The Distances in Which We Live:

Towards a Hermeneutics of Prayer

Abstract

This essay deploys the insights of philosophical hermeneutics to approach a better understanding of the practice of prayer and its effects. Its arguments have a dual purpose: to achieve a wider appreciation of the disclosive powers both of prayerful practice and of philosophical hermeneutics as a phenomenological investigation into the revelatory powers of human experience. Our arguments assume the importance of prayer as a phenomenological occurrence. The essay offers a focus on the structural elements of such experience and does not presume to provide a hermeneutical analysis of the role of prayer in religious liturgies whether they be Christian or Buddhist. Our attention is on something more fundamental––i.e., an experience of opening, which, though it may be initiated and nuanced by given liturgical practices, nevertheless precedes them ontologically. This central concern with opening involves, we argue, experiencing a poignant shift of orientation, a shift that is not to do with religious practice alone since it is also a feature of literary, musical, and visual aesthetics. With regard to such a transformational shift, it is frequently overlooked that coming to understand a subject-matter is less to do with achieving an endpoint but more with a direct experience of transition.

Keywords: Hermeneutic differential, ontological openings, language-being, language act, linguistic consciousness, philosophical hermeneutics, prayer, speculative horizon

Introduction

The genuine merit of a philosophical orientation can be judged by the light it throws on questions it does not initially seek to address. The relation of philosophical hermeneutics to the question of how we should understand prayer is a case in point. Though Gadamer’s hermeneutics does not specifically concern itself with matters of religious experience, its pre-occupation with matters of meaningful experience and language-ontology provides conceptual tools extraordinarily well suited to unravelling the experience of prayer with its underlying ontological entailments. This unravelling is one of transformative reciprocation: the disclosure of prayer’s hermeneutical elements reveals the spiritual dimensions within philosophical hermeneutics. By applying key aspects of philosophical hermeneutics to the question of prayer, this presentation will both honor and celebrate their efficacy in bringing us to a better understanding of one of the most grounding of human experiences.

This essay deploys the insights of philosophical hermeneutics to achieve a better understanding of the practice of prayer and its effects. Its outcome will be twofold, achieving an appreciation both of the disclosive powers of prayerful practice and of philosophical hermeneutics as an investigation into the revelatory powers of human experience. Our argument assumes the importance of prayer as a phenomenological occurrence. Its focus is on the structure of such experience and does not presume to offer a hermeneutical analysis of the role of prayer in religious liturgies whether they be Christian or Buddhist. Our attention is on something more fundamental––i.e., an experience of opening, which, though it may be initiated and nuanced by given liturgical practices, nevertheless precedes them ontologically. This leading concern with opening involves experiencing a shift of orientation, a shift that is not to do with religious practice alone since it is also a feature of literary, musical and visual aesthetics. With regard to such shifts, it is frequently overlooked that coming to understand a subject-matter is less to do with achieving some endpoint but more to do with an experience of transition. Hermeneutical understanding involves an experience of movement or, to be more specific, an experience of being moved cognitively and emotionally: it involves a being moved on in our understanding. This experience is, of course, complex and multiple faceted. When, for example, I am drawn into a meditational involvement with a painting and come to see an image in new and surprising ways, I am also brought to see two other aspects of that image. First, as a result of the differential space that opens between what I now see and what I saw before, I am brought to the realization that my seeing has both moved-on and in so doing has overcome some of its previous limitations. Second, coming to see more of a certain visual subject-matter brings an awareness that there is, indeed, yet more to see and that the journey of my understanding is already traveling towards the unforeseen. The claim of this essay is that prayerful practice initiates just such an experience of movement. This experience entails a controlled suspension of the customary fixities of association between word, thing and meaning, fixities which are normally established in the interests of everyday pragmatics. In Kantian terms, this suspension permits the imagination to enter-free play in order to build new and unexpected relations between words and things. For Kant such activity is essentially private (for subjectivity alone), for Heidegger and Gadamer it is a matter of our becoming open to the free play or spontaneous disclosures of Being itself. The movement of understanding becomes a question of being both attentive to and engaging with the autonomous disclosures of Being. The practice of being prayerful, we shall argue, is a preparing for, involves an opening towards and a becoming receptive to what is, in hermeneutical terms, the numinous world of language-being, a transcendent that is both within us and beyond us.

The burden of our argument about prayerful activity is, then, one of recovery and de-mystification. The demise of institutional religion and its otherworldly commitments should not lead to the devaluing of meditational and prayerful practices. Their value needs deconstructing in order to be re-appropriated as means to expropriating the phenomenological experience of the transcendent within the lived world. Our argument will shift the prayerful away from familiar religious contexts and suggest that such practice transcends the religious per se because it concerns above all a sharpening and a quickening of conscious life and of what comes to life in consciousness. The spiritual is not something exotic or dispensable but is fundamental to our experience of being. The movements of attentiveness are, indeed, not matters of religious disposition alone but are foundational to how existence and the character of being discloses itself through language, art, and music.

