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.