Meditation and Mental Prayer

Wilfred Knox

• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781913527600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

If I have resolved not to lose my temper with a tiresome relative, and have in fact lost my temper badly when I met him, I must repent of having lost my temper, not of having failed to keep my resolution.

Prayer is essential to all forms of belief in God, but it is not always easy to understand how to pray, or what to pray for. In a religious assembly, one can be led by the order of service, but what about private, mental prayer? In this book Wilfred Knox offers a humble, learned, and warm guide to the vital act of personal devotion.

First published in 1927, this is an evergreen classic of theology, one of the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald's favourite books. It is as relevant today as it was when written. Meditation and Mental Prayer is for ordinary people who are trying to learn to pray with mind and heart.

"The nimble wit and intellectual ingenuity he shared with other members of his family never obscured the fundamental simplicity of his character. In the ordinary sense, Wilfred Knox was entirely untroubled by ambition; but perhaps it would be truer to say that he had two ambitions-to be a good scholar and to be a good Christian. Certainly he fulfilled them." The Times

"Heartily commended to all who believe in the abounding power of prayer." Spectator

"There has never been anyone like Father Wilfred and it is impossible to believe that there ever will be." Canon Henry Brandreth

1
Methods of Prayer in General

Vocal and Mental Prayer

Prayer is normally divided by writers on the subject into two main varieties, vocal and mental. By vocal prayer is meant any kind of prayer which is formulated in words. The words may be spoken aloud or merely framed in the mind; or we may read them to ourselves from a book or recite them to ourselves from memory, or join in them when recited by others, as in certain parts of public worship. By mental prayer is meant any kind of prayer in which we direct our thoughts to God without necessarily attempting to form them into words or connected sentences.

The distinction is not theoretically a very good one. Prayer can be defined as the lifting up of the soul to God. If this is what prayer is, it follows that there can be no form of prayer which is not mental prayer. For the recitation of words in the ways described is not prayer at all except in so far as the reciting of words is accompanied by a lifting up of the soul to God. And in so far as it is accompanied by a lifting up of the soul to God, it is obviously not merely vocal but also mental prayer.

Nor is the phrase mental prayer entirely free from objection. It might seem in contrast with vocal prayer to imply that if we are to practise it we must not make use of words at all while we are engaged in it. This would for most people be very difficult at the outset. We shall see that in the case of meditation, with which we usually begin the practice of mental prayer, we make use of more or less consecutive trains of reasoning to suggest motives for raising up our souls to God. We shall very probably find it almost impossible at first to carry out this process of reasoning without framing our thoughts into more or less formal sentences. Similarly in the acts of the will in which we lift up our souls to God we shall usually find it of considerable assistance to make use of short phrases, expressing the attitude of our soul to God, as a means of putting ourselves into the attitude in question. For as a rule many people at least do a great deal, if not most, of their thinking in fairly clearly formulated words. This, however, does not mean that such prayer is not mental prayer. The distinction is that the words are merely an expression of our thoughts and our emotional attitudes, not a means for evoking such thoughts or attitudes. Even though at first we cannot dispense with formulated sentences, we shall find later that they will vanish more or less completely. It is indeed quite possible that from the outset we shall be able to dispense with them, though we may go on to the end expressing our attitudes of the soul in single words or brief phrases, such as those described in chapter 3.

There is a further objection to the term mental prayer, since it suggests that it is in the nature of an intellectual exercise, which demands a high degree of theological ability and knowledge. As a matter of fact it demands nothing of the kind. The only intellectual ability required is the power to understand and appreciate the Christian ideal as it is set before us in the person of him who said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” In other words, the standard of intellectual ability required for the practice of mental prayer is the power to understand the teaching of our Lord as given us in the three Synoptic Gospels and to endeavour to apply it to our daily lives. In fact, the amount of intellectual ability required is the amount necessary to save us from being certified as lunatics! We shall see later on that there are various forms of mental prayer and that some kinds do not suit some people; but this is not due to their lack of intellectual capacity but to their peculiarities of temperament. A further objection to the term mental prayer is that it seems to imply that mental prayer consists mainly in the working out of a reasoned train of thought.

