Prayer Postures: What They Mean, Why They Matter

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ISLAMIC SALAT & CATHOLIC ADORATION
Prayer Postures: What They Mean & Why They Matter

April 2012By Heather M. Erb

Heather M. Erb is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania. She has extensive teaching experience in philosophy and religious studies at the undergraduate and graduate levels at several major universities, including Fordham, Penn State, University of Toronto, and St. Francis University. She lives with her husband and three children in State College, Pennsylvania.

Saint John Damascene (d. 749) was the first major Christian theologian to defend the faith against Islam. He did so by describing the power of the incarnation, whose energy lies at the heart of the world. The mystery of the incarnation and the sacramental life it offers distinguish Christianity from religions of pure immanence or pure transcendence, which focus solely on one aspect of the divine to the neglect of the full truth. In keeping with Prosper of Aquitaine’s ancient dictum lex orandi, lex credendi (“as we pray, so we believe”), and in light of the revival of Islamic influence in the West, it is paramount to explore the historical, theological, and pastoral considerations implicit in the body language of Catholic and Islamic adoration.

In Islamic worship, adoration in the act of prostration — bending the knees to a sitting position and resting the palms and forehead on the ground in a single action — expresses the worshiper’s humility and sense of utter insignificance before God, and forms the central, repetitive part of the daily salat (prayer). This self-effacing, enclosed posture stresses the distance between the human and the divine.

In Catholic worship, kneeling is the prescribed posture for public eucharistic adoration. Pope John Paul II taught that eucharistic worship is the focal point of Catholic life, and adoration of Christ in the Eucharist forms the basis by which we are disposed to be witnesses of Christ in the world.

Clearly, these prayer postures stem from diverse interpretations of the divine presence in the theologies of Catholic and Muslim adoration. For Catholics, eucharistic adoration is the pivot on which authentic mysticism turns because it joins the transcendence of God’s power to the immanence of divine love. God incarnate is manifest and made present in the paradox — indeed, in the scandal — of sacramental particularity. Muslims, however, reject the incarnation. Allah is not understood as “Father,” nor is he present sacramentally. As an affirmation of divine transcendence that avoids the specter of idolatry (shirk), the Muslim is forbidden from casting his eyes on any created thing while performing the ritual salat.

Why do Catholics (and Jews) reject prostration as a regular posture of liturgical worship, and why do Muslims use it as the signature posture of daily salat? Three considerations illumine the underlying theological distinctions: First, the presence of prostration in antiquity, its influence on biblical texts, and the liturgical life of early Christians; second, the connection between Muslim voluntarism and prostration; and third, the theology of “light” that permeates Catholic eucharistic adoration.

In the fifth century B.C., Herodotus described Persian greeting customs (Histories), noting that a kiss on the mouth indicated that the parties meeting were of equal rank, while a kiss on the cheek indicated the inferiority of one party, and prostration or “worship” occurred when one of less noble rank met another of much higher rank. These degrees of intimacy eventually transposed themselves into oriental court worship, where, depending on his rank, a person would either blow a kiss, bow, kneel, or prostrate himself before a ruler. Alexander the Great shocked the Greeks by introducing proskynesis (prostration) in his court in 327 B.C. as part of the cult of emperor worship, introducing the Persian innovation to gain the support of the Iranians serving at his court.

In biblical texts, Jews used the term histahawah (prostration) to signify a posture indicating servitude and homage to a lord, whether human (Gen. 23:7, 12), angelic (Gen. 18:2; 19:1), or divine (Gen. 17:3). By the time of the Psalms (in use by the tenth century B.C.), the term had acquired the general meaning of praying or carrying out a cultic act before God. There is a continuous interplay of the prostrate and erect postures in both Old and New Testaments. Falling down in worship is paired with, but clearly antecedent to, praying with hands lifted (Ps. 63:5). The latter is the orans posture that came to dominate early Christian worship, as illustrated in the catacombs, that anticipates the joy of the resurrection.

Christianity’s closest relative, Judaism, rejected the frequent use of prostration that was practiced during the earlier biblical and First and Second Temple periods. The conscious decision of Rabbinic Jews to substitute bowing for prostration (except in specific circumstances of grave distress and penance) reflected the character of Jewish prayer as shaped by the intimate parent-child (vs. master-servant) relationship. As Judaism moved away from the Temple cult and Eastern cultural influences, prostration gave way to the gesture of greeting and respect found between teacher and student — a relationship bridging, instead of accentuating, the gulf between worshiper and God. Catholic adoration stands in close relation to this type of Jewish interpersonal expression.

In the New Testament, prostration signifies fear, awe, or a desperate plea for divine help, whereas standing erect is closely tied with joy in meeting Christ. For example, St. Paul falls to the ground dumbfounded, only to be instructed by Jesus to rise to preach the Gospel (Acts 9:4-6). The disciples fall prostrate, overcome with fear at the sight of the transfiguration, only to be instructed to rise and to banish their fear (Mt. 17:6-7). The guards at the tomb fall prostrate with fear at the sight of the angel of the Lord (Mt. 28:4); the women fall prostrate, terrified at the sight of two men in dazzling garments at the tomb (Lk. 24:5). Even Jesus throws Himself on the ground in his prayer in Gethsemane (Mt. 26:39).

