prayer

prayer, an act of communication by humans with the sacred or holy—God, the gods, the transcendent realm, or supernatural powers. Found in all religions in all times, prayer may be a corporate or personal act utilizing various forms and techniques. Prayer has been described in its sublimity as “an intimate friendship, a frequent conversation held alone with the Beloved” by St. Teresa of Ávila, a 16th-century Spanish mystic.

Nature and significance

Prayer is a significant and universal aspect of religion, whether of primitive peoples or of modern mystics, that expresses the broad range of religious feelings and attitudes that command human relations with the sacred or holy. Described by some scholars as religion’s primary mode of expression, prayer is said to be to religion what rational thought is to philosophy; it is the very expression of living religion. Prayer distinguishes the phenomenon of religion from those phenomena that approach it or resemble it, such as religious and aesthetic feelings.

Historians of religions, theologians, and believers of all faiths agree in recognizing the central position that prayer occupies in religion. According to the American philosopher William James, without prayer there can be no question of religion. An Islamic proverb states that to pray and to be Muslim are synonymous, and Sadhu Sundar Singh, a modern Christian mystic of India, stated that praying is as important as breathing.

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Of the various forms of religious literature, prayer is considered by many to be the purest in expressing the essential elements of a religion. The Islamic Qurʾān is regarded as a book of prayers, and the book of Psalms of the Bible is viewed as a meditation on biblical history turned into prayer. The Confessions of the great Christian thinker St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) are, in the final analysis, a long prayer with the Creator. Thus, because religion is culturally and historically ubiquitous, if prayer were removed from the literary heritage of a culture, that culture would be deprived of a particularly rich and uplifting aspect.

From its primitive to its mystical expression, prayer expresses a human desire to enter into contact with the sacred or holy. As a part of that desire, prayer is linked to a feeling of presence (of the sacred or holy), which is neither an abstract conviction nor an instinctive intuition but rather a volitional movement conscious of realizing its higher end. Thus, prayer is described not only as meditation about God but as a step, a “going out of one’s self,” a pilgrimage of the spirit “in the presence of God.” It has, therefore, a personal and experiential character that goes beyond critical analysis.

Prayer is also linked to sacrifice, which seems to support prayer as a cultic—as well as a personal—act and as a supplement to the bare word in human attempts to relate to the sacred or holy. In any case, the sacrificial act generally precedes the verbal act of prayer. Thus, the presentation of an offering often prolongs prayer and is viewed as a recognition of the sovereignty and beneficence of the deity or supernatural powers. The word of a human being (in prayer), however, apart from a concomitant sacrificial act, is itself viewed as the embodiment of sacred action and power.

When prayer becomes dominating and manipulative in its intent, it becomes magic. With words and songs, humans thus believe that they can ask, conjure, and threaten the sacred or supernatural powers. Imprecation and incantation become, in effect, “oral talismans” (charms). The effectiveness of such magical prayer is believed to depend on the recitation of a precise formula, or rhythm, or on the saying and repeating of the divine name. Manipulation by magic, however, is neither the explanation nor the essence of prayer but rather its deviation and exploitation, a tendency that is to be noticed whenever prayer departs from its basic and essential meaning—i.e., the expression of a desire to enter into contact with the sacred or holy.

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Origin and development

During the 19th century, when various evolutionary theories were in vogue, prayer was viewed as a stage in the development of religion from a magical to a “higher” stage. Such theories, which saw in prayer no more than a development of magic or incantation, failed to recognize the strictly personal characteristics of prayer. Even if a scholar could prove the chronological precedence of magical incantations to prayer—which has thus far not been done—he would be derelict in his scholarly duty if he saw in such a precedence the only explanation of prayer. The origin of prayer is to be found—essentially and existentially—in the recognition and invocation of the creator-god, the god of heaven.

Though some scholars, such as Costa Guimaraens, a French psychologist in the early 20th century, have attempted to trace prayer back to a biological need, the attempt, on the whole, has been unsuccessful. If sometimes—especially with exceptional subjects or those with fragile nervous systems—the act of prayer is accompanied by corporal phenomena (e.g., bleeding, shaking), such phenomena can accompany it without having provoked it and without explaining its deep inspiration. In order to analyze normal prayer psychologically, it is especially important to choose normal subjects. Affective sources such as fear, joy, and sadness doubtless play a role in prayer. Such affectations are expressed in prayers recorded in various religions and particularly in the book of Psalms in the Bible, but they do not explain the recourse to prayer itself, which is explained by a motivation deeper than affective elements. The cause and occasion of prayer must not be confused.

Moral sentiments also are integrating elements, but they are accidental to the development of prayer; virtue is not necessarily expressed in the act of praying, because there exist atheists of incontestable morality. Morality is more a consequence than a cause of prayer; and it follows more than it prepares for the development of the religious person.

William James and psychologists such as Joseph Segond describe prayer as a “subconscious” and “emotional effusion,” an outburst of the mind that desires to enter into communication with the invisible. Experiences of prayer very often, in fact, do include “cries from the heart,” “inexpressible laments,” and “spiritual outbursts.” The psychological explanation has the advantage of probing the subconscious, of describing the various forces that act within the psyche, but the emergence of the subconscious in the act of prayer is not the essence of prayer, since it minimizes the role of intelligence and the will. Among what are called the higher religions (e.g., Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism), divine action, which is the object of the human action of prayer, violates neither human consciousness nor human freedom.

Sociologists often explain prayer in terms of the religious environment, which plays an indubitable role in spiritual behaviour. Though prayer supposes a personal belief, that belief is, to a great extent, provided by society. Society creates and regulates social and religious rites and liturgies to express its beliefs, but to explain the origin of prayer solely in terms of an environmental context would be to neglect the inner, personal origins of prayer. That belief is transmitted by society is incontestable, but the channel is not to be viewed as the source. Society itself is, so to speak, a tributary of beliefs that are both received from and given to the collective whole and also from and to each of its members. The collective forms may influence personal prayer, but they do not explain it.

The vertical (divine–human) as well as the horizontal (social) dimension of prayer is also expressed in the alternation between speech and silence. Whereas magical formulas are used to coerce the supernatural, liturgical language, even when incomprehensible to the congregation, seeks to lead the participants into an apprehension of the mystery of the divine. In the presence of the mystery of the divine, human beings often discover that they can only stammer or that their speech often falters. When this occurs, they frequently expresses their “fear and love” (Luther) or tremendum et fascinans—i.e., fear and attraction (according to Rudolf Otto, a modern German historian of religion), in apophatic (negative) formulas. Speech with the divine is, in such cases, followed by silence before other people, as one apprehends the inexpressible (i.e., the sacred or holy). Religious language, like silence, thus expresses the distance and inadequacy of the human being in relation to the divine mystery.