1. How Are We to Understand Prayer?

An answer to this question might be that we come to understand the practice of prayer by coming to understand what prayer enables us to understand. The hermeneutical nature of prayer lies not in the obvious––i.e. that it is a dialogical figuration of question and response, but in the fact that it embodies a process of disclosure in which we become conscious of the hermeneutical distances in which we as humans live both joyously and sometimes painfully. Dilthey made familiar the idea that to understand a cultural phenomenon presupposes that one already has a prior acquaintance with the way of life of which it is a part. Heidegger radicalized this figure of argument suggesting that any interpretation of a subject-matter is an elaboration of possibilities that one is already pre-reflectively acquainted with. This implies that coming to understand the act of prayer is dependent upon what one already understands pre-reflectively of prayer and its possibilities. The implication is that prayer is an exemplary example of a practice that discloses the conditions of its own understanding––i.e., we understand prayer by coming to understand what the practice of prayer enables us to understand. The practice of prayer is hermeneutical in the specifically Gadamerian sense that its perceived meaningfulness reflects its historical effects upon its practitioners. Prayer can be perceived to be meaningful by means of the effects it brings about. Why is this important?

Key issues at the core of contemporary hermeneutical reasoning are at stake: What justifies the claims to meaningfulness within a given practice? Is the justification internal––i.e., dependent on an endorsement from within a participatory epistemology, or does it require an external validation which would confirm prayer’s claim to truth in relation to a body of affairs independent of the practice as is the case with representational epistemology? However, the representationalist justification poses severe difficulties; what if the external state of affairs that the alleged meaningfulness represents cease to exist? This is directly analogous to the claims to meaning made by art which have no external correlative to validate their assertions. This lends our over-all argument a certain poignancy. The question of what justifies claims to meaningfulness in art practice has a direct bearing on the same question when applied to the practice of prayer. As we shall suggest below, Nietzsche was correct to suggest that how we understand art touches on the question of how we understand religion and vice versa.^[1] How then are we who live in a supposedly post-metaphysical world dismissive of the idea of a petitionable God as a philosophical naïveté, to understand the act of prayer itself? If, as Nietzsche claims, it is we who have killed God, then are we not also responsible for rendering the act of prayer meaningless?^[2] Nietzsche’s “metaphysical amputation” of a true world beyond this one is strikingly eloquent.

It is true, there could be a metaphysical world: the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed . . . (but) . . . one could assert nothing at all of the metaphysical world except that it was a being other, an inaccessible, incomprehensible being other: it would be a thing with negative qualities––Even if the existence of such a world were never so well demonstrated, it is certain that knowledge of it would be the most useless.^[3]

Such metaphysical skepticism prompted Kant to castigate petitionary prayer (though not ethical meditation) as a superstitious illusion. Don Cupitt is a contemporary theologian who does not shy away from the task that Kant and Nietzsche respectively set; how to rethink Christianity without its metaphysical underpinnings. Cupitt attacks the metaphysical (Platonic) tradition of Christianity for identifying the Real as an eternal intelligible being beyond the apparent world and yet somehow able to uphold it.^[4] Such ideas, he insists, have had their day and require a complete re-valuation if not de-mythologization. However, Cupitt’s renunciation of a binary metaphysics re-enforces our central question: is the meaningfulness of prayer dependent upon accepting a Christian metaphysic? For various reasons, our answer to this question is “No.” Our reasons are as follows.

1. Conceptual indeterminacy: Christian metaphysics cannot exhaust the meaning of prayer. Rowans Williams suggests that “[w]hat we encounter in prayer is never capable of being reduced to a finished conceptual scheme.”^[5] The remark reminds us that all too often we become blind to the restrictive nature of how we have come to understand key terms such as prayer. As a transcendent subject-matter (Sache), the term cannot be subject to fixed determinations of meaning: whatever we think it may mean, it will mean more. This leads David Ford to conjecture that prayer should be considered as a practice of excess––i.e., a becoming open to the abundance of what is contained within religious language and its concepts.^[6]
2. Historical determinacy: What we might understand as the essential characteristics of prayer are rarely universal but indicate the perspectives and preferences of a specific community. Though Anne Michaels’ description of prayer as “seeking by way of silence” is seemingly exemplary, Diarmaid MacCulloch reminds us that silent prayer was frowned on by early ecclesiastical authority.^[7] In other words, dominant ideological preferences have displaced perfectly feasible non-metaphysical ways of configuring the practice of prayer.
3. Hermeneutical Critique: Hermeneutical philosophy is wedded to the axiom that what limits our understanding of a subject-matter also expands it. The etymological and philological inter-relatedness of concepts within language allows hermeneutical critique to uncover alternative ways of thinking about prayer. What renders our understanding finite is not a noumenal reality which it cannot, by definition, embrace but other language constructs within language-being itself. Komparistik can reveal plentiful alternatives to the supposition that prayer is anchored in a traditional metaphysical framework. The Russian philosopher Bibikhin, likens prayer to an act of attentiveness, a constant and conscious-being with the object of mindful attention.^[8] The discipline of acquiring such attentiveness is a path of self-discovery and self-movement in which the limits of understanding become apparent.^[9] This intimation of the eventual gives attentiveness an ontological valence: “Unceasing Prayer reveals what is truly occurring.”^[10] The philosopher Fiona Ellis also argues that prayer does not have to be petitionary but can be considered both as the making of a contemplative space and as achieving an attitude of open-mindedness.^[11] Iris Murdoch contends that “Prayer is not properly petition” but “an act of attention.”^[12] It is “a sort of via negativa” or “mindful action,” and “learning.”^[13] These remarks evidence that non-metaphysical notions of prayer are perfectly plausible. Indeed, a stronger argument can be wagered. Prayerful practice precedes (theological) metaphysics! The phenomenological underpinnings of prayer (the very human experience of “opening towards” and of “being opened by”) precede the religious overlays placed upon it. The force of this argument becomes apparent when we consider that our being as linguistic creatures language “opens us” towards the language-being in which we are grounded.

