The Name of God (V): Taking the Name in Vain — The Third Commandment and the Christian Responsibility for the Name

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Foreword: A Series That Closes with a Question

Through four articles, we have so far traced the journey of the Name of God through the history of salvation. In Part One we followed the Name YHWH, hidden behind the veil of the Temple in the Old Testament — the Unutterable Name, which the pious Israelite replaced with Adonai; the Name that burned in the burning bush of Moses; the Name for which Israel sighed in the days of messianic expectation. In Part Two we saw how this hidden Name took flesh, how YHWH saves (= Yeshua) received, through the Incarnation, the fullness of a human, utterable name — Jesus. In Part Three we traced how, after the Ascension, the Name continued to work in the early Church: in the Acts of the Apostles (as effective power), in the Liturgy and the Sacraments (as the foundation of sacramental life), in martyrdom (as the seal of confession), and in the desert of Egypt (as inward prayer). And in Part Four we saw how, through the unbroken labor of the neptic Tradition — from Sinai to Athos, from Saint Symeon the New Theologian to Saint Gregory Palamas, from Saint Paisius Velichkovsky to the Fathers of our own century — the Name entered into the depths of the heart as unceasing prayer.

The entire series has spoken so far about how we should receive, honor, and utter the Name. The present article — the last — raises the opposite, but no less essential question: how should we not utter Him? It would be an injustice to the patristic Tradition to close a series on the Name of God without speaking of the Third Commandment: “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain” (Exodus 20:7; cf. Deuteronomy 5:11). Along the constant line of the patristic Tradition, this commandment concerns not only false oaths, but the entire state of the heart and the tongue in relation to God — a commandment whose meaning the modern world has almost completely forgotten, and which each of us breaks dozens of times a day.

The present article seeks to place this commandment within its patristic depth, so that the reader may examine, in the light of Tradition, his or her own relationship with the Name. It is not a text of moralizing, but a text of watchfulness (nepsis) — that same wakefulness to which the neptic Fathers call without ceasing every Christian who wishes to lead his life within the Name of Christ.

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I. The Third Commandment in the Old Testament: The Text, the Context, the Meaning

1.1. The Text Itself

In the standard English translations, the Third Commandment reads: “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain” (Exodus 20:7). The parallel verse in Deuteronomy (5:11) is almost identical. The original Hebrew uses the expression lo tissa et-shem-YHWH Eloheikha la-shav. The verb tissa (from the root nasa) literally means “to lift up,” “to bear,” “to carry” — and by extension “to utter,” “to invoke,” “to call upon.” And la-shav — usually translated “in vain” — means, more precisely, “in emptiness,” “in falsehood,” “without content,” “for nothing,” “without foundation.” The term shav is not identical with hevel in Ecclesiastes (the word translated “vanity” in the refrain havel havalim), but it moves within the same family of biblical meanings: emptiness, futility, lack of substance, falseness.

So, rendered more precisely, the commandment says: “Do not lift up / utter / bear the name of the Lord your God without foundation, in emptiness, for nothing.” Or, in its most exact formulation: “You shall not bear the Name of YHWH with emptiness.”

1.2. The Original Meaning: False Oaths and the Magic of the Name

In the context of the ancient world, the commandment had two main targets. The first — which all rabbinic commentaries underline — was the false oath. To swear “by the Name of YHWH” while speaking a lie was considered, in ancient Israel, among the gravest of human acts. For, in the Jewish understanding, when you utter the Name, you call Him as a witness over your word; and to call Him as witness of a false word means to accuse God, through His Name, as witness of a lie.

The second target was the magical use of the Name. Throughout the ancient world surrounding Israel — in Egypt, in Babylon, among the Canaanites — there was a widespread conviction that to know the name of a god gives you power over him. The divine Name was, in pagan religions, a kind of magical instrument through which the priest controlled, manipulated, or compelled the god in rituals so as to demand rain, victory, or fertility. The Third Commandment categorically forbids this attitude toward the Name of YHWH. YHWH is not a god whom man manipulates by invoking His Name; YHWH is the One who rules man, and His Name is uttered with trembling, as a gift received, never as an instrument used.

1.3. How Israel Understood the Commandment

The reverence of the ancient Hebrews for the divine Name went so far that, in the centuries before Christ, it became customary that the Name YHWH should not be uttered at all. Instead, when the reader, in the Torah or the Psalter, came to the Tetragrammaton (יהוה), he pronounced Adonai (“the Lord”). This practice has been preserved to this day in rabbinic Judaism. And in the Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Old Testament from the third century B.C. — YHWH was consistently translated as Kyrios (“Lord”), so that the Name would not be uttered even in public reading. In the Temple period, according to Jewish tradition, the Name was uttered only in very strict liturgical contexts: in the Temple, by the priests, and most solemnly in the service of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), when the high priest pronounced the Shem Ha-Meforash — the Revealed Name — and the people fell on their faces to the ground (Mishnah Yoma 6:2). After the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, this utterance ceased, and the practice of reading the Tetragrammaton as Adonai became definitively established.

