1.
And the most excellent form of prayer is signified by
standing, for it is written : « and Pin’has stood up and he prayed»,
(Talmud, Béra’hot 6b).
Like a poem, a dance, a story, I take prayer to be a form of
thought. We identify certain texts, certain rituals, certain utterances as
prayers – by which we mean a certain combination of word and gesture that is
uttered to certain forces – and in tracing the practice back to the impulse we
come to the same nous, the same entanglement of act, desire, and
thought, that we see in other forms of our literary quotidien – our irrepressible
narration of self and other.
2.
In the early twentieth century, Egyptologists began sorting
through and translating a mass of material that came from a site near Thebes,
Deir-el-Medina, which contained a large number of papyrus revealing the unique
situation of the town during the age of the New Kingdom, about 1200 BC – it was
a town of craftsmen, a company town, so to speak. Skilled craftsman in Ancient
Egypt were often literate. It was a situation that was used by certain
Egyptologists to explore the topic of “personal religion” or “folk piety” –
something apart from the great instituted rituals of the court. If, that is, it
existed at all.
The research program was in opposition to the more
positivist program in the history of religion, which looked at religious ritual
as something extremely public. It did not have, or at least for the purpose of
study it did not have, any researchable interiority. Prayer, from this point of
view, does not require belief. That I talk on the phone to someone else
requires no belief on my part about the science that underlies telephony – I
don’t have to have any belief about it at all. That a priest in Egypt or in
Athens or in Rome prays does not mean that the priest believes something
complex about the relation of the person to the entity prayed to. Rather, the
prayer is all exteriorized.
This idea has had a powerful effect on how scholars have
regarded ancient religions. At the same time, another group, more
archeologically inclined, have patiently combed through excavations of oracles
and burial sites and temples and private houses, finding an enormous number of relics
– votive offerings, prayers inscribed on stone or pottery pieces -ostrocon - or
parchment or papyrus, such as those from Deir-el-Medina – which indicate “personal
piety”, as the Egyptologists put it. The villagers wove dream and spells and
supplications together with consumption, work, sex, eating, excretion and death.
They lived in a cosmos, an order, in which praying was a normal part.
Similarly, the prayer structure accepted intercessors – we have pottery shards
dislodged from the graves of loved ones where the message is about asking the
dead to intervene with the gods for this or that purpose. Even in death, prayer
finds a hierarchy, an ordered approach to the gods.
This tradition in Egyptology eventually spilled over into
the study of ancient Greek religion. For much of the twentieth century, the
idea that, for instance, the ancient Greeks had a public religion that called
for certain practices without involving any particular “personal belief” (just
as I can talk on the phone without any particular belief concerning how my
voice is transmitted, or how I receive voices in return) was the standard
heuristic by which Greek religion, as epitomized in the theses of Walter
Burkert’s Greek Religion.
3.
In 1909, Marcel Mauss published Prayer, an anthropological
study he never finished. It was published in book form joined to his essay on
magic. Magic, superstition and religion are interestingly combined and
disjoined in learned culture. Plutarch’s essay on the Epsilon at the oracle of
Delphi (there were three large E-s displayed at the temple, one of bronze, one
of wood, and one of gold, or gilded with gold) remarks on its meaning, giving
various interpretations. The two interesting ones in terms of prayer are: that
the E stands for if (ei in Greek), with those
seeking answers to their problems at the oracle using the logic of if- then to
think through the future, or that the E reflects the pattern of prayer: we pray
to the god at the temple to help us choose or to choose the future that we
want.
Mauss, too, thought of prayer as a way of dealing with the
gods, or God. He accorded it a high place, as the uniting center between ritual
and myth. Understanding the meaning and function of prayer, Mauss thought,
would give us a sense of the “progress” of religion, a progress out of magico-technological
view of the gods (who we try to make do our will) to an intellectually richer view
of spirituality.
“Religious practices have become for the most part truly
individual. The instant, the place, the conditions and the forms of such and
such an act depends less and less on social causes. Just as every one acts almost
under his own personal responsibility, so to each becomes the creator of his
faith. Some protestant sects, for instance the evangelicals, recognize the
dogmatic authority of every member of the church. The “interior god” of the
most advanced religions is thus also the god of individuals.
These two processes are particularly marked in prayer. It
is, even, one of the best agents of this double evolution. Firstly all
mechanical, only operating by proferred sounds, it has finished up being
completely mental and completely interior. After owing only a small part of
itself to thought, it has finished up by being nothing more than thought and
effusion of the soul. Strictly collective at first, said in common or at least following
forms rigidly fixed by the religious group, sometimes even forbidden to the
individual, it has become the domain of the free conversation of the individual
with God.”
Mauss’s theory of prayer, though he takes evidence from the
Vedas and from various Others, evidently assumes that the evolution of religion
is towards a very Christian ideal of religion. Or, at least, a monotheistic
ideal.