How then can the meaningfulness of non-metaphysical notions of prayer be articulated? As we approach a possible answer to this question, let us briefly take stock of our argument so far.

Prayerful Disclosures and Meditative Openings

We initially asked: “How do we understand the act of prayer in a post-metaphysical world which excludes the idea of a petitionable deity.” If there is no such deity, what justifies the act of prayer? In a post-metaphysical world, is a hermeneutics of prayer possible let alone meaningful? The answer to these questions is provisionally affirmative since there are, logically speaking, clear alternatives to the notion of petitionary prayer. These take the form of various modes of focused, devoted, and concerned attentiveness which seek to achieve a condition of openness. Such watchful openness is directed towards a state of readiness, readiness for the possibility of disclosure whether seen, heard, or revealed. This suggests that prayer is performative, an act which facilitates something happening. Such an act has an epiphanic value in that it occasions the disclosure of something. The disclosure has a clear ontological valence: what is disclosed is both in being, of being, and reflects a kind of being. The process of disclosure is the event of being shown something or of being addressed by something. The event is, then, dialogical.^[14] Such connections suggest, once again, that the workings of prayer are linked to or have something in common with the workings of art. How might this expand our understanding of the occasion of prayer?

Like the artwork, the act of prayer articulates a practice: it is performative in that it endeavors to bring something about. It is an act which like the artwork seeks to initiate a condition of openness, a focused readiness to receive and to be addressed. Both practices entail an attuned attentiveness to the hermeneutical event of being addressed. The prominence of readying oneself to receive the disclosed, explains why, from a Gadamerian perspective, neither the practice of art nor the practice of prayer can be “appropriately” understood from a historical or sociological perspective alone. Of course, it is incontrovertible that both can be studied by means of such disciplines, but if the language of prayerful practice and the language of art are always “in excess,” they cannot be subject to exhaustive historical or sociological reduction. Furthermore, an understanding of prayerful or aesthetic disclosure requires the first-person experience of “being addressed.” As Wittgenstein understood, one can never eavesdrop on God speaking to someone else.^[15] An analogy with what Gadamer calls “the experience of art” is telling. It is perfectly possible for me to analyze an artwork from a formal academic perspective and attempt to assess its intrinsic aesthetic qualities. It is, however, axiomatic for Gadamer that such aestheticism does not constitute an “experience of art” since the latter entails an overwhelming sense of being directly addressed––directed, if not corrected. It is axiomatic for Gadamer that art “speaks to us” directly and immediately. The directness of its address has phenomenological priority over the considerations of aesthetic judgement.

The consciousness of art––the aesthetic consciousness is always secondary to the immediate truth-claim that proceeds from the work of art itself. To this extent, when we judge a work of art on the basis of its aesthetic quality, something that is really much more intimate and familiar to us is alienated. This alienation into aesthetic judgement always takes place when we have withdrawn ourselves and are no longer open to the immediate claim of that which grasps us.^[16]

It is this ability of art to speak so directly that constitutes its claim to truth.^[17] The analogy with prayerful meditation and its truthfulness is clear: prayer involves the practice of preparing the appropriate openness to receiving the address of that which speaks to one. Let us now develop these suggestions.

The previous points establish that considered as a meditational practice of open attentiveness, prayer is perfectly plausible if not desirable in a post-metaphysical realm of being. Indeed, the analogy with the “experience of art” permits a further claim. The practice of prayer, considered from a hermeneutic perspective, is something “on-going,” a living vital (Erfahrung) which we undergo because we undertake it. It is the continuous practice of opening oneself towards the possibility an anticipated disclosure.^[18] This gives rise to a potential paradox.

