One question that arises in connection with an attempt to distinguish superstition from genuine religion is the question whether petitionary prayer is superstitious. The answer will depend not only on what we take superstition to be but also on the type of petitionary prayer.
In an earlier installment I suggested that there are three grades of prayer:
Grade I: The lowest grade is that of petitionary prayer for material benefits. One asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessory prayer, for another. In its crassest forms it borders on idolatry and superstition. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, as does the nimrod who prays to win the lottery. Worse still is the one who prays for the death of a business rival. Such prayer involves both idolatry, the worshipping of a false god, and superstition. A god reduced to the status of a cosmic sugardaddy is an idol. It is the sort of god that atheists say does not exist. I am pleased to agree with them.
Grade II: The next grade up is petitionary prayer for spiritual benefits. At this level one is not asking for one's daily physical bread, but for acceptance, equanimity, patience, courage, and the like in the face of the fact that one lacks bread or has cancer. "Thy Will be done." One asks for forgiveness and for the ability to forgive others. One prays for a lively sense of one's own manifold shortcomings, for self-knowledge and freedom from self-deception. One prays, not to be cured of the cancer, but to bear it with courage. One prays for the ability to see one's tribulations under the aspect of eternity or with the sort of detachment with which one contemplates the sufferings of others.
Grade III: Higher still, I should think, is prayer that is wholly non-petitionary. At this level one asks neither for material nor for spiritual benefits. One form of this wholly non-petitionary prayer is sheer gratitude for what one has. Prayer as thanskgiving. Beyond this there is prayer as pure aspiration, as a straining of the soul upwards. A pure spiritual seeking, ascending, soaring. One seeks to elevate oneself above one's perceived infirmity and wretchedness. One seeks to rise above the paltriness, crudity, baseness of one's usual thoughts and emotions. Not a petitioning, but a self-elevating and a leaving of oneself behind. Prayer as aspiration may then lead on to forms of meditation proper and perhaps infused contemplation. At the stage of meditation the soul enters mental silence and rests there having abandoned all petitioning and aspiring. A"Waiting for God" to borrow a Simone Weil title.One is no longer working but resting in mental silence, listening. Within this silence one perhaps receives mystical grace which comes from without the mind.
Grade I, I would argue, has nothing to do with religion properly understood. But if I were to make this argument, I would run smack into the "Our Father," which, in the fourth of its six petitions, appears precisely to endorse Grade I, petitionary prayer for material benefits. The other five petitions are either clearly or arguably Grade II. The fourth petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," translates the Biblia Vulgata's Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie which occurs at Luke 11:3.
At Matthew 6:11, however, we find Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie, "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread." 'Supersubstantial' suggests a bread that is supernatural. To ask for this bread is to ask for a 'food' that will keeps us spiritually alive. For Simone Weil, "Christ is our bread." We can have physical bread without eating it; we cannot have spiritual bread without 'eating' it: the having is the 'eating' and being nourished by it. This nourishing is the "union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul." (Waiting for God, p. 146) The fourth petition of the Pater Noster, then, is the request for the union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul. It has nothing to do with a crass and infantile demand to be supplied with physical food via a supernatural means.
The Greek word translated as quotidianum in the Luke passage and as supersubstantialem in the Matthew passage is epiousios. I am not competent to discuss the philology of this Greek word, which may be a hapax legomenon. (Nor am I competent to assess the correctness of the two Wikipedia entries to which I have just linked; so Caveat lector!) But if any philologist or Biblical exegete were to tell me that epiousios cannot be understood in terms of 'supersubstantial,' (with the latter implying 'supernatural'), then I would say that that person is either wrong, or the text is corrupt, or the original sources do not record what Jesus actually said.
Philosophically, the fourth petition, if it is to fit with the others, and is not to represent a crass and infantile and quite absurd demand, must be interpreted spiritually, not physically. Otherwise, you play into the hands of the 'Dawkins Gang.' If it is physical bread you want, go to the store and buy some, or learn the art of the baker.
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