Praying the psalms with St Benedict 5C - Three models for praying without ceasing/3: St Benedict on good works

So far in this series we have looked at two theories on how 'praying without ceasing' can be realised: a literal interpretation, based on constant textual prayer, carried over even into talking in one's sleep; and a collective realisation of the ideal, where some pray on behalf of others when they need to take a break for sleep or other purposes.

There were, however, other, rather less literal interpretations of the various Scriptural texts taken by the Fathers as the basis for the Office and prayer such as Psalm 1, and today I want to start to look at St Benedict's particular take on the subject and the theological context from which it grew. [1]

Rome and ceaseless prayer?

Before looking at St Benedict's Rule itself, I think it is worth noting that some modern historians, seeing references to assiduous, continual or prayer 'day and night' in rules, monastic charters, and other literature relating to late antique monasticism, have argued that these references should be interpreted literally and broadly, especially for Gaul in the seventh century onwards, suggesting that the Agaune model in particular was much more influential than previously believed.

But there is fairly clear evidence for Rome and North Africa at least, and also I think for Gaul, that references to continuous prayer did not always refer to what we now call the laus perennis, or literally continuous adoration and/or liturgical prayer.

James McKinnon pointed out, for example, that in references to the agreements between monasteries offering prayers in Rome's basilical churches, where one manuscript of the Liber Pontificalis describes a monastery as offering prayer 'day and night', another manuscript variant offers instead a list of the specific hours said, namely Terce, Sext, None and Matins. [2]

In the Rule attributed to St Augustine, the instruction is to 'Be assiduous in prayer (Col 4:2), at the hours and times appointed'. [3]

For Gaul, studies of sermon collections beyond those of Caesarius, as well as more in depth scrutiny of some of the later rules, have made it clear that neither Caesarius' interpretation of monastic life (or that of Columbanus later), were not the only ones that prevailed. [4]

St Benedict on prayer

At least as far as St Benedict's Rule goes though, the rather less literal interpretation of the various Scriptural texts relating to prayer had a firm theological underpinning that I want to briefly explore briefly in this post.

This interpretation was grounded in the idea, I think, that ceaseless prayer is a state of mind rather than literal prayer; a state of mind, moreover, that should be manifested through active works and service as well as contemplation.

As for Arles and Agaune, St Benedict’s Rule views the Divine Office as an absolutely core obligation.  Indeed the Rule provides that it has to be fulfilled by each individual religious: the daily ‘pensum’ has to be carried out even if the monk is unable to make it to the monastery’s oratory for the official hours, (RB 50).

One of the clear contrasts between St Benedict's Rule and those of Caesarius of Arles, though, is that while Caesarius explicitly instructed his monks and nuns to strive to pray without ceasing, to pray day and night; and Agaune literally did that, St Benedict never uses either the Thessalonians quote or the other similar terms often employed in relation to Agaune and Arles such as assiduous, continuous or perpetual prayer.  Instead, in the liturgical section of the Rule, he arguably implies that ceaseless prayer is achieved symbollically, through the use of he number of day hours, since seven was generally interpreted to mean continously. [5]  Indeed, in his discussion of prayer in chapter 19, and again on the use of the monastery chapel in chapter 52, St Benedict stresses that prayer should be fervent rather than long, and in his tools of good works St Benedict instructs his monks not to pray without ceasing, but rather to ‘pray frequently’ (RB 4). And where the monks of Agaune had to deal with the psychological challenges that go with both long hours and shift-work; while the nuns of Arles had to be given techniques to use to help stay awake through long hours in chapel; St Benedict instead made a deliberate effort to provide a timetable, which, while certainly demanding, aimed at ensuring his monks are at least not too sleep deprived (RB 8&48).

Prayer and good works in St Benedict's Rule

One of the particular features of the Benedictine Rule is the number of references to the importance of good works: in the Prologue, for example, the would be monk is invited, in the words of Psalm 33, to turn away from evil and do good; to gird his loins with faith and the performance of good works.

In an earlier post, I noted that Caesarius of Arles suggested that the only good work a monk or nun needed to focus on was the Office and prayer. St Benedict, by contrast, supplies an entire chapter devoted to a list of good works, starting from the commandments, including the spiritual and corporal works of mercy, and much more.

Most intriguingly of all, St Benedict uses the phrase day and night, and continuously, so often used in early monastic sources as an allusion to Psalm 1's injunction to meditate on the law of the Lord day and night not in relation to the Office or prayer, but rather in relation to the tools of spiritual works.  The monastery, he says, is a workshop:

Behold these are the tools of the spiritual craft. If we employ them unceasingly day and night (die noctuque incessabiliter adimpleta), and on the Day of Judgement render account of them, then we shall receive from the Lord in return the reward which he himself has promised: Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, what God hath prepared for those that love him. (RB 4)

Psalm 1 and meditation day and night

One of the key verses often referred to in relation to monastic prayer was Psalm 1's key verses:

Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence: But his will is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he shall meditate day and night.

