Why doesn't your Cathedral/parish offer Vespers (!)?

c14th Howard Book of Hours

One of the more positive reforms of the Vatican II was the encouragement of the laity to say the Divine Office.  But also one of the most neglected!

Spirit of Vatican IIism

The emphasis on the importance of the Divine Office in the documents of Vatican II was not an innovation: rather it reflected the recovery of a practice that was extremely popular in the late Middle Ages, when 'books of hours' were far and away the most popular book going. 

The decline in its use by the laity reflected a number of factors: the restriction of the official delegation to say the Office to priests and religious because of concerns over use of unorthodox texts and congregationalist theologies associated with the rise of protestantism; the influence of the Jesuits who did not say the choral Office; and the suppression of many of the earlier forms of the Office that had been particularly popular.

The early twentieth century saw a considerable revival in lay interest in the Office, courtesy of the Liturgical Movement, and the creation of many 'short breviaries' appropriate to the laity.  Vatican II's encouragement of this trend, and revival of the permission for the laity to say the Office liturgically, even in the absence of clerics or religious, should then have met fertile ground.

Alas, it is one of those inconvenient bits of text that has been mostly been quietly forgotten about, and whose implementation has largely been subverted by the butchery of the liturgy that is the modern Liturgy of the Hours.

Now for the real renewal?

Nonetheless, as genuine liturgical renewal gains ground, some churches are introducing Sunday Vespers, and late last year Pope Benedict XVI once again encouraged all Catholics to pray the Office, saying:

"I would then like to renew to you all the invitation to pray with the Psalms, even becoming accustomed to using the Liturgy of the Hours of the Church, Lauds in the morning, Vespers in the evening, and Compline before retiring. Our relationship with God cannot but be enriched with greater joy and trust in the daily journey towards him."

The Pope's words merely echoe the actual words - as opposed to the spirit of - Vatican II's Sacrosanctum Concilium, which says, inter alia:

"Pastors of souls should see to it that the principal hours, especially Vespers, are celebrated in common in church on Sundays and on the more common feasts.  The laity, too, are encouraged to recite the divine office, either with the priests, or among themselves, or even individually." (SC 100)

These days in Australia and many other countries, you will be very lucky indeed to find Vespers offered in a major metropolitan cathedral, let alone elsewhere! 

And as for the instruction  that 'In accordance with the age-old tradition of the Latin rite, the Latin language is to be retained by clerics in the divine office.' (SC1010)!

The psalms of Sunday vespers

Nonetheless, for the benefit of those who do want to pray this hour in Latin, or are already saying it and want to understand what they are saying in greater depth, I am going to resume my series aimed at penetrating the meaning of the psalms with a look at the psalms of Sunday Vespers.


I'm working primarily from the traditional Benedictine Office, that means Psalms 109 (110), 110 (111), 111 (112) and 112 (113).  The theme of the Sunday in the Office is, of course, the Resurrection, and these four psalms are particularly pertinent to this theme.


By way of a footnote, in the traditional Roman Office, Psalm 113 (114/115) is also said.  St Benedict's decision to omit that psalm has, I think, to do partly with symmetry, partly with the thematic structure of his Office, and partly to do with keeping the hour short.   In this context, it is worth noting the point on symmetry: the first of the variable psalms said at Lauds in the Benedictine Office on Sunday is Psalm 117, which is the last of the 'hallel' psalms, sung on the great Jewish feasts.  At Vespers we end on the first of the Hallel psalms, Psalm 112.  The Liturgy of the Hours also draws on these core psalms, repeating Psalm 109 each week, and uses Psalm 110, 111 and 113 (split in two).  Curiously, it omits Psalm 112 altogether.

In any case, on to Psalm 109.

Comparing Offices/5 - Vespers and Compline

Today I want to finish off this set of notes on the structure of each of the hours in the various forms of the Office with a look at the last two hours of the day, Vespers and Compline.  The main issue with these hours in the different forms of the Office goes to the spread of the workload over the day.

Vespers in the Benedictine and Roman Offices

In particular, the traditional Benedictine Office, for example, is heavily 'front-end loaded' - most of the work is done in the early morning, with both Vespers and Compline shorter than the Roman models St Benedict seems to have started from.  This makes sense given the emphasis on the monastic nature of the Vigil hour.

