We are a little over half way through Psalm 139, the third psalm of Thursday Vespers in the Benedictine Office, and I thought this might be a good point to pause briefly, and provide the first part of a series of posts that I plan to post weekly, looking at the reasons for the selection of these particular psalms for Thursday Vespers.
This little sub-series may be of interest to those interested in the spirituality of the Benedictine Office in particular, or Office history more generally, but if you are just interested in the individual psalms, feel free to skip past this quickly.
Just how the psalms fall out?
Before we can consider possible reasons for the allocation of particular psalms to particular hours and days in the Benedictine Office we need first to look at the question of whether they really were deliberately selected at all, or they just happened to land on particular days by virtue of the psalm sequences.
For the much of the last century, the consensus view has been that the allocation of psalms to particular days of the week in the Benedictine Office is 'just how they happen to fall out'.
The liturgists have argued that the Roman Office, which, it was thought, was used both by monks and the secular clergy, had a fixed weekly psalm cursus that predated St Benedict's version of the Office, with Psalms 1-108 essentially allocated to the morning hours, and Psalms 109 to 147 to the evenings.
St Benedict, they argued simply made a few tweaks to this in order to shorten the day hours and provide more variety. Consequently, the allocation of the psalms to Vespers each night is driven by purely mechanistic considerations.
There is now, I think, strong evidence that the liturgists were altogether wrong about the Roman Office's fixed psalm cursus predating the Benedictine.
In this post though, I want to start, for arguments sake, from the assumption that St Benedict's starting point was indeed the Roman psalm cursus as we know it (in its pre-1911 form), and demonstrate that the ordering is not simply 'how things happen to turn out'.
The allocation of psalms in the early Roman Office
The early Roman Office as we know it had five psalms each day. None of the psalms were divided, a principle maintained throughout the Office except in the case of Psalm 118, which was repeated each day from Prime to None.
Roman Vespers was based around the sequence of psalms from 109 to 147, but skipped over four psalms allocated to other hours, viz Psalms 117 (Prime in the Roman Office, Lauds in the Benedictine), 118 (day hours), 133 (Compline), and 142 (Lauds).
The table below shows the Roman ordering of Vespers prior to 1911, and the post 1911 ordering (the later strictly for reference purposes).
|
Sun. |
Mon. |
Tues. |
Wed. |
Thurs. |
Fri. |
Sat. |
Roman 1911-1962 |
109 110 111 112 113 |
114 115 119 120 121 |
122 123 124 125 126 |
127 128 129 130 131 |
132 135/1 135/2 136 137 |
138/1 138/2 139 140 141 |
143/1 143/2 144/1 144/2 144/3 |
Roman Pre 1911 |
114 115 116 119 120 |
121 122 123 124 125 |
126 127 128 129 130 |
131 132 134 135 136 |
137 138 139 140 141 |
143 144 145 146 147 |
Shortening the Office?
If this was St Benedict's starting point, his first key decision, it is generally assumed, was to reduce the number of psalms from five to four each day.
It is often claimed that this would have shortened the hour compared to its Roman counterpart, but in reality they would probably have been roughly the same length since the Benedictine Office includes a hymn, whereas the Roman didn't (until the tenth century).
St Benedict omitted the same psalms as the Roman from the 109-147 sequence, but in order to achieve a further reduction in the number of psalms said at the hour, St Benedict also transferred the first nine of the Gradual Psalms, Psalms 119-127, to Terce to None on weekdays.
Why the Gradual Psalms?
One key question is, why move the first nine Gradual Psalms out of Vespers?
They do, it is true, follow on numerically from Psalm 118, which St Benedict spread over the Sunday and Monday day hours, but if St Benedict's aim was purely to make the day hours very short in order to accommodate the demands of farm work, as is often suggested, he could have made other choices, starting with Psalms 116 and 132, for example, the two of the shortest psalms of the psalter.
