Morning blessing and evening blessing
The morning and evening blessings are two of Martin Luther's prayers , which have remained alive in the Protestant area as coined, memorized texts to the present day. They are handed down in the appendix to the Small Catechism and are in the Evangelical Hymnal .
The texts
Both blessings are built in parallel, as the following overview shows:
| Morning blessing | Evening blessing |
| I thank you, my heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ your dear Son that you have me | |
| this night above all harm and danger | merciful this day |
| have protected, and ask yourself, you want | |
| also protect me this day from sins and all evil, so that all my actions and lives may please you. | forgive me all my sins where I have wronged and graciously guard me tonight. |
| Because I command myself, my body and soul and everything in your hands. | |
| Your holy angel be with me that the evil enemy may find no power in me. | |
Context: morning and evening prayers
Luther designed morning and evening prayers for everyone and suggested the morning and evening blessings as a possible closing prayer in this process, which he thought of as follows:
- Sign of the cross : “May God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit do that. Amen."
- Kneel down or stand up
- Creed
- Our Father
- Morning blessing or evening blessing
Both prayers should be linked as personal rituals with getting up in the morning and going to bed in the evening.
The two blessings have broken away from this context today.
Origin of the substance
Evidently Luther, unlike Martin Bucer and Johannes Calvin , did not rewrite the prayer texts and did not compile them from Bible quotations. They are "compilations from the inheritance of the Latin Church". There are echoes of the two monastic times of prayer, Prim and Compline .
It is assumed that Luther took the morning blessing from tradition and then wrote the evening blessing himself as a variation of this text.
In 1937 Erich Sander found the template for the morning blessing in the Rosetum by Jean Mombaer , a prayer book that Luther demonstrably used. The young Luther still lived strongly in the forms of late medieval piety, and it was precisely the Rosetum that influenced his theology at this time.
Since the Rosetum is itself a compilation, a morning prayer from a Carolingian private prayer book is visible behind it. This Latin text, which reflects the Psalter- oriented private piety of the 9th century, was not only known in the 16th century in the text version of the Rosetum, but also in an edited version and supplemented by an evening prayer; this version of the text found its way into a prayer book by Andreas Musculus (Frankfurt / Oder 1553). Luther could also have used this tradition. The angel motif appears here, which is missing in the Rosetum.
Formation by Luther
Although Luther offers nothing new in terms of content in the two blessings and nothing typically Reformation, both texts are titled as Luther's morning blessing and Luther's evening blessing in the Evangelical Hymnal. This is only justified insofar as Luther gave the traditional property a catchy linguistic form and sentence melody. In particular, he took over the rhythm of the Latin art prose ( cursus planus, cursus velox ) , as he knew it from the collection prayers in Latin worship.
reception
Church music
Morning blessing
- Georg Niege : From the bottom of my heart
- Anonymous: I already thank you through your son
- Martin Behm : That is up to God the Father and God the Son
- Heinrich Albert : God of heaven and earth
- Nikolaus Herman : The bright sun is shining for now
- Paul Gerhardt : The golden sun full of joy and bliss (Luther's morning blessing was not used as a template, but Johann Arndt's paraphrase.)
Evening blessing
- Nikolaus Herman: The sun's glow is down
literature
- Frieder Schulz : Martin Luther's house prayers. In: Albrecht Peters : Commentary on Luther's Catechisms. Volume 5: Confession, home table, grape booklet, baptismal booklet. Göttingen 1994, ISBN 3-525-56184-9 .