Vespers in the Benedictine schema uses basically the same set of psalms as the original Roman hour (109-150 skipping over one or two), save for the first nine gradual psalms (119-127) shifted to be said during the day.  But it has only four psalms each night (technically five on Monday, but one is the two verse Psalm 116, and it is said under the same Gloria Patri as Psalm 115) compared to five in the Roman version. St Benedict also split three psalms (Psalms 138, 143 and 144), further shortening the hour compared to the Roman Vespers of his time. In total, the Benedictine schema set 26 psalms for Vespers each week.


By contrast, the Roman Office traditionally spread the workload of the psalms much more evenly through the day.  In the oldest version of the Roman Office, Vespers had five psalms, taken in order from Psalm 109, and skipping over only a few psalms said at other hours (Psalms 117, 118, 133 and 142). All of the psalms were said in whole, thus 34 psalms were said at Vespers each week.

It might have been logical, given the shift in the pattern of human activity over the last few centuries to the evening over the morning, courtesy of the invention of electricity, to beef up the evening hours at the expense of the morning ones.

But in fact, the 1911 revamp of the Office retained the five psalms concept, but split three psalms in parts (more or less following the practice of the Benedictine Office, see below).  The biggest substantive change resulted from the need to accommodate the psalm divisions: instead of Saturday Vespers ending on Psalm 147, it stops at Psalm 144, with several of the psalms traditionally said at Vespers (Psalms 116, 134, 145, 146 and 147) reassigned to Lauds.  The end result was a reduction in the number of psalms said to 31 a week.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the modern Liturgy of the Hours, rather than seeking to rebalance the workload towards the evening, is shorter again, with only two psalms said each night, many of them actually one psalm split in two.  Nor does the Liturgy of the Hours restrict itself to the traditional 'Vespers' psalms, instead drawing on psalms from all books of the psalter.

Compline

The most radical differences between the Offices though relate to Compline.

In the older Roman Office and the Benedictine, Compline was the same every night.  The Benedictine Office always uses Psalms 4, 90 and 133; the pre-1911 Office also added Psalm 30 (which St Benedict assigned to Matins instead).  In many monasteries, the Compline was memorized and said in darkness, the familiarity of the verses providing a gentle wind-down towards sleep.

Pope St Pius X's revisions of the breviary instead made the three psalms of Compline variable each day, with Sunday mirroring the Benedictine schema.  The psalms selected are all thematically appropriate to the hour, expressing similar sentiments perhaps to those of the traditional version of the hour.  Still, there is clearly much more effort involved in saying a different set of psalms each night, particularly given that unlike the Benedictine version of Compline, the psalms come with antiphons, and thus can vary psalm tones depending on feasts and the liturgical season.

And the Liturgy of the Hours of course reduces the length of the hour again, to one or two psalms a night depending on their length.

Intellectual workload and time involved

In summation, the differences in these hours goes primarily to the level of intellectual effort required and time to say them. 

The oldest form of the Roman Office was the longest at both Vespers and Compline by a significant margin, and got through around 25% of the 150 psalms at these hours. 

The Pius X reforms shortened the hours somewhat, but increased the intellectual workload required at Compline in particular, with these hours now getting through 46 of the week's psalms, nearly a third of the 150 psalms. 

By contrast, the traditional Benedictine schema uses only 29 different psalms for the evening hours, or 19% of the total, and both hours are significantly shorter than either the pre or post 1911 Roman forms.  Not as light a load as the modern Liturgy of the Hours of course, which only manages to get through 21 psalms a week or less at these hours.

Comparing the Offices/4 - The structure of the hours from Prime to None

Continuing my series comparing the major variants of the Roman and Benedictine Offices, I want to look now at the day hours of Prime to None.  These day hours are key to the differences in the varying spiritualities implicit in the forms of the Divine Office.   

The first major issue I want to look at is the number of 'hours' to be said each day, which goes to the underlying philosophy of the Divine Office in general.  The second dimension over which the hours vary is their length.  But the third, and perhaps the most important, difference between the various versions of the Office is the nature of the psalms assigned to these hours.

How many hours - on praying ceaselessly

The first major difference is of course in the number of hours.

Traditionally of course, there are four 'little hours': Prime (at first light); Terce (mid-morning); Sext (midday); and None (mid-afternoon).  Terce, Sext and None have the most ancient origin - there are references to praying at these times in the New Testament itself , as well as in early Christian documents such as Didache. 

Prime was a rather later addition, with origins probably in the late fourth century.  One storyline is that it was added to prevent monks from going back to bed after Lauds.  That may be true.  But there are deeper, more important reasons, as we shall see, going to the very nature of the Divine Office. 

Laus perennis (continuous praise)

There have long been competing positions on the idea of the Office as a means of fulfilling the Scriptural injunction to 'pray ceaselessly'.

