To go 'Roman' or not: the Benedictine Office in the Triduum and Easter Octave part I

 (Responsory 3 for Holy Saturday Matins)

This week the Benedictine Office more or less reverts (more or less) to its usual Benedictine Eastertide form, after a brief dip into the Roman for the Triduum. 

 But why does it do that? 

 Why, for example, isn’t there a Benedictine version of the Triduum? 

 And why doesn’t the Benedictine Office continue to follow the Roman for the Octave, which is, after all, just as distinctive as that for the Triduum?

 This year, I decided to do a little digging into some of these questions, and this post (and the couple that will hopefully quickly follow!) are a rather belated look at the issue. 

The Roman Office in the Octave 

If you’ve been saying the Benedictine Office this week you will know, of course, that isn’t quite a return to normal business as yet – the Octave has its own distinctive features, such as lots of extra alleluias and the use of Lauds and Vespers of Easter Sunday throughout the week.  

Still, it is pretty much recognizably Benedictine again. 

That isn’t the case with the Roman Office, which most definitely does not conform to its normal pattern this week. 

Roman Matins in the Octave is particularly short – the opening prayer and invitatory returns, but the hour consists of only one Nocturn with three psalms (Psalms 1, 2 and 3 repeated each day), three readings and three responsories. 

And while the day hours restore some of the things dropped during the Triduum, such as the opening prayers for each hour and the use of doxologies, it doesn’t restore them all: there are still no hymns, chapters or responsories at the day hours for example. 

In addition, up until the thirteenth century, Easter Vespers in Rome was very different indeed, to the point it bore little or no resemblance to its normal form.  

So what is the history behind all of this? 

Just how old is the Triduum: towards reassessment? 

The liturgists have long argued that the Triduum was very ancient indeed: while there is no direct evidence for Tenebrae as such before the early eighth century, Baumstark and his followers argued that its archaic seeming features (such as the lack of introductory prayers, hymns, chapters, doxologies and so forth) are classic example of the ‘law’ that holds that the most ancient feasts tend to preserve ancient practices. 

As for so many of Baumstark’s claims, his ‘first law of liturgical development’ has been pretty thoroughly trashed since his time, challenged both on general methodological grounds, and undermined by concrete research findings (most particularly, somewhat ironically since it is in the ritual of this period that the law claimed to be based, that of Holy Week) that directly contradict it  [1]. 

Indeed, Miklós Földváry has recently suggested that the law should be reformulated to suggest that rather than the most solemn days of the year preserving ancient practice, they actually tend to attract the most innovation (a principle all too often demonstrated in the period after Vatican II!).  It follows that we should be wary of taking at face value what appear to be, or are even claimed to be, ancient practices. 

That’s not to suggest that at least some of the elements of these Offices do not have a long history: Földváry in fact goes on to argue that divergences from the normal pattern are suggestive of various stages in the development of a service, with archaisms sometimes surviving through a process of reinterpreting their meaning.  

As it turns out, more recent research has suggested that Tenebrae, and particularly its distinctive use of light and darkness, developed only fairly slowly, primarily between the sixth and eighth centuries; that its development was strongly influenced by the Gallican liturgy; and that one of its most distinctive features the extinguishing of a candle as each psalms is said, emerged only around 1200 [2]. 

Triduum and the Benedictines 

The history of Benedictine use of the Roman Office during the Triduum and Octave turns out to be much more complicated than earlier thought as well. 

Pierre Battifol, amongst others, for example, assuming Tenebrae was already ancient, found it difficult to explain why St Benedict doesn’t mention the Triduum in the Rule.  In the end, the early liturgists either simply asserted or assumed that the saint and his monks would have used the Roman form: Battifol’s English translator, Atwell Baylay even added a footnote to the History of the Roman Breviary saying: 

“It is remarkable that S. Benedict provided no offices of his own for the Triduum.  He adopted the Roman Offices unchanged – strikingly divergent as is their structure from that of his own offices. It seems to give ground for believing that the office of the Triduum – mattins and lauds, at all events – already existed in Rome in the sixth century in much the same state as now – AB.” [3]

 Although this claim continues to be repeated in even very recent books though, there is, alas, not a shred of hard evidence to support it. 

On the contrary, given that the design of the Roman Offices for the Triduum and Holy Week (as we known them) directly contradict several provisions of St Benedict’s Rule, his silence on the topic would seem more likely indicate he didn’t intend for his monks to follow the practice - if it really existed back then - than that he did. 

In a number of other liturgical matters after all - such as the structure of Matins for solemnities and saints’ feasts, the weekly pattern of fasts (he omitted the Roman Saturday fast), use of hymns and much more - St Benedict most certainly did not follow the Roman practices of his time. 

The Benedictines in Rome? 

Another suggestion has been that perhaps the Benedictines adopted the Roman Triduum when the monks took refuge in the Lateran after the destruction of Monte Cassino [4]. 

There are, as we shall see though, some reasons to doubt this, and the earliest evidence we have for any Benedictine use of the Roman Triduum dates from the late eighth century, with a letter that states that the monks of the newly refounded Monte Cassino had adopted the Roman Triduum – but not the Octave (amongst a number of other Romanizations of the Benedictine Office they followed) [5].  

