Deliver Us from Evil – Part 2
Digesting the Lord’s Prayer

This is the second and final part of a two-part article. Find the first part here.

It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures. (Simone Weil)¹

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil (Luke 11:2–4)²

In a way that strongly resembles what we are discussing as regards to ponēron, the preceding line, “Lead us not into temptation,” doesn’t mean “Please don’t put tempting things in our path.” “Temptation” is quite a bad translation of the Greek verb peirazdein, for which we now have a suitable contemporary translation: “to beta test.”³ Peirazdein is to test in the manner of testing a hammer to see whether or not it might break. “Don’t test us to destruction.” But isn’t that what living does? We are not talking about a test with an examiner, or being tempted versus not being tempted, tested now and then: being “led into being beta tested” is what seems to be going on all the time… apart from the fact that people are not tools at all! Their tool-being is called slavery. “Don’t treat us like tools or software.”

In this sense “Do not beta test us” is quite like the Commandment “Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test” (Luke 4:12). The verb shows up when Jesus spends forty days in the desert. The request also comes close to Deuteronomy, where the Hebrew verb is nâçâh or nasah (“to try”).⁴ Don’t treat God like a hammer or a slave or an app. The link with the next line of the Lord’s Prayer is palpable: “Don’t treat us like tools, but deliver us from…” What? From ponēron, which fundamentally means from toil.⁵ This is a plea not to remain enslaved.

It is in the key of mastery (hence slavery) to hear the lines as “Don’t tempt us, but instead don’t put tempting things (feminine, poneirai) in our way”: the clue is that this is a tautology. It is as if God is hard to convince, that we are insisting on something. “Stop us from going wrong, from malfunctioning… don’t put a tempting thing in our path, because we might grab it.” This phrasing assumes that we want to do bad things and that God’s job is to restrain us: to master the masters. Thomas Jefferson might have prayed this way: “Don’t put the tempting enslaved person in my way, or I might have to assault her.” – “Put the proper labels on the public toilets, or someone might rape someone” says everything about the speaker, and nothing about a trans person. “Give us enough self-control not to murder anyone today” doesn’t sound very inspiring.

But “Please don’t treat us like instruments — in fact, rescue us from instrumentality altogether” sounds great. The key word is the conjunction alla, a strong word for “but.” The Greek alla is strongly contrastive, and the sound of it creates a decisive hinge in the sentence.⁶ “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” means “Don’t force us into the labour camp… liberate us from it.” The divine is not the master, but the liberator. This might be what prompts Paul to say “The wages (opsonia, “rations”) of sin is death, but the gift (charisma) of God is life eternal” (Romans 6:23).⁷ Jesus is asking us to say something outrageous that won’t save us or get us into heaven (or what have you): “Deliver us from evil.” We cannot do it, and asking God to do it for us won’t accomplish anything good – if all it could mean is making us unconscious or brainless or dead. Furthermore, there’s nothing that we could possibly do in return for God’s accomplishing this impossibility for us. We also recognize the request “deliver us from evil” as made in contrast to another: “lead us not into temptation”. Both requests are preceded by conjunctions: “And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil” (emphasis ours), and the juxtaposition of the two is in fact a counterposition that urges the reader to impute an inverse relationship between them.

How do we know that this is a better way to interpret the Lord’s Prayer? Three nominal forms exist in the Greek language: masculine, feminine, and neuter, and they bear an uncanny resemblance to the three familiar voices in English: active, passive, and middle. “Evil” in Greek is here a neuter noun, and the significance of this becomes clear in relation to the alternative forms. The masculine form of evil in the Greek language (ho ponēros) means “an evil person, the Evil One,” conventionally Satan.⁸

Indeed, “Deliver us from the Evil One” is all too often how this line is translated. This dangerous mistake has been institutionalized, to say the least. How many murders have been committed in an attempt to eliminate someone deemed to be evil? Killing or banishing someone as a way to eliminate evil is in fact the very form of evil! This is the case whether or not someone attempting to use these measures as punishment for evil operates based on the appeal “deliver us from evil” found in the Lord’s Prayer. Rather than expressing the principle found in this passage, such extreme castigaton uses the logic of the scapegoat, which is admittedly the mode in which a distressing amount of “religion” on Earth is conducted.⁹ And lest people professing to be non-religious or anti-religious feel off the hook here, the way in which religion as such is rejected or shunned too often takes this “religious” form, as if religion were like the Looking Glass House in Lewis Carroll’s book: all attempts to get away from it are strange loops that end up returning to it.