One idea is to take the idea of praying ceaselessly literally, as some of the Desert Fathers did, praying the Office even as they wove baskets or did other tasks.  At the height of the middle ages, in some medieval monasteries the monks worked in shifts over the day and night in order to ensure that liturgy was always being said.  Perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is another variant on this idea.

At the other extreme, some (including some prominent modern Benedictines, hence the rhetoric in the 1979 Thesaurus for the Order, and the decision to abolish Prime by many modern Benedictine Congregations, even those retaining a one week psalter) argue that it is possible to make our work and relaxation a continual prayer, so that work becomes liturgy.  In this theory, it doesn't really matter how often one gets together at all for formal prayer - hence the decision to abolish Prime in the Roman Office mandated in Sacrosanctum Concilium in Vatican II, and the subsequent decision in the 1971 Office (without any Vatican II mandate whatsoever) to say only one of Terce, Sext or None each day.

The Western Tradition

St Benedict and the mainstream Western tradition, I would argue, strikes a healthy balance between these two extremes. 

First, St Benedict, following the direction set by St Martin of Tours, does not anywhere in his Rule pretend that work and liturgy are the same thing, and that we can therefore abandon one for the other.  Rather, he insists on a sharp differentiation between the two, instructing that the chapel not be used for any other purposes.  Secondly, St Benedict talks about the Divine Office as the monk's service, their 'sacred service', the 'Work of God'.   Liturgy, in this view, is performed not just for our own improvement, not just as a spur to contemplation, but as a duty we owe to God.  As such, it is not something that can be shirked: put nothing before the work of God, he instructs his monks.

Secondly, the traditional ordering of the hours recognises that it is only too easy for us to become caught up in our own work, and forget about God entirely.  Spacing the hours at regular times through the day serves as a practical psychological tool to keep God top of mind and keep an appropriate balance in our lives (there are good reasons why even in secular life we have historically at least mimicked this pattern with breakfast, morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea breaks!) .

Most importantly though, is the rationale for seven day hours in particular.  St Benedict justifies the number of hours in his schema with a quote from Psalm 118: 'seven times a day will I praise you', and 'At midnight I rose to give you praise'.  Seven, as St Benedict points out in his Rule, is a sacred number, symbolising fullness or completeness.   St Augustine, for example, gave long expositions on its significance in terms of the number of petitions in the Lord's Prayer, in the Beatitudes (with a little creative interpretation) and so forth.  The bottom line was that by praying seven times a day, monks could indeed claim to be fulfilling the injunction to 'pray ceaselessly' without the need for interestingly creative rationalisations such as 'quality over quantity' or 'work is liturgy' for abandoning the Office.

The length and content of the little hours

The Benedictine, pre-1911 Roman Office and Pius X Office all featured these four key hours of the day.  Nonetheless, the character of these hours is quite different in each of these forms of the Office.

In the oldest form of the Roman Office, these four hours were the essentially same every day, and centred on the saying of the longest of the psalms, Psalm 118, an extended meditation on the importance of keeping the law.  Prime also included Psalm 117 on Sunday and Psalm 53 the rest of the week. 

Prime in the Benedictine Office

St Benedict made significant changes to all of these hours in his schema.  St Benedict first cut the length of these hours more or less by half.  On Sunday, he shifted Psalm 117 to Lauds, and cut the number of verses of Psalm 118 in half. Sunday Prime in the pre-1911 Office consisted of 68 verses in total: in the Benedictine Office it is only 32 verses of psalm. 

The remaining verses of Psalm 118 are said, in the traditional Benedictine Office, on Sunday and Monday Terce to None, with each hour consisting of 24 verses instead of the Roman 48.

St Benedict also gave Prime during the week much more substantive content, fitting with its character as preparation for the day's work.  Instead of a repeated psalm each day, he allocated psalms 1-2 and 6-19 to the hour, all of which contain important catechetical content. 

The post-Tridentine version of Prime made a move in this direction by adding one of Psalms 21-25 to each day's roster, but at a cost of further lengthening the hour.  On average, the pre-1911 Prime averaged 58 verses of psalms a day; by contrast the Benedictine Office averages only 40.

Terce to Sext

St Benedict's biggest change to the Roman Office though, was to dump Psalm 118 out of the weekday Office, and instead have his monks say the first nine of the Gradual, or Psalms of Ascent, at Terce to None.  These psalms are very short, so that Benedictine Terce to None average only around 22 verses each (compared to the old Roman 48).  They are easily memorized and so could be said in the fields or workplace if necessary, as St Benedict specifically allows. 

