The Grammar of Prayer According to Origen: On Prayer as Technê Askêtikê

I. INTRODUCTION

Catherine Chin has explored the role of grammar and grammarians in the construction of Christian concepts and discourse in late antiquity. She argued that through the teaching of language, Christian grammarians transformed literary concepts into explicitly religious concepts, transforming "linguistic work into incipient religious practice."¹ Building on Chin's argument, Rebecca Krawiec explored John Cassian's use of grammar in constructing a monastic identity.² The role of grammarians in constructing Christian discourse and practice thus provides an intriguing framework to understanding the aims of third-century theological treatises, such as Origen's On Prayer, Peri Euchês (PE), a text explicitly composed to inform the Christian practice of prayer for its readers.

I will apply Chin's work on Christian grammarians of the fourth and fifth centuries to a reading of PE. I argue that both Origen's background as a grammarian and his ascetic values provided him with the literary skills and spiritual vision to construct an understanding of prayer for other ascetically-minded Christians. The confluence of these two worlds (grammar and ascesis) allowed Origen to develop a spiritual theology of prayer rooted in his exegesis of Scripture. However, PE should be considered more than a treatise on the practice of prayer. I argue that in PE, Origen provided his readers a language with which to talk about Christian asceticism. In other words, PE can be seen as a technê askêtikê: a set of rules for the Christian spiritual life.

This paper will be organized into three parts. First, I will focus on several passages from PE highlighting Origen's grammatical work, in order to demonstrate how Origen's grammatical training informed his understanding of Christian prayer. In this section, I will focus specifically on Origen's grammatical exegesis of words and passages from Scripture. This will situate Origen's treatment of the subject of prayer within the context of his grammatical engagement with the biblical text. In the second section, I will focus on the first part of Origen's treatise, his response to certain "problems" pertaining to prayer. Responding to these problems formed the content and structure of the first half of PE.³ Here, Origen constructed a definition of prayer itself. Third, I will focus on Origen's commentary on the Lord's Prayer, which formed the content and structure of the second half of PE, and argue that Origen transformed the Lord's Prayer into a device for his ascetic pedagogy. The combined picture will show the extent to which Origen's training as a grammatikos (grammarian) allowed him to use biblical texts to inform a life of Christian ascesis.

II. A GRAMMAR OF PRAYER

From Eusebius of Caesarea, it is known that Origen spent some of his young adult years as a teacher of grammar in Alexandria. After the martyrdom of his father, the "necessities of life" dictated that Origen needed an occupation to support his family. According to Eusebius, Origen "applied himself more eagerly to the training in literature, so that he had a considerable preparation in letters" (ἐϰθυμóτεϱον τε [ϰαὶ] μετὰ τὴν ἐϰείνου τελευτὴν τῇ πεϱὶ τοὺς λóγους ἀσϰήσει ὅλον ἐπιδοὺς ἑαυτὸν, ὡς ϰαὶ παϱασϰευὴν ἐπὶ τὰ γϱαμματιϰὰ μετϱίαν ἔϰειν).⁴ According to Ronald Heine, as a grammatikos, Origen would have taught grammar at the second level of a child's education. This would have entailed a grammatical study of the classical authors, such as Homer, Herodotus, Xenophon, and Thucydides.⁵

Raffaella Cribiore has demonstrated the tedious methods of grammatical scholarship in late antiquity. Of note was the grammarian's habit of deconstructing a text, or a passage, into its various components, leaving the text as a whole neglected.⁶ This microscopic parsing of a passage indicated that for the ancient grammarian, the text was understood according to the meaning of each of its individual units, not the units taken together as a whole. This is seen in the preface to Origen's PE. While introducing his readers to the subject of prayer, he immediately appealed to the passage from Romans 8:26 ("What we ought to pray for as we ought we do not know").⁷

In his interpretation of this passage, Origen immediately distinguished two individual units: "what...