Below you will find a transcribed full excerpt from then Cardinal Ratzingers monumental effort
Spirit of the Liturgy. This part of the book was brought up in a lentan retreat I attended at St. Stanislaus, and I believe it is worth your time even though it is fairly long:
By Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect CDF (Pope Emeritus
Benedict XVI)
3. Posture
Kneeling (prostratio)
There are groups, of no small influence, who are trying to
talk us out of kneeling. “It doesn’t suit our culture”, they say (which
culture?). It’s not right for a grown man to do this – he should face God on
his feet.” Or again: “It’s not appropriate for redeemed man – he has been set
free by Christ and doesn’t need to kneel anymore.” If we look at history, we
can see that the Greeks and Romans rejected kneeling. In view of the
squabbling, partisan deities described in mythology, this attitude was
thoroughly justified. It was only too obvious that these gods were not God,
even if you were dependent on their capricious power and had to make sure that
whenever possible, you enjoyed their favor. And so they said that kneeling was
unworthy of a free man, unsuitable for the culture of Greece, something the
barbarians went in for. Plutarch and Theophphrastus regarded kneeling as an
expression of superstitio. Aristotle called it a barbaric form of behavior (cf.
Rhetoric 1361 a 36). St. Augustine
agreed with him in a certain respect: the false gods were only the masks of
demons, who subjected men to the worship of money and to self-seeking, thus
making them “servile” and superstitious. He said that the humility of Christ
and his love, which went as far as the cross, have freed us from these powers.
We now kneel before that humility. The kneeling of Christians is not a form of enculturation
into existing customs. It is quite the opposite, an expression of Christian
culture, which transforms the existing culture through a new and deeper
knowledge and experience of God.
Kneeling does not come from any culture – it comes from the
Bible and its knowledge of God. The central importance fo kneeling in the Bible
can be seen in a very concrete way. The word proskynein alone occurs fifty-nine times in the New Testament,
twenty-four of which are in the Apocalypse, the book of the heavenly liturgy,
which is presented to the Church as the standard for her own liturgy. On closer
inspection, we can discern three closely related forms of posture. First, there
is prostratio – lying with ones face
to the ground before the overwhelming power of God; secondly, especially in the
New Testament, there is falling to ones knees before another; and thirdly, there
is kneeling. Linguistically, the three forms of posture are not always clearly
distinguished. They can be combined or merged with one another.
For the sake of brevity, I should like to mention, in the
case of prostratio, just one text from the Old Testament and another from the
New. In the Old Testament, there is an appearance of God to Joshua before the
taking of Jericho, an appearance that the sacred author quite deliberately
presents as a parallel to God’s revelation of himself to Moses in the burning
bush. Joshua sees “the commander of the army of the Lord” and, having
recognized who he is, throws himself to the ground. At that moment he hears the
words once spoken to Moses: “Put off your shoes from your feet; for the place
where you stand is holy” (Josh 5:15). In the mysterious form of the commander
of the army of the Lord”, the hidden God himself speaks to Joshua, and Joshua
throws himself down before him. Origen gives a beautiful interpretation of this
text: “Is there any other commander of the powers of the Lord than our Lord
Jesus Christ?” According to this view Joshua is worshipping the One who is to
come-the coming Christ. In the case fo the new testament, from the Fathers
onward, Jesus’ prayer on the Mount of Olives was especially important.
According to St. Matthew (22:39) and St. Mark (14:35), Jesus throws himself to
the ground; indeed, he falls to the earth (according to Matthew). However, St.
Luke who in his whole work (both the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles) is in
a special way the theologian of kneeling prayer, tells us that Jesus prayed on
his knees. This prayer, the prayer b which Jesus enters into his Passion, is an
example for us, both as a gesture and in its content. The gesture: Jesus
assumes, as it were, the fall of man, let’s himself fall into man’s fallenness,
prays to the Father out of the lowest depths of Human dereliction and anguish.
He lays his will in the will of the Fathers: “Not my will but yours be done.”
He lays the human will in the divine. He takes up all the hesitation of the
human will and endures it. It is this very conforming of the human will to the
divine that is the heart of redemption. Or the fall fo man depends on the
contradiction of wills, on the opposition of the human will to the divine,
which the tempter leads man to think is the condition of his freedom. Only
one’s own autonomous will, subject to no other will, is freedom. “Not my will
but yours…” – those are the words of truth, for God’s will is not in opposition
to our own, but the ground and condition of its possibility. Only when our will
rests in the will of God does it become truly will and truly free. The
suffering and struggle of Gethsemane is the struggle for this redemptive truth,
for this uniting of what is divided, for the uniting that is communion with
God. Now we understand why the Son’s loving way of addressing the Father,
“Abba”, is found in this place (cf. Mk 14:36). St. Paul sees in this cry the
prayer that the Holy Spirit places on our lips (cf. Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6) and thus
anchors our Spirit-filled prayer in the Lord’s Prayer in Gethsemane.