Like Psalm 118, their repetition serves to constantly reinforce fairly straight forward messages, about the necessary virtues to be cultivated in the course of our daily life.  But they also set down a key challenge: it is not enough to merely keep the commandments, St Benedict seems to be telling us; we must also work to ascend the spiritual ladder towards heaven.

The Pius X reforms

The driving concern of the reforms to the Roman Breviary made under Pope St Pius X was length: making the breviary more 'doable' to priests overloaded with pastoral pressures.  As a result, it made a conscious effort to shorten the day hours substantially.  The end result is that the 1960 hours of Prime to None average around 30 verses of psalm each on weekdays (but with some variation over the week, and a much longer Office on Sundays).

The approachability of these hours however suffered drastically, in my view, from the decision to reallocate the psalms of Matins to the day hours.  The old Roman (and Benedictine) Office featured the repetition of familiar verses with relatively straightforward messages during the day; the new day hours required those who say the Office to grapple with psalms full of difficult concepts and ideas.  Instead of being a gentle prod to keep the priest or religious on track during the day, they confront the person praying the Office with the cursing psalms and other difficult to grapple concepts. 

In short, the Pius X reforms completely destroyed the character of the Little Hours.

And the reforms ultimately provoked a reaction, in the form of simply cutting all those difficult passages out of the psalter altogether, and all but abolishing the little hours, in the 1971 Liturgy of the Hours....

Comparing the Offices/3 - The psalmody that structures the hours: Matins and Lauds

I want to turn now, in my series comparing the various forms of the Office and the effects these differing forms have our spirituality, to the ways the hours are structured in terms of their psalmody.  As this is fairly long, I'll split it into a couple of sub-parts, so today, a look at Matins and Lauds.

One of the major differences between the various form of the Office is the number, structure and nature of each of the hours. This part of the series considers them one by one.

Matins aka Vigils

Matins was traditionally said in the darkness of the night. There was a strong symbolism to this which is entirely abolished in the modern “Office of Readings” that can be said at any time of the day.  The symbolism of light and darkness has a long history in the Office (reflecting Scripture), with the darkness symbolising both the long wait for the Messiah before Our Lord's incarnation, and our long wait for his Second Coming during which we must pray and hope, and light (celebrated at Lauds) the Resurrection.

Because Sunday was the day when the Resurrection was especially celebrated in the liturgy, the length of the Sunday Vigil has traditionally (until 1911 been longer than the weekday version of the hour.  One could speculate as to whether the abolition of the concept the concept of the longer Vigil for Sundays by Pope St Pius X paved the way for Saturday night so-called Vigil masses and other innovations that have served to undermine the proper keeping of the Lord's day. 

Originally, Matins, at least in its longer forms, was primarily a monastic hour, and the longer forms of the earlier Offices, such as the Benedictine, reflect that. It is useful to keep in mind that although the Office in general seems to have been something equally said by the laity, ascetics and priests in the early and medieval church, even then Matins or night prayer was regarded as something more appropriate to religious than the laity (see for example the description of Eastern Offices by the fourth century nun Egeria on her pilgrimage).

Even today, this view still holds in many places.   In traditional monasteries, the monks rise at hours such as 3.30am  to say the long form.  Abbot Lawrence of Christ in the Desert for example argues that this hour is absolutely crucial to the monastic vocation: "We can probably say, without much dispute, that Vigils is a defining office of the monk. The monk is a Christian who keeps vigil every day."   For this reason it has often been regarded as the most problematic hour for secular priests and the laity, the reason it has been progressively shortened over the years, and then abolished altogether at least as a Vigil.  This seems a rather extreme solution!  The various traditional 'short' Offices do include it, but with only three psalms said on a rotating basis.

The main differences between the various schemas are as follows:

• In the earliest form of the Roman psalter it consisted of twelve psalms on weeknights, taken in order (save for a few moved to other hours), starting from Psalm 1 (on Sunday) to Psalm 108. The Sunday Office was double the length of other days;
• St Benedict changed the Vigil Office significantly from his Roman model by adding two invitatory psalms to it (Ps 3&94); starting from Psalm 20 on Sunday instead of psalm 1 (allowing each days psalms to include some thematic groupings, though still finishing up at Psalm 108 on Saturday; splitting the longer psalms; and adding three canticles to Sunday rather than additional psalms;
• the post-Trent Roman Office had 18 psalms on a Sunday, twelve on other days, plus Psalm 94 as an invitatory;
• the 1911 Pius X psalter shortened the hour to nine psalms each night, with some of those split into several parts, and dropping the concept of the longer Office on Sunday. Though it still started with Psalm 1 on Sunday, it ended earlier, at Psalm 106 on Saturday, with the psalms previously said at Matins redistributed to Prime, Terce, Sext, None and Compline during the week;
• the LOOH abolished the concept of the Vigil altogether and made it into an ‘Office of Readings’ (which has no historical basis whatsoever; the focus of the hour has always been the psalms not the readings), with three psalms that could be said at any time of the day.