On the one hand, what discloses itself in the practice of prayer is given in the voice of the first-person: it is “I” who am being addressed. On the other hand, in so far as it is a dialogical practice, prayer is also social practice with its own norms and historical conventions albeit that the latter are clearly malleable. The social dimension of prayer is immediately emphasized by the fact that even if the act of prayer is restricted to a process of being in dialogue with oneself, the act of prayer is constituted as a language act and as such is necessarily grounded in a “language-game.” However, being-grounded in a language-game is not the same as being reduced to a language game. This is made clear by the ontological dimensions of dialogue which are clearly rooted in language-being.

Dialogue either between interlocutors or between oneself and a text is much more than an exchange of assertions, statements, or sentences. Dialogue cannot be reduced to an exchange of socially established linguistic codes. It also reveals something of the language-being which sustains every individual exchange and yet transcends them at the same time. This brings us to one of our principal contentions; the practice of prayer opens up the transcendent (aspects of language being) it is embedded in. Mediation and other prayerful practices both open-on-to and open up the speculative dimensions of language-being and its boundless possibilities for meaningfulness. Prayerful practice is, indeed, a process of considerable moment and happening. This returns us to our opening remark: we understand the practice of prayer by coming to understand what prayer enables us to understand. In other words, the nature of a prayerful or meditational practice can only be unfolded from within, in the doing of it: it must be embraced, participated in and its effects mapped out and felt. It is not to be reduced to an object of theoretical scrutiny whether sociological or historical. As a dialogical practice, prayer can indeed be understood by what it discloses and what it discloses is the condition of its own possibility––i.e., its rootedness in language-being.

Through its showing, the practice reveals what it does and, thereby, legitimates itself as a disclosive practice. Central to this dynamic is the ontological grounding of linguistic consciousness in what Gadamer calls language-being. Differently put, as an act of linguistic consciousness, the practice of prayer opens up the language-being sustaining it. The ontological grounding of linguistic consciousness in language-being is key to the argument that concerned prayer is a mode of revealing. The meaning of any significant subject-matter within an individual’s linguistic consciousness is connected to broader networks of historical, etymological, and philological meaning. These transcend a subjectivity’s immediate awareness and form a numinous excess of other possible meanings. The opening of this speculative horizon reveals to subjective consciousness different ways of transcending the limitations of its understanding. Put another way, like hermeneutic reflection, prayerful practice operationalizes the infinite capacity of language to mean more. It opens the differential space within which all meaning shows itself as speculative. Although no one word or concept can capture the totality of meaning to which it belongs, linguistic connectivity implies that any one word or concept can evoke speculatively the totality of inter-connected meanings in which it is entangled, glimmering as it were on the edge of linguistic consciousness. Without initially knowing it, linguistic consciousness is deeply embedded in the objective (trans-individual) structures of language-being. These are aptly described by the Japanese philosopher Nishihira as that “which is mine and yet transcends me,” as those moving frameworks of understanding that are both “through me yet not by me.”^[19] The greater the participation of linguistic consciousness in language-being, the greater the realization of possible meanings enfolded in its horizons. What envelopes each linguistic consciousness, indeed, what the practice of prayer opens up speculatively is not another different world but this world considered as the totality of language-being in the fullness of its explicit and implicit holdings of past, present, and future meanings.

That linguistic consciousness is, ontologically speaking, subordinate to language-being affirms that linguistic consciousness is dependent on that which is outside itself. Language-being enables an effective field of experience which reaches beyond the linguistic consciousness of an individual and yet also resides within it. Without such residence, linguistic consciousness loses its connectivity to what transcends it. Nevertheless, such transcendence resides in the numinous aspects of language-being and is revealed through an individual’s speculative experience of language. The openness of language-being’s structures allows subjective consciousness to transcend its immediate linguistic and cultural placement. Tennyson’s poetry points to a subtle account of the relationship between linguistic consciousness and language-being.

Language-being shows itself as “a tide as moving,” which “seems asleep” but draws our linguistic consciousness “from out [its] boundless deep.”^[20] Though I may “be born of time and place,” the flood of language-being “may carry me far” into realms of transformative meaningfulness beyond anything that my limited linguistic consciousness might anticipate. Tennyson’s imagery aptly conveys how language-being as the numinous ground of linguistic consciousness enables the latter to transcend its initial limitations.

Language, Act, and Revelation

Language-being and linguistic consciousness stand in a relation of mutual dependence. Linguistic consciousness cannot exist without language-being and language-being cannot sustain itself other than through the totality of linguistic agencies that perpetuate its being. The ontological enfolding of linguistic consciousness and language-being enables prayer as a practice of linguistic consciousness to open towards the transcendent objectivities of language-being in which it is grounded.