It was this verse of Psalm 1 that apparently inspired St Jerome to set off from Rome to Bethlehem to live out a monastic calling; and it was also cited in the Liber Pontificalis to describe Pope Damasus’ claimed institution of the office in the churches, basilicas and monasteries of Rome (in an entry dating from circa 530).

St Alexander the Sleepless, you will recall, focused on the phrase day and night as a reference to the pattern given to us by God's ordering of creation, and saw meditation as meaning prayer.  Another school of thought though, focused on the idea of the will being engaged on the law, and gave it a far more active interpretation. The Syriac writer Aphrahat (c. 280–c. 34), for example, in his Demonstration 4:16, states that  'a person should do the will of God, and that constitutes prayer'. [6]  And the approach St Benedict followed was perhaps most pithily of all summarised by Cassian's teacher Evagrius Ponticus  (345–399 AD) in his commentary on Psalm 1, namely:

He meditates constantly on the law of God, who is accomplishing good works. [7]

Evagrius was far from being alone in both the Eastern and Western traditions in the idea that meditation on the law was more about cultivating state of mind, a matter of faith demonstrated through works, rather than formal prayer as such.

Origen, for example, in his commentary on Psalm 1 said:

The blessed person meditates on the law of the Lord day and night, not as one who entrusts the words of the law to his memory without works, but as one who by meditating performs works consistent with it…. [8]

 And in his Treatise on prayer he argued that right action is how continuous prayer is manifested:

Now, since the performance of actions enjoined by virtue or by the commandments is also a constituent part of prayer, he prays without ceasing who combines prayer with right actions, and becoming actions with prayer. For the saying “pray without ceasing” can only be accepted by us as a possibility if we may speak of the whole life of a saint as one great continuous prayer. (ch 7) [9]

Similar sentiments can be found in SS Jerome, Hilary, Basil and Augustine.  St Hilary, for example, explicitly linked Psalm 1 and praying without ceasing.  How, he asks, can we literally pray without ceasing, or meditate day and night, given our bodily needs for food, sleep and so forth?

Meditation in the Law, therefore, does not lie in reading its words, but in pious performance of its injunctions; not in a mere perusal of the books and writings, but in a practical meditation and exercise in their respective contents, and in a fulfilment of the Law by the works we do by night and day, as the Apostle says: Whether you eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God. The way to secure uninterrupted prayer is for every devout man to make his life one long prayer by works acceptable to God and always done to His glory: thus a life lived according to the Law by night and day will in itself become a nightly and daily meditation in the Law. [10]

St Benedict and the liturgy

It was this stream of theology, I want to suggest, rather than any economic imperatives, that impelled the balance St Benedict's sets up in his Rule between giving his monk's opportunities within the monastery to do good works through their service of each other and their hospitality to guests on the one hand, and their liturgical service and prayers on the other.

In drawing out this broader interpretation of how ceaseless prayer can be realised, though, I don't want to suggest for a moment that liturgical and formal and informal non-liturgical prayer were unimportant to St Benedict: quite the contrary. In the next post I will look specifically at that side of the balance.

Notes

[1] Gregory W. Woolfenden, Daily Liturgical Prayer: Origins and Theology (Liturgy, Worship and Society Series), Routlege, 2004, includes a useful compendium of these.

[2]  James McKinnon, The Advent Project: The Later Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper, University of California Press, 2000, pg 83.

[3] The Rule of St Augustine, ch 2.

[4] See in particular Lisa Kaaren Bailey, Christianity's Quiet Success The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection and the Power of the Church in Late Antique Gaul, University of Notre Dame Press, 2010.

[5] See the discussion by Fr Cassian Folsom on St Benedict's use of number symbolism: Praying without ceasing conferences

[6]   Sebastian P Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life (Cistercian Studies 101, 1987), pp21.  An online translation can be found here.

[7] Trans Luke Dysinger, Evagrius on the Psalms.

[8] Craig A. Blaising and Carmen S. Hardin, ed, Psalms 1 - 50, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Vol VII, pg 6.  For an online version, see Tertullian.

[9] William A. Curtis, Sacred Invocation: Origen on Prayer, available on Luke Dysinger website.

[10]  E.W. Watson and L. Pullan, trans,  Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 9. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1899.) Homily on Psalm 1.

Praying the psalms with St Benedict 5B - Three models for praying without ceasing /2: Perpetual prayer at Agaune

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]

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:

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.

Notes

[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

Praying the psalms with St Benedict 5A: Three models for 'praying without ceasing'/1: The drousing virgins of Arles

When the twentieth century liturgists and historian Dom Adalbert de Vogue looked at the purpose of the monastic Office, he argued that its purpose was not, above all praise and adoration on behalf of all Christians, as I argued was the case in the previous post, but was rather, consistent with the monastic versus cathedral office distinction so beloved of the twentieth century liturgiologists, fundamentally about fostering personal prayer and meditation.  Above all, he and others argued, the monastic Office aimed to help the monk fulfill the injunction to 'pray without ceasing', above all through a constant recitation of the psalter.[1] 

Subsequent work has somewhat modified this picture: the  hermits of Egypt who Cassian visited had a communal liturgy only on Sundays, and then consisting only of the hours of Vespers and Matins, with twelve psalms each.  While the monk may have said some form of Office each day, in the model that Cassian advocated, most prayer took a non-liturgical form, in the repetition of the psalter as the monk worked;  rumination on Scripture during the day; and the repetition of the invocation 'Deus in adjutorium meum intende...