This was the extreme expression of the Third Commandment: if the Name of God can be taken in vain, then the surest safeguard is not to utter it at all. And Israel understood this commandment so deeply that it fenced its path with a hundred secondary commandments — all designed to guard against its breaking, even through inattention.

This understanding — which we still find in the time of the Savior — also explains why, in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ places the question of swearing at the center of His teaching on speech: “But I say to you, do not swear at all: neither by heaven, for it is God’s throne; nor by the earth, for it is His footstool (…). But let your communication be: Yes, yes; No, no; whatever is more than these comes from the evil one” (Matthew 5:34–37). Christ does not abolish the Third Commandment; He radicalizes it. For the Christian, the whole of speech must be so true, so complete, that swearing has no place left. And the Name of God no longer needs to be called as a witness — because, in the body of Christ, every word of the Christian is already uttered within the Name.

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II. The Fathers on the Third Commandment

2.1. Saint John Chrysostom: The Christian Mouth and the Oath

Saint John Chrysostom (†407), Archbishop of Constantinople, preached many times on the text of the Third Commandment, most especially in the 21 Homilies on the Statues, delivered at Antioch in the spring of the year 387 — at the time of the popular uprising which led to the tearing down of the imperial statues and to the fear of punishment by the Emperor Theodosius. In that historical setting, Chrysostom made the struggle against the habit of vain swearing the spiritual program of the entire Lent.

Beginning with the Third Homily (§21), Chrysostom imposes upon his Antiochene listeners three practical commandments for the whole of Lent: “to speak evil of no one; to hold no one as an enemy; and to expel from the mouth altogether the evil custom of oaths.” For the Antiochene preacher, even daily, formally “correct” swearing — without perjury — was already a breach of the Third Commandment, because the utterance of the Name in everyday speech, without necessity, is in itself a lack of reverence. Chrysostom returns to this matter in many consecutive homilies (V, VI, VIII, X, XIV, XV, XX), precisely because he sees here a disease which his contemporaries ignored.

In the First Homily on the Statues (§32), he exhorts his listeners to reproach, even sternly, those whom they would hear blaspheming in the streets: “If it is necessary to punish those who blaspheme an earthly emperor, how much more those who insult God.” And in the Seventh Homily of the same series, we find a formulation that directly concerns us, for it ties the vain utterance of the Name to the theme of honor: “Not even a servant dares to call his master by name in a familiar and irreverent way — and yet you utter the Name of the Master of angels with so much irreverence!”

The strongest formulation of Saint John concerning the gravity of the oath is found in the Fifteenth Homily (§13): “The sword is not so piercing as the nature of the oath! The lance is not so destructive as the stroke of an oath!” For Chrysostom, the rash oath — even without perjury — is, hiddenly, a wound of the soul; and the man who has become accustomed to it, “though he appears to live, is already dead, and has received the mortal blow.”

It must be observed that, for Chrysostom, swearing, blasphemy, and the vain use of the Name in everyday speech are often treated together, as a single family of sins of the mouth. What unites them, in the light of the Third Commandment, is the same inner mechanism: the Name of God is set in speech without reverence, without attention, without trembling — that is, the very opposite of what the neptic Fathers call prosochē (inward attention, watchfulness). The reader who wishes to verify this line of thought for himself may read the 21 Homilies on the Statues of Saint John — a text in which this theme appears in almost every homily.

2.2. Saint John Climacus: Guarding the Tongue as the Foundation of Prayer

Some centuries after Chrysostom, in the desert of Sinai, Saint John Climacus (7th c.) — whose Ladder we discussed at length in Part Four — devotes the entire Eleventh Step to the problem of much speaking (polylogia). Saint John opens the Step with an observation that has remained classical in ascetic literature: “Talkativeness is the throne of vainglory, on which it loves to sit and show itself off. (…) Talkativeness is a sign of ignorance, a door for slander, a leader of jesting, a servant of falsehood, the ruin of compunction, a summoner of despondency, a herald of sleep, the dissipation of recollection, the end of vigilance, the cooling of zeal, the darkening of prayer” (Step 11.2).

In the same Step, Saint John also gives the medicine: silence. “Wise silence is the mother of prayer, a recall from captivity, the guardian of fire, the watcher of thoughts, the sentry against enemies, the prison-house of sorrow, the friend of tears, an active remembrance of death” (Step 11.3). And more briefly: “He who has loved silence shuts his mouth; but he who delights in wandering about outside is driven from his cell by his passion” (Step 11.10).

The connection with the Jesus Prayer, of which we spoke at length in Part Four, is very clear: whoever wishes to receive the Name of Jesus into his heart unceasingly must first teach his mouth to be silent. A mouth that speaks much in emptiness cannot receive into itself the Name that calls to be uttered with trembling. And the darkening of prayer which Saint John names as the fruit of much speaking is, very concretely, the inability of the Christian, scattered in speech, to gather himself within the Name of Jesus.

