Lead Us Not into Temptation

Extract

Liturgy is a great thing for sending people to sleep. It does not matter how archaic a word or phrase in the liturgy is, or obscure or even downright nonsense, it can still be said, provided it is said or sung often enough. Witness the remarkable lines of some popular hymns. This is even true of such an exalted thing as the Lord’s Prayer, which has been said somewhere in the liturgy from the earliest times.

Englishmen still say ‘hallowed’ long after the word has gone out of current use, largely because Englishmen have always said ‘hallowed’ since at least the days of King Alfred. This is not an English eccentricity. The Greeks have always recited the Lord’s Prayer with the word epiousios, which is known to have been unintelligible to second-century Christians. Nobody then and nobody since has ever heard of this word in any other context, and nobody is really sure what it means. And yet for century after century the Greeks have gone on saying it.

If this is so of single words, it is more so with whole phrases. The meaning of the line ‘lead us not into temptation’ is no less obscure than epiousios. The words themselves do not present any difficulty, but taken together they seems to imply something that is quite unthinkable. Are we really meaning that God would lead us into temptation, if we didn’t pray to him not to ? This certainly troubled the early Latin Fathers when they were engaged on providing a satisfactory translation for the Western Church. They frequently softened the shock by inserting something like: ‘do not suffer us to be led into temptation’ (ne patiaris nos . . .). But the novelty wore off, and as this cushioning interpolation was not in the Greek, St Jerome stuck on ne nos inducas . . . , and the Western Church was quietly lulled off to sleep by the liturgical anodyne of centuries of repetition.