This is entirely wrong. Prayer is the lifting up of the soul to God; the use of any form of reasoning in prayer is to provide us with motives for directing our wills and emotions towards God more fully than we have hitherto done. The use of reasoning in mental prayer is a means to this end; it is not an end in itself, and it has nothing to do with theological speculation of any kind.

Subject to these qualifications the distinction is a convenient one. Vocal prayer covers the ordinary forms of public worship, in which the prayers of the congregation are formulated into words (it does not matter for the present purpose whether they are recited by all those present or only by an officiant, or whether the words are composed *ex tempore or follow a fixed liturgical form), all prayers which we recite from books or from memory, and all prayers in which we are definitely concerned to formulate our thoughts into words as we go along. Mental prayer consists of all acts of prayer and worship in which the soul is raised to God by the use of formal trains of reasoning or by the activity of the affections and the will: it is irrelevant whether our mind formulates these thoughts into words or not. It must always be borne in mind that vocal prayer is not prayer at all, unless to some extent at least it is accompanied by a raising up of the soul to God.

The Use of Vocal Prayer

It does not fall within the scope of this book to discuss the necessity of corporate public worship of the kind common to all organized Christian bodies apart from the Society of Friends. It is sufficient to point out that if corporate worship of this type is normally a necessary part of the full Christian life, it must express itself in a form of words which unites those present in the offering of their prayer to God. But apart from this, vocal prayer is normally necessary to the Christian life. We may begin the practice of Christianity in childhood or late in life. To children it seems natural to talk to God in ordinary speech; nothing is so attractive as the capacity of children to talk to God in the same way as that in which they talk to their father and mother. It would seem to them ridiculous to do otherwise. And it fairly often happens that people who have real simplicity of heart can go on praying to God either in their own words or in prayers taken from books for all their lives. But most Christians, as they grow up, find that prayer ceases to be a natural and easy thing, and those who turn (or return) to Christianity late in life find prayer a difficult matter. This is only natural. We need the innocence of little children before we can enter into the Kingdom of God, and most of us as we grow older lose that innocence. We can only recover it at the cost of a long and laborious struggle, which may last throughout our lives. Consequently prayer ceases to be a natural activity, and we can only recover the power of praying by laborious efforts.

In attempting this task vocal prayer is nearly always necessary. Except for those who naturally possess some rare gift of contemplation, we cannot raise our souls to God without the use of words. Any difficult art or virtue has to be acquired by practising the actions appropriate to it. Children are trained in the virtue of courtesy by being told to say “Please” or “Thank you”. We learn to read or write by laborious attempts to master single letters. It is the same with prayer. We learn to pray by using simple forms of prayer appropriate to our age and state of education.

Unfortunately, many people stop short at this stage. It is by no means uncommon to meet people who say they have abandoned the practice of prayer because they found no value in it; a number of such people prove on inquiry never to have advanced beyond the use of some simple forms of prayer which they were taught in their childhood. For sentimental reasons they have not liked to change them, and have continued to use them until they realized that their prayers had become a mere farce. They have proceeded to abandon the use of prayer instead of inquiring whether there were not more suitable forms of prayer available.

This difficulty may to some extent be met by the use of more developed forms of vocal prayer. But in the majority of cases the use of vocal prayer alone will not produce the highest spiritual development possible. There are of course many whose state of life allows them too little leisure to admit of more than the saying of a few vocal prayers daily, and there would appear to be some people so constituted that they cannot use any form of mental prayer at all. But it may safely be said that most people can and ought to make a far greater use of mental prayer than they do, and that the quite common tendency to abandon the practice of prayer because it seems to be of no value is largely due to the fact that the whole tradition of mental prayer has been so little known in the Church of England. At best it has been regarded as a special privilege reserved for the more leisured and cultured members of the upper middle classes.