Saint John closes the Step with a formula so concentrated that it has remained in the memory of the Tradition: “It is hard to hold back water without a dyke; harder still is it to restrain a wagging tongue” (Step 11.12). This is, beyond Chrysostom, beyond the juridical question of the oath, the very essence of the pastoral problem of the Third Commandment: man, by his fallen nature, speaks too much; and from this excess of speech comes forth, as from a turbid spring, all the levity with which the Name of God is uttered.

2.3. The Patristic Synthesis

Taking up the thread above, we may formulate the patristic synthesis on the Third Commandment as follows. For the Fathers, “taking the Name in vain” is not, in the first place, an individual moral problem (though it is also that), but a spiritual one — a question of the relationship of the heart to God. Whoever utters the Name vainly shows, by that small act, a deeper sickness: inward inattention, much speaking, the scattering of the heart. Chrysostom attacks it on its most visible side — the habit of vain swearing; Saint John Climacus, on its deeper side — the much-speaking from which all the levities of the mouth flow forth. And the remedy, for both of them and for all the Fathers, is not an external rule, but a whole inward labor: watchfulness, the cleansing of the heart, the Jesus Prayer, silence — that is, the whole of the neptic Tradition which we have unfolded in Part Four.

Thus, the Third Commandment — which seemed, to the ancient Israelite, a rule concerning false oaths and pagan magic — becomes, in the patristic reading, a commandment concerning the whole life of the Christian, the whole of his speech, the whole of his breath. For, in the full sense, the Christian bears the Name — Christianos eimi, “I am a Christian” — and so his entire life is, by itself, a bearing of the Name. And to bear the Name means, before all else, not to leave Him in emptiness.

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III. The Four Ways of Taking the Name in Vain

Drawing from Scripture and from the patristic line of Saint John Chrysostom and the neptic Fathers, we may synthesize four principal ways in which a person takes the Name of God in vain. The first three have direct biblical and patristic foundation; the fourth is a legitimate contemporary application of the same commandment. Each has its own characteristics, each has its own remedy, each calls for a particular inward labor to be healed.

3.1. False Oaths and Superfluous Oaths

The first way — and the one on which the Old Testament most strongly insists — is swearing. Two forms are distinguished here: the false oath, by which the Name of God is set as witness to a lie, and the superfluous oath, by which the Name is set as witness to a truth that needed no such guarantee. The first is, obviously, the more serious. But the second, according to the Fathers, is not without the cause which the commandment sanctions: for it shows that the ordinary speech of man is no longer truthful enough, and needs to lean on the Name of God in order to be believed.

Here Christ came with the well-known radicalization: “Do not swear at all.” And Saint James, the brother of the Lord, repeats it in his epistle: “But above all things, my brethren, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or with any other oath. But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No,’ lest you fall into judgment” (James 5:12). For the Christian, then, the remedy for swearing is truthful speech — speech so true, so accompanied by repentance, so permeated with the presence of Christ, that “yes” and “no” are enough.

3.2. Vain Utterance in Everyday Speech

The second way — and the one which, in today’s world, has become almost universal — is the vain utterance of the Name in everyday speech. Included here are the exclamatory formulas by which the Name of God, or the Name of Christ, or the name of the Mother of God, or of the Cross, are thrown into the middle of an ordinary conversation as a kind of verbal pause, as an exclamation of surprise or irritation, as a way of emphasizing a feeling — without relation to the One Named, without prayer, without trembling.

This problem is so widespread in the modern world that people no longer even notice they do it. In morning traffic, in irritation at work, in heated conversations with loved ones, in surprise at news, in distress at bad tidings — the Name comes out of the mouth as a verbal pause, with no relation to prayer at all. And yet it is the Name; and the Third Commandment is given precisely for such situations.

It must here be noted as a particular phenomenon of the contemporary world: in the English language — which has become, through Hollywood films, through streaming series, and through the global internet, the lingua franca of our age — the Name of Jesus has become one of the most widespread exclamations of surprise, frustration, or irritation. “Jesus!”, “Jesus Christ!”, “For Christ’s sake!”, “Oh my God!” — all of these appear dozens of times in almost every commercial film. Christian reviews of the film The Batman (2022, rated PG-13 for a broad audience) have noted a high number of profane uses of the Name of Christ and of religious language, although the film remained in a rating accessible to younger viewers. Other broadly-rated productions — The Incredibles, Trolls, Ant-Man, Mission: Impossible, La La Land, Back to the Future — contain similar patterns. More gravely still: a guidance from the British Board of Film Classification (the British body which rates films by age suitability) was reported in the British press as including “God” and “Jesus Christ” among the terms acceptable in films rated U (suitable for all ages), with the observation that their use must be rare — a fact which, for an Orthodox reader, is difficult to comprehend. And through Hollywood, through Netflix, through YouTube, these verbal patterns have spread throughout the world, including in languages which traditionally did not use the Name of Jesus as an exclamation.

