This is a fascinating read, on any number of axes. I apologize if this comment is a bit premise rejecting, but reading this essay from a Jewish perspective, certain things jumped out at me, despite Fr. Daniélou's specific claim to universality . As I read him, he's understanding prayer as rooted firmly in the personal, as "service of the heart," as the Babylonian Talmud refers to prayer. His definition makes this sufficiently clear: "By prayer in this connection I mean spiritual experience orientated towards God." The social elements of religion are necessary to cultivate spiritual personalities which can pray with the appropriate devotion.
This understanding of prayer is, while not foreign to the Jewish tradition as I understand and have lived it, nevertheless somewhat marginal. Jewish prayer, though understood as service of the heart, has historically nevertheless been fundamentally and profoundly social. Specific required words are recited, ideally with a group of people (the larger the better, for "the glory of a king is in a large gathering), at specific times of day. There is space for personal prayer (Nahmanides argues that it may be biblically required to cry out to God at moments of crisis, independent of the standard liturgy, but this is an edge case), but personal prayer is a secondary type of prayer. Rather communal prayer, the act of standing in solidarity with one's community in front of God and meeting your obligations to Him, arranging one's life in terms of his commands and demands and building community around that, is primary. The personal isn't ignored in this, of course. Questions of how to find personal meaning in communal prayer, strategies of connecting with God through the mandated liturgy, of assuring that following the external forms leaves space for "service of the heart" are all important to Jewish thought around prayer. However, they rarely displace communal, public prayer from the center.
So, with this in mind, two thoughts/questions:
1) By asserting that social religion is at best the handmaiden of personal prayer, Fr. Daniélou writes off prayer as typically understood by one major non-Christian religious tradition, and I suspect more than a few others. He also fails to see the power of communal, mandated social prayer, independent of personal expression. The ways in which it creates community, ties individuals together, and builds a shared reality between worshipers, regardless what they may be feeling personally in the specific moment or act of prayer. Can this model do anything to address the larger issues he places front and center in this essay? I suspect so, but I'm curious what others think.
2) The second thought is just how profoundly political communal liturgical prayer inevitably is, in a way that personal prayer is not. It's an assertion of identity, of belonging. It's an act of building community and creating solidarity, all specifically done on the context of the relationship between human and God, independent of the subjective experience of prayer. In the context of Jewish communities, at least those that maintain the traditional liturgy, it happens three times a day, and so also requires building one's life around it. Personal prayer may cultivate certain attitudes, but communal prayer cultivates action. Can this be harnessed to build political culture? How?
One sneaky thing about the Catholic faith is that there isn't really any completely private or solitary prayer. When I pray the Liturgy of the Hours (a cycle of daily psalms and readings), I know Catholics all over the world are praying the same words with me—and that's not even counting the unity I have outside of time with everyone who is praying the same words on a different day or in a different year!
Monks and nuns inhabit a physical cell, but everyone is called to cultivate an "interior cell" in the words of St. Catherine of Siena, in which to commune with God. But the more we love God, the more we participate in His love for His people, so turning inward turns us outward again.
It was interesting to hear a Jewish perspective on this article. My understanding of prayer (and hence how I engaged with this article) is formed by Catholic Christianity which ultimately finds expression in the liturgy, which has both a communal aspect and a personal aspect. I thought of this dynamic when I read the second paragraph on p. 2 of the pdf where Danielou labels as "totally insufficient" a Christianity which merely "consists of certain gestures" and "practices". This both/and could happen in a mystical way, as mentioned in this comment, where liturgy (such as the Divine Office) even when done individually is in a very real sense in communion which the Church on earth and throughout time.
On the other hand, it can also be found in a practical sense in the harmony of personal and communal devotion that shapes public prayer such as the Mass. Think about the period of silence which is supposed to follow each reading. This time is supposed to allow the readings - proclaimed to the community - to speak to you personally, to allow you "to take the word of God to heart and to prepare a response to it in prayer" (GIRM 56). Or think about the silence that follows the "Let us pray". This silence proceeding the (public) call to prayer is designed for individuals to (personally) "be conscious of the fact that they are in God’s presence", and "formulate their petitions mentally" (GIRM 54). Their own petitions.
I am not familiar with Jewish ritual prayer but I wonder if there is some element of this in it as well?