Lauds

Lauds traditionally has been regarded as a sister hour to Matins, said immediately after it. St Benedict’s Office is slightly unusual in this regard in that during the winter at least he assumes a substantial break between the two hours: the crucial thing for him was to ensure that Lauds started at first light, to take advantage of the full symbolism of the association between the coming of the light and the Resurrection.

Lauds actually takes its name from the three ‘Laudate’, or praising psalms (Ps 148-150) which traditionally ended the psalmody for this hour. In the pre-1911 Roman Office, many of its psalms were said every day, namely Psalms 62, 66, 50, 148-150. These repetitions, retained in the traditional Benedictine Office, are important, setting a proper pattern and balance for the day: those praying the Office daily ask the Lord’s blessing (Psalm 66), beg forgiveness for sins (Psalm 50) and gave praise to God (Psalm 148-150).

One could speculate, perhaps, as to whether the abandonment of the Miserere in particular as part of the priest’s daily regime might have contributed in a small way at least, to the path to the late twentieth century revolution, including the abandonment of traditional morality. The daily reminder of King David’s repentance for his sin with Bethsheba surely grounded the priest, both in his own life, and in his preaching.

The other possible effect on the spirituality of those saying the Office of the Pius X (and 1971 reforms) is the loss of the emphasis between man and creation as a whole. In its earlier forms, the psalms of Lauds all had direct and obvious allusions to the coming light/dawn/Resurrection, reminding us that we are part of the daily cycle of life God has instituted. And the psalmody for each day had the psalmist joining us to the praise of all created things in the Laudate psalms. Could the abolition of these connections in the Pius X Office have served to reinforce the alienation of man from creation promoted by the rise of technology and secularist attempts to supplant God? Personally, I tend to think so!

In any case the main differences between the various schemas is:

• the older Roman Office’s variable component was one psalm (5, 42, 64, 89, 142, 91) and a canticle each day;
• St Benedict’s version of the hour cut out one of the fixed psalms (Ps 66, said on Sundays only in his Office) and added an extra variable psalm each day except Saturday when the very long canticle was split in two (35, 56, 63, 75,) all of which both fit the dawn theme and contribute to broader themes associated with each day in the Benedictine Office. He also changed switched Psalm 142 from Friday to Saturday;
• the Pius X revision of the psalter made all of the psalms variable (except in Lent when Psalm 50 is said each day), of necessity abandoning the criteria of references to the light/Resurrection in many cases, and utilizing several of the psalms traditionally said in the evening rather than the morning. The Laudate psalms no longer closed the hour;
• the four week schema of the 1971 psalter assigns two psalms and a canticle each day. Several of the traditional psalms of the hour don’t make the cut.

Comparing the Offices/2: why the psalms in a week?

I want to continue my series comparing the various orderings of the psalms used in the Divine Office with a look at how frequently they are said in the various psalm schemas.

And I want to suggest with a fairly controversial proposition: that the idea that all of the psalms should be said once a week (and as far as possible, only once a week), is essentially a twentieth century invention, at least so far as the Western Church is concerned. 

The more traditional idea, I would argue is for a much more repetitive and, contemplative monks aside, selective psalter scheme.

Origins: psalms in scriptural order

The question of how frequently the psalms should be said, and how a one week distributions of the psalms came to be standard in the Church, has not, as far as I can find, unduly preoccupied modern liturgists, who have been more intent on attempting to generate rationalisations for spreading the psalms over as long a period as possible, such as the current four week schema for the liturgy of the hours.

Nonetheless, they are right I think in suggesting that in the earliest forms of the Office, the idea of a one week distribution of the psalms was not the norm.  Instead the assumption was that monks would say the psalms much more frequently than once a week - even up to once a day in extreme cases, as St Benedict suggests in his Rule - while clerics and the laity would say a much smaller selection of nearly the same psalms everyday. 

The typical monastic pattern, even after St Benedict, was to start at Psalm 1, say the psalms in order, and keep going until you reached the end then start again, regardless of what day of the week it was.  The times of prayer and number of responsories and other prayers might be fixed, but the number of psalms and/or which day they were said was not.

