Praying the Office with St Benedict 2: The Benedictine charism

The key thesis of this series is that the form of the Divine Office set out in the Rule is just as fundamental to the Benedictine charism as the other foundational documents of the Order, namely the Rule itself, and the life of St Benedict by St Gregory the Great (Book II of his Dialogues).

How integral is the Benedictine Office to the charism?

It is true of course, that St Benedict himself allowed for the possibility of other orderings of the psalms to be used [1], and that down the centuries many other forms of the Office have been used in conjunction with the other provisions of the Rule, not least in our own day.

And very different amounts of time have been devoted to the Office in different periods: the Carolingians added many extra prayers, and that trend was taken even further by the Cluniacs; in our time many monasteries devote very little time at all to formal communal prayer outside of the Mass.

These variations are, I think a reflection of a key aspect of the Rule itself, one of the reasons for its endurance: namely that there is so much buried spiritual treasure in it that it is very possible to emphasis different aspects of it; to adapt it to different times and situations; and even to use the Rule and/or Office in conjunction with other quite distinctive charisms (such as the Rule of Columbanus in the seventh century, some of the military orders of the Middle Ages and the Carthusians). Indeed, as other charisms and approaches to monasticism have arisen, many have been absorbed and incorporated into particular streams of Benedictine spirituality.

We should not outright reject the validity of these later developments down the centuries: the Holy Ghost blows as it will!  But there is, nonetheless, I think, a particular value in attempting to understand what St Benedict himself intended, or perhaps what God gifted to him, particularly in his design of his Office, since there is, I think, a certain validity to the view articulated by Laszlo Dobszay, that a particular form of the Office forms a particular type of monk. [2]

Challenging twentieth century takes on the Office

That said, let me say upfront by way of summary of this series, that we need, I think, to reject outright some key propositions propagated from the mid-twentieth century onwards, namely:

(1) The idea that there was one, settled form of mainstream monastic life by St Benedict's time.

Few, if any, monastic historians now, for example, would now accept Claude Peifer's claim in RB 1980, that despite the differences between the various monastic rules of the period, “the life actually lived in Western monasteries from the end of the fourth century up to the sixth seems to have been basically the same”. [3] Instead, historians are increasingly appreciating the great diversity of monasticism in this period. [4]

(2) The claim made by Dom Adalbert de Vogue that St Benedict's Office was a merely mechanistic adaptation of the Roman [5].

De Vogue argued that the Roman Office had already settled on its fixed weekly psalm cursus by St Benedict's time, and the saint's adaptation of it was forced by the needs of labour in the fields to support the monks.  There is absolutely no hard evidence to support this claim; instead it hangs on the elaborate reconstructions of the liturgists based on indirect evidence dating from several centuries after Benedict. [6]

(3) The view that Roman Office itself evolved in an essentially mechanistic way, rather than having its own historical, theological and Scriptural underpinnings.

Pascher in particular developed elaborate theories as to a process of evolution reducing the number of psalms said at Vespers. [7]

These propositions were, in large part, I think, driven by the historico-critical paradigm that dominated at the time. Today they are increasingly being challenged through careful examination of both the practical differences in the lives of monks and nuns of the time, and teasing out the differences in underlying theologies. [8]

Monastic diversity in the West in late antiquity: a story of three monasteries

One of the particularly intriguing lines of distinction between monasteries in St Benedict's time seems to have been the balance between liturgy, lectio and work.

St Benedict (c 485 - 540), for example, may be famous today for his injunction to put nothing before the Work of God (the Office), but in reality his Office took up only somewhere between 4-8 hours of the monastic day (estimates differ, and time spent in chapel also varied with the day of the week and feasts, though I would suggest the longer end of the spectrum is more likely than the four hours claimed by some contemporary commentators). [9]  St Benedict's monks lived a life that still allowed considerable time for lectio divina; and manual, intellectual or craft work, including providing hospitality to guests.

By contrast the nuns of the more or less contemporary monastery of Arles established by St Caesarius, whose rule was written between 510 and 535, are thought to have spent typically somewhere between 12 and 16 hours each day in choir [10].  They were strictly enclosed, and offered no hospitality for visitors, their Rule forbidding even the provision of meals for visiting bishops and other notables.  Even so, they still managed some (mostly communal while working) lectio, and work such as manuscript production and clothes manufacture.