Furthermore, in light of the request “lead us not into temptation” that “deliver us from evil” counterposes: if “deliver” means “lead us out of,” then its implication is not to banish others but to remove oneself. The action focuses entirely on the speaker of those words, the repeater of Jesus’s model prayer. In other words, since it is the relationship to evil borne by the person saying the prayer that is always under consideration, this obviates any impulse to punish another for epitomizing an “evil person” (Greek-masculine) or otherwise communing with the “Evil One.”

Then there is “evil” as a feminine noun: hē ponēria.¹⁰ By this is meant evil as a state, as a stigma. We will here be talking about the status of a “feminized” evil, but first let’s pause to reflect on the feminine noun in Greek. We ought to note that for a speaker of Greek, since every noun is gendered, its gender disappears into the background rather than remaining a prominent feature. While we suppose “evil” here to be a “stigma,” we ought also to note that a feminine does not necessarily imply physicality. Both positive and negative mental states are also feminine (agapē, kakia, kalosunē, sophrosunē, eunoia, elpis, and so on); their carriers are masculine (agathos, kakos, and so on). We observe in addition that the feminine gender definitely does not necessarily evoke evil as such.¹¹

Ponēria is a blot or stain on an otherwise good being, like a diseased limb, or a “bad time” as opposed to good times: a bad state of affairs. We could get rid of it: fly a plane into it or fly a drone over it. Ponēria defines how racists and misogynists function.¹² It provides the logic by which such persons characterize what they find objectionable (that is, “evil”) in other races and in women, and this again is the logic of the scapegoat. All the “evil” in a community is poured into a specific kind of being (single or multiple) and that being is exterminated or expelled: evil as poison that can and must be excreted in order for an organism (community or body politic) to survive. It is not difficult to discern in ponēria the basic biological logic of a lifeform as such, even one as simple as a single-celled organism. If sentience is indeed awareness of a malfunction (“Did I leave the lights on?”), then sentience goes “all the way down” to this single-celled form, such that some kind of “awareness” or registration that there is some kind of poison in the system is the standard format of sentience as such. Imagine a single-celled organism floating through the ocean. Something enters its permeable membrane. Now, imagine that this organism could speak. It might at that point say something like “Oh no! Have I just swallowed poison?!”

There is no way to know in advance, so eating as such must have this basic “Have I been poisoned?” phenomenology. Indeed, human beings with extreme forms of the most basic personality disorder — narcissistic (even psychopathy is a step up) — are frequently paranoid that they might have been poisoned. And this is an indication of the incredibly basic, default place where narcissism lives. So basic that, as Derrida argues, there might not be narcissistic versus non-narcissistic people; it might not be possible for a person to be completely devoid of narcissism. There might instead be plural narcissisms, some of which are more or less extended than others, more or less inclusive of different beings.

What is called religion, then, since it has to do with noticing and perhaps expelling or destroying poison (“evil”), might be extremely default to being sentient at all. And if sentience includes non-neuronal modes (science now agrees that some kind of sentience operates in the plant kingdom, for example), what is called religion might be default to being a lifeform at all! Such that Jesus’s “Deliver us from evil” means “Deliver us from the default phenomenology of being alive, without killing us.” It gets more radical the more one considers it.

What is the “poison” in this case? It takes the form of a “burden” or something “toilsome” from the Greek root ponein, which means “to suffer” or “to endure.”¹³ A lifeform has to work to expel or digest poison. To bear a burden, to work, implies time, and a kind of enslavement to another, always painful: it is torment. “Torment” comes at the end of a list of things that includes forgiveness of hamartia (“sins” seen as “flaws”) and forgiveness of “sins” seen as “debts” or “obligations”; forgiveness as “discharge,” in a physical sense (Greek, aphiēmi). “Discharge our flaws to the extent that we write off the obligations others owe to us… ” would be a good literal translation: kai gar (literally “and for”) is the conjunction between what we ask God to do and what we say we do, and this means “even as.” (We could easily hear this as transactional, but what is meant is in a sense “reverse-transactional.” It does not say “forgive us and then in return we will reward you by forgiving others.” Rather, it says “only to the extent that we forgive others do we expect you to forgive us.” The burden of the transaction lies with the seeker of it, the person who prays — this is what makes it reverse transactional. Despite the symmetry usually associated with the term transactional, this method identifies the hidden asymmetry which would usually grant the power and (greater) benefit to the party proposing its terms and reverses this to make it a more subversively benevolent — even righteous — type of transaction: a reverse-transaction.)¹⁴ Finally, the Greek for “deliver” is very physical (rhuomai, eruein), like “drag” or “yank,” stemming from rhein, “to flow”: “…and suck us out of torment.”¹⁵

