Lord's Prayer

The Lord's Prayer (Le Pater Noster), by James Tissot (between 1886 and 1894, Brooklyn Museum, New York City)

The Lord's Prayer, also known as the Our Father (Latin: Pater Noster), is considered the most important prayer of all Christians and, according to the New Testament, was instituted by Jesus Christ himself in the context of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:9–13) or in response to the question of his disciples as to how they should pray (Luke 11:2–4).

The Tradition of the Gospels

The version of the Gospel of Matthew is the most common and well-known:

„9 After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. 10 Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. 11 Give us this day our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. 13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.“

– Matthew 6:9–13

The Gospel of Luke says:

„2 And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. 3 Give us day by day our daily bread. 4 And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.“

– Luke 11:2–4

Jesus taught the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic, but in writing it has only been handed down in the original Greek text of the Bible.

Greek	Latin	English
Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς· ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου· ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου· γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς· τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον· καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν, ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφήκαμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν· καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν, ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.	Pater noster, qui es in caelis: sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo, et in terra. Panem nostrum supersubstantialem (cotidianum) da nobis hodie. Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.	Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Through translation into today's languages, the Lord's Prayer loses its power, but this can be compensated for by a correct understanding of the text of the prayer:

„The prayers of the old languages lose their old power when they are translated into newer languages. There is much more power in the Latin words of the Pater noster than in the Lord's Prayer. The language of the ancient Lord's Prayer is the Aramaic. Whoever spoke it in the Aramaic language felt magic power. Through the correct grasp of things we must again bring the power of the words into the language.“ (Lit.:GA 97, p. 98)

However, the effectiveness of the Lord's Prayer is always given by the pure content of its words, even if the praying person is not yet given a deeper understanding:

The Lord's Prayer "is indeed one of the very deepest prayers in the world. It is only that today we can no longer appreciate the full depth of the Lord's Prayer as the original language in which it was taught would have revealed. But the content of the thought is so powerful that it could not suffer any loss in any language." (Lit.:GA 97, p. 103)

„Those prayers which not only have a brief effect, but which grip souls and lift hearts through millennia, are all drawn from the deepest wisdom. Such prayers have never been given in such a way that beautiful or sublime words have been put together in an arbitrary way, but they have been taken from the deepest wisdom, because only in this way do they have the power to have an effect on the souls of men over the millennia. The objection that the naive soul knows nothing of this wisdom does not apply. It does not need to know anything, for the power which the Lord's Prayer has comes from this wisdom, and it works even if one knows nothing about it.“ (Lit.:GA 97, p. 116)

The esoteric meaning of the Lord's Prayer

The Lord's Prayer in connection with the essential memberss of man (Lit.:GA 96, p. 207)

The seven supplications of the Lord's Prayer according to Matthew refer to the seven members of man's being. In them lies the meaning of the sevenfold development of man's nature. The Lord's Prayer contains the whole theosophical wisdom about man. (Lit.:GA 97, p. 116)

By "guilt" is meant the transgressions of the etheric body. These transgressions bring man into disharmony with his social environment. Temptation" refers to transgressions of the astral body, they are of an individual nature. Contrary to the usual translation of the fourth petition today as "And deliver us from evil", Steiner's translation of πονηροῦ (ponērou) or malo as "evil" refers to the specific transgression of the I: egoism. "Deliver us from evil" means the request for deliverance from egoism. (Lit.:GA 97, p. 122)

A certain tradition knows the addition to Matthew's Lord's Prayer: "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever". This is an addition that does not come from Jesus himself, but from the circle of Dionysius, the Areopagite. However, Steiner sees this addition as fitting to the Lord's Prayer, enriching the prayer. It is the idea of the angelic kingdoms, the three hierarchies that lead up to God the Father.

„If we live as the Lord's Prayer demands, we live our way up through the powers, authorities, dominions to the cherubim, seraphim, up to the Godhead itself in the Lord's Prayer.“ (Lit.:GA 97, p. 124)

From a different perspective, the three ideas of kingdom, power or might and glory are considered in GA 342, p. 193ff: They appear there as the three aspects of a vivid solar trinity:

„And instead of concluding with the words of the evangelical Lord's Prayer: "... for Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory", you can also conclude the Lord's Prayer: "... for Thine is the sun". Every being was regarded in the sense of the Trinity; and he who still knows something of the real Gnostic knowledge knows that simply at the conclusion of the Lord's Prayer it was prayed in such a way that the members of the Trinity of the Sun were brought forward in words, and that one had the consciousness that by closing the Lord's Prayer one was actually saying the seven supplications and pointing to oneself: "Deliver us from evil, for Thou art the Sun". . deliver us from evil": for You who dwell in the Sun, You are the One who is able to do this.“ (Lit.:GA 342, p. 194)

Another esoteric aspect of the Lord's Prayer is illuminated by the account of how Jesus was inspired to offer this prayer. (From Akashic Research. The Fifth Gospel) (Lit.:GA 148, p. 88ff), see also: The Inverted Lord's Prayer).