Nonetheless, critiques by Dom Armand Veilleux (whose book on fourth century monastic liturgy effectively demolished the takes on Cassian and Pachomian practices promoted by Baumstark and his disciples) and others notwithstanding, the liturgists continue to insist that the monastic Office did not have an ecclesial dimension, but was directed purely at individual meditation. [2]  

The claim that St Benedict subscribed to a very literal interpretation of the injunction to pray without ceasing, and the total rejection of an ecclesial dimension to the monastic Office, has had, I think, dire consequences on twentieth and twenty-first century monasticism, so it is worth taking a much closer look at this issue.  My own view, as I hope to show as this series unfolds, is that this is really a case of 'both/and': both the monastic and non-monastic liturgies were, from the beginning intended to be both ecclesial and foster individual devotion.  

In this post I plan to provide something of an overview of the debate, and take a look at the Rule of Arles in this regard.  In the next two posts, I will look at Agaune and the Benedictine traditions respectively.

What does it mean to pray without ceasing?

There are several difficulties with the view that the Benedictine Office is directed at the aim of literally praying without ceasing, as many others have pointed out - not least that, in stark contrast to some of the other rules of the time such as that of Caesarius of Arles, the Benedictine Rule never actually quotes this Scriptural injunction.  Nor does it instruct monks to recite the psalms or pray while working, or provide for spiritual reading during manual labour (as Caesarius of Arles Rule does) for example. [3]

All the same, St Benedict does, as we shall see, allude to one of the related Scriptural formulas on continuous prayer, noted in the previous post, namely Psalm 1's description of the blessed man who meditates the law of the Lord day and night. And others have suggested that it is not so much that St Benedict did not implicitly have this injunction in mind, but rather that he interpreted it rather more symbolically (the seven repetitions of O God come to my aid, for example, meaning completeness) than literally for each individual monk or nun. [4]

In fact, I would suggest, though, that the most fundamental issue is just what the formula really means, and in the foundation documents of the  monasteries of St Benedict and his contemporaries, one can find, I think, at least three competing interpretations of what it means to pray without ceasing.

It is these different interpretations that I want to start teasing out over the next few posts, as one of the key forces that shaped the particular form of the Benedictine office, and differentiated it from others.

St John Cassian on praying without ceasing

Dom De Vogue's argument was basically that St Benedict instructed his monks to read the Institutes and Conferences of St John Cassian, and Cassian, in his conferences argued that the injunction (from 1 Thess 5:17) should be fulfilled literally.

It is true that Cassian urged the monk to learn as much Scripture by heart as possible, in order that it might constantly be turned over in his mind.  He also urged them to repeat the formula that opens the day hours of the Benedictine office ‘O God come to my aid, O Lord make haste to help me’, not just seven times a day, as St Benedict instructed, but continuously:

We must then ceaselessly and continuously pour forth the prayer of this verse, in adversity that we may be delivered, in prosperity that we may be preserved and not puffed up. Let the thought of this verse, I tell you, be conned over in your breast without ceasing. Whatever work you are doing, or office you are holding, or journey you are going, do not cease to chant this. When you are going to bed, or eating, and in the last necessities of nature, think on this. This thought in your heart maybe to you a saving formula, and not only keep you unharmed by all attacks of devils, but also purify you from all faults and earthly stains, and lead you to that invisible and celestial contemplation, and carry you on to that ineffable glow of prayer, of which so few have any experience. [5]

Memorization of Scripture, and most especially the psalms, certainly remained a key element of the monastic way of life for many centuries.

It is less obvious though, that St Benedict put quite the same emphasis on this, as opposed to active study of Scripture, as Cassian had though, in contrast to some of the other monasteries of his time. [6]

The nuns of Arles: waiting for the bridegroom

One of the key monasteries I mentioned in an earlier post was that of the nuns of Arles (founded circa 510), and it is worth starting with them on praying without ceasing, for its foundations documents are the only one of the three to explicitly refer to the injunction to Cassian's teaching on this subject, and to interpret it literally.

In chapter 21 of the Rule, Caesarius instructed the nuns to:

Set yourselves to praying without a break [sine intermissione], in accordance with that injunction of the Evangelist: pray all the time in order to be held worthy, and the apostle said: pray without ceasing. [7]

To understand where Caesarius was coming from on this, it is worth contrasting the opening paragraphs of St Benedict's and St Caesarius of Arles' Rules.  St Benedict famously opens his Rule with a call for the monk to enlist as a soldier of Christ, and to heed God's call for workers (for the vineyard). [8]

The Rule constructed for the nuns of Arles draws instead on another common monastic exemplar (employed in the monastic literature for both men and women), namely that of the wise virgins, waiting  with lamps burning and a good supply of oil, for the arrival of the bridegroom (Matthew 23). [9]

Bishop Caesarius explained the relevant of the image in the opening paragraphs of his Rule:

