PATER NOSTER. - The prayer taught by Jesus to the Apostles, and for that reason called Oratio dominicalis. It is the prayer par excellence of the Christian, the model and type of every other.
The formula is handed down in the twofold redaction of Mt. 6:9-13 and Lk. 11:2-4. The text of Matthew was adopted by the Church from apostolic times (cf. Didache, 8, which adds to it the doxology, which also entered some codices of the Gospels: "for thine is the power and the glory for ever"). Amen is the "seal" (St. Jerome), which entered the Vulgate from liturgical use. Luke's recension is shorter: it begins with the simple invocation, "Father"; the third petition is missing ("thy will be done"...), and the last ("deliver us from evil"), which is the complement of the preceding one. Matthew's recension, as the more complete and, in the judgment of critics, the closer to a Semitic original, reproduces in substance the textual formula of Jesus. The Evangelist inserted it in the Sermon on the Mount. But Luke has better preserved the historical circumstance (after the episode at Bethany), prefixing the episode that gave occasion for the teaching: "And it came to pass that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said to him: 'Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.'"
The prayer begins with an elevation: "Our Father, who art in heaven." St. Augustine brings out the social and fraternal note: "oratio fraterna est: non dicit, Pater meus, sed... omnes videlicet una oratione complectens" (Ep., 130). Above all, the tone of filial confidence is emphasized, in the profound sentiment of the divine fatherhood, which in the Christian religion dominates and absorbs all the relations of the creature with the Creator. Then follows the body of the prayer, divided into two parts: the first comprises three invocations or aspirations that have as their object the glory of God himself; the second sets forth in four petitions the temporal and spiritual needs of the creature.
1st part. - The first three invocations reflect in beautiful symmetry the sentiments of filial love toward the heavenly Father. In them it is invoked: 1) that "his name be hallowed," that is, blessed, venerated, esteemed everywhere as holy; that God be known and loved by all as the Supreme Good and the source of every perfection; 2) that "his kingdom come," that the sovereignty of his power be established and spread everywhere, in the homage of minds and wills, and of his love, with the wide diffusion of divine Grace, and that this kingdom unite men in truth, in justice, in peace; 3) that "his will be done" - the condition and measure of the expansion of the kingdom - "on earth as it is in heaven"; that the just and holy will of the Father be fulfilled on earth by men with the same readiness and perfection with which it is executed in heaven by the angelic spirits, the faithful executors of the divine wills (Ps. 102:20). In the threefold progressive invocation is the recognition of the threefold prerogative of God in relation to the creature: most loving and beneficent Father, glorious and universal King, supreme and absolute Master; and at the same time it is the commitment to cooperate for the realization of such noble ends.
Of the three invocations the most profound and mysterious is the second (A. Vitti, in Biblica, 23 [1942], p. 204 ff.). Its interpretation depends on the meaning attributed to the "Kingdom of God" (v.), a complex notion, whose single reality presents itself under multiple aspects, which are reduced substantially to three: individual or ascetico-mystical (the triumph of divine Grace in the soul and in the life of the Christian), ecclesiological or also missionary-social (the diffusion of the knowledge of God and the observance of his law in the world, the triumph and exaltation of the Kingdom of God on earth, the Church), eschatological (the final manifestation of the glory of God in the triumph of his justice and in the glorification of the elect). The full interpretation is the one that does not exclude but unifies the multiple particular aspects in the unitary spiritual vision: ut sit Deus omnia in omnibus (I Cor. 15:28).
2nd part. - There follow the petitions on the part of human weakness and indigence.