The extent of diversity is even more starkly illustrated by the lives of the monks of the monastery of St Maurice of Agaune (in what is now the Swiss Alps), founded (or refounded) in 515, and which seems to have totally precluded any possibility of other work, as their lives were entirely devoted to the maintenance of a perpetual round of prayer, 24/7, using shifts of monks in succession [11].

The time spent on the Office in each of these communities clearly both constrained or permitted very different forms of religious life for the religious in them, and this was in turn reflected in the particular shapes of their offices, so before we start looking at St Benedict's particular form of the Office, I thought it would be useful context to look at some of the theological drivers for this diversity, on which more in the next post.

The three monasteries in summary

	St Maurice of Agaune	St John of Arles [12]	St Benedict
Location	Kingdom of Burgundy (Swiss Alps, near Geneva)	Arles, France [Gaul (Provence)]	Italy
Type	Relic site/royal foundation (Sigismund)	Urban/episcopal	Rural/lay
Foundation dates	[Refounded] c515	506 started building outside walls; 519 monastery built 534 Rule finalised	[C505-15 Abbot of Vicocaro] C505-25 Subiaco C529 Monte Cassino [?Plombariola] C545 Terracina [?c560 Lateran]
Founder/Benefactor	Prince (later King) Sigismund of Burgundy, aided by bishops Maximus, Avitus and others	Bishop Caesarius of Arles	Benedict (with assistance from lay benefactors?  Ecclesiastical approval??)
Founding abbots/abbesses	Hymnemodus	Caesaria (sister of Caesarius); Caesaria the Younger (niece of the bishop)	Benedict [Scholastica]
Dedications of monastery/church/chapels	St Maurice and the Theban legion	St John the Baptist,  St Martin of Tours St John the Evangelist,  Our Lady	St John the Baptist,  St Martin of Tours

The dimensions of difference

Over the next several posts I want to try and draw out the way the different charisms of these three groups of monasteries affected the forms of the Office that they each used. 

And there are four particular aspects of the liturgy that I want to focus in on to do this, namely the Office as a vehicle for the praise and adoration of God; for promoting prayer and meditation (and the objective of 'praying without ceasing'); the intercessory dimensions of the Office; and the location of the Office in sacred time.

Before doing this though, it is, perhaps, helpful to provide something of an overview of the dimensions and drivers of liturgical diversity in late antiquity, starting in the next part in this series, which you find here.

Notes

[1] RB 18: 22].  St Benedict's caveat on the possiblity of using other distibutions of the psalter is that all 150 psalms must be said each week:  Hoc praecipue commonentes ut, si cui forte haec distributio psalmorum displicuerit, ordinet si melius aliter iudicaverit, [23] dum omnimodis id adtendat ut omni hebdomada psalterium ex integro numero centum quinquaginta psalmorum psallantur, et dominico die semper a caput reprehendatur ad vigilias. [24] Quia nimis inertem devotionis suae servitium ostendunt monachi qui minus a psalterio cum canticis consuetudinariis per septimanae circulum psallunt, [25] dum quando legamus sanctos patres nostros uno die hoc strenue implesse, quod nos tepidi utinam septimana integra persolvamus.

[2] Laszlo Dobszay, Critical reflections on the Bugnini Liturgy, pg 8: "If it is true to say, Chorus facit monachum (Office in common makes the monk), then we may complete the proverb thus: Hic chorus facit hunc monachum (The order’s own  Office shapes the self-identity of the monk).”

[3]  In Timothy Fry (ed), RB 1980 The Rule of St. Benedict In Latin and English with Notes, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesotta: 1981, Claude Peifer claimed that despite the differences between the various monastic rules of the period, “the life actually lived in Western monasteries from the end of the fourth century up to the sixth seems to have been basically the same”.  (pg 85)

[4] For a more accounts of the attempt to develop a 'tradition', see Albrecht Diem, ‘Inventing the Holy Rule: Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West,’ in Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress (eds.),Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of early monastic observance  (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp 53 – 84 and Conrad Leyser, Authority and asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great, Oxford :  Oxford University Press, 2000.

[5] See Adalbert De Vogue, SC La Règle de saint Benoît, commentaire doctrinal et spirituel, Vol 5, Éditions du Cerf, Paris, 1977.