In the Church’s liturgy today, prostration appears on two
occasions: on Good Friday and at ordinations. On Good Friday, the day of the
Lord’s crucifixion, it is the fitting expression of our sense of shock at the
fact that we by our sins share in the responsibility for the death of Christ.
We throw ourselves down and participate in this shock, in his descent into the
depths of anguish. We throw ourselves down and so acknowledge where we are and
who we are: fallen creatures whom only he can set on their feet. We throw
ourselves down, as Jesus did, before the mystery of God’s power present to us,
knowing that the Cross is the true burning bush, the place of the flame of
God’s love, which burns but does not destroy. At ordinations prostration comes
from the awareness of or absolute incapacity, by our own powers, to take on the
priestly mission of Jesus Christ, to speak with his “I”. While the ordinands
are lying on the ground, the whole congregation sings the Litany of the Saints.
I shall never forget lying on the ground at the time of my own priestly and episcopal
ordination. When I was ordained bishop, my intense feeling of inadequacy,
incapacity, in the face of the greatness of the task was even stronger than at
my priestly ordination. The fact that the praying Church was calling upon all
the saints, that the prayer of the Church really was enveloping and embracing
me, was a wonderful consolation. In my incapacity, which had to be expressed in
the bodily posture of prostration, this prayer, this presence of all the
saints, of the living and the dead, was a wonderful strength – it was the only
thing that could, as it were, lift me up. Only the presence of the saints with
me made possible the path that lay before me.
Secondly, we must mention the gesture of falling to ones
knees before another, which is described four times in the Gospels (cf. MK
I:40; 10:17; Mt 17:14; 27:29) by means of the word gonypetein. Let us single out Mark I:40. A leper comes to Jesus and
begs him for help. He falls to his knees before him and says: “If you will, you
can make me clean.” It is hard to assess the significance of the gesture. What
we have here is surely not a proper act of adoration, but rather a supplication
expressed fervently in bodily form, while showing a trust in a power beyond the
merely human. The situation is different, though, with the classical word for
adoration on one’s knees – proskynein.
I shall give two examples in order to clarify the question that faces the
translator. First there is the account of how, after the multiplication the
loaves, Jesus stays with the Father on the mountain, while the disciples
struggle in vain on the lake with the wind and the waves. Jesus comes to them across the water. Peter
hurries toward him and is saved from sinking by the Lord. Then Jesus climbs
into the boat, and the wind lets up. The text continues: “And the ship’s crew
came and said, falling at his feet, ‘Thou art indeed the Son of God’” (Mt 14:33,
Knox version). Other translations say: [The disciples] in the boat worshipped
[Jesus], saying…” (RSV). Both translations are correct. Each emphasizes one
aspect of what is going on. The Knox version brings out the bodily expression, while
the RSV shows what is happening interiorly. It is perfectly clear from he
structure of the narrative that the gesture of acknowledging Jesus as the Son of
God is an act of worship. We encountered similar set of problems in St. John’s
Gospel when we read the account of the healing of the man born blind. This
narrative, which is structured in a truly “theo-dramatic” way, ends with a
dialogue between Jesus and the man he has healed. It serves as a model for the
dialogue of conversion, for the whole narrative must also be seen as a profound
exposition of the existential and theological significance of Baptism. In the
dialogue, Jesus asks the man whether he believes in the Son of Man, The man
born blind replies: “Tell me who he is Lord.” When Jesus sys, “It is I who is
speaking to you”, the man makes the confession of faith: I do believe, Lord”,
and then he “[falls] down to worship him” (Jn 9:35-38, Knox version adapted).
Earlier translations said: “He worshipped him.” In fact, the whole scene is
directed toward the act of faith and the worship of Jesus, which follows from
it. Now the eyes of the heart, as well as of the body, are opened. The man has
in truth begun to see. For the exegesis of the text it is important to note
that the word proskynein occurs eleven time sin John’s Gospel of which nine occurrences
are found in Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan women by Jacob’s well (Jn
4: 19-24). This conversation is entirely devoted to the theme of worship, and
it is indisputable that here, as elsewhere in St. John’s Gospel, the word
always has the meaning of “worship”. Incidentally, this conversation, too, ends
– like that of the healing of the man born blind – with Jesus’ revealing
himself: “I who speak to you am he” (Jn 4:26).
I have lingered over these texts, because they bring to
light something important. In the two passages that we looked at most closely,
the spiritual and bodily meanings of proskynein are really inseparable. The
bodily gesture itself is the bear of the spiritual meaning, which is precisely
that of worship. Without the worship, the bodily gesture would be meaningless,
while the spiritual act must of its very nature, because of the psychosomatic
unity of man express itself in the bodily gesture. The two aspects are united
in the one word, because in a very profound way they belong together. When
kneeling becomes merely external, a merely physical act, it becomes
meaningless. On the other hand, when someone tries to take worship back into
the purely spiritual realm and refuses to give it embodied form, the act of
worship evaporates, for what is purely spiritual is inappropriate to the nature
of man. Worship is one of those fundamental acts that affect the whole man that
is why bending the knee before the presence of the living God is something we
cannot abandon.