Because the Lord in his mercy has deigned to inspire and aid us to found a monastery for you, we have set down spiritual and holy counsels for you as to how you shall live in the monastery according to the prescriptions of the ancient Fathers.  That, with the help of God, you may be able to keep them as you abide unceasingly in your monastery cell, implore by assiduous prayer [assiduis orationibus] the visitation of the Son of God...Hence I ask you, consecrated virgins and souls dedicated to God, who, with your lamps burning, await with secure consciences the coming of the Lord, that, as you know I have labored in the constructing of a monastery for you, you beg by your holy prayers to have me made a companion of your journey; so that when you happily enter the kingdom with the holy and wise virgins, you may, by your suffrages, obtain for me that I may not remain outside with the foolish.… [10]

The good works of religious

One of the most common interpretations of the oil of the virgins was that it represented good works. [11]

But for Caesarius (in stark contrast to St Benedict's Rule), prayers and vigils - provided they were done for the right reasons - were the only good works religious needed to undertake.  In one of his sermons to monks, for example, he said:

you fulfill everything by your deeds…am I to give you advice to give generous alms when I know that out of love of Christ you have rejected all the wealth of the world, and when I see that you have given the Lord not only all your possessions but your very selves?...Do I dare to say that your holy selves should not be occupied with idle gossip, when I know that you are busy with reading and prayer, and that you meditate on the law of God by day and by night?  Only this one thing remains, then, dearest brethren, since the Lord has deigned to gather you and put you in a holy monastery as in a haven of rest and refreshment as if in some part of paradise.  By your continuous prayers may you strive to obtain for us that we who are ceaselessly tossed about by the waves of the world…[12]

The nuns had, moreover, a model to emulate in their founder-bishop, for the Vita commissioned by the sisters after Caesarius’ death claimed that:

He had him [God] in his heart not only in prayer and entreaty, but also at meals and on journeys, in conversation and in solitude, and in prosperity and adversity; even in his sleep he always had him with him.  Indeed, we ourselves and our fellow servants who stayed in his cell know what we are talking about.  Between interruptions in his sleep that his age not only required but also sometimes demanded because of sickness - his spirit being ever vigilant - he used to say, 'Come now, speak', as though he were advising someone to recite a psalm.  No one doubts that he used to sing psalms spiritually with the saints or that he certainly fulfilled that saying of the prophet, 'I sleep, and my heart remains on watch'.  [13]

The liturgy of Arles

The Arles liturgy was steeped in this theology.  

Seilac and McCrane have pointed out that one particularly notable feature of Caesarius’ discussion of the liturgy in the Rule for Nuns is that, although he drew on the (much earlier) Augustinian Rule's liturgical prescriptions when writing the text, he explicitly modified them so as to be more consistent with Cassian: where Augustine wrote 'be assiduous in prayer at the scheduled times and hours', Caesarius substituted "persevere in prayer without ceasing".  He also replaced Augustine's warning not to disturb those who wish to pray in the oratory with two scriptural invitations to pray without ceasing; and admonishes the nuns to always ruminate on something from Scripture. [14]

As the table below indicates, Caesarius required the nuns to nuns recite an enormous number of psalms each day. [15] They also read a large quantity of Scripture each week, both through formal lectio divina; Scriptural readings while they worked; and above all in the liturgy itself. [16] Each Saturday and Sunday night, for example, they said several ‘vigilia’, blocks of readings, prayers and psalms in addition to the core hours. [17]  And if they were struggling to stay awake, they were urged to stand up in order to fight off fatigue. [18]

Office design elements	Arles
‘Hours’	[7-9] Nocturns/Vigils, Lauds, Prime (S&S only), Terce, Sext, None, Lucernarium, Duodecima,
Estimated length of liturgy each day	12-16 hours per day
Extended/all night vigils	Yes – Fridays and Saturdays, feasts; some seasons
Psalter said over…	2-3 days, depending on season
Psalms per day	60-80+
Psalm order	Some fixed psalm for each hour; at Vigils, numerical order
Scriptural readings (other than psalms)	Scripture heavy - Readings at all of the hours except lucernarium + vigils of readings interspersed with prayers and psalms Sat&Sun plus winter.
Hymns, antiphons, prayers	yes
Explicitly intercessory elements	Capitella (psalm verse selections for particular intentions)

The Arles Rule was not though, the only Rule to attempt to legislate for perpetual prayer, and in the next post in this series I plan to look briefly at another regime that stood in contrast to St Benedict's, and that I think also helps to illuminate it, namely that of Agaune.

Notes

[1]  See Adalbert de Vogue, The Rule Of Saint Benedict: A Doctrinal and Spiritual Commentary (Cistercian Studies) (vol 1), 1983.  For a reassessment of the validity of the cathedral-monastic distinction see Stig Simeon R. Frøyshov, The Cathedral–Monastic Distinction Revisited
Part I: Was Egyptian Desert Liturgy a Pure Monastic Office?, Studia Liturgica 37 (2007), 198-216.