[6] The most recent treatment of this issue relies on the claim that the arrangement of the 'de psalmiis' responsories, now used during Epiphanytide, and which use psalms more or less aligned to the Roman Matins cursus each day, were originally a prototype set  used throughout the year (see Lazlo Dobszay, the Divine Office in History, in Alcuin Reid, ed, T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy, Bloomsbury, 2016, pp  207- 235).  However the earliest references to the de psalmiis responsories dates from long after St Benedict's time, and there is every reason to think that their current arrangement changed over time (not least because of the inclusion of non-psalmic elements in the set). Moreover, the claim depends on the assumption that the psalms utilised were essentially selected randomly, for their fit to the curus.  In reality there are good reasons to think they were actually selected for their appropriateness to the season and readings therein (paper forthcoming). 

[7] A view developed primarily by Callaewaert and Pascher.  for a helpful discussion, see James McKinnon, The Origins of the Western Office in Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer (ed), The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography, OUP, 2000, pp 63-73.

[8]  See in particular: Daniel Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity, University of California Press, 2002; Peter Brown, Treasure in Heaven The Holy Poor in Early Christianity, University of Virginia Press, 2016.

[9] Estimates of the amount of time spent on the Benedictine Office  in St Benedict's time vary wildly: Dom David Knowles estimated at least eight hours a day in his book The Benedictines; modern Benedictine commentators (perhaps less familiar with the full sung office?) such as Kardong suggest around four.

[10] Estimate from Laurent Ripart, De lérins à agaune: Le monachisme rhodanien reconsidéré, in Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, Monachesimi d’oriente e d’occidente nell’alto medioevo, Spoleto, 2016, pp123-193.

[11] There is a large literature on Agaune, but the most helpful and up-to-date treatment of  primary and secondary sources is Anne-Marie Helvétius, L’abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune dans le haut Moyen Âge, in Autour de saint Maurice. Actes du colloque Politique, société et construction identitaire : autour de saint Maurice, 29 septembre-2 octobre 2009, Besançon (France )- Saint-Maurice (Suisse), dir. N. BROCARD, F. VANNOTTI et A. WAGNER, Fondation des Archives historiques de l’abbaye de Saint-Maurice, 2012, p. 113-131.

[12] For Arles, the most important sources are the Rules for monks and nuns, in Caesarius of Arles, Oeuvres Monastique, de Vogue and Courreau ed and trans, 2 vols, Sources Chretienne 345, 398 and W. Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul, Cambridge UP, 1994.  For a full listing of relevant studies see the online bibliography managed by W Klingshirn: https://arts-sciences.catholic.edu/academics/interdisciplinary/early-christianity/projects/caesarius-studies.html

*Note: Some of the material in this post and planned subsequent ones derive from a conference paper originally presented to the Australian Early Medieval Association in 2018. 

Praying the psalms with St Benedict/1: Why forty psalms each day

This Lent I plan to provide some commentaries on the Benedictine Office, and particularly the psalm cursus.

While this topic isn't explicitly Lenten in focus, there is, I think, a Lenten connection, in that one of St Benedict's key themes, both in the Rule and the Office, is on the process of conversion of our way of life, of turning away from evil, and cultivating the good. [1]

And this process of progressive transformation, I want to suggest, is something St Benedict explicitly and implicitly connects to the symbolism of the forty days of Lent, not least through the number of psalms said each day in the Benedictine Office (viz forty; see the appendix below for a discussion of how the number is made up).

Lent in the Rule

St Benedict in his Rule gives particular attention to Lent: it is the only liturgical season he discusses, devoting an entire chapter to its character, and making mentions of the disciplines that apply during this period in several others.

But perhaps one of his most important comments on the subject is this: the character of the monk's life ought always be Lenten in character. [2]

One particular way that he builds this dictum into the life of the monk, I would suggest, is the Office, for each day the monk's daily 'pensum' (weight or measure), or in this context obligation, consists of saying forty psalms in total. [3]

The number is surely not random.

Forty

Lent may not have been strictly forty days in St Benedict's time (just when it became so is hotly contested).

But the symbolism of forty psalms each day is, I think, made clear not only by the various Biblical forty day fasts (Moses, Joshua, Elijah and Our Lord), but also the periods of purgation represented by the forty days of rain in the Great Flood, and the forty years the Israelites spent in the wilderness before being allowed to enter the promised land.