I saying this, we come to the typical gesture of kneeling on
one or both knees. In the Hebrew of the old Testament, the verb barak, “to
kneel”, is cognate with the word berek, “knee”. The Hebrews regarded the knees
as a symbol of strength; to bend the knee is, therefore, to bend our strength
before the living God, an acknowledgement fo the fact that all that we are we
receive form him. In important passages of the Old Testament, this gesture
appears as an expression of worship. At the dedication of the Temple, Solomon
kneels “in the presence of all the assembly of Israel” (2 Chron 6: 13). After
the exile, in the afflictions of the returned Israel, which is still without a
Temple, Ezra repeats this gesture at the time of the evening sacrifice: “I…fell
upon my knees and spread out my hands to the Lord my God” (Ezra 9:5). The great
psalm of the passion, Psalm 22, ends with the promise: “Yes to him shall all
the proud of the earth fall down; before him all who go down to the dust shall
throw themselves down”. The related passage Isaiah 45:23 we shall have to
consider in the context of the New Testament. The Acts fo the Apostles tells us
how St. Peter (9:40, St. Paul (20:36) and the whole Christian community (21:5)
pray on their knees. Particularly important for our question is the account of
the martyrdom of St. Stephen. The first man to witness to Christ with his blood
is described in his suffering as a perfect image of Christ, whose Passion is
repeated in the martyrdom of the witness, even in small details. One of these
is that Stephen, on his knees, takes up the petition of the crucified Christ:
“Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (7:60. We should remember that Luke,
unlike Matthew and Mark, speaks fo the Lord kneeling in Gethsemane, which shows
that Luke wants the kneeling fo the first martyr as his entry into the prayer
of Jesus. Kneeling is not only a Christian gesture, but a Christological one.
For me, the most important passage for the theology of
kneeling will always be the great hymn of Christ in Philippians 2:6-11. In this
pre-Pauline hymn, we hear and see the prayer fot he apostolic Church and can
discern within it her confession of faith in Christ. However, we also hear the
voice of the Apostle, who enters into this prayer and hands it onto us, and
ultimately, we perceive here both the profound inner unity of the Old and New
Testaments and the cosmic breadth of Christian faith. The hymn presents Christ
as the antitype of the First Adam. While the latter high-handedly grasped at
likeness to God, Christ does not count equality with God, which is his by
nature, a “thing to be grasped”, but humbles himself unto death, even death on
the Cross. It is precisely this humility, which comes from love that is the
truly divine reality and procures for him the “name which is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on Earth and
under the Earth” (Phil 2: 5-10). Here the hymn of the apostolic Church takes up
the words of promise in Isaiah 45:23: “By myself I have sworn, from my mouth
has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return: ‘to me every knee
shall bow, every tongue shall sear.’” In the interweaving of the old and New
Testaments, it becomes clear that, even as crucified, Jesus bears the “name
above every name” – the name of the Most High – and is himself God by nature.
Through him, through the Crucified, the bold promise of the Old Testament is
now fulfilled: all bend the knee before Jesus, the One who ascended, and bow to
him precisely as the one true God above all gods. The Cross has become the
world-embracing sign of God’s presence, and all that we have previously heard
about the historical and cosmic Christ should now, in this passage, come back
into our minds. The Christian liturgy is a cosmic liturgy precisely because it
bends the knee before the crucified and exalted Lord. Here is the center o
authentic culture – the culture of truth. The humble gesture by which we fall
at the feet of the Lord inserts us into the true path fo the life fo the
cosmos.
There is much more that we might add. For example, there is
the touching story told by Eusebius in his history of the Church as a tradition
going back to Hegesippus in the second century. Apparently, St. James, the
“Brother of the Lord”, the first bishop of Jerusalem and “head” of the Jewish Christian
Church, had a kind of callous on his knees, because he was always on his knees
worshipping God and begging for forgiveness for his people (2, 23, 6). Again,
there is a story that comes from the sayings of the Desert Fathers, according
to which the devil was compelled by God to show himself to a certain Abba
Apollo. He looked black and ugly, with frighteningly thin limbs, but, most
strikingly, he had no knees. The inability to kneel is seen as the very essence
of the diabolical.
But I do not want to go into more detail. I should like to
make just one more remark. The
expression used by St. Luke to describe the kneeling of Christians (theis ta
gonata) is unknown in classical Greek. We are dealing here with a specifically
Christian word. With that remark, our reflections return full circle to where
they began. It may well be that kneeling is alien to modern culture – insofar as
it is a culture, for this culture has turned away from the faith and no longer
knows the One before whom kneeling is the right, indeed the intrinsically
necessary gesture. The man who learns to believe learns also to kneel, and a
faith or a liturgy no longer familiar with kneeling would be sick at the core.
Where it has been lost, kneeling must be rediscovered, so that in our prayer,
we remain in fellowship with the apostles and martyrs, in fellowship with the
whole cosmos, indeed in union with Jesus Christ himself.
+JMJ+
