Prayer presupposes an understanding of the self as fundamentally dependent on something outside of itself—namely, God. In this respect, prayer involves a passivity that seems, initially, in tension with autonomous agency, with self-direction and self-responsibility. George Pattison’s new book, however, challenges this unnuanced view of prayer as simply heteronomous. Framed as a critical response to the Kantian criticism that prayer’s passivity precludes full moral selfhood, Pattison argues for a more complex account of the passivity of prayer, suggesting that ‘the convergence of passivity and activity’ (p. 13) in the praying self is a central feature of prayer, and that emphasising this convergence problematises the binaries of autonomy—heteronomy and activity—passivity as a framework to conceptualise prayer. To defend the possibility of prayer against the Kantian criticism, and to recover a richer conception of the passivity so integral to prayer, Pattison draws on a suite of post-Kantian philosophers—Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Buber, Levinas, Weil, and Chrétien—as interlocutors, since, as Pattison suggests, these broadly ‘existential’ thinkers variously indicate ‘how prayer might be possible in a secular world’ (p. xii) that sets autonomy against passivity.

Pattison’s critical response to the Kantian charge unfolds in three thematically unified clusters of chapters: first, the anthropology of prayer in existential terms (chapters 1–3), then the nature of language in prayer (chapters 4–6), and finally, the ethical dimensions of prayer (chapters 7–9). In the first three chapters, Pattison articulates an account of the human person that emphasises the apophatic dimensions of human existence—what Pattison will call, following Orthodox thought, ‘the apophatics of the human person’ (p. 34)—in order to defend the more complicated sense of passivity presupposed by prayer. Prayer’s passivity, in Pattison’s view, is not ‘straightforward’ but always paradoxically dependent on the self’s activity of self-annihilation, of becoming nothing, of unknowing, in relation to God, which ultimately brings that self to acknowledge the mystery of both God and itself (pp. 16, 33). This emphasis on the apophatic should not, however, be misconstrued as a dismissal of language. The praying self is not a self denuded of language, since, as Pattison insists, intimacy with God in prayer is fostered precisely in and through prayerful language, a point argued for in chapters 4, 5 and 6. Drawing on Heidegger and Buber, Pattison suggests that the relationship between the effable and the ineffable is a positive intertwinement, not a mere opposition. It is precisely in the words of prayer and their expression of the praying self’s need for what transcends itself that the ineffability of God achieves a ‘resonance’ in language (p. 59). Importantly, this resonance occurs only to the extent that prayer is ‘always [a] response to a word that calls’ (p. 63), and, as such, is always embedded within a matrix of mutual calling and response, of addressing and being addressed.

Woven through these two thematic issues is, arguably, the central concern of Pattison’s whole book-length argument; namely, the relation of prayer to ethics or, more provocatively, the ethics of prayer. For Pattison, the ethical dimensions of prayer are built into the very nature of the language of prayer, for, as Pattison emphasises, prayer’s call and response structure precludes the completion of prayer in anything other than the ‘turn[ing of] our attention to the ethical demand, [to] the word that calls us to the love and care of our neighbor’ (p. 82). Involved in this turning of attention is the recognition and acceptance of the ontological fact that ‘the word of another stands at the foundation of any possible self-understanding’ (p. 122), which, Pattison insists, applies to both the divine and human word, to the words we inherit from others and to the divine word that precedes prayer. This is the ontological and existential backdrop to the ethics of prayer: the ontological fact that another’s words—both the divine and human other—form the foundation for ‘our own human and individual capacity for language’ thus requires ‘the suspension of [the] drive for autonomous self-affirmation’ (pp. 108–9) in response to being called, to being addressed, in and through language, by both the divine and human other. This responsivity requires and presupposes a certain mode of ontological or existential humility. Humility, in the sense that Pattison wishes to defend, is ‘the moral aspect or enactment’ (p. 123) of an apophatic conception of the human person: humility here is not ‘predicated on self-hatred’ but instead on the self’s self-governance that is most fully expressed only when in relation to that which ‘comes to the self from outside the orbit of its own self-concern’ (pp. 134–5).

As is perhaps now evident, an implicit goal of the book is to problematise a conception of prayer as an isolated activity undertaken by a solitary self. In Pattison’s view, there is no possibility of prayer ‘[i]n the nameless and wordless world of a solitary individual’, where ‘there is no call, no promise, no response’ (pp. 141–2), no loving exchange, and thus, no possibility of spiritual life. This, of course, raises questions about the intersection of prayer and politics: does prayerful agency perhaps offer a model for political agency; what does an anthropology of prayer, with its emphasis on mutual address and mutual calling, have to offer conceptions of political and social life? That these questions emerge as a consequence of Pattison’s argument evidences the success of that argument in critically probing ‘the traditional hierarchy of forms of prayer’ (p. 108)—moving in ascending order from intercession to contemplative prayer—and the polarities (e.g., contemplation and action, divine intimacy and sociality, activity and passivity) that underpin this hierarchy. In questioning these divisions, Pattison amply succeeds in undoing certain caricatures of prayer, and in doing so, offering a rich framework for connecting the spiritual life with communal and social life without reducing one to the other.