Allocating psalms to particular hours

By contrast to the Scriptural 'running cursus' system, in the fourth century and later 'cathedral' Offices, for example, the psalms used at the day hours started to become relatively fixed.  In the old Roman Office, for example, which St Benedict in turn adapted in his Office, Psalms 1-108 were allocated to the night Vigil and morning hours, and psalms 109-147 to the day and evening hours.  In addition, particular groupings of psalms, such as the last three 'Laudate' psalms became associated with particular hours, in the case of Psalms 148-150, Lauds.

The two competing traditions - the monastic and the Cathedral - reflect differing principles of selection.  Monks, who said all of the psalms frequently, could be expected to pause and ponder the more important psalms as they needed to.  Those who had less time to allocate to the task had to focus on the more important psalms: for while all Scripture is preserved for our benefit, not all Scripture is equally important for our spiritual life.  Moreover, many of the psalms deal with similar themes, and duplicate verses or even whole sections of the text.

For these reasons, there doesn't seem to have been a presumption, at least until the middle ages, that anyone other than monks could or would say all of the psalms over some particular period.  In the early Roman cathedral office for example:

• Lauds had only one variable psalm and canticle each day (the Benedictine Office added an extra variable psalm in);
• Prime consisted of Psalm 53 and sections of Psalm 118 each day except Sunday (when Psalm 117 was substituted in), whereas in the Benedictine Office Prime works through psalms 1-19;
• Terce to None were the same each day, with sections of Psalm 118 (St Benedict spreads Psalm 118 over Sunday and Monday, then substitutes in the first nine of the gradual psalms for the remaining days); and
• Compline was always Psalms 4,90 and 133, as for the Benedictine Office. 

Clerics and the laity did join in with the variable Office of Vespers, but according to contemporary reports, the remaining psalms were said only by the monks and/or nuns who maintained the night vigil on behalf of all. 

And in fact, even once psalm schemas became standardized, this pattern persisted in diluted form through much of the Middle Ages.  Although the Benedictine Office, for example, is arranged on a one week cycle, it has many repetitions so that in fact the monk or nun traditionally says some 247 psalms each week.  But the laity typically used much shorter Offices, participating in the day hours of the Roman Office (Lauds and Vespers had variable psalms, but Prime to None and Compline were the mostly the same each day), or short Offices such as the Little Office of Our Lady and the Office of the Dead, both of which use the same psalms for the day hours everyday, with a three day rotation of psalms for Matins.

The Benedictine Revolution

St Benedict's (480-547) one week schema for the Office, set out in his Rule, is thought to have borrowed heavily from the Office used by both clerics and religious in Rome in his time (indeed, rather than listing out the canticles to be used at Lauds, he simply specifies the one's customary in the Roman Church).

St Benedict's schema, though it clearly did have early fans, seems to have taken a long time to become widely accepted in monastic practice: most of the surviving evidence for the continuation of his Rule in the period immediately after his death is for 'mixed-rule' monasteries, where his general prescriptions were combined with a much more intensive liturgical regime.  Indeed, St Columbanus (540-615) was positively scathing about monks who said a mere twelve psalms, as St Benedict prescribed, at the night vigil: his own rule prescribed 36 at night on weekdays, increasing to 75 on Saturdays and Sundays in winter! 

Even after the Benedictine Rule's provisions became the monastic norm in the West as a result of the Carolingian reforms, monks were expected to say many extra psalms in the additional devotional offices that became the norm.

No wonder then that St Benedict's throwaway line in his Rule allowing for alternative distributions of the psalter, providing that all of the psalms are said at least once a week, gained no traction at all until the nineteenth century. 

Offices of the saints

The other complicating factor to keep in mind is the development of special Offices for feasts and the saints.  St Benedict's Rule actually prescribes that on saints days the structure of the Office should be as for Sunday (ie an extended Vigil), but the actual psalms to be said those of the day of the week.  But in fact in both the Roman and Benedictine Offices the psalms of the day came increasingly to be displaced by specific sets of psalms appropriate to the feast, or from the 'Commons' for particular types of saints or classes of feast, which in practice drastically reducing the variety of psalms said, even for those nominally saying the full Office, rather than one of the abbreviated versions such as the Office of Our Lady. 

Indeed, one of the primary aims of  Pope Pius X's 1911 reforms of the Breviary was to drastically prune back the displacement of the regular psalter by feasts.

So where did the idea of a one-week distribution come from?