And this is the right moment in our essay for a deep dive into the actual “evil” Jesus is speaking of: to ponēron (neuter). We know it’s neuter because of the many, many instances elsewhere in the New Testament of the definite article and the plural form of the neuter, ta ponēra. This is the adjectival, adverbial, phenomenological evil we have been arguing for, (an) irreducible evil that “sticks to us” as a basic aspect of our biological being as such. This brings “Deliver us from evil” into line with many of the outrageous, radical things Jesus says. “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee” (Mathew 5:30). Surely Jesus is not enjoining us to mutilate ourselves, but to think about what “offend” might mean: “You think evil can be located like that?!” The injunction is perhaps along the same lines as the Buddhist koan, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him”: this doesn’t mean that we should go around stabbing buddhas to death. Or, “Good Master,” Jesus is quoted as having said, “Why callest thou me good? there is none good, but… God” (Mark 10:18).¹⁶ In other words, “If you’re that into prurience, go ahead; remove the plank in your own eye before you remove the speck in another’s.” Jesus might be challenging our tendency to locate evil — in any one limb, being, or group. Of course, his hint that we should do this to a member of our own body excites the very horror we should also feel whenever we seek to expel another whom we suspect of evil.

Rather, we are as likely to meet disembodied evil as we are to meet a person who is evil incarnate. The result of looking for evil in either of these ways will be the same as identifying Buddha on the road. To mix my religions, thou shalt not kill and kill the buddha can both be true only vacuously: i.e., you won’t find the buddha on any road, and you won’t find (the) evil (in any) one.

The reader perhaps by now suspects that a very significant feature of phenomenological evil is that it does not name a subject or an object. We are not talking about an “evil person” or an “evil state.” Indeed, no distinction between “person” and “thing” is being made at all. This is not evil that can be located in a being conventionally known as a person or in a being conventionally known as a thing. This is radical, irreducible evil that we cannot “point to,” cannot locate. A requirement of what deconstructive philosophy calls the metaphysics of presence is that one can point out something real. To be present means “capable of being pointed to.” Heidegger identifies this presence in that which can be pointed out as vorhanden, as distinct from that which is ready to hand or zuhanden.¹⁷ So this is evil, which is in the language of Heidegger zuhanden — “ready to hand,” “handy” — we might prefer these days default: default evil; evil that, as it were, comes with the software by dint of being software. It is almost as though Heidegger is saying that, primordially, being is banal: you don’t have to think about it, you don’t even have to look at it or otherwise “point at” it for being to be in effect. If, simultaneously, we were to understand his ex-girlfriend Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” in a certain sense, this would mean that being as such is evil!

To ponēron describes evil that is “around” whether one thinks of it or not, whether one can point to it or not. It is neither “here” nor “over there.” When Jesus says “deliver us from evil,” what he is directing (us to ask) God to do is to deliver us from default-ness. Rather than functioning so smoothly that we become oblivious to it, everything should be sticking out, uncanny, as if malfunctioning or breaking in some way: agonizing. To be delivered from evil is to be delivered into agony. Angst is often not translated successfully as “anxiety,” which all too often is heard as “low level fear,” “diluted unease” or something like that. Rather than getting rid of anguish, God seems keen on us feeling it acutely, as the phenomenological “noise” that “being good” really makes.

This in turn makes sense of something else in the Gospels, the instances of “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2). “Repent” is perhaps an unsuccessful translation of the Greek metanoeite, which means “transcend your mind,” or “change your mind,” or even “perceive too late.”¹⁸ The “perceive too late” sense elegantly encapsulates what thought does in any case by (dare we say) default, namely to reflect upon itself, the minimal form of which is the “remembering we forgot something” we were speaking about earlier. What are we forgetting in this instance? The kingdom of heaven — which, in turn, is quite a bad translation of hē basileia tōn ouranōn, which strictly means “the realm [feminine noun, that is to say, substantial place, with a texture and a feel] of the heavens [literally, “outer space” is what is meant when Greek uses the plural].”¹⁹ “The heavens” in a Ptolemaic universe is a hard, glassy substance, if we are going to be literal about it, and “tōn ouranōn” leaves us with little alternative but to be literal. The literality is intriguing and piquant.

