Praying the psalms with St Benedict/3B - The drivers of liturgical diversity in late antiquity*

In the previous post in this series, I pointed out the huge diversity of late antique monastic and other forms of the Divine Office.

So what drove that diversity?

Drivers of diversity

One of the factors was almost certainly the variety of entrenched local traditions.

Scripture, politics and the influence of new ideas filtering in from the elsewhere may all also have played a role.

I want to suggest, however, that differing underlying theologies for monastic life was by far the most important factor.

First though, it is helpful to look at some of the others that have been suggested.

Local traditions?

One obvious source for a monastic Office the local form of the Office the founder of a monastery already knew.

Caesarius of Arles, for example, claimed to base the Offices he set out in his Rules for monks and nuns on the practice of the great monastery of Lerins (off the coast of Cannes). [1]

Similarly, St Benedict claimed the authority of the Church of Rome for his Lauds psalms and Old Testament canticle ordering. [2]

And many local Offices had, by the sixth century, clearly acquired the authority of long use.

A Synod of Tours held in 567, for example, described an Office that attempted to reconcile the competing claims of a Night Office of twelve psalms (presumably reflecting the influence of Cassian, or perhaps even St Benedict), and the traditions it associated with St Martin of Tours, by making twelve psalms a summer minimum, but the many more psalms associated with Gallic Offices, the rule for the rest of the year. [3]

Two centuries later, the Ratio de cursus, an anonymous treatise written before 767, went even further, claiming that the Benedictine Office was a Johnny-come-lately compared to both the Gallic Office, which it claimed had originated with St John the Evangelist, and the Irish Office his (probably Columbanian) house used, which he claimed originated with St Mark the Evangelist. [4]  Whether or not one thinks these claims had any historical merit, they do illustrate that entrenched traditions could be highly resistant to outside influences. [5]

The search for a perfect Office

Despite this, though, monastic Offices in St Benedict's time clearly were, in many cases, influenced by other forces.

One of the most intriguing stories about the process of developing a monastic Office, not least because it emphasises several of the other drivers that shaped particular forms of the Office, comes from the Life of Alexander the Sleepless, which was probably written in the second half of the fifth century. [6]

Alexander (died 430) originally learnt his craft in Syria, but travelled extensively, before ultimately ending up in Constantinople.  Along the way, he seems to have encountered and tried several  different forms of the Office.

Scripture mining or local traditions?

Initially he used the form of the Office that he had been taught during his monastic apprenticeship, praying Terce, Sext, None, and again in the night, an arrangement that reflected the various descriptions of prayer in the Book of Acts. [7]

St Alexander though, seems to have been something of a Scriptural fundamentalist: the Life tells us that he 'was scrupulously attentive to the things written in the God-inspired Scriptures and was adamant that not a single line of God's commandments should escape him'.  Accordingly, when he encountered an Office of seven times of prayer each day and night, justified by the text St Benedict also cites in the Rule, Psalm 118:64, he readily adopted it:

He saw that God his Master everywhere proclaims the number seven, as when he says, Seven times a day I praise you.  So he endeavoured to carry out this too, and did so by performing his prayers seven times a day and seven times at night. [8]

This regime, too, though, ultimately failed to satisfy him, as he wrestled with the question of how to satisfy the injunction to meditate on the law of God both day and night (Psalm 1:2).

Arriving at a particular charism 

Accordingly, the life tells us, for three years he sought a solution, 'that this too could be performed by him on earth, although it was the work of heavenly powers'. He certainly scoured Scripture for clues, the Life tells us; fasted; prayed, and petitioned God.  But intriguingly, it tells us he also studied the forms of the office used by others. And eventually he came to a solution, based on the order of creation itself:

Therefore he took as a teacher the Creator of the universe, and just as he imposed limits on His creation, so too did Alexander arrange his way of life, saying, My Christ in His creation allotted twenty-four hours for day and night; so let us also pass the course of the day and night with twenty-four services singing hymns to God....My master has made the days and nights increase in orderly fashion; so let us also ceaselessly offer hymns to Him in such an orderly arrangement...[9]

In order to actually accomplish, he settled on a system of monks working in shifts, and was, it seems, aimed at modelling the angelic life devoted to the pure praise and adoration of God above all.

The Office and the angelic life

St Alexander was not actually the first either to base his Office around the 24 hours of the day, or to instigate a 'laus perennis' (as the system of perpetual prayer was much later dubbed) - he had almost certainly encountered versions of it in his travels. [10]

To his office of hymns of praise, though, he added also an intercessory element, which must have added to its appeal to benefactors (essential since he also took literally the instruction to leave the provision of all food and other essentials to God):

Our Savior bids us forgive our fellow slaves their sins against us seventy times seven; so let us also raise our petitions to our good God on their behalf by making seventy-seven genuflections....So when the full liturgical sequence had been performed and the recitations and the repetitions kept and the services finished, then in addition he sang the hymn of the holy angels seventy-seven times both day and night, the one that goes Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men. [11]

St Alexander's brand of monasticism emphasised the idea of monks living a life devoted to adoration of God that emulated that of the angels, reflected in giving primacy to prayer and in avoidance of any form of manual work, and his Office reflected that.