As regards the Apostles’ prostration at the transfiguration, St. John Chrysostom points to a “vast solitude, a lonely height,” and “a great stillness” on the mountain as contributing to their “immense fear.” Pope Pius XII quotes Chrysostom on the link between eucharistic adoration and the freedom of a creature made in the image of God:

“When you see [the Body of Christ] exposed, say to yourself: Thanks to this body, I am no longer dust and ashes, I am no more a captive but a freeman: hence I hope to obtain heaven and the good things that are there in store for me, eternal life, the heritage of the angels, companionship with Christ….” (Mediator Dei, no. 134)

For St. Augustine, the Apostles’ prostration symbolizes returning to the dust, while the Lord’s raising them up signifies our resurrection. Faith in the risen Christ raises the incarnate spirit up from earth toward Heaven. This emphasis is echoed in Augustine’s Confessions, a text saturated with images of spiritual ascent, culminating in the mystical vision at Ostia. Here, he and his mother, Monica, were “raising [themselves] up with a more ardent love to the Selfsame,” and “ascending higher yet by means of inward thought” to attain the food of truth that never fails.

While kneeling was eventually reintroduced into Sunday worship, prostration is proper to only two occasions in Catholic liturgy today — on Good Friday, when the priest’s prostration before the altar signifies the abasement of “earthly man” and the grief and sorrow of the Church, and in the rite of ordination, when it signifies the complete nothingness of the ordinand in contrast to the efficacious power of God that sustains all aspects of the priest’s ministry.

There is also a distinction between Eastern Christian (Catholic and Orthodox) and Islamic prostrations. While one variety of Eastern Christian liturgical bowing (the deep or low-earth bow) resembles Islamic prostration in appearance, the meaning of the bow (including head bows, metanies or waist bows, and low-earth bows) in the East stems from Christian sacramental, not Islamic, spirituality.

Unlike Islam, Eastern Christianity is relatively innocent of legalistic interpretations of salvation. In forgiving sin, says Chrysostom, God is more a physician than a condemning judge. This is not to diminish divine justice and mercy. Ascetical literature even recommends prostrations as one form of penance.

Whereas the Islamic legalistic notion of sin is one of crime against a potentially vengeful God who loves humans conditionally upon their repentant adherence to His law, the Eastern Christian theology of penance emphasizes sin as a mortal sickness to be removed by God’s unconditional love and spiritual healing. As a penitential gesture, the deep bow is performed with the Prayer of St. Ephrem during Lenten Vespers. Deep bowing can also occur, for example, during the epiclesis (the calling down of the Spirit on the Holy Gifts or eucharistic elements), during the veneration of icons, and at the Great Entrance (the procession of the Holy Gifts to the altar).

As a rule, Eastern Christianity does not practice eucharistic exposition and adoration, a fact that parallels its unique sacramental theology and liturgical demands. In the East, the sense of the “hiddenness” of the divine mysteries displaces contemplative vision from the eucharistic elements to the divine revelation through the icon. The eucharistic mysteries are to be received as food and drink, not adored by the eyes as a static “given” in prolonged ocular communion, a practice particular to the Latin West.

The Arabic term ‘ibadah (worship) literally means “slavehood,” and denotes the entire relationship of man to his Creator. The noted Muslim commentator Al’farabi (d. 1240) explained that, in Islamic theology, reality is divided into two categories: the “worshiper” and the “Object of worship,” such that the fundamental meaning of “human” is to be a “slave.” Worship (‘ibadah) means submission to God and denotes the act of becoming ‘abd, a slave.

Ritual acts such as prayer (salat), almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage are considered ‘ibadah, but so is any act performed in recognition of one’s true relation to God, that of slave to master. The proper posture of a human as ‘abd to God characterizes salat as a “divine service” elaborated in a series of prescribed cultic acts.

Unlike Catholic liturgy, which is a celebration not of what we accomplish but of what is accomplished in us through Christ, the work of Islamic salat is an active labor or travail more than a contemplative oeuvre.

Daily salat emphasizes at once the activity of the subject in a repeated “bending toward” the divine Legislator and a series of minutely detailed ritual prescriptions whose exact performance conditions the validity and efficacy of the prayer. An enclosed posture that repudiates our dignified autonomy as humans, it mirrors our solidarity with the lowest grade of organism in the praise of God, vegetative life.

The juridical character of Islamic adoration as an act of obedience stems from the triumph of the voluntarist over the rationalist tradition, with the consequent focus on divine will and omnipotence as the sole source for the validity of cultic performance and ethical norms. Tracing the line of voluntarist thinkers to Scotus and Ockham, and to the teachers of Islam above all, Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain located the origin of voluntarism in the exclusive focus on the omnipotent legislative power of the divine. The distinction between good and evil in such a view depends not on divine wisdom but exclusively on God’s arbitrary sovereign freedom: “A kind of divine despotism thus became the source of the moral law, decreed and imposed without reason by the celestial High Command.”