[2] Armand Veilleux, La Liturgie Dans Le Cenobitisme Pachomien Au Quatrieme Siecle,  (Strrdia Anselmiana 57); Herder, Rome 1968. For a more recent restatement of the liturgists position see Terrance G Kardong, Benedict's Rule Atranslation and Commentary, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, 1996,  See especially pp 209-217.

[3] Caesarius of Arles, Rule for Virgins, chapters 20-22.

[4] see in particular Fr Cassian Fulsom, Pray without ceasing.

[5]  C.S. Gibson, trans, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 11. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1894, Conference 10, ch 10.

[6] Only the short, repeated readings of St Benedict's Office are done from memory for example, and the Matins readings are read from the book except for the short weekday readings of summer (see in particular RB 9: 5, 8 - Quibus dictis, dicto versu, benedicat abbas et, sedentibus omnibus in scamnis, legantur vicissim a fratribus in codice super analogium tres lectione...Codices autem legantur in vigiliis divinae auctoritatis...10:1 ...excepto quod lectiones in codice, propter brevitatem noctium, minime legantur, sed pro ipsis tribus lectionibus una de veteri testamento memoriter dicatur; RB 12, on Lauds, says: Inde benedictiones et laudes, lectionem de Apocalypsis una ex corde...).  The time between Matins and Lauds in winter is allocated to memorization of the psalms and lessons for those who needed it (RB 8: Quod vero restat post vigilias a fratribus qui psalterii vel lectionum aliquid indigent meditationi inserviatur.), but this is separate for the time generally allocated to lectio divina (set out RB 48).

St Benedict also explicitly provided for the reading of the commentaries on the books, which may have reflected a more intellectual approach to Scripture in Italy more generally: his contemporary Cassiodorus, for example, lists out the appropriate commentaries to use of the monks of his Vivarium in his Institutes.

By way of contrast, there is no reference at all in the Rule of Caesarius to the reading of the Fathers, and the nuns of Arles were required to do more substantial readings from Scripture at several of the hours.  The eighteen readings of their Friday night vigil from Easter to Pentecost were to be said from memory. (RC66)

[7] Rule for nuns of Caesarius of Arles, chapter 21.  The full Latin text of the Rule, along with a french translation can be found in A de Vogue and J Courneau (trans and ed), Caesarius D'Arles, Oeuvres Monastique, Sources Chretienne 345, Paris, 1988, vol 1, pp 190 ff.  An English translation can in theory (though the book is very rare) be found in Maria Caritas McCarthy, The Rule for Nuns of St. Caesarius of Arles, Volume 16 of Studies in mediaeval history: New series, Catholic University of America, 1960.

[8]  Prologue.3,14: Ad te ergo nunc mihi sermo dirigitur, quisquis abrenuntians propriis voluntatibus, Domino Christo vero regi militaturus, oboedientiae fortissima atque praeclara arma sumis...Et quaerens Dominus in multitudine populi cui haec clamat operarium suum, iterum dicit.

[9]  For earlier treatments of the wise virgins as a monastic exemplar for men, see for example Aphrahat Demonstation 6 (on monks): "Whosoever is invited to the Bridegroom, let him prepare himself. Whosoever has lighted his lamp, let him not suffer it to go out. Whosoever is expectant of the marriage-cry, let him take oil in his vessel; and Oresius in  Pachomian Koinonia 3, Instructions, Letters, and Other Writings Of Saint Pachomius And His DisciplesTranslated and annotated by Armand Veilleux OCSO.  The image was a staple for female monasticism, cited in numerous treatments of the subject.

[10] Ch 1, trans McCarthy, in La Corte, Daniel Marcel, and Douglas J. McMillan. Regular Life: Monastic, Canonical, and Mendicant Rules, Second Edition. Series: TEAMS Documents of Practice Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004, pp 58-9.

[11] Caesarius set this out himself in Sermon 156, which drew heavily on St Augustine's interpretation of the text: St Caesarius, Sermons, trans Mary Magdeleine Mueller, Fathers of the Church, 3 vols (31, 47, 66).  See also the discussion in Derek A. Olsen, Reading Matthew with Monks: Liturgical Interpretation in Anglo-Saxon England. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015, pp228-9.

[12] ibid, Sermon 234.

[13] Caesarius of Arles: Life, Testament, Letters, trans W Klingshirn, Liverpool University Press, 1994, Bk II ch 5.

[14]  Colleen Maura McGrane, The rule of virgins: the evolution of enclosure, ABR 59:4 - DEC. 2008, drawing on L. de Rodorel de Seilhac, L’Utilisation par S. Césaire d’Arles de la règle de S. Augustin. Étude de terminologie et de doctrine monastiques (Rome, 1974).

[15] The liturgical provisions of the Rule are contained in chapters 66-70.

[16]  All the hours have at least 2 or 3 readings except Lauds (which is followed by lectio for two hours) and Lucernarium (followed immediately by duodecima).  On reading while at work, see chapter 20.

[17] On the vigils, see RC chs 66, 68, 69.

[18] RC 15.

Praying the Office with St Benedict 4: On praise and adoration

Gentile da Fabriano
Image source: Wikipedia

One of the much debated aspects of the Divine Office over the last fifty years or so has been, what precisely is its purpose?