Initiating prayer involves, as the Quaker tradition describes, an act of centering-down. Whether the act takes place within a meditational process or in the expedition of a liturgical practice, any instrumental or literal approach to language is abandoned in favor of a reflective or poetical receptiveness that is open to language’s speculative powers of evocation. Such meditational or prayerful de-centering demands aesthetic distance from the everyday language world of statements in order to develop an acuter sense of the poetic resonances within language’s speculative horizons. What the practice of prayer opens up is, crucially, a differential space between linguistic consciousness and language-being––i.e., the hermeneutical space between the conventional or customary meaning of a term and how it (because of its rootedness in etymological and historical networks of meaning) also speaks to other configurations of meaning. The emergence of this differential space within prayerful practice offers an insight into why the attentiveness of prayerful meditation is often described as empowering.

Prayerful practice empowers because it opens the differential space between linguistic consciousness and language being. This is the heightened space of subjective awareness. No longer constrained by the conventional established meanings of words or concepts, the emergent space created by the hermeneutic differential allows linguistic consciousness to see how everyday language is edged by a speculative complexity. Prayerful practice allows the speculative imagination to roam more freely. No longer is a word or concept seen as a point of fixity impervious to alteration but, on the contrary, it reveals itself as a permeable site through which its speculative entanglement with other meanings and ways of thinking can be glimpsed. The transition from the constraints of linguistic consciousness to the broader, freer, speculative horizons of language-being manifests itself in an experience of empowerment. No longer restrained by the close-at-hand, subjective consciousness senses an increase in the possible range of its ways of thinking. Speculative awareness expands a sense of existential possibility. By opening the speculative horizons of language, prayer releases us into a sense of the wondrous. The infinite possibilities for creative engagement held within language-being glimmer suggestively before us. In other words, the act of prayer discloses our rootedness in the hermeneutical sublime and, in so doing, the act reveals the condition of its own possibility. This substantiates our central claim: we are able to “understand” the act of prayer as hermeneutical because it brings into reflection the ontological conditions which render it explicable. By doing what it does, the act of prayer reveals what it is; an act of opening. This establishes prayerful practice as a spiritual act, an act of empowerment which allows the individual to move more freely in the opening spaces of possible meaningfulness within language-being.

Spirit, Movement, Empowerment

The reflective shift from linguistic consciousness to an awareness of the speculative character of language-being occasions a very specific understanding of spirituality. Gadamer claims that an experience of movement is key to a phenomenological understanding of spirituality.^[21] Christian Lotz also speaks of the spiritual as a “transitionary moment,” a “becoming and forming moment.”^[22] The notion of the spiritual as a “transitionary moment” emphasizes that the practice of prayer considered as a language act can occasion a release into speculative wonder and possibility. The practice, in effect, opens the differential space between linguistic consciousness and language-being. A crucial point needs to be raised here. What is of key importance in understanding the spiritual aspect of prayer’s transitionary moment is not so much what the practice opens-out-on-to (i.e., other meanings or insights) but the act of opening itself. Prayerful practice initiates this transitionary passage which takes us “away from which” (away from the constraint of conventional, doctrinal or dogmatic meanings) and a “towards which” (towards the enticement and excitement of the hermeneutic sublimity of language-being with its infinity of actual and potential meanings). Prayer and meditational practice entail a phenomenological experience of both release and expectation. The experience of this transitionary moment constitutes the spirituality of prayerful practice. It is the transitionary moment that engages us, drawing us into the promise of release and expectation. Prayerful practice draws us into the transformative motion of the betwixt and the between. The practice moves, on the one hand, between release from the containment of everyday horizons of meaning and sensing, on the other hand, the nearness and exhilarating openness of the hermeneutic sublime (language-being) with its incalculable potential for meaningfulness. The hermeneutical subject (linguistic consciousness) knows that because of its apophatic entanglements in language-being, it is already enfolded in constellations of possible meaning that stretch beyond its immediate consciousness. Prayerful practice is “spirited”: it enlivens and intensifies an awareness of the open and potentially transformative hermeneutical spaces within language-being. Indeed, by opening the differential space between linguistic consciousness and language-being, prayerful practice creates the very space that hermeneutical reflection moves within. This brings us to our final claim: prayerful practice is not reducible to a specific religious or meditational tradition. To the contrary, it reflects in its power of “bringing into the open,” a universal phenomenological structure that articulates the vital differential space between linguistic consciousness (irrespective of the language of that consciousness) and language-being itself.

As a language act and irrespective of its originating language, prayerful practice is part of a language game. However, a practice is not reducible to the rules of a given game. It is what arises in the playing of that game, and it is what is brought into play by it that matters. Whether the enabling practice belongs to Christian, Jewish or Buddhist liturgical practice is not the point. It is what involvement in such practices bring into the open that matters. What discloses itself is, as we have argued, the differential space between the specific language act of a given consciousness and the universal language-being that sustains it. It is this transitionary moment which is above all the achievement of prayerful practice.

