Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The gospel precepts, most beloved brothers, are nothing other than divine lessons: foundations on which hope is built, supports by which faith is strengthened, food by which the heart is nourished, rudders by which our course is steered, safeguards by which salvation is secured; and while they instruct the teachable minds of believers on earth, they lead them through to the kingdoms of heaven. Through the prophets—his own servants—God chose that much be declared and made known; yet the Son's own utterance far surpasses these, for he is God's Word, once voiced through the prophets, now bearing witness in his own voice—no longer commanding that a way be prepared for one who was coming, but himself coming and himself opening and showing us the way, so that we who once wandered blind and unwary in the darkness of death might now, illumined by the light of grace, hold to the path of life with the Lord as our guide and director.
Among his other saving counsels and divine precepts by which he provides for the salvation of his people, he himself also gave us a form for prayer; he himself instructed and taught us what to ask. The one who instructed our living instructed our praying as well, moved by the same generosity that led him to grant us every other gift, so that speaking to the Father in the words his Son gave us, we would be heard all the more readily. Already he had announced beforehand a coming time in which those who worship in spirit and truth would render the Father genuine worship, and what he had promised earlier he brought to fulfillment, so that we, having received spirit and truth from his sanctifying gift, might likewise offer him worship both true and spiritual, following what he passed down to us. For what prayer could be more spiritual than the one given to us by Christ, from whom the Holy Spirit was also sent to us? What petition could be truer before the Father than the one spoken by the Son, who is the Truth, from his own mouth? So that to pray in any other way than he taught is not merely ignorance but fault — since he himself declared: you reject the commandment of God in order to establish your own tradition.
Let us pray, then, most beloved brothers, as God our teacher has taught. It is a friendly and familiar prayer to ask God for what belongs to him, to let Christ's own prayer rise to his ears. May the Father, hearing us pray, recognize his own Son's speech in ours: may the one dwelling inside our breast also make himself heard through our lips — and because we hold him as our advocate with the Father on account of our sins, we sinners, pleading over our own wrongs, ought to utter nothing but our advocate's own utterance. He himself promises that anything asked of the Father under his name will be granted to us; how much more surely, then, do we secure our request when we invoke Christ's name by praying in the exact words he gave?
Let the speech and prayer of those who pray be marked by discipline, restraint, and modesty. Let us consider that we stand in the sight of God. We must please his divine eyes both in the bearing of our body and in the manner of our voice. For as it belongs to the shameless to make an uproar with shouting, so, on the contrary, it is fitting to pray with modest and measured petitions. Indeed, the Lord's own teaching directs that our prayers be offered secretly, tucked away in withdrawn, hidden places — within our own chambers — which suits our faith better, since we know that God is present everywhere, that he hears and sees all things, and that in the fullness of his majesty he penetrates even into what is hidden and concealed. Scripture attests this: I draw near as God, says the Lord, and am no distant deity. If a man hides himself in secret places, shall I not see him? Do I not fill heaven and earth? And again: in every place the eyes of the Lord watch over the good and the evil. And when we assemble together with the brothers and join God's priest in celebrating the divine sacrifice, reverence and discipline must guide our conduct: we should not scatter prayers abroad in disordered shouting, nor hurl toward God, in noisy babble, a plea that deserves to be offered to him with quiet restraint — since God listens to the heart rather than the voice, and one whose thoughts are already seen has no need to be stirred by shouting, just as the Lord himself confirms: why do you think evil in your hearts? And elsewhere: every congregation will come to know that I am he who searches the innermost heart and mind.
Hannah observes exactly this, bearing as she does the church's own figure in the first book of Kings, when she besought God quietly and humbly, deep within the concealed recesses of her breast, rather than through any noisy demand. Her prayer stayed concealed even as her faith stood open; her heart, not her tongue, did the speaking, for she understood this to be how the Lord listens — and because she asked in faith, she gained exactly what she sought. Divine Scripture confirms it: her heart spoke, her lips stirred, yet no sound reached the ear, and still the Lord heard her. So too the Psalms tell us: converse within your own hearts, and let remorse pierce you upon your beds. Jeremiah conveys this same instruction from the Holy Spirit when he says: Lord, it is in the mind that you must be worshipped.
In worship, most beloved brothers, let none overlook how, within the temple, the tax collector prayed beside the Pharisee. Without raising his eyes toward heaven in shamelessness or lifting his hands in insolent display, he struck his own breast, acknowledging the wrongs locked inside him, and begged for divine mercy's aid; and though the Pharisee took pleasure in himself, sanctification instead fell to this humbler suppliant, since he grounded his hope of salvation not on confidence in his own blamelessness — for no one is without fault — but prayed with humility, admitting his sins; and the one who pardons the humble gave ear to his prayer. The Lord sets this down in the gospel thus: a pair of men climbed up to the temple to worship, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. Standing there, the Pharisee prayed to himself in this way: God, I give you thanks that I am not like other people — thieves, wrongdoers, adulterers — nor even like this tax collector here. Twice a week I fast; of everything I possess I give a tenth. But the tax collector remained at a distance, unwilling even to raise his eyes toward heaven, striking his own chest instead as he said: God, show mercy toward me, a sinner. I tell you: it was this man, not the other, who returned home set right before God — for whoever raises himself up will be brought low, and whoever lowers himself will be raised up.
