Belongs To Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Christianity Mantras gathers five formulas the atlas catalogues for their counted, repeated use, most of them ordinarily read as prayer or hymn rather than as mantra in any Christian vocabulary of its own.

The Ave Maria, repeated fifty-three times in a full rosary, and the Kyrie Eleison, repeated dozens and in Byzantine practice sometimes hundreds of times, are the two most recited by sheer volume; the Kyrie is also the one fragment of Greek the Latin Mass never translated, a retention that marks the sound itself as having become the thing recited. The Trisagion, sung near the start of the Byzantine liturgy, is the rare case where a repeated formula caused a schism: a fifth century Antiochene addition to its wording split Chalcedonian from non-Chalcedonian churches. Maranatha is older than any of these, an Aramaic phrase Paul left untranslated in a Greek letter, evidence it was already a fixed formula in the earliest church, though its own division between an imperative and a completed action is unresolved.

The Jesus Prayer stands apart from the other four in how it is used: repeated continuously with the breath in hesychasm until, the tradition says, it prays itself, while Orthodox teaching insists throughout that its words are attended to rather than merely produced. That distinction, between formulas held here as much for their hymn character as for their repetition and one built for continuous inner recitation, is what the five members of this grouping actually divide along.