The design of the Benedictine Office and Thursday Vespers, Part I

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

In fact though, the Benedictine psalm cursus looks quite different.

First, instead of treating Psalm 116 as a separate psalm, perhaps desirous of keeping the Gradual Psalms together (since 119 - 127 are said at Terce to None from Tuesday to Saturday each week), St Benedict combined Psalm 115 and 116 under one doxology, thus creating the need to divide three psalms, not two.

Then, rather dividing the two longest psalms, he divided the third, fourth and seventh longest psalms of the hour instead.   

There is another oddity here -  it would have been straightforward enough to make Tuesday Vespers flow on directly from Tuesday None's Psalm 127, and start at Psalm 128, then consist of five psalms (perhaps making it technically four by combining two of the hours under one doxology) in order to have all of the Gradual Psalms said on that day.  

He could then have also divided the longest psalm of the hour to fill in the resulting gap, as the table below illustrates: 

	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

In particular for our purposes, rather than Thursday Vespers starting with Psalm 137 as would have been the case if the longest psalms were divided, it starts at Psalm 138 and encompasses Psalm 140.

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 changes St Benedict made to a purely mechanistic allocation of the psalms, I hope to convince you over the course of this series, were quite deliberate.

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.

Praying the psalms with St Benedict 8 - Approaches to interpreting the psalms**

In the last post in this series on praying the psalms with St Benedict, I suggested that the key focus of St Benedict in his Office as in the Rule, is the period of preparation for Easter: the monk 's life is essentially a perpetual Lent.

Rather than assuming we already incapable of sin, and can immediately imitate the angels, as some contemporary schools of monastic thought proposed, St Benedict emphasised the process of our gradual transformation through grace.

And he presents, I think, the psalms as a means to that end.

The psalms as a means to spiritual progress

One of the most intriguing Patristic discussions on the use of the psalms as a means of spiritual progress comes in St Basil the Great's brother, St Gregory of Nyssa's treatise on the psalm titles, or inscriptions. [1]

St Gregory argues that mankind was once truly part of the angelic chorus ever praising God, but through the Fall, was expelled from it.  But we can be lead by the psalms, to progress in the spiritual life through five stages, that open ourselves to resonate to the music of the universe, and can thus rejoin to the heavenly choir, and thus defeat evil and gain the blessings promised to us by God:

The divine book of the psalms wonderfully shows us the way [to blessedness] by a systematic, natural order presenting the various means for man to attain blessedness both by a simplicity which is evident and a teaching which is plain...The psalms' sublime teaching points out to us a way to blessedness which constantly leads persons progressing in the exalted life of virtue until they attain that measure of blessedness where the mind subjects transcendental reality neither to circumstantial evidence nor to opinions... 

The first words of the [first] psalm are a gate or entrance into blessedness and open up to us the destruction of evil...When all creation above and below will join to form one dance, the pleasant sound from our symphony will complete what has been sundered, for sin now divides the spiritual creation which resembles a cymbal. When our humanity will be united to the angels and when the divine battle-order lifts it out of the present turmoil, it will sing a victorious song of triumph at the bloody defeat of the enemy.  [2] 

A beginners rule

St Benedict claims his Rule is one for beginners, sinners motivated at first by fear of hell, who need time to cultivate good habits, and hopefully eventually arrive at that happy where all is done for love of God. [3]

Each day in the Benedictine Office, for example, we are reminded of that period of preparation for entering the Promised Land, and invited to apply that typology to ourselves and our community in the forty psalms said each day, and in the verses of the invitatory Psalm 94.

But perhaps the most important way, I want to suggest, that St Benedict teaches us how to 'progress in the monastic life and in faith' (Prologue to the Rule) is, I think the programmatic aspects of the weekly psalm cycle.

And it is this that will be the focus of the second part of this series.

Notes

[1] Gregory of Nyssa, On the Inscriptions on the Psalms,  Casimir McCanbley (trans), Hellenic College Press trans, 1995.

[2] ibid, Part I, 3, 12.

[3] See especially the Prologue, RB 4, RB 7, RB 73.