Language and its forms come-forth in its presentational acts. As foundational spontaneous emergences, such acts show themselves. In philosophical hermeneutics, language is a performative act: it brings a form of life into being. Language and its forms are epiphanic. They announce themselves: there is no getting beyond or behind language-being to explain its forms. However, as a language act, prayerful activity does not bring a specific form into being. The differential space between linguistic consciousness and language-being is not a form but a generative space within which spontaneous emergences of meaning and insight can take place. This is consistent with the suggestion that prayerful activity opens a transitionary space. This in turn implies that language-being maintains itself in a condition of constant movement understood as the perpetual interpenetration and co-origination of the co-dependents part and whole within language-being.

We have presented language-being as the totality of actual, past, and potential meanings which collectively constitute the bio-sphere of language-being. The co-dependence of part and whole within language-being emphasizes that while no individual linguistic perspective can exist without the language horizons that sustain it, language-being cannot itself exist apart from the particular linguistic perspectives that make it up. The transitionary moment initiated by each language act involves the constant passing back and forth of part and whole within language-being. Each particular expression is dependent on and speculatively invokes the language-being that sustains its existence. Furthermore, language-being can only sustain itself in and through its historical and cultural particularizations. In short, prayerful practice considered as a language act opens up the differential space in which the speculative horizon of language-being comes into view, affording a glimpse of other possible ways of thinking and beings. Prayerful practice releases us from the containment of very restricted or determinant ways thinking and opens a glimpse of the other possibilities for meaningfulness within language-being. In so doing, prayerful practice reveals a key aspect of human ontology. By opening the differential space between the particularities of our immediate existence and the broader speculative horizons of language-being, prayerful practice reveals the distances in which we live, distances which enable the constant transitions between part and whole upon which the life of language-being depends. Gadamer’s language ontology permits the conclusion that we are prayerful creatures because we are creatures of language-being.

At the close this reflection we must address a question implied by the very initiation of our discussion. In these days of unfathomable cruelty, days in which it seems that much of the world has clearly forgotten the Ancient Greek wisdom that “in every stranger there is a future friend,” what justification can there be for turning inward toward prayerful reflection? Implicit in our argument is the quiet insistence that prayerful practice is not an indulgent escapism. We have argued that a key aspect of the practice of prayer is its disclosure of its enabling ground. That which makes prayer possible is its rootedness. As a language act, not only does prayerful activity disclose the language-being it depends on but activates the speculative dimensions of language-being. When I enter a prayerful mode, I do not enter a world other than this world. Rather, I engage this world but attentively with an attitude of focus. Such attentiveness does not strive to subdue the world but seeks to become receptive to what it shows of itself. Prayerful practice is an attentiveness, an apprenticing of ourselves to the world’s disclosures.^[23] What prayer is shows itself through the prayerful––i.e., the act of soliciting and surrendering to an opening in the hermeneutical sublime.

The speculative and the sublime are clearly connected in hermeneutical thinking. The “speculative” capacity of the word concerns its ability to insinuate unstated connections of meaning which though they sustain a given expression are not directly given in it. The speculative power of a word links it to the sublime: it illuminates that penumbra of unstated meanings whose presence can be sensed in the spoken but never fully grasped or conceptualized. Because of this, a word or image can always come to mean more: it insinuates a transcendent speculative dimension of meaning. The hermeneutical sublime articulates the excess of meaning within language-being, upholding its promise to always mean more. In other words, the transitionary space of prayerful reflection reveals not a determinate meaning but an enlivening space of possibility the edges of which glimmer with promising intimations of other ways of thinking and being. Prayerful practice is orientated towards keeping the promise of the possible open and in view. By keeping the horizons of possibility open, it resists the crushing determinacies of the everyday. Opening the transitionary spaces of the hermeneutic sublime is, perhaps, the true goal of prayerful practice phenomenologically conceived. It discloses a realm of open possibility that reaches well beyond the everyday limitations and constraints of linguistic consciousness. The appearance of the speculative dimensions of language-being offers glimpses of something distinctly different––i.e., the possibility or promise of something larger, the intimation of a greater completeness or meaningfulness yet to come. Becoming conscious of the speculative dimensions of language-being promotes a double insight: on the one hand, coming to an awareness that linguistic consciousness is limited in what it can grasp of the totality of what language-being affirms; on the other hand, that there is something beyond, indeed, that there is always something more to be grasped, and, indeed, something more to be hoped for. The clear practical value of prayerful activity is, then, that it keeps the enabling horizon of the possible open. Prayerful activity does not disclose what to do but draws us towards a vivifying awareness of the presence of the possible, of what might yet be done. Prayerful activity affirms the possibility of hope for something other which is already held within language-being. Such attentiveness is far from escapist: it is a necessary prelude for opening pathways to clear and directed activity.

This paper has proposed a hermeneutics of prayer. It has addressed the following questions: (1) How, in an age deeply suspicious of other-worldly religion, is prayerful activity to be understood? (2) How is such activity to be justified and on what claim-to-truth is it grounded? (3) What is the relationship between prayerful activity and philosophical hermeneutics, and exactly what does prayerful activity reveal about the nature of hermeneutical thought?