There is, however, a striking asymmetry that deserves to be noted. In Western media culture, the profane use of the Name of Jesus is often treated as ordinary language, while the symbols of other religions are, as a rule, handled with greater public caution. The case of the disaster film 2012 (2009) is telling: the director Roland Emmerich publicly acknowledged that he had dropped the destruction of the Kaaba from the film for fear of violent reaction, while Christian symbols such as the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter’s Basilica were shown destroyed on screen without any similar reservation. This kind of asymmetry — in which the Name of Jesus Christ remains, astonishingly, available for generalized blasphemy, while other sacred names are spared — is not, in the patristic reading, a cultural coincidence. It is a hidden working of the antichristic spirit which has fallen upon the world; and the modern Christian world, instead of defending the Name of its Saviour, has accepted this mockery as the norm.

But the problem is not only that of English-speaking culture. Every modern language is, in its own way, loaded with exclamations that take the Name of God in vain. In English we have, beyond the formulas mentioned above, “Holy Christ!”, “Lord have mercy!” (used non-prayerfully), “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”, “Christ Almighty!”, “Goddamn it!”, “Holy Mother of God!” — all formulas which, when uttered mechanically as exclamations, fall directly under the Third Commandment. To these are added the everyday oaths — “I swear to God!”, “By God!”, “Cross my heart!” — each of which is a breach of the same commandment: the invocation of the Name or of a sacred reality as guarantee of an idle word, when Christ has plainly commanded: “Do not swear at all (…); but let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No'” (Matthew 5:34–37).

There is also a special category of expressions which preserve their pious form while having lost, in modern usage, their prayerful substance: in English, things like “God bless you” or “Lord willing”, said almost mechanically; in Romanian, “Doamne ferește!” (literally “Lord forbid!”) and “Doamne păzește!” (literally “Lord protect!”) — both, in origin, short prayers asking for divine protection in the face of danger or evil. Our grandparents uttered them with a genuine calling upon God’s help — at hearing news of illness, death, misfortune. Today, however, in everyday speech, “Lord forbid!” has become an almost mechanical exclamation — pronounced automatically at any unpleasant news, without any genuine prayer for protection in the depth of the heart. In such usages, the Name of God is no longer invoked — it is only used as a verbal pause. The problem, here as elsewhere, is one of attention and intention: real prayer, or empty formula?

A still more subtle situation deserves to be noted separately — namely, the generalized use of the formula “Lord, help us!” (in Romanian “Doamne, ajută!”) in certain Orthodox circles today. It must be said from the outset, openly: this formula is, in its origin, true prayer, indeed one of the most ancient in the hesychast Tradition. It is the popular form of the psalmic verse which Abba Isaac, through the voice of Saint John Cassian, recommended as prayer of a single word (monologistos): “O God, attend to my help; O Lord, hasten to help me!” (Psalm 70:1, Septuagint Ps. 69:1). Used at the beginning of a hard labor, as a response when someone asks one to do something (“can you help me with this?” — “Lord, help us!”, that is, “with God’s help, yes”), or as a brief cry in moments of real distress, “Lord, help us!” is, without doubt, one of the most beautiful short forms of prayer.

The problem, however, arises when the formula goes outside its natural place — the request for help — and becomes a universal greeting: at meeting, at parting, in every circumstance where a normal formula would be natural — “Good morning,” “Good evening,” “Goodbye,” “God bless you.” For “Lord, help us!” literally means “Lord, help me” — that is, a request. At a greeting between two people who are meeting without doing a hard work together, the legitimate question is: help for what, in that very moment? Used without attention — merely as an automatic greeting or as a sign of belonging to a group — the formula risks losing its character of prayer and becoming a religious label. The formula is not the problem; the emptying of it from a living address to God is.

A delicate clarification must be made here, for it is a sensitive point. The greeting “Good morning,” “Good evening,” “Goodbye,” is not, as some Orthodox newcomers sometimes think, a “worldly” or “insufficiently Christian” formula. It is, in its very origin, a Christian wish: “may your day be good” — that is, “with God’s blessing, may your day be good.” In English, “Goodbye” is itself a contraction of “God be with ye.” Our languages are, in this respect, Christian at the root; we need not overlay them with prayer to make them “more Orthodox.” And the oldest Tradition of the Church has different formulas for different things: “Christ is risen!” — “Indeed He is risen!” in Bright Week, “Bless, Father!” — “The Lord!” at meeting a priest or a monk, “Peace be unto you!” in a liturgical context. Each has its place; and “Lord, help us!” has its place — the request for help, the beginning of a labor, the affirmative answer when someone asks for help — and there it is natural and beautiful.