So Jewish ritual communal prayer definitely has moments built in for personal prayer, as well as a long history of different practices and intentions built to attempt to make the fixed liturgy personal to the individual praying. As I said above: "Questions of how to find personal meaning in communal prayer, strategies of connecting with God through the mandated liturgy, of assuring that following the external forms leaves space for "service of the heart" are all important to Jewish thought around prayer." However, it's all very much in the framework of a mandated liturgy with a fixed text, ideally said communally. I was deliberately emphasizing the communal and fixed element in contrast to how I was reading Fr. Daniélou.
I suspect that Catholic and Jewish liturgy share a lot, even as canon law does not expect every individual Catholic to participate in the Liturgy of the Hours daily in the way that Jewish law requires it of Jews.
(Jewish law requires prayer three times daily, not specifically the Hours, just to clarify. Sorry for the pronoun with the unclear antecedent, my 7th grade English teacher would be ashamed of me.)
Do you think this is reflected in the way Fr. Daniélou writes about prayer here? How does it fit into his scheme of "social" vs. "personal" religion? Does it have political consequences? (So many questions, sorry, I'll stop myself there.)
I think other parts of the book may be helpful here. In the first chapter, he writes:
"Religious freedom must be thought of as a right that belongs to communities as well as to individuals. It implies not only that people should be able to practise religion publicly, but also that they should have the scope and mutual support necessary to order their lives with the demands of that religion. In no other way can tradition be kept alive among a people."
Though his definition of prayer here doesn't really seem to reflect a communal element, I think Danielou would agree completely that communal prayer, and the conditions that would make communal prayer accessible to the masses, fall under the purview of the "political problem" he is describing.
I think he is talking about a mere cultural attachment to religion. Think of the atheist Jew that just enjoys family time and ritual at Passover. Or Irish Catholics that think it’s an act of faith to attend a St. Patrick’s day parade and get drunk. If your faith isn’t at all personal it’s just empty kitsch. Unbelievers in society won’t accommodate or respect us if they think our religion is phony. He points out that we are criticized not for being Christian but for being bad Christians.
I love this comment & the questions it raises, and idk if I have any answers, but this comment made me notice the way Daniélou brings up monks as "feeling the need to create an environment in which they will find prayer possible." In the Catholic religious tradition, vowed religious are *obliged* to communal/social prayer, they are bound by law to it and structure their lives around it, as distinct from the personal prayer to which they are *urged* and *commended*. But fundamentally, the communal liturgy of the hours takes precedence. I think it does say a lot that, as Daniélou implies, vowed religious have often felt the need to withdraw from a society they perceive as hostile to prayer (both communal and personal) in order to pursue that as their lives' goal. The blossoming of active, urban religious life—that places personal and communal prayer at the heart of the modern city—might be able to tell us something about that. For now these are all just ruminations but I hope to reread the chapter and have something more meaningful/conclusive to add here!
100%, that's a wonderful observation. I'll add that Jewish law requires thrice daily prayer, ideally communal, of all adults (though some argue that women are exempt). Everybody is expect to structure their lives around prayer. And modern cities are the center of thriving prayer communities. Ad hoc groups of observant Jews gathering daily in office buildings to say the afternoon service as well as more permanent prayer groups and synagogues. Cities, with their masses of people seeking to connect with each other, to find community of various kinds, are hot beds of prayer. I can't imagine that Judaism is unique in this, or that urban life is really as hostile to prayer, communal social prayer, as he seems to think. The richest prayer communities I have observed and been a part of have all been urban.
On this point, I really loved the book Empowered Judaism by Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, and I cite it in my Building the BenOp. Kaunfer is so thoughtful about all the small preparations it takes to make a space for communal prayer. (I love the tip to put out fewer chairs than needed and then add extras, so things feel busy and cheerful, rather than sparse and slow).
Empowered Judaism is great, and Hadar is 100% one of the prayer communities I had in mind when talking about urban communal prayer. (Elie is also a delightful human being. We were neighbors for a few years.)
These are very good observations! It can be helpful to remember that Fr. Daniélou is a Jesuit, an order founded to engage and evangelize the world. Their spirituality is quite different than that of Monks.
There is much here for fruitful reflection, and in such a variety of directions. One spark that stood out for me was when I read, "If politics does not create the conditions in which man can completely fulfil himself, it becomes an impediment to that fulfilment." (p. 2) It made me think of John Rawls' idea to (if I remember this right) put comprehensive systems of belief outside of politics. Because these systems create intractable conflict, they cannot be used as a way to form or judge a political framework. And religion is often cited as an example of such a system.
