The Prayer of St Ephrem

The Lenten prayer “O Lord and Master of my life,” recited with prostrations throughout the Orthodox season of Great Lent and known to every Orthodox Christian as “the Prayer of St Ephrem.” This chapter sets out the text and its liturgical use; the manner of its recitation with great and small prostrations; the differences between its Greek and older Slavonic forms; and — handled carefully, per the methodology — the question of its authenticity, which scholarship has answered: the prayer is not found in the genuine Syriac corpus of Ephrem and is in all likelihood a later Byzantine composition received under his name, not a work of his own pen.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

The Prayer and Its Place in Lent

Of all the texts that bear St Ephrem’s name, the one most familiar to Orthodox Christians is the short penitential prayer recited throughout Great Lent. In its common English form it runs:

O Lord and Master of my life, give me not a spirit of sloth, idle curiosity, lust for power, and idle talk.
But grant unto me, Thy servant, a spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love.
Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own sins and not to judge my brother; for blessed art Thou unto the ages of ages. Amen.

This is the Lenten prayer par excellence. It is appointed at the weekday services of Great Lent, including the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, and it is widely used in private prayer through the fast (Bishop Irenei (Steenberg), “The Lenten Prayer ‘of St Ephrem’”; the Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware). Its three petitions move from the vices to be removed, to the virtues to be granted, to the climactic plea to see one’s own sins and not to judge one’s brother — a compact summary of the whole ascetic labor of the fast.

Recitation with Prostrations

The prayer is distinguished in practice by its accompanying prostrations. In the common Russian usage, the prayer is said in three sections, a great prostration (a full bow to the ground, metanoia) made after each; then twelve small bows are made, each with the words “O God, cleanse me a sinner”; and then the whole prayer is repeated once more, concluding with a single great prostration (Bishop Irenei, “The Lenten Prayer”; the Lenten Triodion). The bodily act is integral to the prayer’s meaning: the prostration enacts the humility and compunction the words ask for, and the repeated rising and falling marks the rhythm of the penitential season. It is one of the most physically expressive of all Orthodox prayers, and for many faithful it is the very signature of Lent.

The Greek and Slavonic Forms

The prayer exists in more than one form, and the differences are instructive. The standard Greek text reads “give me not” a spirit of certain vices; the older, pre-Nikonian Slavonic text read instead “drive away from me,” and its list of vices differed: where the Greek has “idle curiosity,” the old Slavonic had “despondency” (akedia, the classic monastic vice of listlessness); and where the Greek has “lust for power,” the old Slavonic had “lust for money” (Bishop Irenei, “The Lenten Prayer”; on the Nikonian reforms and the Old Believer text). These variants are not trivial copyist’s slips but reflect different streams of transmission, and the prominence of akedia — a vice named and analyzed in the developed monastic literature — is one of several marks that point to the prayer’s origins in a settled coenobitic monasticism later than Ephrem’s own fourth-century Syriac milieu (see below).

The Question of Authenticity

Here the methodology of this collection requires a careful word, for the prayer’s attribution to Ephrem is one of the points where popular devotion and scholarly judgment diverge, and the honest course is to state the matter plainly rather than to assert or to embarrass.

The scholarly consensus is that the prayer is not genuinely Ephrem’s own composition. [Disputed: the “Prayer of St Ephrem” is universally received in Orthodox practice under his name, but it is not found in the genuine Syriac corpus of Ephrem, and scholarship judges it a later (Greek/Byzantine) composition rather than his own work.] The grounds are several and convergent. First, the prayer is not found in the authentic Syriac corpus; it survives only in the Greek tradition and the prayer-books derived from it. Bishop Irenei (Steenberg), in a careful study, notes that the prayer “is not found in the Syriac corpus of St Ephrem, and in all its known forms dates to a later period of coenobitic monastic development than was contemporary to Ephrem,” and is “almost universally thought not actually to have been written by him”; it appears as the twelfth of a series of Greek “Prayers for Various Occasions” (Bishop Irenei, “The Lenten Prayer ‘of St Ephrem’”). Second, its content — its “triumvirate of classical monastic virtues” and its catalogue of monastic vices — reflects a more developed monasticism than the indigenous Syriac asceticism of Ephrem’s day (the bnay qyama; see the chapter on the deacon). Third, the edition history points the same way: Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash), in his study of the Greek writings attributed to Ephrem, observes that even Assemani’s great edition contains the prayer only in the form found in the Greek prayer-books, with no Syriac witness, making it “unlikely that the prayer is by St Ephrem himself, though whether its origin is Greek or Syrian is harder to say” (Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, “The Greek Writings Attributed to Saint Ephrem the Syrian,” in Abba, SVS Press, 2003).