There is, however, a growing social pressure in some Orthodox circles today for “Lord, help us!” to be used exclusively — as a mark of belonging to “the true Orthodoxy.” Whoever answers with “Good morning” or “Goodbye” feels seen as less devout, less spiritual, less “one of us.” This is no longer a phenomenon of prayer; it is an identity phenomenon — a use of prayer as a signal of belonging, as a social label. The Gospel gives us, concerning precisely this phenomenon, a grave warning: “And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men” (Matthew 6:5). The use of prayer in order to fashion an identity for myself before others is, in a hidden way, a form of the same Pharisaism. And from authentic prayer — “Lord, help us!”, a cry of the heart — the formula descends to a code of identification — “Lord, help us!”, a watchword of a tribe.

The pastoral distinction is, therefore, simple: “Lord, help us!” uttered with genuine request for help, in its natural place, is beautiful prayer. “Lord, help us!” uttered as a universal greeting, as a sign of belonging, as an identity formula, is a new form — more subtle but increasingly widespread — of taking the Name in vain. And the examination of conscience is the same as for all the pious exclamations: to whom am I speaking when I utter the Name? Am I really asking for something, or am I only making myself visible?

A similar phenomenon exists in many Christian milieus — Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox alike — with formulas such as “God bless,” “Praise the Lord,” “Hallelujah,” used as automatic punctuation in speech, or as identifiers of religious belonging on social media. The Name is real, the formulas are good, but their use becomes problematic when they go from prayer to label. The same examination of conscience applies.

There is, it is true, a pastoral nuance. The pious grandmother in a Moldovan village who, at every trouble, says “Lord, Mother of God, help me!” — and says it with a genuine calling upon divine help, with sighs, with real tears — is not in the taking of the Name in vain. For her, the expression is a short, condensed prayer, learned in childhood. The same nuance applies to “Lord forbid!” in Romanian, or to a sincere “God bless you” in English: when uttered with true faith and the fear of God, it becomes prayer; when thrown out mechanically, it becomes a breach of the commandment. The distinction is one of intention and attention: when we say these words — to whom are we speaking? to whom are we addressing? Or do we only throw out words? And if, after self-examination, we see that we were speaking only in emptiness, the remedy is the same as that we have set forth above: to add, secretly, on the spot, “Lord, have mercy on me”, covering the vain utterance with a true prayer.

Ironically, modern languages preserve, in their very oaths, the condemnation of the misuse of the Name. The harshest curses in many languages are built precisely with the Name of God, the Name of Christ, the Name of the Mother of God, the Name of the Cross. And the gravity of such curses comes not from their vulgarity (other languages have far harsher vulgarities without touching the Name) but precisely from the use of the Name. We shall speak of this gravest form of breaking the Third Commandment below, in the section on cursing and blasphemy.

A second paradox deserves attention. Most of those who use the Name of Jesus as a profane exclamation are — especially in the West — either nominal Christians or convinced atheists. For the former, the problem is unguarded habit: they have learned the formula from films and from the speech of those around them, and have adopted it without thought. With regard to the second group, the theological observation is the following: even when uttered by unbelievers, the fact that the Name of Jesus has remained such a powerful exclamation shows at least one thing — Western culture has not truly managed to detach itself from Christ. It rejects Him, yet continues to use His Name. And this persistence of the Name — even on the lips of those who declare they do not believe — is, theologically considered, a paradoxical form of presence. This Name is, hiddenly, different from all other names.

The patristic Tradition does not ask the Christian never to utter the Name Lord or Jesus — on the contrary, as we saw in Part Four, it asks us to utter Him as often as possible, as prayer. What it asks is attention: whenever we utter the Name, let us utter it with attention, let us know it as presence, let us not throw it at random. And if we notice that we have uttered the Name without attention, the remedy is simple: to add, secretly, on the spot, “Lord, have mercy on me” — so that the vain utterance may be covered by an utterance with prayer. And for Christians who watch a film with blasphemy — especially if they hear it frequently — the Tradition asks the same reflex: at each hearing, to make the sign of the cross secretly and to say in the heart “Lord, have mercy,” as if to cleanse the air every time the Name is wounded.

3.3. Cursing and Blasphemy

The third way is the most serious: cursing or blasphemy — that is, the use of the Name of God in association with a word of insult or with an intention of mockery. Here it is no longer a question of inattention, but of turning the Name against the One Named. In the stern language of his age, Saint John Chrysostom, in the First Homily on the Statues (§32), urged his listeners not to remain indifferent toward those whom they would hear blaspheming in the marketplace or the streets, “for if we punish those who insult an earthly emperor, how much more those who insult God.” For us today, the pastoral application cannot be violence — which belonged to the Antiochene rhetoric of the fourth century — but rather correction with discernment, sorrow for the sin, and the refusal to normalize blasphemy around us. And in the Seventeenth Homily (§17), concerning the rebels who had torn down the imperial statues, Saint John records the word of one of the defenders of the Antiochenes addressed to the imperial inquisitors: “The statues that were thrown down have been raised again and have come back to their proper form (…); but if you put to death the image of God, how shall you be able to revoke this deed?” The same logic applies, on the level of speech, to cursing: the word of blasphemy is a striking of the image of God through His Name.