St Augustine, for example, commented in a sermon now used at Matins of Ember Friday in Lent in the 1962 Benedictine and Roman breviaries:

The number forty is put before us as hallowed, and, in a way, perfect. I think that your love knoweth this God's Scriptures often and; often witness it. Ye well know that a Fast of this number of days is hallowed. Moses fasted forty days. Elias did the same. And our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself fasted this number of days complete...Love is the fulfilling of the law; to the fulfilling of the law belongeth in every work the number forty. [4] 

And it is the forty years in the desert that we are daily reminded of in the Benedictine office if we say Matins, with the invitatory psalm (Psalm 94), and particularly its verse:

Quadragínta annis próximus fui generatióni huic, et dixi: Semper hi errant corde; ipsi vero non cognovérunt vias meas: quibus jurávi in ira mea: Si introíbunt in réquiem meam.

Forty years long was I offended with that generation, and I said: These always err in heart. And these men have not known my ways: so I swore in my wrath that they shall not enter into my rest.

The monastic day, then, I would suggest, symbolically traces the path of the Israelites in the desert each day, the path of our life in this world: we have come out of Egypt, and are learning how to serve God; at the end of the day, in the last Psalm 133, we hope to stand at last within the Promised Land, in its very heart, the heavenly Jerusalem.

The psalms, in this context, act as a means of purgation both personally and for the world, one for each year in the desert.

Indeed, St Augustine's sermon quoted earlier may well be the source for two key memes in the Benedictine Rule, namely the idea that our lives ought always to be Lenten in character, and to our hoped for reward as labourers in the vineyard:

We, then, make our pilgrimage in this world a Lent, by living good lives, and abstaining from her iniquities and her forbidden pleasures. But at the end of this life-long Lent there will be an Easter indeed. We look for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour   Jesus Christ When that hope is realised, when that faith is swallowed up in knowledge, then indeed shall we receive every man a penny. In good sooth, it is true that every labourer in the vineyard will get his wages... [5]

Monks and laypeople

I don't want to suggest by this that laypeople should attempt to say all forty of the psalms the Rule specifies for each day - most laypeople have too many other demands on their time, and other, proper duties associated with their state of life, to fulfil that must take higher priority.

Rather, and I hope to come back to this point later in this series, I would argue (unfashionable though this idea is) that one of the key functions of religious is that they say them in part on our behalf; the point for us is to be aware of this function, and do what we can, financially and otherwise, to support their work.

Nonetheless, one possible Lenten practice might be to add just one extra psalm each day to our normal Office, and thus reach the number 40 by the end of Lent?

That way, we too can seek to purify ourselves afresh, and to support and build the community of like souls who travel with us, hoping that we too, may eventually be found worthy to enter the promised Land; that we too might dwell in the halls of the heavenly Jerusalem described in Psalm 133 at the end of the day, at Compline.

You can find the next part in this series here.

Appendix: How many psalms are said in the Office each day?

Some authors suggest that the number of psalms said each day in the Benedictine Office is 38, since the Laudate psalms are said under one doxology and should therefore only be counted as one.

I would suggest firstly that this is being overly literal, and it is far more likely that St Benedict had in mind the symbolism of forty given his attention to other key Biblical and other numbers throughout the Rule. First, although St Benedict specifies that Laudate psalms should be said at Lauds each day, he doesn't actually specify that they should be said under one doxology. Indeed, the problems of divided psalms aside, St Benedict actually varied the number of psalms said at a few hours on different days:

Matins: 14 (ps 3, Ps 94 + 12 variable psalms or parts of psalms of the day)
Lauds: 5 or 7 psalms depending on how Laudates are counted; one less on Saturday
Prime: 3 psalms or parts of psalms, 4 on Sundays
Terce, Sext None: 9 psalms or parts of Psalms
Vespers: 4 psalms or parts of psalms, with 5 on Mondays (but generally counted as one as Psalm 115 and  116 under one doxology)
Compline: 3 psalms

The custom of doing so, I would suggest, could well be a later shortening of the Office imported from the (later) Roman version of the hour, since most liturgists seem to agree that the Roman Office of St Benedict's time didn't actually have doxologies, but adopted the custom later in the sixth century.