The Lord's Prayer as a daily prayer is suitable for the development of occult powers. In an answer to a question (after the 10th lecture GA 137, in Beiträge zur Rudolf-Steiner-Gesamtausgabe Heft Nr. 110) Rudolf Steiner expresses himself thus:

„The Lord's Prayer as a daily prayer is in the highest degree suitable for developing occult powers. It is the most effective of the prayers. The more respect and devotion one has for this prayer, the better it is for a consciousness soul. When man prays it, even if he knows nothing about it, the forces which are the original forces of man still underlie the prayer. The one who taught people this prayer had to know these forces. Whoever uses it can unconsciously have these forces living in him. Respect for this prayer grows more and more the more one enters into it. Then come times when, because of the majesty of the Lord's Prayer, one does not dare to pray the whole Lord's Prayer in one day, because one gets such a great idea of the interaction of the seven petitions that one does not consider oneself worthy to unfold this greatest initiatory prayer in one's heart every day.“ (Lit.: Contributions 110, p. 25)

„Now, for the prayer, in order to be able to be descriptive, I would like to link up with the Lord's Prayer itself and would like to discuss the inner experience of this Lord's Prayer here. It is a matter of the fact that today we cannot perhaps start from the feelings that the early Christians had when they heard the Lord's Prayer or when they brought it to life inwardly; we must start from what the man of the present day can have, for we want to speak of the Lord's Prayer as a general human being. But we must be aware of the following. Let us assume, then, that we begin to say the Lord's Prayer and in our own style, so to speak, we say the first sentence, "Our Father in the heavens". Now it is a question of what we feel and sense with such a sentence, and what we can feel and sense with other sentences of the Lord's Prayer, for only in this way does the Lord's Prayer become inwardly alive. It is indeed a matter of our first having something like an inner perception of such a sentence, really not merely something that lives in us in the sign of the word, but something that lives in us in the real word. The heavens are basically the totality of the cosmos, and by saying "Our Father in the heavens" or "Our Father who art in the heavens" we make it clear to ourselves that what we are speaking to is permeated by something spiritual, we are addressing the spiritual. That is the perception, that is what we should bring before our eyes as vividly as possible when we pronounce such a sentence "Our Father who art in heaven". We must have just such an experience [with the words] "Thy kingdom come to us", for the question must arise in us, even if more or less only felt and inwardly intuitive: What is this kingdom now? And if we are Christians, we will be reminded of something that was spoken of here yesterday, we will be reminded of Christ's words that echo the term "the kingdoms of heaven". In the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, Christ wants to speak to the people on the one hand and to the disciples on the other about what the kingdom of heaven is. So something must be stirred up by the phrase "Thy kingdom" or "Thy kingdoms come to us". Well, when does the right thing become active in us? The right thing only becomes active in us when we do not have such sentences as thoughts, but when we can bring them to life as if we really heard them inwardly, that is, when we apply what I have discussed with you several times in the last few days. The way must be made from the concept to the word, for in it lies a quite different inner experience if, without speaking outwardly, we have inwardly not merely an abstract conceptual content, but the living experience of the sound, in whatever language it may be at first. The whole of the Lord's Prayer will, so to speak, already reduce the specificity of language, even if we do not present the mere thought content but the sound content from any language. In earlier times it was very important in prayer that the phonetic content should come to life inwardly, for only when the phonetic content comes to life inwardly does prayer transform itself into what it must be, into a dialogue with the divine. Prayer is never a real prayer if it is not a dialogue with the divine, and the Lord's Prayer is made into such a dialogue with the divine in the most eminent sense by its special structure. We are, as it were, out of ourselves when we say such phrases as "Our Father, who art in the heavens" or "May your kingdoms come to us". We forget ourselves at the moment by properly making these sentences inwardly audibly alive. We extinguish ourselves to a great extent simply by the content of these sentences, but we take ourselves in hand again when we read or inwardly bring to life sentences of a different structure. We immediately take ourselves in hand again when we say "Let your name be hallowed". It is indeed a living dialogue with the divine, because this "Thy name be hallowed" is immediately transformed in us into an inner deed. On the one hand we have the perception "Our Father, who art in the heavens"; without something happening in the process, it is not possible to experience this sentence in its completeness. And by attuning ourselves to inward hearing, this inward hearing arouses in us the name of Christ, as it aroused the name of Yahweh in pre-Christian times, in the sense in which I have spoken about the beginning of the Gospel of John. So if we say within ourselves the sentence "Our Father, who art in the heavens" in the right way, then the name of Christ is mixed into this saying for us in our present time, and then we inwardly give the answer to that which we feel as a question: "Let this name be sanctified through us".

