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The Nature of Prayer1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

Mary Whiton Calkins
Mary Whiton Calkins
Affiliation:
Wellesley College
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Extract

Prayer is the intercourse of the human spirit with a reality, or being, realized as greater-than-human and either conceived or treated as personal. This definition, it will be observed, leaves open the question whether the object of religion is always reflectively known to be personal; yet it regards prayer, the characteristic religious experience, as a personal and personifying consciousness, the worshipper's awareness of superhuman reality in vital connection with him, the worshipper. As William James has said, “The religious phenomenon, studied as an inner fact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications has shown itself to consist, everywhere and at all its stages, in the consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related.” Or, to quote Jevons, “rites and ceremonies, sacrifices and altars exist” for the sake of “the prayer in which man's soul rises or seeks to rise to God.”

This paper considers the nature of prayer thus conceived as the expression of intercourse with God—or with the gods.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , October 1911 , pp. 489 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1911

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References

2 The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 465.

3 F. B. Jevons, An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion, 1908, p. 149.

4 The Psychology of Religious Experience, 1910, p. 972, etc. Cf. Irving King, “The Differentiation of the Religious Consciousness” in Psychological Review, Monograph Supplement, 1905, pp. 2, 20, etc.

5 Ames, , op. cit., pp. 97 ff.Google Scholar, 106, 120, 172 ff., 311.

6 See Leuba, J. H., The Psychological Origin and the Nature of Religion, pp. 65 ff.Google Scholar; and M. Jastrow, as cited below, p. 492, and footnote.

7 The Golden Bough, second edition, p. xvi. Cf. Jevons, F. B., who quotes these words, op. cit., p. 94.Google Scholar

8 F. B. Jevons, An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion, 1908, p. 71. Cf. p. 104.

9 See Leuba, , op. cit., pp. 12 ff.Google Scholar, 49 ff.; Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion, vol. ii, pp. 16, 135 ff.; Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, Mythus und Religion, 2ter Teil, pp. 182 ff.

10 Stromata, vii, 242 d.

11 Summa theologica, secunda secundae, quaest. lxxxiii, art. i, 2.

12 Esquisse d'une philosophic de la religion, pp. 24–26, quoted by James, as cited below, pp. 464–465.

13 The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, p. 464; cf. p. 477, note 2.

14 Tylor, E. B., Primitive Culture, vol. ii, pp. 291–292Google Scholar. Cf. D. G. Brinton, Religions of Primitive People, 1897: “The earliest hymns and prayers do not, as a rule, contain definite requests but are general invitations to the gods to be present.”

15 Quoted and translated from Sir H. C. Rawlinson, The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, 20(2) K 3343, by M. Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, 1898, p. 301. Like all these hymns to Shamash, this hymn passes into an incantation,—in Jastrow's words (p. 293, etc.), a probable “concession made to the persistent belief in the efficacy of certain formulas.”

16 Jevons, , op. cit., p. 183Google Scholar; cf. pp. 186–187.

17 Jastrow, , op. cit., p. 321.Google Scholar

18 Brinton, , op. cit., p. 106Google Scholar; quoted from Sahagun, Hist, de Nueva España, lib. v.

19 Rig-Veda, vii, 89, 3; quoted by Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii, p. 374.

20 Brinton, , op. cit., p. 106Google Scholar; quoted from Clark, Indian Sign Language, p. 309.

21 Tylor, , op. cit., vol. ii, p. 373Google Scholar; quoted from Sahagun.

22 Brinton, , op. cit., p. 105Google Scholar; cf. Jevons, , op. cit., p. 139Google Scholar.

23 Fénelon.

24 Memorabilia, i, 3 2.

25 The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 466, note 2; cf. p. 477, note 2.

26 An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion, p. 176.

27 The Psychology of Religious Experience, p. 72, note 2.

28 James, , op. cit., p. 281, note.Google Scholar

29 James Martineau.

30 Ames, , op. cit., pp. 144, 168.Google Scholar

31 Cf. Ames, , op. cit., p. 134Google Scholar: “Prayer appears to justify the belief in supernatural beings.” Cf. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, Mythus und Religion, 3ter Teil, for the explicit distinction between the primitive social and moral consciousness and primitive religion. Wundt says, for example: “Die Keime des Sittlichen [liegen] zunächst ausserhalb des Gebiets religiöser Betätigung (p. 690).… Die [Wurzel] der Religion ist die … Idee des Uebersinnlichen; die der Sittlichkeit liegt zunächst in den sinnlichen Affekten (p. 751).”