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| The martyrdom of St Maurice and the Theban legion Source: wiki commons |
In the last post in this series I talked about the monastery of St John of Arles, where the ideal held out was for each nun to literally pray without ceasing, even when sleeping; aided to achieve this through a Rule that sought to eliminate as many distractions as possible (through a strictly regimented life and severe restrictions on visitors), and through long hours in church.
Today I want to look briefly at another interpretation of praying without ceasing, practiced at another monastery contemporary to St Benedict, namely that of St Maurice of Agaune, where the emphasis was on maintaining a regime of continuous prayer at the communal rather than individual level.
Literally praying without ceasing
Before we move on though, it is worth noting that although the literal interpretation of the injunction to pray without ceasing is largely (though not entirely) out of favour now, it had a well-established genealogy, and continued to have adherents long after St Benedict's time.
Its advocates could point to Scriptural precedents, such as the widow and Prophetess Anna, described by St Luke as never leaving the Temple, but instead serving God night and day with fasting and prayer (quæ non discedebat de templo, jejuniis et obsecrationibus serviens nocte ac die). [1]
And the practices of this school of spiritual theology - such as the continuous recitation of the psalter - were discussed not just in Cassian, the Lives of the Desert Fathers, the Canons of Hippolytus and other influential texts of early monastic literature, but also in writers such as St Clement of Alexandria, who saw the fixed hours of prayer such as Terce, Sext and None largely as props for those who had not yet achieved the state of continual prayer. [2]
Nor did this approach fall out of favour in the centuries that followed: many monastic saints lives, Benedictine and otherwise, from the seventh to tenth century showcased prodigious feats of psalter recitation: St Benedict Biscop, Bede the Venerable's teacher, for example, apparently recited the entire psalter twice daily in addition to singing the Office of his monastery. [3]
Continuous prayer as a corporate action
This literal approach to St Paul's injunction was, however, far from being the only interpretation of how to pray without ceasing (or to pray day and night, as Psalm 1 enjoined): a key alternative interpretation saw it being achieved not necessarily at the individual level, but rather through collective effort.
In particular, Agaune, a monastery dedicated to St Maurice and the martyred Theban legion, a group of soldiers who, according to the Vita by Eucherius, refused an order to slaughter their fellow Christians for refusing to offer sacrifices to the Emperor, instead laying down their weapons and allowing themselves to be first decimated, and ultimately all martyred. [4]
The monastery was refounded around 515 with the monks organised into several different choirs, which took turns to maintain the perpetual round of psalmody. [5]
Just how they organised themselves to do this remains speculative: all of the details of their practices date from a much later era, or from other monasteries that claimed to adopt their customs. We know though, that the monks were organised into five to nine units (turmae, terminology that echoed the military) or choirs, who maintained the psalmody in turn (with possibly all the monks attending the core six or seven hours, and the different shifts then filling in the gaps).
The roots of perpetual prayer
The Agaune model, on the face of it, seems quite different theologically either from that of Arles, which sought to aid the religious to achieve a state of literally continuous prayer, or that of St Benedict, who insisted that the individual monk fulfill his Office obligation individually each day, reciting it, if necessary, even if out working in the fields or absent from the monastery for some reason.
Instead it made the church, rather than the individual monk the locus of perpetual prayer, to be maintained by a newly created ‘monastic family’ (hoc est monachorum, familia locaretur), who, according to the Vita of the first three abbots, imitating heaven, would maintain the divine office day and night. [6]
Instead it made the church, rather than the individual monk the locus of perpetual prayer, to be maintained by a newly created ‘monastic family’ (hoc est monachorum, familia locaretur), who, according to the Vita of the first three abbots, imitating heaven, would maintain the divine office day and night. [6]
There were certainly clear precedents in both Scripture and monastic tradition for this approach. In the Old Testament it could point to the Temple traditions, such as the Levite families chosen to live in temple chambers to serve day and night (1 Parap 9:33); in he New Testament, the vigil maintained by the community of Jerusalem, praying for Peter while he was imprisoned (Acts 12: Oratio autem fiebat sine intermissione ab ecclesia ad Deum pro eo). And in the monastic tradition, one of the Apophthemgmata Patriae tells the story of a monk who prayed as he worked in order to earn enough to support himself, and to pay someone to pray for him when he slept. [7]
The angelic chorus
One of the intriguing points of distinction between this approach and the other models though, seems to me to be the way in which the Divine Office on earth is depicted as being linked to that of heaven.