And that theology of prayer was almost extremely influential, including, almost certainly, in the adoption of a similar regime in the West at the Office of  Monastery of St Maurice of Agaune circa 515. [12]

Labourers

St Benedict's Rule, however famously does not fall into this same stream of monastic theology: the angels, in the Rule, are more often depicted as watching and reporting back to God on what the monks are up to; the monks as sinners needing to be punished for infractions.

Instead the saint provided two other exemplars for monastic life: the soldier and the labourer.

St Benedict's Rule opens with an invitation to enrol in Christ's army, and the differing concepts of the military metaphor for monasticism and their implications in this period are worth exploring further. [13]

But it is St Benedict's allusion to God's call for labourers (in the vineyard) that has traditionally attracted the most attention.

St Benedict certainly encouraged his monks to at least do some manual labour, even if that did not necessarily amount to economic self-sufficiency. [14]  But the claim that he simply shortened the day hours to accommodate the demands of manual labour misses, I think, some of the deeper theological underpinnings of St Benedict's approach to the Office which I hope to tease out in this series.

In particular, in the next post I want to look at one of the fundamental purposes of the Office, namely that of the pure praise and adoration of God.

Notes

[1] Rule of Caesarius of Arles, chapter 66.

[2]  RB 13:  Post quem alii duo psalmi dicantur secundum consuetudinem, id est...Nam ceteris diebus canticum unumquemque die suo ex prophetis sicut psallit ecclesia Romana dicantur.  Liturgists (following Callaewaert) tend to reject this particular claim, while insisting that St Benedict drew virtually everything else from the Roman Office.

[3] Synod of Tours, 567, Canon 19, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, Turnhout 1954 - , 148 A:202.

[4] Ratio de cursus qui fuerunt euis auctores, ed Semmler, in Hallinger, Initio Consuedutines Benedictiae.

[5] For a positive appraisal of its usefulness, see Constant Mews, Apostolic authority and Celtic liturgies: From the Vita Samsonis to the Ratio de Cursus in Lynette Olson, (ed), St Samson of Dol and the Earliest History of Brittany, Cornwall and Wales, Boyden Press, 2017; others though, such as Jesse Billett, have taken a different view.

[6] The translation quoted here is from the Life of St Alexander included as an appendix in Daniel Caner's Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity, University of California Press, 2002.

[7] That is, Pentecost (Acts 2) for Terce; St Peter (Acts 10) for Sext; and Peter and John at the temple (Acts 3) and Cornelius Acts 10) for Nones.

[8] Caner op cit, pg 266; Psalm 118:164.

[9] Caner op cit pg 269.

[10] An Office consisting of 24 psalms, one for each hour of the day and night is attested to in the Alexandrine fragment, and may have formed the basis of the Jerusalem Office (see Froyshov).  For early versions of the perpetual liturgy, see the discussion of the monasteries on the borders of the Euphrates, and St Sabas, in the early fifth century of Jahballaha in Jean-Marie Baguenard (ed and trans), Les moines acémètes: vies des saints Alexandre, Marcel et Jean Calybite, Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1988, pp 59-60.

[11] Caner op cit, pg 267.

[12]  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).

[13]  RB Prologue.  St Benedict's military imagery, for example in chapter 1 of the Rule, is one with a history going back to St Athanasius' depiction of St Antony, of  monks engaged in spiritual combat, an image reinforced by the very first psalm said in his Office each day, Psalm 3.

By contrast, the Theban Legion commemorated by the monastery of Agaune were depicted in their legends as soldiers who refused to fight, laying down their weapons and allowing themselves to be slaughtered rather than following an unjust order, and by virtue of this act transformed into members of the heavenly legion of martyrs depicted in the Book of Revelation devoted to the constant praise of God and calling for justice to be done for their deaths.

The idea of the soldier who refuses to fight for the (unjust) state was not unique to the Theban Legion; it is part of the story of St Martin of Tours as well, but is one that does not, on the face of it, that seems to fit well with the idea of a monastery of solider-monks engaged in the defence of  the state of Burgundy proposed by Albrecht Diem as the rationale for Agaune's perpetual liturgy in 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).

[14] Prologue to the Rule: Ad te ergo nunc mihi sermo dirigitur, quisquis abrenuntians propriis voluntatibus, Domino Christo vero regi militaturus, oboedientiae fortissima atque praeclara arma sumis... St Benedict makes it clear in several places in the Rule that monks were unlikely to be entirely self-supporting (such as in the provisions for monks and their parents to donate land or goods to the monastery when they entered).  St Gregory's Life also mentions lay donors, both in the context of child oblates, and the later foundation of Terracina.