Avicenna and Aquinas on the Efficacious Petitionary Prayer

Petitionary prayer is one of the issues that can play an important role in creating an interreligious dialogue between Islamic and Christian theology in the medieval period. Avicenna, as a Muslim philosopher, and Aquinas, as a Christian theologian, have addressed the challenge of effective prayer and tried to defend its efficacy while maintaining its compatibility with the traditional picture of God. For this aim, they provide an intellectual framework based on which prayer can be answered. This article aims to comparatively explain their accounts of efficacious answered prayer and to infer the criteria they may suggest for the efficacy of petitionary prayer. The absolute presence of God’s will and providence in all stages of practice of petitionary prayer, God's impassibility with regard to anything outside the providential order of the world, and explanation of the efficacy of prayer in light of drawing a necessary relationship between prayer and its result are among commonalities between their accounts. Avicenna highlights the active role of the petitioning soul and the universal expediency in response to prayer, while Aquinas extends the expediency to the particular good of individuals and emphasizes the possibility of change in particular orders in God’s plan. This comparative approach to Avicenna and Aquinas’ accounts of effective prayer reveals that in their accounts, compared to the perspectives of contemporary philosophers of religion, maintaining traditional theological teachings such as the unchanging picture of God's will and providence has overshadowed the effectiveness of prayer.

کلیدواژه ها:

effective prayer ، God’s traditional attributes ، Avicenna ، Aquinas