Regarding (1), we have argued that prayerful activity is by no means restricted to the petitionary. Gadamer’s language-ontology suggests that as a language act the practice of prayer indicates that coming to a consciousness of “openness” is a primordial experience, a phenomenological universality shared by all language creatures who live, have lived, and will live in the differential spaces of language-being. Such a primordial experience of openness with its attendant sense of wonder for the speculative horizons of meaning which both sustain and reach beyond linguistic consciousness precedes and transcends the limitations of institutionalized religion. Given this, a “secular” prayerful practice is clearly possible, since as a primordial experience of the differential spaces within language-being, it is ontologically prior to the emergence of formalized religion upon which, after all, the very definition of the secular depends. Asserting the primordial experience of openness as ontologically prior to religious interpretations of it dissolves the basis upon what experience can be described as secular. Laying claim to the ontological priority of the experience of openness demonstrates not just the possibility of a prayerful mode of being but asserts its living actuality.

With reference to (2), How is prayerful activity to be justified and on what claim to-truth is it grounded?, our argument has been that once the practice of prayer is conceived as a language act it becomes self-justifying for two reasons. As a mode of language-being, prayerful activity is clearly mediated by the forms of language which considered ontologically are spontaneous acts of emergence. Language and its forms are epiphanic: there is no getting beyond or behind language-being to explain its forms. As a language-act, what justifies prayerful activity is that it brings into the open its own enabling ground. It discloses the transcendent aspects of language-being it is embedded in. The practice opens-on-to and opens-up the speculative dimensions of language-being disclosing its boundless possibilities for meaningfulness. This affirms our central claim: we understand the practice of prayer by coming to understand what it reveals––i.e., the speculative dimensions of language-being. The truth of what the act of prayer discloses can only be confirmed by the experience of coming into that openness of horizon which affords a liberating glimpse of other configurations of meaning and ways of being. The prayerful entails an accepting attentiveness to the ever-present movement of understanding and its speculative entailments, entailments which always point beyond what we presently understand. This tells us something of the transcendent space of openness which the prayerful discloses. Prayerful activity does not disclose language-being per se: it insinuates its presence from the speculative inference of every determinate expression of meaning; it opens the differential space between the infinite (language-being considered as the totality of all actual and possible meaningfulness) and the finite (those determinate language acts from which the totality of language being can be inferred.) The prayerful inhabits the in-between of this differential and, in so doing, reveals the ground of its own possibility.

And so, finally, (3): What is the relationship between prayerful activity and philosophical hermeneutics? What does prayerful activity reveal about the nature of hermeneutical reflection? We have argued that the practice of being prayerful is a preparing for, an act of steadying-down in readiness for becoming receptive to the opening horizons of possibility which infer the presence of the numinous world of language-being. Given Gadamer’s equation of the spirit with the movement of understanding, our argument implies that there is a spiritual moment in hermeneutic understanding. However, this moment does not entail grasping a determinate moment of insight or achieving command of a decisive interpretation. To the contrary, the hermeneutical shift in understanding arises in that transitioning moment when clearing one’s mind of the everyday makes ready for a glimpse of the speculative dimension of language-being. It involves that transitionary moment of inference when the speculative discloses itself at the edges of language’s horizons. Put another way, the prayerful opens us to the possibility of other words, to other meanings or to other ways of seeing. Prayerful being resides in the momentary in-between of “arrival” and “departure.” Whilst the flow of this transitioning moment draws us away from the short-sightedness of the everyday, it also pulls us towards the insight that there is no necessity to our habitual perspectives. The emergence of speculative awareness within prayerful being points both to the very contingency of our everyday perspectives and affords a glimpse of alternative possibilities to our established ways of thinking and being.