You see, prayer takes on the form of a dialogue with the Divine when we live correctly into the Lord's Prayer; likewise, when we experience in the right way as a perception "May your kingdoms come to us". These kingdoms we cannot at first receive into intellectualistic consciousness; we can receive them into the will alone. And again, when we lose ourselves in the sentence "Thy kingdoms may come to us," we find ourselves, we take ourselves in hand and vow that the kingdoms, when they come to us, will work in us, that the divine Will will really be done as in the heavenly kingdoms, thus also ds.y where we are on earth. You see, you have an exchange with the Divine in the Lord's Prayer.

This intercommunication prepares you to have the inner dignity to relate that which now belongs to the earth with that with which you have come into intercommunication, also for earthly circumstances. It might seem conspicuous to one that I say that the words "Thy name be hallowed" arouse in us the Christ name. But therein, my dear friends, lies the whole mystery of Christ. This Christ-mystery will not be properly seen until the beginning of the Gospel of John is properly understood. At the beginning of the Gospel of John you read the words "All things came into being through the Word, and there is nothing in what came into being that did not come into being through the Word". By attributing the creation of the world to the Father-God, you are in fact going against the Gospel of John. One only holds to the Gospel of John if one is certain that that which has come into being, that which surrounds us as the world, has come into being through the Word, that is, in the Christian sense, through the Christ, through the Son, that the Father is the substantial underlying, the subsisting, and that the Father has no name, but that His name is precisely that which lives in the Christ. The whole mystery of Christ lies in this "Let thy name be hallowed", for the name of the Father is given in the Christ. We will have enough to say about this on other occasions, but today I wanted above all to point out how in prayer there must be a real inner dialogue with the divine through the very content of the prayer.

Then we can go further and say to ourselves: It is not from the mere world of nature that we are given what we become every day through the intake of our food, through bread. We take bread from nature through the processes I have described to you; through our digestive processes, through the processes of regeneration, we become what we are on earth as earthly human beings, but this must not really live in us, for the life of the God is different, the life of the God lives in the spiritual events. After we have entered into dialogue with the divine in the first part of the Lord's Prayer, we can now, out of the mood that has taken hold of our inner being, leave out the negative and say the positive: "Give us today our bread that works in everyday life. What is meant by this is that what otherwise are only natural processes and work in us as natural processes should become a spiritual process through our consciousness, through our inner experience. And in the same way our attitude is to be transformed. We should become able to forgive those who have done something to us, who have harmed us. We can only do this if we become aware that we have done much harm to the Divine-Spiritual and that we therefore have to ask for the right attitude, so that we can treat in the right way that which has harmed us on earth, that which has been owed to us on earth; we can only do this if we become aware that we are always harming the Divine through our very nature and that we are always in need of the forgiveness of that Being to whom we have become guilty.

And then we can also bring forward the following, which is again an earthly matter, that is, that which we want to send up to Him to whom we have first placed ourselves in a relationship. "Lead us not into temptation," that is, let the connection with Thee be so active in us that we do not experience the temptation to become absorbed in mere nature, to surrender ourselves merely to nature, so that we can hold on to Thee in all our everyday nourishment. "And deliver us, deliver us from evil." Evil consists in man's detachment from the Divine; we ask to be freed and delivered from this evil.