But if Fr. Danielou is right, Rawls' approach is self-defeating from a human level because it prevents our flourishing. It forces us to bracket an essential part of who we are as merely interior. In a sense, our prayer is not allowed to be social because it would be too politically disruptive. I wonder if the outburst of strongly moralistic political ideologies on the left and the right is the result of the repression of the social dimension of prayer, as broadly conceived here by Fr. Danielou. He speaks again and again of how hard it is for most to pray when the environment works against it. Perhaps our environment has not simply made prayer difficult, but has perverted the impulse into something angry and hateful out of frustration.
Yes! People's religious beliefs *do* clash and cause tension, but people can't neatly live a life of private religion or philosophy. If we love our neighbor, we will their good. And if we disagree about what that good is, there will be tension.
While reading, I found it difficult not to keep returning to the idea that's become pretty popularly discussed these days, that politics and other secular concerns have developed into a type of pseudo-spiritual practice for some.
While Daniélou highlights the dangers of contemporary life to our appreciation of the sacred -- "A world which had built up its culture without reference to God, a humanism from which adoration was completely absent, would make the maintenance of a positive religious point of view impossible for the great majority of men" -- I think there's an impulse overlooked here. A culture may fall away from public devotion to God, but the "nones" -- to borrow survey parlance, those without a religious affiliation -- seem no less aware of that void. Prayer is simply replaced by less useful, secular (and sometimes downright heretical) forms of devotion.
Perhaps the next question then is, to what extent does a perversion of the prayer impulse harm the culture that's fostered this secularism? An absence of prayer is bad for individuals and the greater society, but what is the consequence of its proactive, corrupted form?
I think it can lead to having isolated *pieces* of a faith, which can't hold together. Discussion of shared guilt for systemic discrimination can mirror original sin... but without a theology of repentance.
And one of the important freedoms from work is the expectation of knowing *when* you'll be off, so you can make commitments to things besides your boss. Someone who gets their work schedule with a week's notice can't take responsibility for a weekly hour at the Adoration chapel.
I had a similar thought about the description of modern urban life as "relentlessly collective." I often think of the problem of urban life, especially for single people, as one of loneliness. Perhaps, paradoxically, that loneliness is due in part to a lack of solitude and contemplation. Instead of making time for that, are we "relentlessly collective" in going to happy hours, rec sports leagues, new restaurants, and all the other offerings a city holds out?
Some of the "relentless collectivity" today seems more driven by social media—people are always gathered (in a sense!) and you are absent from an active conversation whenever you are solitary.
This is a fascinating read, on any number of axes. I apologize if this comment is a bit premise rejecting, but reading this essay from a Jewish perspective, certain things jumped out at me, despite Fr. Daniélou's specific claim to universality . As I read him, he's understanding prayer as rooted firmly in the personal, as "service of the heart," as the Babylonian Talmud refers to prayer. His definition makes this sufficiently clear: "By prayer in this connection I mean spiritual experience orientated towards God." The social elements of religion are necessary to cultivate spiritual personalities which can pray with the appropriate devotion.
This understanding of prayer is, while not foreign to the Jewish tradition as I understand and have lived it, nevertheless somewhat marginal. Jewish prayer, though understood as service of the heart, has historically nevertheless been fundamentally and profoundly social. Specific required words are recited, ideally with a group of people (the larger the better, for "the glory of a king is in a large gathering), at specific times of day. There is space for personal prayer (Nahmanides argues that it may be biblically required to cry out to God at moments of crisis, independent of the standard liturgy, but this is an edge case), but personal prayer is a secondary type of prayer. Rather communal prayer, the act of standing in solidarity with one's community in front of God and meeting your obligations to Him, arranging one's life in terms of his commands and demands and building community around that, is primary. The personal isn't ignored in this, of course. Questions of how to find personal meaning in communal prayer, strategies of connecting with God through the mandated liturgy, of assuring that following the external forms leaves space for "service of the heart" are all important to Jewish thought around prayer. However, they rarely displace communal, public prayer from the center.
So, with this in mind, two thoughts/questions:
1) By asserting that social religion is at best the handmaiden of personal prayer, Fr. Daniélou writes off prayer as typically understood by one major non-Christian religious tradition, and I suspect more than a few others. He also fails to see the power of communal, mandated social prayer, independent of personal expression. The ways in which it creates community, ties individuals together, and builds a shared reality between worshipers, regardless what they may be feeling personally in the specific moment or act of prayer. Can this model do anything to address the larger issues he places front and center in this essay? I suspect so, but I'm curious what others think.
