Give us this day our daily bread.
So goes the familiar wording of the Fourth Petition of Our Father. From the hallowed name of the transcendent Father and the coming heavenly kingdom the prayer zooms in on the seemingly banal necessities of everyday existence. But hidden within the Greek is a deeper meaning to what is translated in the English, daily bread.
The Greek, in both versions of this prayer that appear in the gospels, reads: arton … epiousion. Arton is the word for bread. Epiousion is daily, though it might be better translated as coming day.
But something about this word should stand out, especially to students of theology or ancient philosophy. Take away the prefix epi- and you are left with ousia. This was a loaded word in ancient Greece, referring to existence, being, or substance. When the Church sought to squelch the Arian heresy in the fourth century it defined the relationship between God the Father and Jesus using the Greek word homoousios, meaning consubstantial or one in being (literally, ‘same being,’ with the prefix homo- meaning same).
We can infer, then, that epiousion has something to do with being. The question is what the addition of the prefix epi– means. In Greek, epi– is defined as on or upon, sometimes with the sense of someone or something situated above something else (like a man epi- or upon a horse). When it is added to ousia, the resulting word is often translated to refer to that which is necessary to sustain our existence to the ‘day upon this day,’ that is the next day, hence ‘daily.’
But we could also call this the ‘bread of being,’ the bread ‘above’ being, or ‘substantial bread.’
Could something more significant than dietary nourishment be in mind here?
St. Jerome, the man the Church tapped for its official Latin translation of the Bible, certainly thought so. When faced with this puzzling word in the Greek text of Matthew 6:11, he translated it as supersubstantialem—our ‘supersubstantial’ bread. (The version in Luke 11:3 retains ‘daily,’ perhaps to keep us grounded in the literal meaning.)
This translation seems to be almost a slavishly literal rendering of the Greek. We’ve already seen how the Latin substantialis (meaning essentially the same thing as the English substance) was one of the meanings of ousia. And the Latin prefix super- best preserves the meaning of the Greek epi-. In giving us supersubstantialem, Jerome refused to drain epiousion of its depths meaning, urging us to dig for more than just ‘daily.’
Jerome, who was motivated by piety, was able to justify his translation on the basis of other biblical texts. In his Commentary on Matthew, he says he looked for instances of the word in the Septuagint—the Greek version of the Old Testament—using those to pinpoint the underlying Hebrew text. There, the corresponding Hebrew word meant principal or perfect. This, in his mind, confirmed the connection with Christ, the ‘perfect’ bread. He wrote, “We can interpret our ‘supersubstantial bread’ also as ‘the bread which is higher than all substances and than all creatures.’
In his polemic against the Pelagians, Jerome was even more explicit: “The Apostles prayed for the daily bread, or the bread better than all food, which was to come, so that they might be worthy to receive the body of Christ.”
In this explanation, Jerome emphasizes the eschatological aspect of the Eucharist. This bread is, after all, meant to be comfort and consolation for pilgrims progressing towards paradise. It is the medicine of immortality inoculating us against spiritual death and serving as a guarantee of eternal life. This explanation harmonizes well with the basic meaning of the Greek word epiousion, meaning daily in the sense of what’s necessary for the coming, or future day.
St. Ambrose, while agreeing with Jerome on the fundamental meaning of epiousion, took a slightly different linguistic path to the same conclusion. The bread is epiousion, he wrote, because it takes “the substance of abiding power from the substance of the Word.” (Apparently he is reading the sense of “out of” into epi-.) But, like Jerome, he saw this as referring to spiritual food: ‘[I]t supplies this to heart and soul, for it is written: ‘And bread strengtheneth man’s heart.’”
To this day, the Church continues to teach that there is a Eucharistic meaning to daily bread.
The catechism affirms that, “Taken literally (epi-ousios: ‘super-essential’), it refers directly to the Bread of Life, the Body of Christ, the ‘medicine of immortality,’ without which we have no life within us. Finally in this connection, its heavenly meaning is evident: ‘this day’ is the Day of the Lord, the day of the feast of the kingdom, anticipated in the Eucharist that is already the foretaste of the kingdom to come.”
Of course, this is not to diminish the basic meaning of daily bread in the sense of our daily needs. Rather, the two meanings complement each other. As we pray for the food and other things we need to get us to the next day, we should be reminded of the spiritual sustenance we need to make it to the next day all the way to the latter days when Christ returns again.
It seems no accident that the petition for daily bread is in the middle of the Our Father. The preceding petitions deal with things divine and heavenly. The petitions that follow express the yearnings of earthly beings grappling with their sins and fighting off temptations and evils.
The Eucharist is thus a sort of hinge to the Our Father, the axis on which it all turns—calling down the Father and His heavenly kingdom to us and calling upon Him to draw us sinners up from earth to Him. It is precisely in the Eucharist where heaven meets earth, where divinity and humanity are reconciled.