In the Eastern patristic Tradition, blasphemy is considered a mortal sin — that is, a sin which, if not confessed to a spiritual father and wept over with tears, separates man from communion with God. And the cause is not, in the first place, the severity of God, but the objective gravity of the act: for through blasphemy man draws the Name of God — the Name in which he was baptized, the Name in which he received Holy Communion, the Name in which he was redeemed by the Cross of Christ — into a relation of adversity with the One Named. To blaspheme the Name, then, means to blaspheme the very reality of one’s own being as a Christian: for you yourself bear the Name through Baptism, as we have shown at length in Part Three of this series.

A pastoral observation must be made here: when a tongue has, through long habit, learned cursing, breaking the habit is not the work of a single day. The Tradition asks here for three things: constant repentance, confession to a spiritual father, and the replacement of cursing with the Jesus Prayer. That is: whenever you notice that you have cursed (or that you were about to curse), add on the spot “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” In time, the mouth will begin to seek the Name uttered in prayer in the place of the Name uttered in curse.

3.4. The Use of the Name as Decoration

The fourth way — more modern, more subtle, but no less insidious — is the use of the Name as decoration. Included here are all manner of external uses of the Name of God or of Christ to lend a religious aura to an activity, an opinion, an ideology which, in its substance, has nothing to do with the One Named. This is a form which the Holy Fathers did not address as such in their time — because in the ancient Christian world it was not possible — but which their whole teaching on the honor of the Name clearly excludes.

To use the Name of God to crown one’s worldly projects, to justify a political cause, to adorn a personal ambition — all these are forms of taking the Name in vain, however pious they may seem in form. And the criterion of discernment is simple: does that use of the Name require repentance, humility, and the service of the Cross? Or, on the contrary, does it seek to confer upon me power, recognition, validation? If the answer is the second, then we are dealing with a subtle form of the same Third Commandment broken.

There is here a spiritual observation which the whole patristic Tradition lets shine through: to bear the Name of Christ means, in its full sense, also to bear His Cross. Whoever bears the Name without the Cross — that is, whoever uses the Name of Christ for power, but refuses the humility and the suffering that accompany life in Christ — “takes the Name in vain” in a way all the more serious because it is more subtle. For the form is pious while the substance is worldly. This is one of the most widespread forms of taking the Name in vain in our times — and especially within the religious sphere itself, when the Name is used as an instrument of power, of influence, or of personal validation.

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IV. Silence as the Liturgy of the Name

If in the present article we have spoken until now mainly about how the Name must not be taken, it is time to close with a positive reflection: what is the proper posture of the Christian toward the Name, beyond mere prohibition?

4.1. Watchfulness as the Guarding of the Name

The whole neptic Tradition which we have unfolded in Part Four of this series offers a single answer to this question: watchfulness (nepsis). Watchfulness is the state of the man who guards his heart as a citadel, attentive to every thought that enters, to every word that goes forth. And the Name of God — which, through Baptism, dwells in this citadel — is defended by this inward attention as a hearth which the wind must not extinguish.

Saint Hesychius of Sinai writes in his Discourse to Theodoulos: “Watchfulness is a spiritual method which, with the help of God and with long labor, delivers a man from passionate thoughts and from evil words and from his own works.” And the method of watchfulness is, according to Hesychius, but one: the unceasing calling of the Lord Jesus in the heart. In other words: one cannot guard the Name outside the heart except through honoring the Name within the heart. He who calls upon Jesus in secret will no longer utter the Name in vain in speech. For between the two callings — the inward one, with prayer, and the outward one, without prayer — there is an organic bond: when the first weakens, the second grows; when the first strengthens, the second dies down.

4.2. Silence as the Preparation of the Name

The second practice which the Tradition offers is silence. Not an absolute silence (man has to speak, to confess, to serve), but an economy of speech — a setting of speech under the discipline of repentance. This is the foundation of every Christian silence: to speak when it is time, as much as is needed, about what is true, in the Name of Him who is the Truth.

Saint John Climacus writes: “Wise silence is the mother of prayer (…) it is the working of the mind allowed to rise unhindered by evil thoughts.” That is: it is not enough to be silent; it is needful to make of silence a preparation for the Name. Silence without prayer is sterile; silence with prayer is the mother of spiritual life.

This is also why, in the life of every Orthodox monastery, strict rules of silence are kept — in the trapeza (during meals), in the cells, at certain hours of the day. Not because speech in itself were evil, but because, through the discipline of silence, the mouth learns to utter the Name with reverence.