In the first place, nourishment for life, bread, is asked of the Father: but in bread, the basis of human nourishment, are included material needs of every kind, all that concerns the bodily life; by reflection the petition can be extended to the spiritual life, which likewise needs its nourishment. It is for each day (give us today) and is meant to be a perennial recognition of God's providence and of his supreme dominion over human life, as also of the creature's absolute dependence on him. "Our daily bread" (Greek ἐπιούσιον): an epithet that does not occur elsewhere in Sacred Scripture, nor is it ever used in classical literature, but only in the Hellenistic koine language (some examples have recently been found in popular texts). Its meaning is disputed (F. Zorell, Lexicon graecum N. T., 2nd ed., Paris 1931, cols. 480-91), as is evident also from the different rendering of the same word in the Vulgate: supersubstantia(tm) (Mt. 6:11), and quotidianum (Lk. 11:3). The various interpretations gathered since antiquity are reduced to these two senses: a) the first understands ἐπιούσιος as a synonym of ἐφήμερος ("daily"), from the participle ἐπιούσα (sc. ἡμέρα) or ἐπιών (sc. χρόνος), which means the imminent or tomorrow's day, or also the day that is beginning, hence bread "for the day"; thus more or less, with Athanasius, Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Alexandria, many ancient and recent interpreters and several versions (quotidianum, Old Latin; "of tomorrow" or "of the future" in the Sahidic, Gospel of the Hebrews; "perpetual," in the Curetonian-Sinaitic Syriac, Gothic and Armenian; "of each day," Ethiopic); b) the second interpretation derives the epithet from the noun ἐπι-ουσία (subsistence, substance), that is, indispensable for subsisting, hence "necessary": thus Origen, Cyril of Jerusalem, Jerome, Theophylact, Euthymius, and many recent Catholics and non-Catholics, with the Peshitta. This interpretation seems the most reliable, all the more so since the daily character is already expressed in the adverb σήμερον "today" (Lk. 11:3 καθ' ἡμέραν "for every day"): an epithet of the same sense would be a tautology. The Latin term supersubstantialem has suggested the supernatural bread, hence the Eucharistic bread (thus, after St. Irenaeus, many writers, both Catholic and non-Catholic): but such a meaning in the context can only be secondary.
"Forgive us our debts": the merciful Father is entreated to grant us the pardon of "our sins" (thus Lk. 11:4), a formidable debt that cannot be satisfied unless the Lord himself remits it. But to obtain from God the remission, there is an indispensable condition (cf. Mt. 6:14-15, the concluding warning of the prayer), the mutual remission of debts, that is, of offenses, fraternal forgiveness. Nothing is more natural and dutiful, in a petition of such importance, than the protestation of this generous forgiveness which Jesus requires sincere and explicit in the very act of invoking divine pardon: "as we also forgive our debtors." It is a kind of pact: "if man fails in this, the effect of the prayer is null" (St. Augustine). And here is expressed the formal commitment of man before the great commandment of charity toward neighbor.
The last two petitions (in substance only one, as Chrysostom observes) concern the future: reminding God of the dangers to which we are exposed, we invoke liberation from them for the attainment of the end, which is the holiness of life and the salvation of the soul. "Lead us not into temptation," that is, into every occasion of sin to which man is exposed by his innate frailty and by various external causes. "Lead us not" is a crude Semitism which, having entered even the versions, must be rightly understood: "do not permit us to succumb to temptation," falling into the fault to which temptation is an incentive; we do not ask to be exempt from temptation, but to emerge from it victorious (St. Augustine). "But deliver us from evil": πονηρός (like the Latin malo) can be understood both as neuter (evil) and as masculine (the malignant one par excellence, Satan): the first meaning has prevailed, understanding evil in its whole extent: physical evil and moral evil, and therefore also the author and instigator of every evil, the devil.
In this formula, depth equals simplicity. St. Cyprian (De Orat. Dom.: PL 4, 535) echoes Tertullian, who defines it as "totius Evangelii breviarium" (De Oratione: PL 1, 1255); St. Thomas calls it oratio perfectissima, because it sums up all the petitions of a good prayer (Sum. Theol., 2a-2ae, q. 83, 8-9). Therefore it has always held a pre-eminent place in Christian practice and in the liturgy. The Didaché (8) urged that it be recited three times a day; St. Cyprian attests that it was (publica nobis et communis oratio) of his time or, as Tertullian says, oratio legitima et ordinaria.
In the ancient catechumenate there was a special rite called traditio or explanation of the P., which took place on the fourth feria after the Fourth Sunday of Lent; and in Baptism, at the end of the rite, the neophyte himself recited the P.: and even today the P. is recited, together with the Creed, by the priest and the sponsor, or by the baptizand himself if he is an adult. Also in the Mass (v.) of all rites it has its place in the Canon, a use that probably goes back to the apostolic age, according to the testimony of Gregory the Great (Ep. IX ad Joh. Syrac.) and of Jerome (Adv. Pelag., III, 15). Likewise in the Divine Office, in the Sacramentals and in all sacred functions the P. holds the place of honor.
