Samuel Matthis

What Kierkegaard said about prayer, and what he didn't

· revised

The idea at the heart of my book came to me by way of Søren Kierkegaard, from someone close to me whom I thank in the book. The idea is simple: prayer can’t be explained. It can only be learned by praying, and by wrestling with it.

Before I used Kierkegaard’s name for that, I wanted to know what he actually wrote. He wrote in Danish, and lines circulate under his name in English without a book or a page. The research for the book went to the Danish critical edition of his works and journals, which is freely available online, and read the passages themselves.

Three lines matter for my book. One is his, but it’s usually quoted out of its setting. One isn’t his at all. The third is his, and the last of my forty days ends with it.

The best-known line is this: ‘Prayer does not change God, but it changes the one who prays.’ It’s real. Kierkegaard wrote it in 1847, under his own name: ‘Bønnen forandrer ikke Gud, men den forandrer den Bedende’ (SKS 8:137).

What’s usually left out is where it stands. It comes in a discourse written for the occasion of a confession, the one known in English as Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing. Kierkegaard is answering an objection: why tell an all-knowing God what he already knows? A hasty answer, he says, would call prayer idle, since a person’s prayer doesn’t change the Unchangeable. Then he turns it around. Would we really want a God we could change? And he goes on:

‘The true explanation is therefore also the only desirable one: prayer does not change God, but it changes the one who prays. So too with what is the subject of this discourse: God does not get to know anything by your confessing; you do, the one who confesses’ (SKS 8:137).

The sentence is an aside, then, leading up to a point about confession. It isn’t a theory that asking God for things is pointless. In a discourse he published in 1855, Kierkegaard begins with a prayer to the Unchangeable One that says the sparrow’s need moves God, and that ‘what we so often hardly notice, a human sigh, moves you, infinite love: but nothing changes you’ (SKS 13:327). Moved, but not changed. It’s a careful distinction, and it gets lost when the line travels alone.

My own view is that asking does change things, and that it changes us. Both are true. My book keeps both, and it quotes Kierkegaard for the second.

The second line is the one that matters most to me: that prayer can only be learned by praying. It sounds like Kierkegaard. The research searched his published works and his journals for it, phrase by phrase, and didn’t find it. It isn’t his sentence.

The closest he comes is a journal entry from 1848. He complains that pastors preach about prayer without praying themselves. If they did pray, he says, they’d know ‘by heart that here the spiritual trials begin’. Then he gives an image: the pastor is like ‘a gymnastics instructor who cannot swim himself and who teaches people to swim while standing on the jetty, and shouts: just strike out briskly with your arms’ (SKS 21:36, a private journal, not a published work).

A year later, in a discourse I come back to below, he says of someone who didn’t know how to pray that he ‘perhaps learned exactly this in prayer’ (SKS 11:17). Prayer teaches itself. You learn to swim in the water.

The idea is fair to Kierkegaard, and I believe it’s true. But it’s my summary, not his quotation. In the book I say it in my own voice, and the notes point to these two passages.

In 1849 Kierkegaard published three short discourses on the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, the passage that comes shortly after the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew. In the first one he describes a man who wants very much to pray well. Something weighs on him, and he’s afraid he’ll forget something, and that God won’t remember it by himself. So he gathers himself to pray with all his heart. Then:

‘The wonderful thing happened to him: as he became more and more inward in prayer, he had less and less to say, and at last he became quite silent. He became silent; yes, he became what is, if possible, even more the opposite of speaking than silence: he became a listener’ (SKS 11:17–18).

Han blev en Hørende. He became a listener—literally ‘one who hears’, though ‘listener’ is the word most English readers know from this passage. Kierkegaard goes on: ‘He had thought that to pray is to speak; he learned that to pray is not merely to be silent but is to hear.’

This is where my forty days end. The fortieth day is Holy Saturday, the day of silence between the cross and Easter, and it turns on this passage. In that reading I tell of a time when I was running from God because God doesn’t answer, and heard that I was the one not listening. Kierkegaard had described that turn long before.

It would’ve been easy to put the famous lines in quotation marks and move on. But a sentence printed under a name borrows that person’s authority. If the name is wrong, the authority is borrowed from someone who never gave it.

Kierkegaard is a witness in my book, not its voice. I want him to say only what he said, where he said it. The line about confession, the instructor on the jetty, and the man who became a listener are enough. They say more than the quotation he never wrote.

Sources

Cockayne, Joshua. ‘Prayer as God-knowledge (via Self)’. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2017: 101–114. Quotes Hong’s English of SKS 8:137 (Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Princeton, 1993, p. 22): ‘the prayer does not change God, but it changes the one who prays’.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS). Copenhagen: Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret. The Danish critical edition, on the Royal Danish Library’s text portal. Cited by volume and page:

Translations from the Danish are mine.

Words Given

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