2) The second thought is just how profoundly political communal liturgical prayer inevitably is, in a way that personal prayer is not. It's an assertion of identity, of belonging. It's an act of building community and creating solidarity, all specifically done on the context of the relationship between human and God, independent of the subjective experience of prayer. In the context of Jewish communities, at least those that maintain the traditional liturgy, it happens three times a day, and so also requires building one's life around it. Personal prayer may cultivate certain attitudes, but communal prayer cultivates action. Can this be harnessed to build political culture? How?
One sneaky thing about the Catholic faith is that there isn't really any completely private or solitary prayer. When I pray the Liturgy of the Hours (a cycle of daily psalms and readings), I know Catholics all over the world are praying the same words with me—and that's not even counting the unity I have outside of time with everyone who is praying the same words on a different day or in a different year!
Monks and nuns inhabit a physical cell, but everyone is called to cultivate an "interior cell" in the words of St. Catherine of Siena, in which to commune with God. But the more we love God, the more we participate in His love for His people, so turning inward turns us outward again.
It was interesting to hear a Jewish perspective on this article. My understanding of prayer (and hence how I engaged with this article) is formed by Catholic Christianity which ultimately finds expression in the liturgy, which has both a communal aspect and a personal aspect. I thought of this dynamic when I read the second paragraph on p. 2 of the pdf where Danielou labels as "totally insufficient" a Christianity which merely "consists of certain gestures" and "practices". This both/and could happen in a mystical way, as mentioned in this comment, where liturgy (such as the Divine Office) even when done individually is in a very real sense in communion which the Church on earth and throughout time.
On the other hand, it can also be found in a practical sense in the harmony of personal and communal devotion that shapes public prayer such as the Mass. Think about the period of silence which is supposed to follow each reading. This time is supposed to allow the readings - proclaimed to the community - to speak to you personally, to allow you "to take the word of God to heart and to prepare a response to it in prayer" (GIRM 56). Or think about the silence that follows the "Let us pray". This silence proceeding the (public) call to prayer is designed for individuals to (personally) "be conscious of the fact that they are in God’s presence", and "formulate their petitions mentally" (GIRM 54). Their own petitions.
I am not familiar with Jewish ritual prayer but I wonder if there is some element of this in it as well?
So Jewish ritual communal prayer definitely has moments built in for personal prayer, as well as a long history of different practices and intentions built to attempt to make the fixed liturgy personal to the individual praying. As I said above: "Questions of how to find personal meaning in communal prayer, strategies of connecting with God through the mandated liturgy, of assuring that following the external forms leaves space for "service of the heart" are all important to Jewish thought around prayer." However, it's all very much in the framework of a mandated liturgy with a fixed text, ideally said communally. I was deliberately emphasizing the communal and fixed element in contrast to how I was reading Fr. Daniélou.
I suspect that Catholic and Jewish liturgy share a lot, even as canon law does not expect every individual Catholic to participate in the Liturgy of the Hours daily in the way that Jewish law requires it of Jews.
(Jewish law requires prayer three times daily, not specifically the Hours, just to clarify. Sorry for the pronoun with the unclear antecedent, my 7th grade English teacher would be ashamed of me.)
Do you think this is reflected in the way Fr. Daniélou writes about prayer here? How does it fit into his scheme of "social" vs. "personal" religion? Does it have political consequences? (So many questions, sorry, I'll stop myself there.)
I think other parts of the book may be helpful here. In the first chapter, he writes:
"Religious freedom must be thought of as a right that belongs to communities as well as to individuals. It implies not only that people should be able to practise religion publicly, but also that they should have the scope and mutual support necessary to order their lives with the demands of that religion. In no other way can tradition be kept alive among a people."
Though his definition of prayer here doesn't really seem to reflect a communal element, I think Danielou would agree completely that communal prayer, and the conditions that would make communal prayer accessible to the masses, fall under the purview of the "political problem" he is describing.
I think he is talking about a mere cultural attachment to religion. Think of the atheist Jew that just enjoys family time and ritual at Passover. Or Irish Catholics that think it’s an act of faith to attend a St. Patrick’s day parade and get drunk. If your faith isn’t at all personal it’s just empty kitsch. Unbelievers in society won’t accommodate or respect us if they think our religion is phony. He points out that we are criticized not for being Christian but for being bad Christians.
I love this comment & the questions it raises, and idk if I have any answers, but this comment made me notice the way Daniélou brings up monks as "feeling the need to create an environment in which they will find prayer possible." In the Catholic religious tradition, vowed religious are *obliged* to communal/social prayer, they are bound by law to it and structure their lives around it, as distinct from the personal prayer to which they are *urged* and *commended*. But fundamentally, the communal liturgy of the hours takes precedence. I think it does say a lot that, as Daniélou implies, vowed religious have often felt the need to withdraw from a society they perceive as hostile to prayer (both communal and personal) in order to pursue that as their lives' goal. The blossoming of active, urban religious life—that places personal and communal prayer at the heart of the modern city—might be able to tell us something about that. For now these are all just ruminations but I hope to reread the chapter and have something more meaningful/conclusive to add here!