The originality of the P. has been contested in recent times by some rationalists and by numerous Jewish writers (J. J. Wetstein, E. Stapfer, J. Nork, A. Wünsche, H. Hamburger, J. Lightfoot, G. Friedländer, G. Klein, D. De Sola, C. G. Montefiore, etc.). Friedländer writes: "The Lord's Prayer is entirely Jewish... all the phrases and all the petitions have been drawn from Jewish sources" (The Jewish sources of the Sermon of the Mount, London 1911, p. 163). And there are adduced, besides the apocryphal Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs (in which traces of Christian interpolation are evident), disconnected phrases of rabbis of the 3rd-4th centuries, some invocations of the well-known Jewish prayer Shemoneh Esreh ("...forgive us, our Father... deliver us for your name's sake..., be king over us...") and of the Qaddish, a doxology in use in the synagogues (Aramaic text in A. Dalman, Die Worte Jesu, French trans. in Rev. biblique, 24 [1915], p. 557 ff.). In this last document (vv. 1, 2, 4) there are allusions to the holiness of God's name, to the establishment of his Kingdom and to the fulfillment of his will, which suggest the first three petitions of the P. (A. Harnack too recognized in these first three invocations a markedly Jewish tone, to the point of expunging them as additions, together with the last, from the original form of Jesus' prayer). Exaggerating the analogies, David De Sola (The old Jewish aramaic prayer the Kaddish, Leipzig 1909) concluded outright for the literary dependence of the P. on the Qaddish. But it must be noted first of all that the Qaddish is a cento, composed of pieces of various ages, as is admitted by the critics, and the vv. 1, 2 and 4 cited above certainly are not earlier than the Christian era (one of the principal phrases occurs for the first time in R. Joseph, a tannaitic rabbi of the 2nd century). On the other hand it is no wonder that in the mare magnum of rabbinic writings one encounters here and there, scattered and fragmentary, terms and expressions in some way analogous to the formulas of the P. It is certain, however, that nowhere are such sublime invocations found gathered together in a formula of prayer as simple and pithy as the
P., in clear contrast with the prolixity of the rabbinic formulas. Above all the spirit is different, and therefore the scope and the meaning. The commentary and interpretation of the P. are to be sought in the Sermon on the Mount. Thoughts of such great moral elevation find no counterpart either in the Shemoneh Esreh or in the Qaddish or in other Jewish formulas of prayer. Even the second petition, which has appeared to some "the most Jewish of all the petitions of the P.," proves, on careful examination, perfectly in conformity with Christ's most original thought on the nature of the messianic Kingdom, a spiritual and transcendent kingdom, which is the inheritance of the poor, the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful (Mt. 5, 3 ff.). Moreover, for some petitions of the P. the parallels with the Old Testament hold good (for the Name of God: Lev. 22, 32; Is. 29, 23; Ez. 36, 23; for the Kingdom: Ps. 21, 29; 103, 19; Abd. 21; Tob. 13, 1, etc.), from which likewise descend, mingled with much dross, the rare felicitous expressions of the rabbinic texts.
The place of the teaching of the P. is indicated by a tradition going back to the 9th century in a sanctuary near the summit of the Mount of Olives, where from the 4th century a great basilica, called Eleona, consecrated the memory of Jesus' teachings to the Apostles (with special reference to the eschatological discourse delivered on this mount: cf. Mt. 24, 3). Although the Evangelist has left the place undetermined (Lk. 11, 1 "in a certain place") and the voice of tradition is not very ancient (G. Perrella, I Luoghi Santi, Piacenza 1936, pp. 218-28), nevertheless the historical circumstance brings us very close to that locality. In fact, if the P. was taught shortly after the episode of Bethany, which immediately precedes (Lk. 10, 38 ff.), it is very probable that this happened in the vicinity of that same village, near the summit of the Olivet.
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