Having learned this, most beloved brothers, from the divine reading, and having come to know how we ought to approach prayer, let us also learn from the Lord's own teaching what we ought to pray. Pray thus, he says: Our Father, who art in the heavens, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done in heaven and on earth. Give us this day the bread we need for today, and cancel our debts for us, in the same way that we cancel them for our debtors; do not allow us to be brought into trial, but rescue us from evil.
Above all, the one who teaches peace and instructs in unity refused to let prayer be offered as a solitary, private act, as though a person praying should seek only for himself. None of us says my Father, who art in the heavens, nor give me today my bread; nor does anyone ask forgiveness for his debt alone, or pray solely for himself to avoid temptation and escape evil. Instead our petition belongs to everyone in common: praying, we do not intercede for a single soul but for an entire people, since all of us together form one body. It was God's will — he who teaches peace and concord, who instituted unity — that a single prayer should be lifted for everyone, just as he himself carried everyone within himself as one. Three youths, shut inside the blazing furnace, kept exactly this rule of prayer, their petitions in harmony and their spirits joined as one; faithful Scripture bears witness to this, and by showing how such men prayed, it offers us a pattern to follow in our own petitions, so that we might come to resemble them. Then, it says, all three, as though from a single mouth, raised a hymn and blessed God. Even before Christ had given them any teaching on prayer, their words rang out as one, as if from a single mouth. That is precisely why their prayer proved effective and secured its request — because a tranquil, unadorned, spiritual prayer wins the Lord's favor. In just this way we discover that the apostles, together with the other disciples, kept praying once the Lord had ascended. All of them, it says, continued steadfastly and with one mind in prayer, alongside the women, Mary who had been Jesus's mother, and his brothers. Their perseverance in prayer displayed at once both constancy and unity of spirit — since God, who settles people of one mind together in a household, admits into his own everlasting household only those whose prayer rises as one.
How great, most beloved brothers, are the mysteries held within the Lord's Prayer — how numerous, how vast, gathered briefly into speech yet spiritually overflowing in power, so that this compendium of heavenly teaching leaves out nothing at all that belongs in our prayers and petitions! So, he says, worship: Our Father, who art in the heavens. Reborn and remade in his God through grace, the new man names Father before anything else, since he has already begun his life as a son. To his own he came, it says, and his own did not welcome him; yet to all who did welcome him he granted the power to become children of God, to everyone trusting in his name. Anyone, then, who has trusted in his name and thereby become God's child ought to start from here: giving thanks and declaring himself a son of God — since by naming as his own the Father who dwells in the heavens, one of the earliest things he utters after this new birth must be a testimony that he has cast off his earthly, fleshly father and has come instead to know and hold only the Father in the heavens — as it is written: those who say to father and mother, I do not know you, and who did not acknowledge their own children — these have kept your commandments and observed your covenant. Likewise the Lord in his gospel commanded that we call no man on earth our father, since we have but one Father, who is in the heavens. And to the disciple who mentioned his dead father, he answered: let the dead bury their own dead — for he had called his father dead, though the Father of believers is living.
Nor ought we, most beloved brothers, to fix our attention solely on this — that we address as Father the one who is in the heavens — but we combine the words and declare Our Father: that is, father to everyone who believes, to those who, made holy through him and remade by a birth of spiritual grace, have begun their life as God's children. This very phrase also strikes and rebukes the Jews, since not only did they faithlessly spurn Christ — announced to them beforehand by the prophets and sent to them first — but they went so far as to kill him with cruelty; they can therefore no longer address the Lord as Father, for the Lord himself rebuts and confounds them, saying: your father is the devil, from whom you are born, and it is his desires you wish to carry out. From the very start he was a killer, never standing firm in truth, since truth finds no place in him. And through the prophet Isaiah, God cries out indignantly: sons I have raised and lifted high, yet they have scorned me. An ox recognizes its owner, a donkey its master's feeding trough, yet Israel has not recognized me, and my own people have failed to understand. Woe to this sinning nation, a people weighed down with sins, a corrupt brood, depraved children! You have abandoned the Lord and stirred to fury the Holy One of Israel. It is precisely to shame such people that we Christians, praying, address God as Our Father — since he has taken up residence as ours and abandoned his place among the Jews who deserted him. A people mired in sin cannot hold the title of son; but those granted forgiveness of their sins receive the name of sons inscribed to them, and to them eternity too stands promised, as the Lord himself states: everyone who sins is a slave. Yet a slave does not stay in the household forever, while a son remains there forever.
