LEX ORANDI

LEX ORANDI. This phrase means the “law of prayer,” and is intimately related to the preceding “law of belief.” As the ancient formula has it, lex orandi lex est credendi, or “As we pray, so we believe”. Prayer (q.v.) and belief were seen as absolutely interrelated and mutually supporting from the earliest times. Irenaeus (q.v.) thus argues for the reality of Christ’s humanity against gnosticism’s phantom with an appeal to the Eucharist (qq.v.): “Our opinion [the real body of Christ] is in accord with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn establishes our opinion” (Adv.Haer. IV, 18,5). Basil the Great (q.v.) uses the Trinitarian invocation at Baptism as the foundation of his argument for the divinity of the Holy Spirit (q.v.) in his De Spiritu Sancto. Augustine of Hippo (q.v.) begins with an appeal to the practice of infant Baptism in his arguments for original sin (q.v.) against Pelagius. Later still, the long-established use of icons in the Church’s liturgy (qq.v.) will become one of the foundations for the defense of images against iconoclasm led by Joh n of Damascus and Theodore of Studion (qq.v.).