St Benedict, of course, directs us to be mindful of the presence of the angels when praying the Office, and adjust our behaviour accordingly: the angels, not the monks, are the 'watchers', observing us.
Clement of Alexander elevates the status of the ascetic somewhat higher, seeing the prayers of the perpetual prayer as serving to unite him to the angelic choir:
The angelic chorus
One of the intriguing points of distinction between this approach and the other models though, seems to me to be the way in which the Divine Office on earth is depicted as being linked to that of heaven.
St Benedict, of course, directs us to be mindful of the presence of the angels when praying the Office, and adjust our behaviour accordingly: the angels, not the monks, are the 'watchers', observing us.
Clement of Alexander elevates the status of the ascetic somewhat higher, seeing the prayers of the perpetual prayer as serving to unite him to the angelic choir:
His sacrifices are prayers, and praises, and readings in the Scriptures before meals, and psalms and hymns during meals and before bed, and prayers also again during night. By these he unites himself to the divine choir, from continual recollection, engaged in contemplation which has everlasting remembrance. [8]The description of the Agaune model in the very early lives of the first three abbots, takes it one step further, for it is depicts the monks' choruses as explicitly imitating those of heaven (qui die noctuque caelestia imitantes, cantionibus divinis insisterent). [9]
Some historians have argued that Agaune's perpetual liturgy regime evolved naturally out of the Gallic tradition of long hours in church typified by the liturgy of Arles, in response to particular local concerns and issues. [10] The more obvious direct inspiration for this model, though, as others have pointed out, was that of the Sleepless monks of Constantinople that I discussed in a previous post, with their multiple repetitions of the angelic chorus recorded in the New Testament, and whose fame had certainly spread to the West by this time. [11]
All the same, their model must certainly have seemed a particularly good fit for a monastery dedicated to the maintenance of a shrine where the founding legend concluded that the soldiers, by their martyrdom, had been transformed members of the angelic choir:
Thus that whole angelic legion was murdered, which now, we believe, joins with legions of angels in heaven in always praising together the Lord God Sabaoth. [12]Half a century later Gregory of Tours provided a story that nicely echoes this imagery, in the story of a young monk who died, to the great distress of his mother, who then spent her days weeping in the Church. [13] Happily, St Maurice appeared to her and assured her that her son was still part of the chorus made up not just of the still living monks, but the dead among their number, as well as the entire Theban legion itself. To prove this, he invited her to return the next morning at Lauds, and every subsequent day that she so desired for the rest of her life, so that she could (miraculously) hear his particular voice joining that of the other (still living) monks.
The angelic life
The idea of monks as imitators of the angelic life was not of course new, and was certainly not unknown in the West. Monks were regularly compared to angels on the basis of their commitment to chastity, their dedication to prayer and contemplation, and in their quest for virtue. And St Martin of Tours' brand of monasticism, for example, also seems to have joined in the rejection of manual work, something also part of the Agaune charism.