100%, that's a wonderful observation. I'll add that Jewish law requires thrice daily prayer, ideally communal, of all adults (though some argue that women are exempt). Everybody is expect to structure their lives around prayer. And modern cities are the center of thriving prayer communities. Ad hoc groups of observant Jews gathering daily in office buildings to say the afternoon service as well as more permanent prayer groups and synagogues. Cities, with their masses of people seeking to connect with each other, to find community of various kinds, are hot beds of prayer. I can't imagine that Judaism is unique in this, or that urban life is really as hostile to prayer, communal social prayer, as he seems to think. The richest prayer communities I have observed and been a part of have all been urban.
On this point, I really loved the book Empowered Judaism by Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, and I cite it in my Building the BenOp. Kaunfer is so thoughtful about all the small preparations it takes to make a space for communal prayer. (I love the tip to put out fewer chairs than needed and then add extras, so things feel busy and cheerful, rather than sparse and slow).
Empowered Judaism is great, and Hadar is 100% one of the prayer communities I had in mind when talking about urban communal prayer. (Elie is also a delightful human being. We were neighbors for a few years.)
These are very good observations! It can be helpful to remember that Fr. Daniélou is a Jesuit, an order founded to engage and evangelize the world. Their spirituality is quite different than that of Monks.
There is much here for fruitful reflection, and in such a variety of directions. One spark that stood out for me was when I read, "If politics does not create the conditions in which man can completely fulfil himself, it becomes an impediment to that fulfilment." (p. 2) It made me think of John Rawls' idea to (if I remember this right) put comprehensive systems of belief outside of politics. Because these systems create intractable conflict, they cannot be used as a way to form or judge a political framework. And religion is often cited as an example of such a system.
But if Fr. Danielou is right, Rawls' approach is self-defeating from a human level because it prevents our flourishing. It forces us to bracket an essential part of who we are as merely interior. In a sense, our prayer is not allowed to be social because it would be too politically disruptive. I wonder if the outburst of strongly moralistic political ideologies on the left and the right is the result of the repression of the social dimension of prayer, as broadly conceived here by Fr. Danielou. He speaks again and again of how hard it is for most to pray when the environment works against it. Perhaps our environment has not simply made prayer difficult, but has perverted the impulse into something angry and hateful out of frustration.
Yes! People's religious beliefs *do* clash and cause tension, but people can't neatly live a life of private religion or philosophy. If we love our neighbor, we will their good. And if we disagree about what that good is, there will be tension.
While reading, I found it difficult not to keep returning to the idea that's become pretty popularly discussed these days, that politics and other secular concerns have developed into a type of pseudo-spiritual practice for some.
While Daniélou highlights the dangers of contemporary life to our appreciation of the sacred -- "A world which had built up its culture without reference to God, a humanism from which adoration was completely absent, would make the maintenance of a positive religious point of view impossible for the great majority of men" -- I think there's an impulse overlooked here. A culture may fall away from public devotion to God, but the "nones" -- to borrow survey parlance, those without a religious affiliation -- seem no less aware of that void. Prayer is simply replaced by less useful, secular (and sometimes downright heretical) forms of devotion.
Perhaps the next question then is, to what extent does a perversion of the prayer impulse harm the culture that's fostered this secularism? An absence of prayer is bad for individuals and the greater society, but what is the consequence of its proactive, corrupted form?
I think it can lead to having isolated *pieces* of a faith, which can't hold together. Discussion of shared guilt for systemic discrimination can mirror original sin... but without a theology of repentance.
And one of the important freedoms from work is the expectation of knowing *when* you'll be off, so you can make commitments to things besides your boss. Someone who gets their work schedule with a week's notice can't take responsibility for a weekly hour at the Adoration chapel.
I had a similar thought about the description of modern urban life as "relentlessly collective." I often think of the problem of urban life, especially for single people, as one of loneliness. Perhaps, paradoxically, that loneliness is due in part to a lack of solitude and contemplation. Instead of making time for that, are we "relentlessly collective" in going to happy hours, rec sports leagues, new restaurants, and all the other offerings a city holds out?
Some of the "relentless collectivity" today seems more driven by social media—people are always gathered (in a sense!) and you are absent from an active conversation whenever you are solitary.