Throughout the Middle Ages a number of different psalm schemas competed, including the short one, two and three day devotional Offices, as well as the two week schema of Milan. Still, the two dominant ones were the one week distributions of St Benedict and the Roman Office.

Professor Dobszay, in his reflections on the Bugnini reforms of the psalter, has suggested that the reason for settling on a week rotation is the tie in with the seven days of creation.  It is certainly true that several of the modern Vespers hymns do contain allusions to the respective days of creation, but the allocation of these hymns to the particular days are actually a (relatively) recent development.  None of the recent histories of the Office point to any patristic or medieval discussions of this link as far as I could find (though do point me to them if they exist!) though. Nor is there any obvious allocation of psalms pertinent to each day of creation to particular days of week in the older Roman Office at least. 

Nonetheless, the idea is certainly plausible, and in fact, I do think at least some allusions to the days of creation can be found in the ordering of the Benedictine Office, albeit 'Christianized' so that Sunday rather than Saturday becomes the day of rest, when we reflect on the goodness of creation; Monday focuses on the first day of creation, including of light, opening with Psalm 32 on the role of the Word in creation, and in Psalm 35 which St Benedict added to Lauds, in the section of Psalm 118 that starts at Terce (Lucerna...); on Tuesday there is a strong focus on the city of Jerusalem (the day starts with the first of the 'songs of Sion', Psalm 45, and features the Gradual Psalms during the day and at Vespers), a focus on heaven, created on the second day; and so forth. 

Still, even if there is such a tie in, it doesn't really explain why all the psalms should be said in the course of a week.  Though perhaps there was thought to be a link to the mystical function of liturgy in the maintenance of the cosmos, and the book of Psalms. 

Practical reasons?

In reality one can't help suspecting that the real origin of weekly psalter schemas is both practically and spiritually based: psalms said every day are easy to memorize and keep in mind.  At a week's remove it is still possible to say them from memory without too many errors creeping in, though having a large proportion of the psalms repeated within the week makes this easier.  A weekly psalter serves to both emphasize the importance of the messages contained in the repeated psalms by keeping them top of mind, and reduces the memory workload on the brain! And in age where books were scarce and extremely expensive, these were important considerations. 

At a month's remove however, as for the Liturgy of the Hours, the chances of memorizing and keeping key psalm messages top of mind must surely greatly diminish, if not become all but impossible.

The beginning of the wreckovations?

In fact the psalter schemas that are designed around the idea of saying all of the psalms once a week, only once a week, one quickly suppressed sixteenth century experiment aside, in fact mostly date from the nineteenth century onwards. 

In 1842 the Hungarian Maurist Congregation took up the opt-out clause in St Benedict's Rule and designed a one week psalter that eliminated most repetitions.   The 1979 Benedictine 'Thesauris' similarly offers a one week arrangement that differs from St Benedict's as an option, and number of monasteries have adopted it in order to follow the Roman Rite suppression of the hour of Prime.

The most drastic and dramatic reorganization of the traditional psalter prior to Vatican II though, that set the precedent for the 1971 Liturgy of the Hours, was the thoroughly anti-traditional reform of Pope Pius X in 1910, reflected still in the Roman 1962 breviary.  

The governing principle of Pope Pius X's reform was to say each of the psalms at least once a week, and to reduce the overall load on those bound to say the Office.  The objective was perhaps noble.  In the process though, his breviary jettisoned the traditional allocations of psalms to morning and day; implied that all of the psalms were equally important (or unimportant as the case may be!); largely destroyed the particular character of many of the hours, particularly the Resurrection focus of Lauds and the short and sharp focus of the little hours; and completely revamped Compline by giving it variable psalms. 

And in the wake of Pope Pius X's reforms, further innovations occurred, most notably revamps of the Little Office of Our Lady occurred to allow (or require) religious sisters who had previously said a much more limited selection of psalms of that Office to say the whole 150 over two weeks.  And thus was the path set to Vatican II's wholesale wreckovation of the psalter.  But I'll come back to these issues in due course...

Notes:  For my discussion I'm primarily drawing on the following sources, though my ultimate conclusions do differ significantly from the authors in some cases:

Paul Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church A Study of the Origin and Early Development of the Divine Office, Wipf and Stock: Eugene, Oregon, 1981, republished 2008

Laszlo Dobszay, “Critical Reflections on the Bugnini Liturgy: The Divine Office”, 1983 PDF available from http://musicasacra.com/literature/

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.