4.3. Thanksgiving as the Liturgy of Speech

There is, however, in the Tradition, a specific form of speech which is never in vain: thanksgiving (in Greek eucharistia). Thanksgiving is, in its very essence, a returning of the Name back to the One who gave it. Whoever says “Glory to God” after a meal, “Lord, help me” before a journey, “Thank You, Lord” at hearing good news — he uses the Name with foundation, with truth, with prayer. He does not take Him in vain; he places Him back in His own place.

Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians: “Therefore, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). And to the Thessalonians he commands: “Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks” (1 Thessalonians 5:17–18). Both formulas connect organically with our theme. Unceasing prayer (of which we spoke at length in Part IV) and thanksgiving in all things are the two paths through which the speech of the Christian becomes the Liturgy of the Name — that is, the use of the Name with foundation, in the service of God.

4.4. The Name Uttered with Trembling

The union of these three elements — watchfulness, wise silence, and thanksgiving — gives birth to what the Holy Fathers called the honor of the Name: a state of the heart and the lips in which the Name of God is, at once, beloved presence and awesome presence. Beloved — because the Name is the One who became incarnate for us, who died for us on the Cross, who rose for us from the dead. Awesome — because it is the Name of God, before whom the cherubim cover their faces with their wings.

This state — love with trembling — is so far from the way the world today utters the Name of God that it may seem unreal. But it is the way in which the Tradition has guarded the Name for two thousand years. And every Christian, in the measure in which he becomes a bearer of the Tradition, is called to settle into this state — slowly, with patience, with repentance, with the Jesus Prayer.

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V. The Return: What to Do Today

5.1. An Examination of Conscience

The patristic Tradition advises, before confession, an examination of conscience — that is, an honest look at the day or the week just past, in order to see where we have transgressed the commandments of God. For the Third Commandment, the examination is simple, but searching:

How many times have I uttered, in today’s speech, the Name of God or the Name of Jesus? How many of these utterances were with prayer? How many without prayer? How many with trembling, and how many out of habit? How many out of thanksgiving, and how many out of irritation or empty surprise? How many out of glorification, and how many out of inattention? How many were, openly, cursing or blasphemy? How many were the invocation of the Name in an oath, even on small matters of life?

And more deeply: how does my heart stand toward the One Named? Do I truly love Christ, or do I utter Him only out of cultural habit? Do I speak with Him (prayer) or only about Him (pious speech without prayer)? Do I tremble when I mention His Name, or have I worn it down through long use?

These questions are not posed to bring despair — the Holy Fathers repeat again and again that every honest acknowledgment of sins, if accompanied by repentance, is the beginning of the spiritual life, not its end. They are posed to bring watchfulness. And watchfulness is what, little by little, heals the wound.

5.2. Concrete Steps of Change

Tradition never asks for spectacular leaps; it asks for small, steady steps, under guidance. For the one who wishes to begin, in the light of the Third Commandment, a reformation of his speech, the Fathers suggest — each in his own language — a few practical paths:

First: a single week of heightened attention. No more. For seven days, observe yourself in speech — without judging yourself harshly, only observe. How many vain utterances of the Name do you make in a day? In what circumstances? With what intensity? This simple observation, without effort to change, is already a great spiritual gain.

Second: after a week of observation, begin replacement. Whenever you notice that you have uttered the Name in vain, add on the spot, secretly, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.” In time, the mouth will begin to utter the Jesus Prayer before it has time to utter the Name in vain. Then healing has begun.

Third: a small rule of prayer, undemanding but steady. A few minutes in the morning, a few minutes in the evening, in which to utter with attention “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” That is all. Our Fathers repeated: whoever teaches the mouth to utter the Name with prayer can no longer bring it to utter the Name without prayer. For a mouth which has learned to bow before Christ no longer endures to strike Him.

Fourth: confession. Whenever you have occasion for confession, say plainly that “I take the Name of God in vain.” Not generically — concretely: “I utter ‘Lord’ without prayer,” “I sometimes curse,” “I say ‘Jesus’ without sorrow.” And the spiritual father will give you a penance — a rule of repentance — and above all he will give you grace: the grace of forgiveness through which forgiven sins no longer drag one back.

5.3. The Role of the Family and the Community

The Third Commandment is not worked out only in secret; it is worked out also in community. The Christian family — and especially parents toward their children — has here a great responsibility. The child learns, from one day to the next, how the Name of God is uttered. If in the home the Name Lord or Jesus is heard only in the evening prayer, but is also heard at every irritation and every surprise — the child learns, without realizing it, that the Name is a convenient word, usable in any way. If, on the contrary, in the home the Name is heard only in prayer or in thanksgiving, the child learns, organically, what the honor of the Name is. And this silent apprenticeship, through the daily example of parents, is a form of catechesis more powerful than any sermon.