When we approach the Lord's Prayer, my dear friends, more and more on the basis of such feelings, then the Lord's Prayer does indeed deepen into an inner experience which makes us capable of really creating for ourselves, through the mood into which we put ourselves, the possibility of working not only from the physical human being to the physical human being, but as a human soul to the human soul. For then we have, as it were, brought ourselves into contact with the divine and find the divine creation in the other human being, and through this we first learn to feel how we have to understand such a word: "Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of My brethren, you have done it to Me". There we have learned to feel the divine in everything earthly that exists. But we must turn away from world existence in a real sense, not by a theory, but in a real sense, because we become aware that the world existence which is first given to us as human beings is not at all the real world existence, but the de-divinised world existence, and that we have the real world existence only after we have turned to God in prayer and have found a connection with God in prayer.

With this, my dear friends, the staircase, the stairway that can lead up to the realisation of the religious impulse in the human being, is first of all only indicated in the most elementary steps. This religious impulse is, as it were, inherent in man from the very beginning, but it is a question of man becoming conscious of this impulse which lies within him, and he can only do this when prayer becomes in him a real intercourse with the Divine. The first significant discovery one can make with the Lord's Prayer is that its inner structure is such that one can immediately, if one understands it, enter into a reciprocal relationship between the human and the divine. This is, of course, only a beginning, my dear friends, but it is so that the beginning, if it is experienced correctly, leads on of its own accord, and precisely when the question is conceived in religious terms, it is a question of wanting to find in the experience of the first steps the strength to take the following steps through our own inner being.“ (Lit.:GA 343a, p. 151ff)

The Esoteric Apostles' Prayer

The esoteric Apostles' Prayer was given by Rudolf Steiner in the period before 1913 in the following form:

Vater, der du warst, bist und sein wirst in unser aller innerstem Wesen! Dein Wesen wird in uns allen verherrlicht und hochgepriesen. Dein Reich erweitere sich in unseren Taten und in unserem Lebenswandel. Deinen Willen führen wir in der Betätigung unseres Lebens so aus, wie du, ο Vater, ihn in unser innerstes Gemüt gelegt hast. Die Nahrung des Geistes, das Brot des Lebens, bietest du uns in Überfülle in den wechselnden Zuständen unseres Lebens. Lasse Ausgleich sein unser Erbarmen an anderen für die Sünden an unserem Wesen begangen. Den Versucher lässt du nicht über das Vermögen unserer Kraft in uns wirken, da in deinem Wesen keine Versuchung bestehen kann; denn der Versucher ist nur Schein und Täuschung, aus der du, ο Vater, uns durch das Licht deiner Erkenntnis sicher herausführen wirst. Deine Kraft und Herrlichkeit wirke in uns in die Zeitläufe der Zeitläufe. (Lit.:GA 268, p. 341)

Father, you who were, are and will be in the innermost being of all of us! Your being is glorified and highly praised in all of us. Your kingdom expand in our deeds and in our way of life. We carry out your will in the activity of our lives as you, ο Father, have placed it in our innermost mind. The nourishment of the spirit, the bread of life, you offer us in abundance in the changing states of our lives. Let our mercy on others be compensation for the sins committed against our being. You do not allow the tempter to work in us beyond the capacity of our strength, since no temptation can exist in your being; for the tempter is only appearance and deception, from which you, ο Father, will lead us safely out through the light of your knowledge. Thy power and glory work in us into the courses of the ages.

Literature

• Friedrich Rittelmeyer: Das Vaterunser. Ein Weg zur Menschwerdung. Urachhaus 1990. ISBN 3-87838-415-7
• Valentin Tomberg: Der VATERUNSER-Kurs, Bände 1 - 4 (Achamoth Verlag) 2010
• Judith von Halle: Das Vaterunser. Das lebendige Wort Gottes. Verlag am Goetheanum, Dornach 2006, ISBN 3-7235-1274-7
• Peter Selg: Das Vaterunser in der Darstellung Rudolf Steiners. Verlag Freies Geistesleben 2012 (2. Aufl.) ISBN 3772523986
• Rudolf Steiner: Das christliche Mysterium, S. 102 ff. GA 97 (1998), ISBN 3-7274-0970-3 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Ursprungsimpulse der Geisteswissenschaft, S. 202 ff. GA 96 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Aus der Akasha-Forschung. Das fünfte Evangelium S. 92 ff. GA 148 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Mantrische Sprüche. Seelenübungen Band II, 1903 – 1925, GA 268 (1999), ISBN 3-7274-2680-2 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Vorträge und Kurse über christlich-religiöses Wirken II, 1921 GA 343 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe Beiträge (Contributions) 110, S. 25

References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated. Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com. Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English. Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA) Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.