βατταλογέω: of babbling and repetition

From the Blog of the Dormition, a post on prayer and hapax legomenon found in Matthew 6.

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St. Gregory of Nyssa

All Christians repeat the Lord’s Prayer, taught to do so by Jesus Himself (Matt 6:5-15). Fittingly, then, Gregory of Nyssa devoted five sermons to a reflection on this fundamental prayer of Christianity. Often, regrettably, we repeat the Lord’s Prayer by thoughtless rote, but our repetition need not be meaningless. The prayer teaches us much about prayer itself, especially upon repeated reflection, and Gregory’s text is a useful guide to such reflection. One theme that Gregory particularly focuses on in such is the necessity of virtue and holiness on the part of those who make bold to call God by the familiar name of Father.

In his first sermon, Gregory provides an enlightening exegesis of the Lord’s neologism βατταλογέω (battalogeo) in the Gospel according to Matthew (6:7). Gregory claims that Jesus “invented this… word.” Some – for example, the King James Version and the American Standard Version – have problematically translated this word as “use vain repetitions,” which for some might call into question our practice of frequently repeating the very prayer which our Lord then teaches us to pray (Matt 6:9-13). This “strange novelty of a word,” as Gregory calls it, occurs only once in Scripture and consequently those who seek to understand its true meaning require some explanation. Gregory’s ideas about this word are helpful in the contemporary context because so many have encountered its use by Protestant critics of the Catholic and Orthodox custom of prayerful repetition. Repetition, in fact, does have a certain value. “Through frequent repetition,” Gregory writes, “we may be given to understand some of [the prayer’s] hidden meaning.” Repetition, if prayerful, is not vain but an aid to the human spirit seeking to focus on God in the midst of a temporal world filled with distractions, especially the incessant desire for pleasures. Gregory tells us that the Lord is not advising us to avoid repetition, but to avoid indulging “vain desires” by praying for “empty pleasures.”

This is what He means by βατταλογέω, or babbling. One example Gregory gives of this is the prayer of some to God “for the crown in the games.” This, certainly, is an example many can relate to in our own time and place. Our football culture has even named a certain type of play – one particularly unlikely to succeed – the “Hail Mary pass.” Those who pray for such things “babble nonsense,” as Gregory says, and it is this type of babbling, not repetition, that our Lord commands us to avoid in prayer...

Complete post here.