Tenth- and eleventh-century Islamic Ash’arite theologians maintained divine sovereignty against the possibility of any external logical or moral standards, and denied any such limits on God’s unrestricted will and power. Thus, God could impose illogical acts of cruelty or un­achievable obligations. The impact of the traditionalist Ash’arite school of theology was decisive in subsequent Islamic theology and ethics, eventually triumphing over the rationalist Mu’tazilite view, which stressed both divine wisdom as the source of God’s commands and prohibitions, and the autonomy of human agency. Creaturely causality shriveled under the weight of divine occa­sionalism, as Islamic salat shrinks the topography of the self to its relation to power and authority.

In his “Regensburg Address,” Pope Benedict XVI corrected Ibn Hazm’s claim that God’s transcendence is such that He is not bound even by His own word. The teaching of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) — that there exists an analogical similitude between creatures and God — inveighs against the notion of God as One who acts as sheer voluntas, or with a freedom that contravenes law and rationality. Our worship also extols the divine mind, and the process by which we are engrafted onto the divine life does not occur without the development of the virtues and the natural light of reason, by which we recognize God’s power and goodness, and are assisted in giving Him the highest reverence and adoration.

Worship offered to God by the Church is not a juridical action but a public divine service for the glorification of God and for the sanctification of humanity called to participate in His life, opened up by the invitation of One who has lifted us from the dust through Christ.

In Catholic eucharistic theology, light and vision are associated with the incarnation and intimate union with God. The cult of eucharistic adoration, with its emphasis on Christ’s healing light, emerged at the time the Church defeated the Cathar heresy, which denied the value of the flesh. King Louis IX ordered the Blessed Sacrament to be exposed after his victory over the Albigensians in 1226, and anchorites had windows installed in their cells in order visually to worship the sacrament on the altar.

The thirteenth century witnessed a great surge in devotion to the incarnation and the real presence of Christ in the eucharistic species. This culminated in the establishment of the Feast of Corpus Christi, first in Liège, then in 1264 extended to the general Roman calendar. Thus, a series of ideas converged in the Church’s focus on the sacrament as the continuing presence of Christ and the immanence of God. The true and incarnate Son of God is God made present on the altar, and the vision of His light is our ascent and conduit to God through prayer.

Pope John Paul II, in his apostolic letter Mane Nobiscum Domine, focused on the Eucharist as a “mystery of light” that nourishes Catholic life and spirituality. Christ comes to us in the Eucharist as the “light streaming from the ‘Bread of Life,’ as the supreme fulfillment of his promise to ‘be with us always…’ (cf. Mt. 28:20)” (no. 2). But since the glory of Christ remains veiled in the Eucharist (unlike at the transfiguration and resurrection), the Eucharist is pre-eminently a mysterium fidei.

In the tradition of bridal mysticism, adoration of Christ in the Eucharist propels the soul beyond the vacuum of its own nothingness and into the fertile, communicative source of its very being and life. The rich harvest gleaned from meditation on the relation between the metaphor of vision and eucharistic adoration yields conclusions about the appropriateness of kneeling. The physical vision that accompanies kneeling before Christ on the altar reflects our nature as intelligent, incarnate spirits made in the divine image, who, by lifting up our minds and wills to God, can experience even on earth a foretaste of the heavenly visio awaiting us in the afterlife. The kneeler’s act of beholding Christ in the Eucharist bespeaks openness, readiness, and an engagement that corresponds to the adorer’s joyful anticipation of receiving the Bread of Life, whereas the sensory enclosure of Muslim prostration shuts out the light and turns the self inward toward its own nothingness.

Our adoring contemplation of Christ in the Eucharist is the high point of a journey in progress and a gazing on the mysterious face of Christ, whose light reaches our inner being. “Kneeling,” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger stated, “is not only a Christian gesture, but a Christological one.” The spiritual communion of seeing and being seen begins in adoration and is perfected in the beatific vision.

From the human perspective, kneeling is a fitting sign of three theological realities. First, it is a sign of the Eucharist as a “mystery of light” that draws us into personal and communal contemplation of the presence of Christ, in which we “wait patiently to hear his voice, and, as it were, to sense the beating of his heart” (Mane Nobis­cum Domine, no. 18). Second, it is a sign of our adoption as sons of God, made in His image as intelligent seekers of the true light. Third, it is a sign of our readiness and availability as pilgrims on a journey toward the beatific vision. From the divine perspective, the act of adoration involves God’s invitation to participate in His divinity, made possible by a divine condescension that fosters intimacy with Christ.

In a homily to the universal Church at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Pope Benedict XVI used the symbolism of the Gothic cathedral to elucidate a Catholic spirituality and theology of the mystical body. The splendor of the Gothic spires, no less than the church’s height and light, forces the eyes upward, thereby reflecting the constant yearning of the human spirit to rise to God, and signifies the dynamic unity in diversity that characterizes the Church. With Pope Benedict XVI, we do well to lift our gaze upward as we travel the path to the New Jerusalem, whose light is the Lamb (Rev. 21:23).