Compelling God: Theories of Prayer in Anglo-Saxon England by Stephanie Clark (review)

Reviewed by: Compelling God: Theories of Prayer in Anglo-Saxon England by Stephanie Clark Jodi Grimes Compelling God: Theories of Prayer in Anglo-Saxon England. By Stephanie Clark. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. ISBN 978–1–4875–0198–3. Pp. x + 318. $88.00. Not only is Stephanie Clark's first monograph an important academic study on Anglo-Saxon theories of prayer, and therefore of interest to medievalists and scholars of Christianity, but also it is valuable for anyone interested in prayer and spiritual formation more generally. Clark, an associate professor at the University of Oregon, contests modern, post-Reformation conceptions of early and medieval Christian prayer, and her work may also indirectly challenge those who pray to think more deeply about their own beliefs and spiritual practices. Studies on prayer in Anglo-Saxon England tend to focus on sources and manuscript contexts or "later forms of devotion" (53), although a few concentrate more broadly on prayer in the Western tradition, such as Roy Hammerling's A History of Prayer (2008) and Paul F. Bradshaw's The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy (2002). Clark's analysis is unique in its consideration of Anglo-Saxon texts on prayer through the application of gift theory, which derives from the anthropological studies of Marcel Mauss (The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, 1925) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1969); and later developed in works like Jacques Derrida's Given Time I: Counterfeit Money (1994), Jacques Godbout's The World of the Gift (1998), and Maurice Godelier's The Enigma of the Gift (1999). Clark argues that gift theory is particularly useful for her analysis since Anglo-Saxon authors tend to view prayer as a highly relational, reciprocal "gift exchange with God" (20). Modern readers may misunderstand this view because they are inclined to "conflate reciprocity," which focuses on the relationships between "the persons involved in the exchange" with "transactionality," which focuses on the things involved in the exchange (41). Clark proposes, however, that the "reciprocal gift gives community, communication, and identity" (45). The first chapter, "The Anglo-Saxon Inheritance," begins with a discussion of two early Christian approaches to prayer vis-à-vis Origen of Alexandria, who identifies prayer as a gift to God, and Tertullian, who claims that only prayer can "conquer God" (50). Clark exposes the "central problem of will" highlighted by these teachings: does prayer change God's will, or does it show human willingness to submit to God's will? If prayer is a gift, is it "a response in gratitude, an act of submission, or is it an attempt to produce a response, a return gift?" (54). [End Page 328] To clarify how early Christians reconciled such doctrinal paradoxes, Clark masterfully surveys the extant sources. Heavily represented in early teachings about prayer are "literal explication[s]" of the Paternoster, which is featured in the "four major treatises on prayer" (66) that precede the Anglo-Saxon era: Tertullian's De oratione (turn of the third century), Origen's Peri euches ("On Prayer," early third century), Cyprian's De dominica oratione (middle of the third century), and John Cassian's Conlationes 9 and 10 (early fifth century). Also referencing Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Bede, and Benedict, Clark explains that for these authors, "humans are not praying for God's benefit" (69) but "as a reminder of their obligation—what they pray for should have effect in them and should make a real difference in their own actions and disposition . . . humans cannot obligate God to act by praying the prayer; the teaching preserves God's agency by reminding precators [that is, those who pray (11, note 29)] of their obligations" (71). Clark stresses that in these texts, along with early teachings on other biblical passages, "proper prayer . . . involves discipline of the mind and body and forms part of a moral framework of Christian behavior as well as enacting a position of dependence upon God" (76). Although post-Reformation thinkers may be inclined to reject the idea of reliance on recited prayers in favor of extemporaneous prayers, early Christian writers do not privilege spontaneity...

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