Cathedral vs monastic?

For much of the last century, the prevailing consensus is that there were two main types of ‘Divine Office’, monastic and ‘cathedral’.  The monastic office, it was held, was originally at least, designed primarily to feed the meditation of individual monk; the cathedral was more ecclesial and intercessory in character.  

Neither of these conceptions, however, really capture what is perhaps the first and most obvious purpose of the Office, namely the pure praise of God for his goodness. 

The pure praise of God

The very first words the Benedictine monk says each day, after all, at least according to the Rule, is a verse of Psalm 50, repeated thrice, namely, O God open my lips that my mouth may proclaim your praise. [1]

And the Invitatory psalm, Psalm 94 continues this theme inviting us to:

 Come let us praise the Lord with joy: let us joyfully sing to God our saviour. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving; and make a joyful noise to him with psalms. For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. For in his hand are all the ends of the earth: and the heights of the mountains are his. For the sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land. Come let us adore and fall down: and weep before the Lord that made us. For he is the Lord our God: and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. [2]

For this reason, Pope Benedict XIV suggested that:

Monks pray first and foremost not for any specific intention, but simply because God is worthy of being praised. “Confitemini Domino, quoniam bonus! – Praise the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy is eternal!”: so we are urged by a number of Psalms (e.g. Ps 106:1)... [3]

This is certainly an important starting point for our consideration of the Office, since it impacts, I want to suggest, directly on the arrangement of the psalm cursus, and indeed on the whole design of the Benedictine Office.

The repeated memes

I've already noted some of the elements of the Office repeated each day, that reiterate this objective, in the opening verse (from Psalm 50), and Psalm 94 at Matins.

There are several other repeated reminders though: at Lauds each day, for example, the theme is continued in Psalm 50's daily recitation; in the Laudate psalms at Lauds; and again before sleep at Compline, in Psalm 4's injunction to offer the sacrifice of justice.

Giving thanks for creation

But what I hope to demonstrate goes beyond this, deliberately arranging thematic elements into his Office intended to teach us just why we should praise God, through judicious thematic arrangements of psalms that encourage us to contemplate God's wondrous nature in and of itself; his work of creation; his providential guidance of history; and above all the work of salvation effected by his only son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, during his time on earth.

I will come back to the way these key themes unfold in the Office in more depth later in this series, but for now let me provide a brief teaser, around the theme of the days of creation in the Office.

In the address at Heiligkeuz I mentioned earlier, Pope Benedict XVI  mentioned God's work of creation as the preeminent reason for our praise and adoration of him:

It is offered to the triune God who, above all else, is worthy “to receive glory, honour and power” (Rev 4:11), because he wondrously created the world and even more wondrously renewed it. [4]

In the Benedictine Office, Vespers each day, Saturday aside, has long featured a set of hymns  traditionally attributed to St Gregory the Great, each of which allude to the relevant day of creation.  On Sunday, for example, Lucis Creator Optime runs  'O blest creator of the light, who makest the day with radiance bright, and oer the forming world didst call the light from chaos first of all'. [5] On Wednesday, Caeli Deus sanctissime sets out the creation of the sun, moon, stars, firmament and time, saying exlicitly, 'Thou, when the fourth day was begun, didst frame the circle of the sun, and set the moon for ordered change, and planets for their wider range...''

Their placement at Vespers could of course, be independent of the psalms selected for that hour, simply reflecting the wording of Genesis ('evening and morning the xth day').

But in fact I think one can find explicit references to the relevant day of creation in the psalms set for the hour; references that would have been evident to readers steeped in the Patristic viewpoint shared by St Benedict at least.

On Monday (feria secunda), for example, Psalm 113's mention of the waters of division of the Red Sea and Jordan were often seen by the Father's as paralleling the division of the waters on the second day of creation.

And perhaps the clearest reference of all is on Wednesday (feria quarta), where Psalm 135 takes us through the story of creation in poetic form, stopping at the creation of the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day:

Praise the Lord, for he is good...Who made the heavens in understanding... Who established the earth above the waters...Who made the great lights: for his mercy endureth for ever...The sun to rule the day: for his mercy endureth for ever...The moon and the stars to rule the night: for his mercy endureth for ever.

But the reasons for building these themes into the Office go beyond simply instructing us so that we can properly praise God I think; rather it goes to the idea that by becoming labourers in the vineyard, we become co-creators with God, participating and helping to bring about the work of binging the universe to its ultimate destiny.

 More on that anon; in the meantime, you can find the next part in this series here.

Notes

[1] (Domine labia mea aperies: et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam).  See RB 9, 42.

[2] RB 9; all quotes from Scripture are from the Douay-Rheims-Challoner version.

[3] See for example, Pope Benedict XVI, Address during visit to Heiligenkeuz Abbey, September 2007.

[4] ibid.

[5] Translations of the hymns in this paragraph are from Collegeville (from the Monastic Diurnal, reprinted Farnborough, 2005).

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, 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 the Gallic Office that had originated with St John the Evangelist and the Irish Office his (probably Columbanian) house used, which 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 and adopted an Office of seven times of prayer each day and night, justified by the text St Benedict also cites in the Rule, 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.

