the Christian story in greater depth. But with this particular prayer, which Augustine once referred to as a sacramentum, fascinatingly rich as the tradition is manifestly shown to be, there is a wider ‘public’ life for the words that Jesus gives to the whole world; words that will continue to evoke new interpretations, new layers of textuality, and new patterns of devotion, in what Archbishop Michael Ramsey of Canterbury once described as ‘the great Christian centuries yet to come.’”