This is also the heaven of “Our Father, who art in Heaven”: Pater, hēmon, ho en tois ouranois. The plural denotes the heavens as in outer space: at the time a glassy or ceramic bowl, inverted. Such that when Jesus asks “Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven” the resonance of “the heavens” still vibrates.

The verb ēngiken then means “has come near.”²⁰ The verb is engizdein, “to approach” in the sense of “to be next”: there is a sense in which the verb can be used to denote “next of kin” or “next in line.” It almost has the disturbing feel of “you’re next!” To use the appropriately shocking up to date terminology, outer space is next, as if we were to open our front door and find an abrupt drop with galaxies and comets where once we assumed there would be a front porch and a street. And what can this mean? No matter what “kingdoms of Earth” might exist, actual physical reality is not ours to manipulate. This is Jesus toying with the idea of kingship, as in the phrase “king of kings”: this simply cannot mean “the head mafia don with the greatest weaponry,” but its opposite, “king” in a loop with itself: the mastering of mastery as such — at once embracing and subverting the sprightly playfulness of a Nietzschean superman — and therefore the end of slavery.

“The kingdom of heaven is at hand” means that what is reliable, what just disappears from view because one can just trust it’s “around,” is far more wondrous and disturbing than we take for granted. You can’t rely on anything anymore – because “relying-on” is the way evil has persisted in the world. To be delivered from evil is not to feel soothed and well, at least not in a conventional sense of “getting away with it.” Quite the opposite. So, we ought to think hard about whether we really want to ask for such a thing.

But here is the upside. To be alive, a lifeform has to expel poison (excrete). The “original sin” of being alive at all, sentient or no, is that one increases the chaos in the world by reducing it in oneself. Jesus is telling us not to get too serious about that, not to make it a big deal, not to make it a moral code or cultural norm: you just have to poop, and that’s it. Just ask God to do that for you. Asking is all one can do: this is what “good” feels like. The prayer as such is the deliverance. There is no reason to become morally bulimic, addicted to expelling poison in whatever form, real or metaphorical (whatever that might mean). “Deliver us from evil” is what crying would say, if crying could talk. One has to throw up, one has to poop — but one doesn’t have to use these features of being alive as a template for morality. Everything else is workable, possible – leave the impossible stuff to God.

Jesus radically dislocates “being good” from “behaving well,” which might have toilet training as its basic form. Totalitarian leaders are well known for their obsession with this layer of the human psyche. Being good might never “look good” to oneself or others. So “Deliver us from evil” is a “forever” request, as basic to being a good person as crying or laughing is to being a person at all. It is the default-ness of the persistent thought that “goodness cannot be default” that expresses well the full form of the paradox that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The one thing we can rely on is that we can’t rely on anything.

Notes

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1. Simone Weil, “A War of Religions,” Selected Essays, 1934–1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings, ed. and tr. Richard Rees (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2015), 211–18 (214). ↩︎

2. The King James version. ↩︎

3. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon. ↩︎

4. James Strong, The New Strong’s Expanded Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 5254 (188). ↩︎

5. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon. ↩︎

6. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon. ↩︎

7. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon. ↩︎

8. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon. ↩︎

9. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, tr. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). ↩︎

10. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon. ↩︎

11. Thank you very much to Andreas Matthias for discussing this with us. ↩︎

12. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, tr. StephenConway, in collaboration with Erica Carter, and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). ↩︎

13. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon. ↩︎

14. See Simone Weil, “About the Our Father,” Awaiting God, tr. Bradley Jersak, intro. Sylvie Weil (Abbotsford: Fresh Wind Press, 2012), 105–13 (110–11). ↩︎

15. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon. ↩︎

16. See Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, Foreword Vincent Harding (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 107-8. ↩︎

17. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 64–65, 69, 81, 95, 98–99. ↩︎

18. We are grateful to Andreas Matthias for a discussion of this verb. ↩︎

19. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon. ↩︎

20. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon. ↩︎

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