Praying the psalms with St Benedict 3A: Was there ever 'a' monastic Office? The diversity of the Office in late antiquity

One of the key questions about early monastic liturgy is just how much choice monastic founders such as St Benedict had when it came to selecting, adapting or designing their own Offices.

In the next few posts, I want to explore this issue briefly, looking at the dimensions of liturgical diversity, and some of the key drivers that are often suggested for this.

One correct form of the Office?

St John Cassian (430), in his Institutes, insisted that once his monk was properly clothed, he should 'next learn the system of the canonical prayers and Psalms which was long ago arranged by the holy fathers in the East', intended to help the monk 'pray without ceasing' [1].

St Benedict and other monastic founders of his time had certainly read and absorbed Cassian's teachings, and they encouraged their disciples to do likewise. [2]

When it came to the liturgy though, it would seem that Cassian's insistence that there was one correct form of monastic Office seems to have fallen mostly on less fertile ground.

Cassian observed disapprovingly that in his time, pretty much every monastery had their own form of the Office:

For we have found that many in different countries, according to the fancy of their mind (having, indeed, as the Apostle says, a zeal, for God but not according to knowledge), have made for themselves different rules and arrangements in this matter...And in this way we have found different rules appointed in different places, and the system and regulations that we have seen are almost as many in number as the monasteries and cells which we have visited. [3]

At the day hours, Cassian observed, some used three psalms at each hour (his preferred model, based, he claimed, on the practice in Palestine); but others as many as six.  At the Night Office, he noted, many went well beyond the 'canonical' twelve psalms:

some have appointed that each night twenty or thirty Psalms should be said, and that these should be prolonged by the music of antiphonal singing, and by the addition of some modulations as well. Others have even tried to go beyond this number. Some use eighteen. [4]

Sixth century monastic liturgies

Although some have claimed that Cassian's liturgical dictates were extremely influential, the bulk of the evidence would seem to suggest otherwise, for almost a century later, nothing had changed. [5]

The Office of  the Master, which may represent early sixth century Roman region practice (though its date and location continue to be disputed), had a variable number of psalms in the night office, depending on the season. [6]

A 567 Office of Tours involved up to 30 psalms a night. [7]

The Office said by the nuns following the Rule of Caesarius of Arles involved six psalms at the day hours (or even twelve at times) and also went well beyond Cassian's numbers for the Night, saying up to 41 psalms each night in their proper office, as well as even more in the form of vigil 'fillers'. [8]

And the Office of St Maurice of Agaune (circa 515) probably involved reciting at least the entire psalter (and probably more) every day. [9]

Dimensions of difference

The differences between these liturgies though, went far deeper than things like the number of psalms said, as the table [10] below illustrates.

Dimension	Differences
Number of times of prayer (‘hours’) said each day	2 (Egypt, Severinus, Fulgentius) to 24 (Constantinople’s sleepless monks)
Balance between the Book of Psalms and other Scriptural material	Almost entirely psalm based (Benedictine) vs largely (other) Scriptural readings (Pachomius, Arles)
Order of the psalmody	Mostly selective (Benedictine) vs mostly numerical order (Rule of the Master)
Use of non-Scriptural material	Benedictine uses hymns and Patristic readings; Caesarius of Arles specified hymns and readings from the acts of the martyrs; Rule of the Master and  Roman used neither hymns nor non-Scriptural readings.
Vigils	Caesarius of Arles specified regular all night vigils for his nuns; Benedict provides only for a somewhat longer form of the Night Office to be used on Sundays and feasts.
Obligation to say	Benedict makes it an individual responsibility – even when away from the monastery, the monk must say his ‘pensum’ of psalms.  By contrast at Agaune, the Office was a collective responsibility, fulfilled by shifts of monks working in turn.
Time spent on the Office	Benedictine 4-8hrs compared to 12-16 at Arles; and more at Agaune.
Performance methods	Benedictine/Roman – primarily antiphonal, with two choirs answering each other. Gaul – primarily responsorial, with soloist leading.
Variation with the natural seasons	Fixed structure Offices, with little or no variation, except in length of readings – Egyptian, Benedictine and later Roman vs Offices that lengthened as nights became longer in winter (Augustine, Arles, the Master, etc).
Variation with the liturgical seasons	Benedict: use of the Alleluia Arles: length of hours, hymns used, vigils
Prayer while working?	Egypt – yes; Arles – during ‘vigilia’ only; Benedictine – no.
Psalm cursus arrangemen	(1) Same each day - all 150 (Sleepless monks/Agaune?) or selection repeated, eg early Alexandrine (2) Mostly fixed but some variable elements each day such as collects, psalm(s) for the day of the week for one or more hours, set psalms for feasts (3) Variable number of psalms at night office depending on season, so that psalms not fixed to a day of the week. (4) Offices that added extra psalms and other elements for Saturday and Sundays  - eg Arles (5) Fixed weekly psalm cycle (Benedictine)
No of psalms said at each hour	Benedictine - units of 3/4/7/12 (+2) depending on hour. Gaul – units of 6/12/18 depending on hour