And at the level of the ecclesial community, every community has the power to form or to deform the sense of the honor of the Name. A community in which the faithful talk to one another, before and after the Liturgy, about worldly matters without moderation, in which the names of the Mother of God and the Saints are used as decoration, in which cursing is accepted in jokes — such a community forms Christians who take the Name in vain. A community in which everyday speech itself is permeated with thanksgiving, in which the prayer of the Name is heard in secret, in which cursing is gently corrected — such a community forms Christians who learn to love the Name.

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VI. Not Every Frequent Utterance Is Taking in Vain

Before concluding, one thing must be said plainly which, if it remains unclear, can cause a great misunderstanding. The Third Commandment does not forbid the frequent utterance of the Name of God. On the contrary, the whole Tradition which we have unfolded in Parts Three and Four — the Fathers of the Egyptian desert, Saint John Cassian, Saint Diadochus of Photike, Saint John Climacus, Saint Gregory Palamas, Saint Paisius Velichkovsky, Saint Joseph the Hesychast — exhorts us, on the contrary, to call upon the Name of Jesus without ceasing. “Pray without ceasing,” writes Saint Paul (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Let the remembrance of Jesus be united with your breath, writes Saint John Climacus (Ladder, Step 27).

What the commandment forbids is not frequency but the emptying of prayer. An Athonite monk may utter the Name Jesus thousands of times a day without taking Him in vain even once; a scattered man may utter Him only once, as an exclamation of irritation, and have thrown Him into the void. The difference is not in the number of utterances, but in the attention and intention with which the Name leaves the mouth.

This distinction is essential also for the lay Christian who, reading this article, might reach the mistaken conclusion that “it is safest not to utter the Name at all.” Quite the opposite. The solution is not the silence of the Name, but the silence of vain speech; the solution is not less prayer, but more prayer with attention; the solution is not fear of the Name, but love of the Name. And the whole Eastern Tradition — so well summed up by The Way of a Pilgrim, of which we spoke in Part Four — teaches us that the true remedy for the empty mouth is the mouth full of the Name: the more the Name Jesus is uttered with faith, with repentance, with hope, the less room remains in the mouth for uttering Him in vain.

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VII. Conclusion: The Name That Remains

We have come to the end of this series. Five articles, more than twenty-five thousand words, a single theme: the Name of God.

We saw, in Part One, how this Name, hidden in the Old Testament under the Tetragrammaton, was guarded with such reverence that Israel did not dare to utter it. We saw, in Part Two, how this Name took flesh in Christ, receiving in the Incarnation a human, utterable name — Jesus. We saw, in Part Three, how, after the Ascension, the Name continued to work in the early Church: in the Acts of the Apostles, in the Liturgy, in martyrdom, in the desert of Egypt. We saw, in Part Four, how, through the neptic Tradition — from Sinai and Athos to the Fathers of our own century — the Name entered into the depths of the heart as unceasing prayer. And we have seen, in this final article, what it means to guard the Name in the world: not to take Him in vain.

The synthesis that we may make, as the conclusion of the whole series, is this: the Name of God is, before all else, a living reality. Not a word among words. Not a conventional sign. Not a label for a theological idea. But the very presence of God, made accessible to man in Christ, through the Incarnation, through Baptism, through the Liturgy, through Prayer. And the life of the Christian — the whole life of the Christian — is, in its essence, a life within the Name: we were baptized in the Name, we communicate in the Name, we confess in the Name, we pray with the Name, we shall die with the Name on our lips and — so we hope — we shall rise in the Name.

And every day of ours, seen in this light, is a day in which the Name is given to us anew, to be guarded, honored, loved, uttered with trembling. And if we lose Him through inattention, through habit, through the passion of an unbridled tongue — we can find Him back through repentance, through confession, through the Jesus Prayer, through watchfulness. For, as Saint Paul wrote: “The gifts and calling of God are without repentance (= without revoking)” (Romans 11:29). The Name given to us at Baptism is not taken back from us. We can leave Him in forgetfulness, but He does not forget us. It is enough that we return.

And the return, the Tradition teaches us, is within reach of anyone, anywhere, at any time. “Lord, have mercy on me” — five words. The poorest form of the Jesus Prayer, but also the most accessible. That is all. And in this poor calling is contained the whole theology which we have unfolded, through five articles, in this series: the Name of God revealed in the Old Testament, incarnated in Jesus, working in the Church, dwelling in the heart through Prayer, guarded by watchfulness from being taken in vain. Two thousand years of Tradition in a single short phrase, which any Christian can utter, with repentance, in the secret of his heart, at any moment of life.

And this is one of the great mysteries of Christianity: faith is not first a system of ideas, but the meeting with a Person — and this Person has revealed Himself to us through His Name. And this Name — Jesus, YHWH saves — is the one which our Fathers handed down to us at Baptism, which they guarded with their blood in martyrdom, which they made to dwell in their hearts through Prayer, which they have transmitted to us, that we, in our turn, may transmit Him further.

And to His Name be glory, unto the ages. Amen.

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