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 held 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 both the Gallic Office, which it claimed had originated with St John the Evangelist, and the Irish Office his (probably Columbanian) house used, which he claimed 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 an Office of seven times of prayer each day and night, justified by the text St Benedict also cites in the Rule, Psalm 118:64, 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.

Psalm 27 - Overview

Just to continue my process of putting at least marker post for each psalm, including information on its liturgical uses, some brief notes on Psalm 27, which is said at Sunday Matins in the Benedictine office, presumably because of its references to the Resurrection, also the reason for its use in Matins of Easter Day.

St Augustine, in his commentary on it, suggested that this is the prayer of Christ himself in the Passion, predicting his Resurrection.

But as St Alphonsus Liguori commented, it is readily applicable to each of us:

David, in the midst of persecutions, implores the help of God, and foretells his triumph. There is not one among the faithful who cannot apply this psalm to himself in view of the temptations and perils of which his life here upon earth is so full.

The text of the psalm

Vulgate	Douay-Rheims
Psalmus ipsi David.	A psalm for David himself.

Ad te, Dómine, clamábo, Deus meus, ne síleas a me: * nequándo táceas a me, et assimilábor descendéntibus in lacum.	Unto you will I cry, O Lord: O my God, be not silent to me: lest if you be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit.
Exáudi, Dómine, vocem deprecatiónis meæ dum oro ad te: * dum extóllo manus meas ad templum sanctum tuum.	Hear, O Lord, the voice of my supplication, when I pray to you; when I lift up my hands to your holy temple.
Ne simul trahas me cum peccatóribus: * et cum operántibus iniquitátem ne perdas me.	Draw me not away together with the wicked; and with the workers of iniquity destroy me not:
Qui loquúntur pacem cum próximo suo, * mala autem in córdibus eórum.	Who speak peace with their neighbour, but evils are in their hearts.
Da illis secúndum ópera eórum, * et secúndum nequítiam adinventiónum ipsórum.	Give them according to their works, and according to the wickedness of their inventions.
Secúndum ópera mánuum eórum tríbue illis, * redde retributiónem eórum ipsis.	According to the works of their hands give to them: render to them their reward.
Quóniam non intellexérunt ópera Dómini, et in ópera mánuum eius * déstrues illos, et non ædificábis eos.	Because they have not understood the works of the Lord, and the operations of his hands: you shall destroy them, and shall not build them up.
Benedíctus Dóminus, * quóniam exaudívit vocem deprecatiónis meæ.	Blessed be the Lord, for he has heard the voice of my supplication.
Dóminus adiútor meus, et protéctor meus: * in ipso sperávit cor meum et adiútus sum.	The Lord is my helper and my protector: in him has my heart confided, and I have been helped
Et reflóruit caro mea: * et ex voluntáte mea confitébor ei.	And my flesh has flourished again, and with my will I will give praise to him.
Dóminus fortitúdo plebis suæ: * et protéctor salvatiónum Christi sui est.	The Lord is the strength of his people, and the protector of the salvation of his anointed.
Salvum fac pópulum tuum, Dómine, et bénedic hereditáti tuæ, * et rege eos, et extólle illos usque in ætérnum.	Save, O Lord, your people, and bless your inheritance: and rule them and exalt them forever.
Glória Patri, et Fílio, * et Spirítui Sancto.	Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.
Sicut erat in princípio, et nunc, et semper, * et in sǽcula sæculórum. Amen.	As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Scriptural and liturgical uses

NT references	Rev 2012ff; Rev 22:12 (5-6)
RB cursus	Sunday Matins II, 2
Monastic/(Roman) feasts etc	Easter
Roman pre 1911	Monday Matins
Roman post 1911	1911-62: Monday Terce . 1970:
Mass propers (EF)	Lent 2 Wednesday (1, 12); Lent 3 Friday GR (1, 9); PP 6, IN (1, 9, 12); PP 11 (1, 9)

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, in his Institutes (written circa 430 AD), 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, it is evident that nothing had changed. [5]  The Office of  the Master, for example, 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]  Similarly, a 567 Office of Tours involved up to 30 psalms a night,  [7] while 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 arrangement	(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 (unconvincingly 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),

Praying the Office with St Benedict 2: The Benedictine charism

The key thesis of this series is that the form of the Divine Office set out in the Rule is just as fundamental to the Benedictine charism as the other foundational documents of the Order, namely the Rule itself, and the life of St Benedict by St Gregory the Great (Book II of his Dialogues).