How immense is the Lord's generosity, how abundant his kindness and goodness toward us, in that he wished us to conduct our prayer before God in such a manner that we address the Lord as Father — and that, just as Christ holds the title Son of God, we too are named children of God: a title none of us would have dared claim in prayer had he not himself granted us leave to pray this way. We ought therefore, most beloved brothers, to bear in mind and understand that addressing God as our Father calls for conduct befitting God's children, so that just as we take satisfaction in ourselves before our Father, he too may take satisfaction in us. Let us live as though we were temples of God, so it is evident that the Lord makes his home within us. Our behavior should not fall beneath the Spirit's standard, so that we, already embarked on a spiritual and heavenly existence, might think and act on nothing except what belongs to heaven and the spirit — since the Lord God himself declared: those who glorify me, I will glorify, and those who scorn me will be scorned. The blessed apostle likewise set this down in his third letter: you do not belong to yourselves, for you were purchased at a great price; glorify God and bear him in your body.
After this we say: hallowed be your name — not that we wish God to be made holy by our prayers, but that we ask the Lord that his name be made holy in us. For by whom is God made holy, who himself makes all things holy? But because he himself said, be holy, for I too am holy, this is what we ask and request: that we who were made holy in baptism may continue steadfastly in the state we have already entered upon. This too we plead for every day. For we need a daily sanctification, so that we who sin daily may cleanse our faults through constant sanctification. What this sanctification is, which is granted to us by God's favor, the apostle proclaims, saying: no fornicator, no idol-worshipper, no adulterer, no man given to softness or to lying with men, no thief, no swindler, no drunkard, no slanderer, no grasping person will have any share in God's kingdom. Such, indeed, is what you once were — yet you have since been cleansed, set right, and consecrated, through the name belonging to the Lord Jesus Christ and through God's own Spirit. In the Lord Jesus's name and by our God's Spirit, he tells us, we have been made holy. It is our prayer that this holiness endure within us; and because the Lord, as our judge, having restored health and life to the man he rescued, cautions him against sinning again lest worse befall him, we turn this into an unceasing petition, asking day and night that the holiness and life granted to us through God's favor be kept safe under his own guard.
Next in the prayer comes: your kingdom come. Just as we ask that his name be made holy within us, so we ask that God's kingdom also be manifested among us. For at what point could God cease reigning, or when could something begin for one whose reign has always existed and will never end? What we request is the arrival of the kingdom already promised to us by God, purchased through Christ's blood and suffering — so that we, once bound in service within this present age, might afterward rule under Christ's dominion, exactly as he pledges: come, those my Father has blessed, take possession of the realm made ready for you since the world's beginning. It could also be, most beloved brothers, that Christ himself constitutes God's kingdom — the very one whose daily arrival we crave, whose presence among us we long to see fulfilled as soon as possible. Since he is himself the resurrection (because rising happens within him), the kingdom of God can likewise be understood as himself, since ruling too will happen within him. And we are right to seek God's kingdom, meaning specifically the heavenly one, since an earthly kingdom exists as well. Yet whoever has already turned away from this present age stands above both its honors and its dominion; thus anyone devoted to God and to Christ longs not for earthly rule but for the kingdoms of heaven. Continual prayer and petition remain necessary, lest we slip away from that heavenly kingdom just as the Jews did — those to whom it was first pledged and who nonetheless fell from it, as the Lord himself demonstrates and declares. Many, he says, will arrive from east and west and will take their place at table alongside Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob within the kingdom of the heavens; yet the kingdom's own sons will be thrown out into the darkness beyond — there will be weeping there, and grinding of teeth. He thereby shows that the Jews had once been sons of the kingdom, for as long as they also remained sons of God; once the title of Father no longer applied to them, the kingdom departed as well. And so we Christians, having already begun in prayer to name God our Father, likewise pray that his kingdom may come to us.
We continue further, saying: your will be done in heaven and on earth — meaning not that God needs to carry out what he wills, but that we ourselves might be capable of carrying out what God wills. For who could stand against God so as to prevent him from doing as he wills? Rather, because the devil sets himself against us, keeping our thinking and our conduct from submitting fully to God in every respect, our prayer and petition is that God's will take effect within us; and for that to happen within us, God's own will must supply the help and shelter needed, since strength drawn from one's own powers avails nothing, while safety comes from God's mercy and forbearance. The Lord himself, in fact, revealing the frailty of the human nature he carried, said: Father, if this is possible, take this cup away from me; and then, setting an example for his disciples — that their own preference should yield to God's — he added: yet let it be not as I wish but as you wish. And elsewhere he says: I did not descend from heaven to carry out my own preference, but the preference of the one who sent me. Now if the Son submitted in order to carry out the Father's preference, how much more should a servant submit in order to carry out his master's! John, too, in his letter, presses and teaches this same obedience to God's preference, saying: do not set your love on the world or on what belongs to the world. Whoever loves the world lacks the Father's love within him, since everything the world contains — fleshly craving, the craving of the eyes, and the arrogance bred by life — springs not from the Father but from the world's own craving. And the world, together with its craving, is passing away; but whoever carries out God's preference endures forever, exactly as God himself endures forever. Those of us who wish to endure forever must carry out the will of the eternal God.