What Is Prayer?

What Is the Question?

Prayer is the act of addressing God, in praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition, or contemplation. The word comes from the Latin precari, meaning "to entreat," and it carries the sense of a request, an appeal, and a turning to. The practice is central to the religious traditions, and it has been the subject of philosophical reflection from the early church through the modern period. The philosophical questions prayer raises are deep. If God is eternal and omniscient, can prayer change God's mind? If God is good, why do some prayers go unanswered? And if God is the author of all good, does prayer do any work, or is it a practice that shapes the pray-er rather than God? The question is what prayer amounts to, what it accomplishes, and what it implies about the divine and the human.

The SEP entry on philosophy of religion treats prayer as one of the central topics of the tradition, especially in the theology of grace and divine action, and the philosophical work is to articulate the concept and to ask the questions it raises.

Historical Background

The practice of prayer is ancient and universal. In the Hebrew Bible, prayer is the act of addressing God, from the psalms, which range from praise and thanksgiving to lament and petition, to the prayers of the prophets, which intercede for the people and seek the divine will. The Hebrew Bible treats prayer as a central religious practice, and it shaped the Jewish and Christian traditions. In the New Testament, prayer is central to the life of Jesus, who prays before his baptism, in the Garden of Gethsemane, and on the cross, and who teaches his disciples the Lord's Prayer.

Augustine, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, gave the concept its classical philosophical form. Augustine treated prayer as the soul's turning to God, an act of love that participates in the divine life. The Confessions, Augustine's spiritual autobiography, is itself a prayer, addressed to God and structured as a continuous act of praise, confession, and petition. Augustine's account of prayer is inseparable from his account of grace, the divine assistance that heals the disordered will, and the prayer, on Augustine's view, is both the expression of the soul's dependence on God and the means by which the grace is received.

Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, systematized the Augustinian account, and defended the utility of prayer against the objection that prayer is superfluous, since God knows what we need before we ask. Aquinas's reply was that prayer is not for God's information but for the soul's ordering, that the act of praying directs the soul to God and disposes it to receive what God gives. The reply is the classic defense of the utility of prayer, and it has shaped the Catholic theology of prayer ever since.

The modern period has seen a number of distinctive accounts. Kierkegaard, in the nineteenth century, treated prayer as the individual's standing before God, an act of subjective truth that is the heart of the religious life. The contemporary philosophy of religion has treated prayer as a central topic, especially in the debate about petitionary prayer and divine action.

The Varieties of Prayer

The tradition distinguishes several varieties of prayer, and the distinctions are philosophically important. Petitionary prayer asks God for a specific good, for oneself or for another. Intercessory prayer asks God on behalf of others, especially for the sick, the suffering, and the dead. Thanksgiving prayer thanks God for the goods received. Confession prayer confesses one's sin and seeks forgiveness. Praise prayer praises God for God's own sake, not for what God has done but for who God is. Contemplative prayer rests in God's presence, and seeks not to ask but to be, in the tradition of the mystics.

The varieties raise distinct philosophical questions. Petitionary prayer raises the question whether prayer can change God's mind, since it asks God for a specific good, and the question is whether God's will can be moved by the request. Intercessory prayer raises the question whether prayer for others can be effective, since it asks God on behalf of others, and the question is whether the prayer of one person can benefit another. Contemplative prayer raises the question whether prayer is a practice that shapes the pray-er rather than God, since it seeks not to ask but to be, and the question is what the practice accomplishes if it does not move God.

The Problem of Petitionary Prayer

The central philosophical problem is petitionary prayer. If God is eternal and omniscient, God knows what we need before we ask, and if God is good, God wills the good whether we ask or not. The question is what petitionary prayer accomplishes, if God's mind is not changed and God's will is not moved. The problem is sharpened by the fact that some prayers go unanswered, and the question is why, if God is good and omnipotent, the prayers of the suffering and the just sometimes go unheard.

The traditional defense, in Augustine and Aquinas, is that petitionary prayer is not for God's information but for the soul's ordering. The act of praying directs the soul to God, disposes it to receive what God gives, and aligns the will with the divine will. The petition, on this view, is not a request that God change God's mind, but a request that God act, and the act is one that God has eternally willed to perform in response to the prayer. The prayer, on this view, is a means by which God's eternal will is worked out in time, and the pray-er is a participant in the divine action, not a petitioner who changes it.