The prayer belongs, in short, to the wider body of Greek works circulating under Ephrem’s name — the Ephraem Graecus corpus, the subject of the companion chapter — and its liturgical horizon is Byzantine, no earlier than the developed Lenten customs of roughly the ninth century. (It should not be confused with another “Prayer of St Ephrem,” the Marian Threni or Lamentations of the Virgin, a Byzantine composition of around 1400, catalogued separately as Ephraem Graecus.)

A Model for Handling Disputed Attribution

The Lenten prayer is, in a sense, the model case for the whole discipline this collection follows, and it is worth drawing out why. Here is a text universally beloved, recited by every Orthodox Christian through every Lent, attached with complete confidence to a great saint’s name — and yet, when the evidence is weighed, not his. The temptation is to one of two errors: either to defend the attribution against the evidence, out of piety, or to use the disproof of the attribution as a weapon against the tradition, out of skepticism. The methodology of this collection (see the methodology) refuses both. It states the evidence plainly — the prayer is absent from the Syriac corpus, its monastic vocabulary postdates Ephrem, even Assemani has it only in the Greek prayer-book form (Steenberg, “The Lenten Prayer”; Lash, in Abba) — and it converts the attribution into a structured note rather than either asserting or denouncing it. The prayer remains the Church’s prayer, prayed in Ephrem’s name and worthily so; the historian simply records that the surviving text is the work of a later Greek hand. This is hagiography pinned to its source rather than adjudicated as fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5), and it shows that critical honesty and reverent reception are not enemies. One can love the prayer, pray it, and know the truth about its authorship, all at once.

The Prayer Within the Lenten Spirit

Set within the whole movement of Great Lent, the prayer’s three petitions form a small map of the penitential journey. The first asks for the removal of the spirit of sloth, idle curiosity (or, in the older Slavonic, despondency), lust for power (or money), and idle talk — the cluster of vices that scatter and corrupt the soul. The second asks for the answering virtues: chastity, humility, patience, and love — the gathering and healing of the soul. The third rises to the summit of the whole ascetic labor: to see one’s own sins and not to judge one’s brother — the self-knowledge and the mercy toward others that are, for the whole Orthodox tradition, the very heart of repentance. The prayer thus rehearses, in miniature and several times a day, the entire work of the fast: the turning from the vices, the seeking of the virtues, and the arrival at non-judgment and compunction. That this compact summary of the penitential life should be borne under the name of Ephrem — the great poet of repentance and compunction, who taught the Church to sing its sorrow for sin (see the chapter on the teaching hymns) — is entirely fitting, whatever the hand that actually shaped the Greek text. The prayer is Ephremic in spirit even where it is not Ephrem’s in authorship, and the spirit is what the Church receives when it prays.

How the Tradition Receives It

None of this diminishes the prayer’s standing in Orthodox life, and the way the tradition holds it is itself worth understanding. Orthodoxy ascribes the prayer to Ephrem not as a forensic claim of autograph authorship but as part of his received legacy — much as a body of work may be attributed to a “school” or a tradition gathered under a master’s name (Bishop Irenei, “The Lenten Prayer”). The prayer is genuinely Ephremic in spirit: its compunction, its plain penitential directness, its movement from self-accusation to non-judgment, are entirely in keeping with the deacon of Edessa who taught the Church to sing its repentance. That the surviving text is the work of a later Greek hand does not make it less the Church’s prayer, nor less worthily borne under the name of the great poet of Syriac penitence. It does mean that the honest student distinguishes the prayer the Church prays in Ephrem’s name from the hymns and homilies that are demonstrably his own — and that is exactly the distinction this collection is built to keep clear.

References

Steenberg, Bishop Irenei. “The Lenten Prayer ‘of St Ephrem.’” (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia / synod.com.) On the prayer’s text, its absence from the Syriac corpus, its later monastic horizon, and its reception under Ephrem’s name.
Lash, Archimandrite Ephrem. “The Greek Writings Attributed to Saint Ephrem the Syrian.” In Abba: The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West (Festschrift for Bishop Kallistos Ware). Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003. On Assemani’s edition containing the prayer only in the Greek prayer-book form.
Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware (trans.). The Lenten Triodion. London: Faber, 1978 (repr. St Tikhon’s). The liturgical text and rubrics for the prayer and its prostrations.
OrthodoxWiki, s.v. “Prayer of Saint Ephrem.” (Used to locate the variant texts and the Ephraem Graecus attribution; cross-checked against Steenberg and Lash.)