Theo Keller, "Short" Breviaries of 2oth and 21st Century America, keller book

Ruben M Leikam, “The Liturgy of the Hours in the Roman Rite”,  in Handbook for Liturgical Studies Liturgical Times and Space, Anscar J Chupungco ed, A Pueblo Book, Liturgical Press: Collegeville, 2000.

Alcuin Reid in The Organic Development of the Liturgy The Principles of Liturgical Reform and their Relation to the Twentieth Century Liturgical Movement Prior to the Second Vatican Council, St Michael’s Abbey Press: Farnborough, 2004.

Robert Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today, Second Revised Edition, 1993, The Liturgical Press: Collegeville, Minnesota, Second Revised Edition 1993

Adalbert de Vogüé, OSB, The Rule of Saint Benedict A Doctrinal and Spiritual Commentary, trans John Baptist Hasbrouck, Cistercian Publications: Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1983.

Comparing Offices/1

I've been planning to make some comments about 'psalm cursus' or the running order of the psalms for various purposes, particularly in the Divine Office, and I've seen as couple of requests for psalter comparisons recently, so I've been spurred into action!

Psalm schemas and their effects

My primary interest is the construction of the traditional Benedictine Office (so please do jump in and comment, especially if you are more familiar with other forms of the office or disagree with my comments, questions and conclusions).  My premise is that the way the psalms are arranged so that we hear and/or say them clearly affects how we interpret them, and thus how they affect us.  So my starting point is that the differing arrangements of the psalter affect our spirituality.

The practice of rearranging the psalms into particular groupings and orders is ancient.

In Scripture itself, there are both distinct groupings of psalms arising from their use for particular purposes (such as the 'Gradual Psalms' and 'Hallel Psalms' which both had a place in traditional Jewish liturgy), and an overall ordering which arguably reflects one or more editorial programs.  In addition, some of the ancient titles to the psalms include notes as to the particular day of the week they are associated with, presumably for liturgical purposes.

In the EF Mass the selected psalm verses have generally serve to reinforce or help interpret the messages implicit or explicit to a particular Sunday or feast.

In the Divine Office the number, length, content of particular allocated psalms can give that hour and day a distinctive character.  Indeed, many would suggest that the particular orderings of psalms, choice of repeated psalms and other such features contribute to the distinctive spirituality for the group using them, for example, peculiar to the various religious orders.

Some comparisons

In this series I plan make comparisons between five main orderings of the psalter (though I will make comments about others), namely:

• the ancient Roman Psalter. And here I will primarily rely on the (speculative) reconstruction of the c5-6th century psalter included in Robert Taft's The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, pp136;
• the Monastic schema as set out in the Rule of St Benedict.  This schema is used in the 'traditional' Benedictine Office for weekdays, although over the centuries the Benedictine Office has adopted additional psalm schemas for feasts;
• the pre-1911 Roman Psalter  used from the Council of Trent to 1911;
• the Pius X psalter that forms the basis of the 1962 Roman Office; and
• the 1971 Liturgy of the Hours.

So what are the nature of the differences?

I want to work through this rather systematically, so this series will stretch over several parts, but let me start by giving a bit of an overview.

Psalm schemas, it seems to me, differ in:

• the timeframe in which the selected psalms are said - the Liturgy of the Hours (LOOH) is spread over four weeks, whereas the major pre-Vatican II schemas listed above rotate on a one week system;
• how many 'hours' (sets of prayers) are said a day -  the pre-Vatican II norm was eight hours; Vatican II abolished the hour of Prime, and requires only one of Terce, Sext or None to be said;
• which psalms are said - the Benedictine and older Roman forms of the Office use all 150 psalms from the Book of Psalms plus a number of additional 'canticles' (ie psalms from other books of the Bible).  The LOOH omits some psalms and many verses considered 'too hard' for modern readers, but adds in additional 'canticles';
• whether psalms are divided or not - the pre-1911 Roman Office kept all psalms together regardless of length, whereas the Benedictine and other later Offices divided psalms for length and thematic reasons;
• the number and length of psalms said at particular hours - Terce, Sext, None and Vespers in the Benedictine Office for example are much shorter than any of the older Roman variants, while Matins is much longer;
• the extent to which psalms are repeated.  The older forms of the Office all included a number of repeated psalms.  The Benedictine Office for example actually involves saying 247 psalms (plus an additional 24 canticles) each week, not 150.  The various revisions of the Roman psalter have gradually reduced, and in the LOOH all but much eliminated, these repetitions;
• the extent to which the days of the Office and/or particular hours have an underlying theme or program to them. 

What impact do these differing dimensions have on us?  Part 2 in this series can be found here.