Indeed, the Preface to his Latin translation the Life of Pachomius by the Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus in Rome in the first half of the sixth century provided an origin story for monasticism that held up just this image:
For when by the Lord's permission, the pagan Emperors rose up and brought savage and stormy persecutions against Christians everywhere...[monasteries grew up] practising abstinence as they renounced the world and adorned the secret places of solitude...They sought the quietness of solitude, and by looking for the joyous divine gift of their own salvation through faith, they have furnished an example to others of a more sublime and sacred life. Freed from all earthly cares, they emulated the holiness of the Angels while still living in this mortal flesh. [14]Still, this view of monastic life seems more characteristic of the spirituality of Syrian and Eastern monasticism than that which generally prevailed in the West. Certainly neither the Rule of Caesarius of Arles nor that of St Benedict really play much on this concept, and St Gregory's Life of St Benedict more often depicts his disciples as sinners than angelic imitators or saints!
Rather, St Benedict's Rule depicts the monastic life as that of a group of sinners struggling towards perfection, a life that is the ordinary Christian life lived intensively; differentiated from the lay life primarily by being lived in one place, and under obedience to an abbot and a rule. In the next post, I will look at how St Benedict's particular take on praying fits with this.
[1] Lk 2:36-8
[2] See in particular Cassian Conference 13; Canons of Hippolytus 27 (Egyptian c336-340) “When a man sleeps in his bed he must pray to God in his heart” (quoted by Taft, Liturgy of the Hours... pg 71).
[3] Bede, Life of Benedict Biscop in his Lives of the Wearmouth Abbots.
[4] Eucherius of Lyons, The Passion of the Martyrs of Agaune (translation in the appendix of Tim Vivian, Kim Vivian and Jeffrey Russell trans, The Life of
the Jura Fathers The Life of the Holy Fathers Romanus, Lupicinus , and
Eugendus, Abbots of the Monasteries in the Jura Mountains...,
Cistercian Studies Series no 178, Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo, 1999, Studies Series 178); for the latin text see Passio Acaunensium martyrum, BHL-5737.
[5] There is an extensive literature on Agaune; for the most up-to-date and systematic treatments see in particular Anne-Marie Helvétius, L’abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune dans le haut Moyen Âge, 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 and 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.
[6] Vita abbatum Acaunensium (BHL 142), § 3, éd. B. KRUSCH, MGH, SSRM, III, Hanovre, 1896.
[7] Lives of the Desert Fathers,
[8] Stromata bk 7, Chapter 7.
[9] BHL, op cit.
[10] For this view see in particular B. Rosenwein, ‘Perennial Prayer at Agaune’, in S. Farmer and B. Rosenwein (eds), Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society (Ithaca, 2000), pp. 37–56; Albrecht Diem, Who is Allowed to Pray for the King? Saint-Maurice d’Agaune and the Creation of a Burgundian Identity, in Post-Roman Transitions: Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West, Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann (eds), pp. 47-88, Brepol 2014.
[11] See Helvetius op cit. The fame of the Sleepless monks had spread to the West by this time - they maintained a regular correspondence with the Pope over assorted theological disputes in Constantinople the early sixth century, and delegations visited on a number of occasions. The monastery's royal patron, Sigismund of Burgundy and or his episcopal advisors could well have encountered or heard of them either there, since he converted from Arianism during a visit to Rome, or in the course of Burgundy's attempts to negotiate a treaty with Constantinople to protect the Kingdom against the threat of invasion from Theodoric in Italy, or Clovis and his heirs in Gaul.
[12] See Eucherius, op cit. There is also an anonymous passion of the Martyrs, available atg BHL 5730, available in translation by David Woods, The Passion of St. Maurice and the Theban Legion (BHL 5740); see also Eric Chevalley, La Passion anonyme de saint Maurice d'Agaune Edition critique*, dans Vallesia,VL (1990), pp. 37-120.
[13] Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloria martyrum, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM 1.2: Gregorii Turonensis Opera. Teil 2: Miracula et opera minora. Editio nova lucisope expressa (Hanover, 1885), pp. 34–111 (at c. 74-75). Trans Raymond van Dam, LUP, 1988, pp 69-71.
[14] http://www.vitae-patrum.org.uk/page11.html
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