The contemporary defense, in the work of Richard Swinburne and others, is that petitionary prayer can be effective because God has chosen to make some goods conditional on prayer. The goods, on this view, are goods that God wills to give, but only in response to prayer, and the prayer is the means by which the goods are received. The defense preserves the freedom of the pray-er, since the prayer is a free act, and it preserves the efficacy of the prayer, since the prayer is the means by which the good is received. The defense has been criticized, both within the tradition and without, as making God dependent on the prayer, and as raising the question why some prayers are answered and others are not.

The Question of Unanswered Prayer

The deeper question is why some prayers go unanswered. The traditional answer, in Augustine and Aquinas, is that God answers all prayers, but sometimes the answer is no, and the no is for a greater good that the pray-er cannot see. The answer preserves the goodness of God, since the no is for a greater good, and it preserves the efficacy of prayer, since the prayer is answered, if not in the way the pray-er requested. The answer has been criticized, especially in the face of horrific suffering, as too easy, and as failing to take seriously the experience of the pray-er whose prayers go unheard.

The contemporary debate has refined the question. The problem of evil bears directly on the question of unanswered prayer, since the suffering that God permits is the suffering that the prayers of the suffering ask God to relieve. The theodicy of John Hick, which treats the evils of the world as part of the soul-making process, offers a partial answer, by holding that the unanswered prayers are part of the process, and that the process is for a greater good that the pray-er cannot see. The free will defense, developed by Alvin Plantinga, offers a different partial answer, by holding that the unanswered prayers are the result of the freedom of other agents, and that the freedom is a greater good that justifies the evil.

Prayer and Divine Action

The question of prayer bears on the wider question of divine action, the question of how God acts in the world. If God acts in the world, then prayer can be a means by which God acts, and the petitionary prayer can be effective, in the sense that God acts in response to the prayer. If God does not act in the world, except through the regularities of nature, then prayer cannot be a means by which God acts, and the petitionary prayer is not effective, in the sense that it does not move God to act. The question of divine action is one of the central questions in the contemporary philosophy of religion, and the question of prayer is a part of it.

The traditional account, in Augustine and Aquinas, holds that God acts in the world, both through the regularities of nature and through special divine actions, including miracles and answers to prayer. The contemporary debate has produced a number of distinct accounts, including the account of special divine action as a form of non-interventionist divine action, developed by Maurice Wiles and others, and the account of divine action as a form of causal joint, developed by Robert Russell and others. The debate is live, and the question of prayer is a part of it.

Prayer as a Practice

A more recent development in the philosophy of prayer treats prayer as a practice, a form of life that shapes the pray-er. The practice, on this view, is not primarily a means of moving God but a means of forming the soul, a discipline of attention that orders the soul to God and that produces the moral and spiritual goods that the religious traditions have always associated with prayer. The account has some affinity with the Augustinian and Aquinan defense, which holds that prayer is for the soul's ordering, but it shifts the emphasis from the divine to the human, from what prayer does to God to what prayer does to the pray-er.

The account has been developed in the work of contemporary philosophers of religion, including Charles Taliaferro and others, and it has connections to the contemporary philosophy of spiritual practices, including the work of Pierre Hadot on philosophy as a way of life. The account does not deny that petitionary prayer can be effective, but it shifts the focus from the petition to the practice, and it treats the practice as the heart of the religious life.

Contemporary Relevance

Prayer remains a live topic, both in philosophy and in the wider culture. The persistence of prayer, even in secularized societies, and the revival of contemplative practices such as meditation and centering prayer, suggest that prayer is a deep feature of human spirituality, and the philosophical question of what to make of it is correspondingly urgent. The honest philosophical stance is to take the practice seriously, to engage with the philosophical questions it raises, and to ask what the practice names that the alternatives do not.

The deeper lesson is that the question of prayer is part of the larger question of how to understand the relation of the human and the divine, and the older practice, with its insistence on the reality of the divine and the possibility of a relation, may still have something to teach us. The work of philosophy is not to dismiss the practice by procedural fiat, but to do the careful work of comparison and assessment that the question deserves.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Philosophy of Religion" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-religion/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Augustine" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Thomas Aquinas" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Religious Experience" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religious-experience/

Related Topics

• What Is Grace? — the divine assistance prayer receives.
• What Is Salvation? — the goal of the religious life.
• Is Faith Rational? — the wider question.
• What Is a Miracle? — special divine action.
• What Is Religious Experience? — the experiential context.
• What Is the Sacred? — the object of prayer.
• Philosophy of God — the wider domain.