And at least in the form we know them, both the Roman and Benedictine Offices maintain a certain symmetry (albeit in different ways) in the number of psalms said in the morning and evening:

Roman Lauds: 5 psalms if Laudates treated as one
Roman Vespers: 5 psalms

Benedictine Lauds: 7 psalms (if Laudates counted as three)
Benedictine Vespers: 4 psalms + 3 Compline = 7

Perhaps even more compellingly, St Augustine's Tract 17, quoted further above, on John provides a commentary on the number 38 that associates that number with weakness:

...the man healed by our Lord at the pool of Bethesda had had an infirmity thirty and eight years. I wish to explain why this number of thirty-eight is proper rather to weakness than to health. Love is the fulfilling of the law; to the fulfilling of the law belongeth in every work the number forty...

But in love we have given us two precepts: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. When the widow gave all she had for an offering to God she gave two mites; the inn-keeper received two pence wherewith to cure him that had fallen among thieves Jesus abode for two days among the Samaritans, that He might establish them in love. 

When, then, anything good is spoken of as two, the two great  divisions of love are the chief mystic interpretation. If, then, the law is fulfilled in the number forty, and it is not fulfilled if there be lacking the two  precepts of love, what wonder is it that he was infirm who lacked two of forty? [6]

And you can find the next part in this series here.

Notes

[1]  See for example the conclusion of the Prologue ll. 49: Processu verso conversationis et fidei, dilato corde, inerrabili dilectionis dulcedine curritur via mandatorum Dei...All English translations of the Rule come from Justin McCann ed and trans), The Rule of Saint Benedict in English and Latin, Burns Oates, 1952; for the Latin see the Latin Intratext Edition,  2007.

[2] RB 49.1: Licet omni tempore vita monachi Quadragesimae debet observationem habere...

[3]  See RB 49 &50.

[4] Augustine, Tract 17.4 on the Gospel of John, translation from the Maquis de Bute translation of the Roman Breviary: Quadragenarius numerus sacratus nobis in quadam perfectione commendatur. Notum esse arbitror Caritati vestrae: testantur saepissime divinae Scripturae. Ieiunium hoc numero consecratum est: bene nostis. Nam et Moyses quadraginta diebus ieiunavit, et Elias totidem 6 ipse Dominus noster et salvator Iesus Christus hunc ieiunii numerum implevit. Per Moysen significatur Lex, per Eliam significantur Prophetae, per Dominum significatur Evangelium.

[5] ibid: In hoc ergo saeculo quasi Quadragesimam abstinentiae celebramus, cum bene vivimus, cum ab iniquitatibus et ab illicitis voluptatibus abstinemus. Sed quia haec abstinentia sine mercede non erit, exspectamus beatam illam spem, et revelationem gloriae magni Dei, et salvatoris nostri Iesu Christi. In illa spe, cum fuerit de spe facta res, accepturi sumus mercedem denarium. Ipsa enim merces redditur operariis in vinea laborantibus...  For the labourer image, see especial Prologue to the Rule 14: Et quaerens Dominus in multitudine populi cui haec clamat operarium suum, iterum dicit...

[6] ibid: Videamus ergo quid voluerit significare in illo uno, quem etiam ipse servans unitatis mysterium, sicut praelocutus sum, de tot languentibus unum sanare dignatus est. Invenit in annis eius numerum quemdam languoris: Triginta octo annos habebat in infirmitate. Hic numerus quomodo magis ad languorem pertineat, quam ad sanitatem, paulo diligentius exponendum est...Caritatis praecepta duo sunt a Domino commendata: Diliges Dominum Deum tuum ex toto corde tuo, et ex tota anima tua, et ex tota mente tua; et: Diliges proximum tuum tamquam teipsum. In his duobus praeceptis tota Lex pendet et Prophetae. Merito et illa vidua omnes facultates suas, duo minuta misit in dona Dei: merito et pro illo languido a latronibus sauciato, stabularius duos nummos accepit unde sanaretur: merito apud Samaritanos biduum fecit Iesus, ut eos caritate firmaret. Binario ergo isto numero cum aliquid boni significatur maxime bipartita caritas commendatur. Si ergo quadragenarius numerus habet perfectionem legis et Lex non impletur nisi in gemino praecepto caritatis; quid miraris quia languebat qui ad quadraginta, duo minus habebat?