In short, to paraphrase a contemporary commentator writing on the Jura monasteries, monks read Cassian and other monastic rules, but they followed their own, particularly when it came to the liturgy:

My discourse has caused me to touch on some of the institutions of the fathers as they were imitated by blessed Eugendus….In no way am I belittling, by a disdainful presumptuousness, the institutions of the holy and eminent Basil, bishop of the episcopal see of Cappodochia, or those of the holy fathers of Lerins and of Saint Pachomius, the ancient abbot of the Syrians [sic], or those of the venerable Cassian, formulated more recently.  But while we read these daily, we strive to follow those Condadisco... [11]

The drivers of diversity

What then drove these differences, and why did St Benedict settle on the particular ones he did?

In the mid twentieth century the consensus was that monasteries usually simply adopted the liturgies of their locality [12]; more recent studies though, have seen the differences as reflecting different underlying theological drivers. [13]

More on that in the next post in this series.

Notes

[1] John Cassian, The Twelve Books of John Cassian on the Institutes of the Coenobia, and the Remedies for the Eight Principal Faults, Book II, C.S. Gibson (trans). Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 11. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1894.)

[2] St Benedict paraphrased Cassian throughout the Rule, and prescribed the reading of his conferences and institutes (RB 43&73).

[3] Op cit, II.2

[4] Ibid.

[5]  In particular, Peter Jeffery, Psalmody and Prayer in Early Monasticism, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West, January 2020, pp 122, argues that the monastic Rules of Caesarius of Arles reflect Cassian's model.  It is, on the face of it, hard to see how, given that the number of hours is not a conflation of Cassian's description of the Egyptian and Palestinian monastic Offices, but rather includes two additional hours (which Taft argued were Cathedral additions to Caesarius' Lerins model), and far from being based on the three/twelve psalm model Cassian advocated, uses six psalms at most of the day hours, and 18 as the base for the nocturns.  To describe this as 'an expansion' of Cassian's 3/12 model, rather than a continuation of the longstanding gallic practices Cassian had condemned seems a stretch.

[6] Adalbert de Vogue (ed), La Regle du Maitre, Sources Chretiennes, 105&106, Les Editions de Cerf, 1964.

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

[8] A de Vogue and J Courreau, trans and ed, Ouevres Monastique, vol 1, Sources Chretienne 345, Paris, 1988, pp 190ff.

[9] Very few details of Agaune's perpetual liturgy have actually been preserved, but for a survey of what is known, see Marcel Dietler, Laus perennis ou la psalmodie angélique à Saint-Maurice, Dans Echos de Saint-Maurice, 1965, tome 63, cahier spécial, p. 9-33'; P. Bernard, "La laus perennis d’Agaune dans la Gaule de l’antiquité tardive : état des questions et éléments d’un bilan, Sine musica nulla disciplina… Studi in onore di Giulio Cattin, dir. F. Bernabei et A. Lovato, Padoue, 2006, p. 39-69.

[10] In addition to the sources cited above see:
Egypt: Barsanuphius, Quaestiones et responsiones  F. Neyt and P. de Angelis-Noah, Barsanuphe et Jean de Gaza, Correspondence, tome I-II [Source Chrétiennes 426/427. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1997-98]; TLG: 2851.001. Q. 125-170 based on: Letters from the Desert, Barsanuphius and John, A Selection of Questions and Responses, tr. & intr. by John Chryssavgis St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Popular Patristics Series, Ed. John Behr, New York 2003) (Questions and responses); Armand Veilleux, Pachomian Koinonia (4 vols), Cistercian Studies, 1989-1992.

Severinus (Danube region, eventually settled in Italy), see Eugippius, Life of Severinus).

(North Africa and Sicily): Augustine,  Ordo Monasterii; Fulgentius -  A. Isola (ed.), Anonymus. Vita S. Fulgentii episcopi, Turnhout, 2016 (Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina, 91F) and for an Englsh translation, Robert Eno (trans), Fulgentius: Selected Works vol 1, Fathers of the Church 95, Catholic University of America 1997.

[11] 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

[12] See for example Marilyn Dunn, “Mastering Benedict: Monastic Rules and Their Authors in the Early Medieval West”, English Historical Review 105 No. 416 (1990): 567-594 and “The Master and St Benedict: A Rejoinder”, English Historical Review, 107 No. 422 (1992): 104-111.

[13] There has, for example, been a vigorous debate on the source and purpose of the liturgy of Agaune, with three main camps.  Barbara Rosenwein argued it grew out of local liturgies, in response to the needs of the bishops involved (in Perennial Prayer at Agaune, in Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts, Religion in Medieval Society, Essays in honor of Lester K Little, ed Sharon Farmer and Barbara H Rosenwein, Cornell UP, Ithaca and London, 2000, pp 37-56); Albrecht Diem has argued (unconvingingly in my view) that it similarly had local origins, but in the needs of Prince Sigismond of Burgungy (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). Anne-Marie Helvétius argues that it was largely an imported liturgy from Constantinople, for essentially political reasons (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),