At the beginning of this discussion, it was suggested that the merit of a philosophical orientation can be judged by the light it throws on questions it does not initially seek to address. In relation to the respective questions of how we who live in a deeply secular age are to understand prayer, its claims and its effects, philosophical hermeneutics and its categories prove notably efficacious. Though Gadamer’s hermeneutics does not specifically concern itself with religious experience, its pre-occupation with matters of meaningful experience and language ontology develops conceptual tools extraordinarily well-suited to unravelling the experience of prayer and its underlying ontological entailments. The interaction between linguistic consciousness and language-being establishes the generative space of the hermeneutic differential. The opening of this space is central to our hermeneutical account of prayer, which, while attentive to the limitations of the contingent world, remains expectant of the possibility of meanings less fragmented. In establishing this space, prayerful practice reveals its ground in language-being and, crucially, demonstrates that language-being is transcendent––no meditative practice can encompass its ontological ground. This is the basis of the strong claim: the experience of opening which prayerful practice affords is anterior to institutionalized religion: the very human experience of “opening towards” and of “being opened by” precedes the religious overlays subsequently placed upon it. In other words, it is our being as linguistic creatures that “opens us” towards the language-being in which we are grounded and not any specific religious disposition. The revelation of prayer’s hermeneutical basis in language-ontology uncovers the spiritual dimension within the practice of hermeneutics. Residing in the differential space between linguistic consciousness and language-being is to live in that openness which makes ready for those disclosures of meaningfulness, which, via word or image, have yet to come. In a post-metaphysical world, a hermeneutics of prayer is, then, both possible and meaningful. The practice of prayerful-openness and the skills of being disciplined in meditative attentiveness are essential elements in making ready for understanding’s disclosures. The prayerful is hermeneutical, and the hermeneutical is prayerful: both usher us into that primordial space of openness in which we surrender to the possibilities of what is to come. In conclusion, the transitionary moments which enable understanding’s unfolding passages require of linguistic consciousness a foundational openness to the transformative possibilities held with language-being. The foregoing hermeneutical reflections on prayer reveal that its attentiveness to what is yet to be revealed depends on an opening of the differential space between linguistic consciousness and language being. If so, the corollary is clear. The ability of hermeneutic reflection to be receptive to what language-being has yet to disclose depends upon a focused, attentive, if not prayerful openness to the as-yet-unrealized possibilities for future understanding. Indeed, such expectant openness to the possible is, arguably, a necessary pre-condition of all future learning and transformation. Without a prayerful acquaintance with primordial openness, hermeneutical understanding is deprived of that transitionary space upon which its transformative unfolding depends.

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Even when the free spirit has divested himself of everything metaphysical the highest effects of art can easily set the metaphysical strings which have long been silent, vibrating in sympathy. “From the Souls of Artists and Writers,” in Human, All Too Human, ed. and trans. Gary Handwerk (Cambridge University Press, 1986), sec. 153. ↑

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage, 1974), sec.128; “Prologue 1–2,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin, 1974). ↑

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of First and Last Things,” in Human, All Too Human, sec. 9. ↑

4. Don Cupitt, Emptiness and Brightness (Polebridge Press, 2001), 9. ↑

5. See Rowan Williams, “Silence and the Word,” in Silence and the Word, ed. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge University Press), 2008. ↑

6. David Ford, “Holy Spirit and Christian Spirituality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Post-Modern Theology, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 26. ↑

7. For Anne Michaels, see “Apophasis and the Shoah: Where Was Jesus Christ at Auschwitz,” in Silence and the Word, 199. See also Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence a Christian History, (Allen Lane, 2014), who offers a striking account of the historical transition of vocal prayer to silent prayer within Christian practice. ↑

8. Vladimir Bibikhin, The Woods (Polity, 2021), 33. ↑

9. Bibikhin, 21, 22. ↑

10. Bibikhin, 33. ↑

11. Fiona Ellis, God Value and Nature (Oxford University Press, 2014), 180–81. ↑

12. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, Writings on Philosophy and Literature (Chatto and Windus), 1997. ↑

13. Murdoch, 357, 368, 518. ↑

14. The dialogical nature of prayer is emphasizes in the observations of Edith Stein. She remarks, “We stopped in at the cathedral for a few minutes; and while we looked around in respectful silence, a woman carrying a basket came in and knelt down in one of the pews to pray briefly. This was something entirely new to me. [. . . ] Here was someone interrupting her everyday shopping errands to come into the church, although no other person was in it as though she were (t)here for an intimate conversation.” Edith Stein, cited in Peter Tyler, The Living Philosophy of Edith Stein (Bloomsbury, 2023), 23. ↑

15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell. 1990), sec. 717. ↑

16. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (University of California Press, 1976), 7 (emphasis added). ↑

17. This should be understood as art truly making a claim upon our reflective awareness rather than as art making a truth-claim which has to be tested and verified in the manner of a proposition. ↑

18. The notion of a living experience rather than ‘lived experience’ is preferable in so far as the former implies a practice that is on-going generating a continuity of evolving and changing effects. Furthermore, if experience is but a moment and making sense of that moment is a life (cf. Richard Flanagan, Question 7 [Vintage, 2023], 84), then the notion of a lived (complete) experience empties experience of all living (i.e., on-going) content. ↑

19. See Nishihira Tadashi, The Philosophy of No-Mind (Bloomsbury, 2024), 242. ↑

20. Alfred, Lord Tennyson,“ Crossing the Bar,” The Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45321/crossing-the-bar. ↑

21. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi and trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 10. ↑

22. Christian Lötz, The Art of Gerhard Richter (Bloomsbury, 2017), 7. ↑

23. Prayerful practice is not just a formal or conceptual aspect of our understanding. It is an activity that must be perpetually executed. In the words of Joel Hubick, it is “a practice that must be constantly practised . . . an activity that can only be ‘mastered’ through perpetual repetition.” See Joel Hubick, The Phenomenology of Questioning, Husserl, Heidegger and Patočka (Bloomsbury, 2024), 214. ↑