4.
Prayer, in Mauss’s essay, is a factor in the long history of
individuation and interiorization that characterize the “West” – which is
further characterized as the vehicle of progress in the world, or among the
cultures of the world.
A common trope. I could draw a straight line from the
enlightenment regard for prayer to Mauss’s essay. In the philosophe culture,
prayer held a special place: it was a kind of rational exaltation, the sublime
of reason. Both Voltaire and Rousseau took prayer to have a special civic and
rational place, addressing the God discovered by reason and removing the dross
of superstition clinging to the deity. Voltaire in particular had a perspectival view
of the cosmos, in which immensity figured as the check to all merely human –
and immensely small – customs and vanities. In the Treatise on Tolerance, we
find this rather magnificent relic of French rhetoric:
« Tu ne nous as point
donné un cœur pour nous haïr, et des mains pour nous égorger ; fais que
nous nous aidions mutuellement à supporter le fardeau d’une vie pénible et
passagère ; que les petites différences entre les vêtements qui couvrent
nos débiles corps, entre tous nos langages insuffisants, entre tous nos usages
ridicules, entre toutes nos lois imparfaites, entre toutes nos opinions
insensées, entre toutes nos conditions si disproportionnées à nos yeux, et si
égales devant toi ; que toutes ces petites nuances qui distinguent les
atomes appelés hommes ne soient pas des signaux de haine et de
persécution ; que ceux qui allument des cierges en plein midi pour te
célébrer supporte ceux qui se contentent de la lumière de ton soleil ; que
ceux qui couvrent leur robe d’une toile blanche pour dire qu’il faut t’aimer ne
détestent pas ceux qui disent la même chose sous un manteau de laine
noire ; qu’il soit égal de t’adorer dans un jargon formé d’une ancienne
langue, ou dans un jargon plus nouveau ; que ceux dont l’habit est teint
en rouge ou en violet, qui dominent sur une petite parcelle d’un petit tas de
boue de ce monde, et qui possèdent quelques fragments arrondis d’un certain
métal, jouissent sans orgueil de ce qu’ils appellent grandeur et richesse, et
que les autres les voient sans envie : car tu sais qu’il n’y a dans ces
vanités ni envier, ni de quoi s’enorgueillir. »
“You did not give us a heart so that we could
hate each other, nor hands so we could slit each other’s throats; help us to
help each other endure the burden of this painful and brief life; may the tiny
differences between the clothes which cover our feeble bodies, between our
inadequate languages, between our ridiculous customs, between all our imperfect
laws, our absurd opinions, between all our circumstances, so disproportionate
in our eyes and yet so equal before yours; may all these tiny variations which
differentiate the atoms called humans not be the triggers of hatred and
persecution; may those who light candles at midday in adoration of you learn to
tolerate those who simply bask in the light of your sun; may those who wrap a
white cloth round their robes to express the command to love you not hate those
who say the same thing under a coat of black wool; may it be equally acceptable
to adore you in the jargon of an ancient language or of a more recent one; may
those whose clothes are dyed red or violet and who rule over a small plot on a
little heap of the mud of this world, and who happen to possess some rounded
pieces of a certain metal, enjoy what they call greatness and riches without
pride, and may others view them without envy: for you know that there is
nothing to envy or boast about in these vanities.”
The translation is by Caroline Warmen, who led
a collective of Oxford students to translate a number of French texts from the
18th century.
Although the philosophe concept of the deity
excluded a non-rational deity – one that appears in three guises, for instance,
as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – the romantic agony was already knocking on the
door. The sublime of reason found its true object in freedom, that most
dialectical of concepts. God, from Sade to Nietzsche, was never again so
immense and so rational.
In a sense, a line could be drawn, in this
history of prayer, back to the defining prayer of the Gospels. Jesus’s
disciples are all very anxious to learn how to pray. This is already a symptom
of the great Eastern Mediterranean culture of personal piety. Jesus obliges,
and in doing so separates prayer from the public. It is a radical gesture, making
prayer and the lyric self converge: “And
when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to
pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they
may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But
when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who
is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
And when you pray, do not
keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of
their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need
before you ask him.”
The radical nature of this critique of prayer – and of
public religion – is, indeed, one of the great Enlightenment gestures. Although
Voltaire might well have dismissed Jesus as a peasant, another savage outside
the circle, in positioning prayer outside the temple and making it a message in
plain words, Jesus was instituting a revolution in prayer – one that was doomed,
of course, to failure in the institutions built under his name.
Yet there is much to say for the hypocrites. When prayer
becomes associated with the lyric self, it confronts its communicative limits. And
in the elite culture which picked up on the philosophe critique of religion (as
an instrument in the creation of homo economicus), prayer began to disappear as a form of
thought, an impulse, a text.
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