St Bede, however, suggests that this decision has to do with St Benedict's humility theme in the Rule, and indeed, humility is, I think, one of the key themes driving St Benedict's design of his Office, a point I will talk more about in the next part of this series.
Dividing the longest psalms?
The excision of Psalms 119-127 leaves the hour two psalms short, as the following table illustrates, showing the sequence just run through in numerical order.
|
Sun. |
Mon. |
Tues. |
Wed. |
Thurs. |
Fri. |
Sat. |
Early Roman |
109 110 111 112 113 |
114 115 119 120 121 |
122 123 124 125 126 |
127 128 129 130 131 |
132, 135/1, 135/2, 136, 137 |
138/1, 138/2, 139, 140, 141 |
143/1 143/2 144/1 144/2 144/3 |
Four psalms, No divisions |
109 110 111 112 |
113 114 115 116 |
128 129 130 131 |
132 134 135 136 |
137 138 139 140 |
141 143 144 145 |
146 147 [] [] |
Sun. | Mon. | Tues. | Wed. | Thurs. | Fri. | Sat. | |
Benedictine actual order | 109 110 111 112 | 113 114 115/116 128 | 129 130 131 132 | 134 135 136 137 | 138/1 138/2 139 140 | 141 143/1 143/2 144/1 | 144/2 145 146 147 |
In contrast to the Roman practice, St Benedict was quite willing to divide psalms in his Office, so the key question for Vespers would have been which ones to split in order to fill the missing slots.
At the other hours with divided psalms (Matins, Lauds and Prime), St Benedict simply divided the longest psalms, thus helping to even out the length of the hours somewhat.
The table below shows what would the Benedictine Vespers have looked like if St Benedict had simply divided the largest psalms.
|
Sun. |
Mon. |
Tues. |
Wed. |
Thurs. |
Fri. |
Sat. |
Divide longest psalms |
109 110 111 112 |
113 113 114 115 |
116 128 129 130 |
131 132 135 135 |
136 136 137 138 |
139 140 141 143 |
144 145 146 147 |
|
Sun. |
Mon. |
Tues. |
Wed. |
Thurs. |
Fri. |
Sat. |
Graduals on Tues |
109 110 111 112 |
113 113 114 115/116 |
128 129 130 131 [132] |
134 135 135 136 |
137 138 138 139 |
140 141 143 144 |
144 145 146 147 |
The Benedictine psalm allocation
In fact though, rather than dividing the longest psalms of the hour, St Benedict divided the third, fourth and seventh longest psalms of the set, Psalms 138 (23 verses), 144 (22 verses) and 143 (18 verses) respectively.
This means that instead of the Gradual Psalms being said in sequence, Psalm 128 is said essentially out of order from the Tuesday vertical Gradual sequence, at Monday Vespers, and the psalms allocated to their days also shifts in important ways, as the table below, showing the actual Benedictine Office psalm ordering illustrates:
|
Sun. |
Mon. |
Tues. |
Wed. |
Thurs. |
Fri. |
Sat. |
Ben. actual order |
109 110 111 112 |
113 114 115/116 128 |
129 130 131 132 |
134 135 136 137 |
138/1 138/2 139 140 |
141 143/1 143/2 144/1 |
144/2 145 146 147 |
It also results in a quite uneven number of verses said each day at Vespers, as the table below illustrates, with Monday and Wednesdays being the longest, because they contain the two longest psalms, Psalms 113 and 135 respectively, each of which has 27 verses.
| Sunday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday |
Verses | 44 | 63 | 36 | 69 | 58 | 47 | 43 |
Conclusion: why engineer the Office?
The reasons for them, I want to suggest, can be divided into three broad categories:
- a desire to give each hour in the Office a distinctive character, through use of particular themes and repeated words and images;
- some particular thematic connections between St Benedict's Office and Rule, most particularly relating to his humility theme; and
- themes that go to the very reasons for adopting a weekly psalter in the first place, related to the idea of a seven day cycle based around the days of creation and other cycles that the Fathers saw as flowing from that seven day template.
You can find the next part in this series here.
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