But outside of Rome and its orbit, Benedictine monasteries (several of which had been established longer than the refounded Monte Cassino) may actually have been using a Benedictine version of Tenebrae.  [6]   

The Triduum and the Carolingians 

The issue apparently came to a head at the Council of Aachen in 816, which came down (to the dismay of some) on the side of the use of the secular version of the Office in the Triduum. 

Hildemar of Corbie’s Commentary on the Rule provides an interesting commentary on the debate, claiming that Louis the Pious had championed the use of the Benedictine Office during the Triduum, but that he and his supporters were overruled by the bishops:

 Nevertheless, it must be known that the Lord’s Supper and the Preparation [Good Friday] and Holy Saturday and Pascha [Easter] pertain to the solemnities of Christ. With regard to those four days it was defined in council that the Office should be chanted completely by the monks, in accordance with the Roman Church and not in accordance with the Rule. 

Yet there are more zealous monks who do not wish to act in accordance with the Roman tradition in those four days but to speak fully in accordance with the Rule because, if on other days we do not transgress the Rule in chanting Offices, we also do not want to transgress it in those four days… 

For the most pious Emperor Louis wished that monks should do the Office according to the Rule; but because the bishops said that it is not good that in those days they should be unlike the Roman Church in chanting the Offices, then there were some abbots who consented with the bishops. [7] 

The ultimate decision, according to Hildemar, was that Benedictines would say the Roman version during the Triduum, but return to the Benedictine Office for the Sunday (and Octave, as we do now): 

And although some did not agree, the bishops prevailed, so that only in those three days, i.e., Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, would they do the Roman Office, but the good abbots did not consent to act so upon the Lord’s Day. Instead they do the Office in accord with the Rule. 

Hildemar’s rationale for sticking with the Rule, aside from compliance with it, is particularly interesting: he cites the authority of a letter by St Gregory the Great reproduced by Bede on his Ecclesiastical History: 

For, as it seems to me, it is better that in those four days the Regular Office should be sung rather than the Roman because as St Gregory says, “There is no harm with regard to diverse customs in the Catholic faith and in good actions.” Nevertheless for this reason, i.e., with regard to those four days, there was a synod in Francia that monks should not do otherwise, i.e. not by the Rule, but they should act as does the Roman Church. 

The link to an English source may well be significant, since many of the first wave of Benedictine monasteries in the Empire had been founded by, or with the help of English missionary monks and nuns such as SS Boniface and Willibrord, thus perhaps hinting at the source of the diversity in practice Hildemar was pointing to.  

Indeed, it seems likely that the English Benedictines did not actually adopt the Roman Triduum until the tenth century, and even then, they seem to have done so with some reluctance: the Regularis Concordia also appealed to St Gregory’s authority to justify the change, this time, on the basis of his (supposed) antiphoner. [8]  But it also required all monks and nuns to recite the entire 150 psalms of the psalter after Prime each day perhaps in reparation! [9] 

The surviving English antiphoners from the Middle Ages also suggest considerable diversity in practices around the Triduum and Octave, such that the issue was really only resolved by the first post-Trent breviary [10]. 

But we are getting ahead of ourselves – in the next post, I want to go back to the beginning of the story, which may actually be a time when the Roman Office may not have been said at all on these days. 

Notes 

[1] Miklós István Földváry, Usuarium A Guide to the Study of Latin Liturgical Uses in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, Vols I–II (Budapest, 2023), pp 201-2. 

[2] A J MacGregor, Fire and Light in the Western Triduum their use at Tenebrae and at the Paschal Vigil, (Collegeville, 1992). 

[3] Pierre Battifol, trans Atwell Baylay, History of the Roman Breviary, second ed (London, 1912), note 3 pg 92.  The original version was L'Histoire du Bréviaire Romain (Paris, 1893). 

[4] See for example H B L Tolhurst (ed), Introduction to the English Monastic Breviaries, (Bury St Edmunds, 1942), pp 206. 

[5] Theodemar, Epistola ad Theodoricum gloriosum, c12, ed J Winandy and K Hillinger, Initia consuttudines Benedictinae, CCM 1, pp 132. 

[6] There are at least some possible traces of a Benedictine form of the Triduum in some of the early antiphoners, including some manuscripts that preserve a full twelve responsories for Maundy Thursday, and I’ll look at this later in the series. 

[7] (And subsequent quotes): Commentary on the Rule, Chapter 14, trans Zachary Guiliano for The Hildemar Project, (with thanks to Albrecht Diem). 

[8] Jesse Billett, ‘The liturgy of the ‘Roman’ Office in England from the Conversion to the Conquest’ in Claudia Bolgia et al, (eds) Rome across Time and Space Cultural transmission and the Exchange of Ideas, c500 – 1400 (Cambridge, 2011), p105. 

[9] Thomas Symons (trans), The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation Regularis Concordia, (Oxford, 1953), p 38. 

[10] Tolhurst, Introduction to the English Monastic Breviaries, pp 206 -226.