But mental prayer can never entirely replace the use of vocal prayer. Mental prayer by itself is liable to degenerate into vagueness and unreality unless it is used in conjunction with a certain amount of vocal prayer. This element of vocal prayer is provided by the Liturgy of the Church and the Divine Office. Other forms of devotion are provided in various books; but most people would derive great benefit by relying less on such books and more on mental prayer, and by a more frequent attendance at the Liturgy and by recitation of the Divine Office.

The Necessity of Mental Prayer

In the strict sense it cannot be said that mental prayer is necessary. It has never been held that the faithful are bound to practise it, except in the case of those who are members of religious orders which enjoin it as part of their rule. And since there would appear to be some people who cannot practise mental prayer and can derive the greatest benefit from vocal prayer alone, it cannot be said that mental prayer is in the strict sense a necessary part of the Christian life. But it may safely be said that most people will fail to achieve anything like the fullest spiritual development of which they are capable without it. And although theologians may draw a distinction between those practices which are binding on all Christians under pain of sin and those which are laudable but not necessary, it is very dangerous for us to be content with anything less than the constant endeavour to attain to the highest standard that our state of life allows. We cannot afford to allow ourselves deliberately to be second-class Christians. It is easy for us to begin by being content with a Laodicean religion and to end by abandoning religion altogether.

In this sense mental prayer is necessary to almost all Christians. The regular use of it will force us to keep before our minds the true nature of the Christian ideal of conduct, as revealed in the person of our Lord, and the appalling extent to which we fall short of it. It will prevent us from ever supposing that we can substitute the observance of external rules for the attempt to realize in our lives the Spirit of Christ. It will reveal to us to an ever-increasing extent our sins and failures, and supply us continually with fresh incentives for overcoming them. Further, it will add fresh meaning and life to our vocal prayers and our attendance at public worship, and prevent them from becoming formal and lifeless repetitions with no spiritual meaning.

These are benefits which most people cannot obtain in any other way. And although we may urge that there is no rule of the Church which orders us to make use of mental prayer, yet we can hardly hope that we shall have any very good excuse in the sight of God, if we deliberately neglect the means of obtaining them and content ourselves with a lower standard of religion. In this sense it may fairly be urged that mental prayer should be a necessary part of the life of all Christians except those quite exceptional people who seem incapable of mental prayer of any kind, or those whose condition of life really does give them no leisure for any but the briefest prayers. It will be seen below that this lack of leisure cannot be pleaded with real sincerity by any but a very few people, even in the conditions of modern industrial civilization.

In general, therefore, it may be said that though mental prayer is not in the strict sense a duty binding upon Christians, it is normally necessary for all those who are not prepared to be content with offering our Lord anything less than the fullest devotion of which they are capable. No doubt those for whom it is really impossible receive grace in other ways to compensate for their inability to practise mental prayer; but we cannot expect to be given exceptional forms of grace while we are deliberately neglecting the normal means of obtaining it.

It has been said that the Church of England has succeeded in producing a generally high level of virtuous conduct among her members, but has failed on the whole to produce any large number of conspicuous examples of the more heroic forms of Christian sanctity. Allowing for certain exceptions there is a considerable degree of truth in the charge. It is at least possible that the general neglect of mental prayer among us is largely responsible for this failure. For it is mainly through mental prayer that we are drawn to the conception of the Christian life as an adventure in which we must be prepared to throw everything away for the sake of Jesus and to count the world well lost if we can find him. It is of course quite untrue to suppose that many Anglicans have not done so; but it is very doubtful whether there have been as many as there ought to have been.

Objections to the Use of Mental Prayer

Before considering the methods of mental prayer, it may be well to consider some of the objections commonly made by those who do not use it.

The first of these is a theoretical one: “How can I be sure that mental prayer is not a form of auto-suggestion, and that the spiritual progress which it produces is not simply due to the fact that by meditating on the character of Jesus I naturally tend to assimilate my character to the ideal I am continually contemplating?” From the Christian point of view the objection is entirely unimportant. In so far as the psychologist is able to analyse the effect of the use of mental prayer on the human character, he is merely analysing the method by which the grace of God affects the soul; he is analysing the method by which God works in one sphere of creation, just as ...