How integral is the Benedictine Office to the charism?

It is true of course, that St Benedict himself allowed for the possibility of other orderings of the psalms to be used [1], and that down the centuries many other forms of the Office have been used in conjunction with the other provisions of the Rule, not least in our own day.

And very different amounts of time have been devoted to the Office in different periods: the Carolingians added many extra prayers, and that trend was taken even further by the Cluniacs; in our time many monasteries devote very little time at all to formal communal prayer outside of the Mass.

These variations are, I think a reflection of a key aspect of the Rule itself, one of the reasons for its endurance: namely that there is so much buried spiritual treasure in it that it is very possible to emphasis different aspects of it; to adapt it to different times and situations; and even to use the Rule and/or Office in conjunction with other quite distinctive charisms (such as the Rule of Columbanus in the seventh century, some of the military orders of the Middle Ages and the Carthusians). Indeed, as other charisms and approaches to monasticism have arisen, many have been absorbed and incorporated into particular streams of Benedictine spirituality.

We should not outright reject the validity of these later developments down the centuries: the Holy Ghost blows as it will!  But there is, nonetheless, I think, a particular value in attempting to understand what St Benedict himself intended, or perhaps what God gifted to him, particularly in his design of his Office, since there is, I think, a certain validity to the view articulated by Laszlo Dobszay, that a particular form of the Office forms a particular type of monk. [2]

Challenging twentieth century takes on the Office

That said, let me say upfront by way of summary of this series, that we need, I think, to reject outright some key propositions propagated from the mid-twentieth century onwards, namely:

(1) The idea that there was one, settled form of mainstream monastic life by St Benedict's time.

Few, if any, monastic historians now, for example, would now accept Claude Peifer's claim in RB 1980, that despite the differences between the various monastic rules of the period, “the life actually lived in Western monasteries from the end of the fourth century up to the sixth seems to have been basically the same”. [3] Instead, historians are increasingly appreciating the great diversity of monasticism in this period. [4]

(2) The claim made by Dom Adalbert de Vogue that St Benedict's Office was a merely mechanistic adaptation of the Roman [5].

De Vogue argued that the Roman Office had already settled on its fixed weekly psalm cursus by St Benedict's time, and the saint's adaptation of it was forced by the needs of labour in the fields to support the monks.  There is absolutely no hard evidence to support this claim; instead it hangs on the elaborate reconstructions of the liturgists based on indirect evidence dating from several centuries after Benedict. [6]

(3) The view that Roman Office itself evolved in an essentially mechanistic way, rather than having its own historical, theological and Scriptural underpinnings.

Pascher in particular developed elaborate theories as to a process of evolution reducing the number of psalms said at Vespers. [7]

These propositions were, in large part, I think, driven by the historico-critical paradigm that dominated at the time. Today they are increasingly being challenged through careful examination of both the practical differences in the lives of monks and nuns of the time, and teasing out the differences in underlying theologies. [8]

Monastic diversity in the West in late antiquity: a story of three monasteries

One of the particularly intriguing lines of distinction between monasteries in St Benedict's time seems to have been the balance between liturgy, lectio and work.

St Benedict (c 485 - 540), for example, may be famous today for his injunction to put nothing before the Work of God (the Office), but in reality his Office took up only somewhere between 4-8 hours of the monastic day (estimates differ, and time spent in chapel also varied with the day of the week and feasts, though I would suggest the longer end of the spectrum is more likely than the four hours claimed by some contemporary commentators). [9]  St Benedict's monks lived a life that still allowed considerable time for lectio divina; and manual, intellectual or craft work, including providing hospitality to guests.

By contrast the nuns of the more or less contemporary monastery of Arles established by St Caesarius, whose rule was written between 510 and 535, are thought to have spent typically somewhere between 12 and 16 hours each day in choir [10].  They were strictly enclosed, and offered no hospitality for visitors, their Rule forbidding even the provision of meals for visiting bishops and other notables.  Even so, they still managed some (mostly communal while working) lectio, and work such as manuscript production and clothes manufacture.

The extent of diversity is even more starkly illustrated by the lives of the monks of the monastery of St Maurice of Agaune (in what is now the Swiss Alps), founded (or refounded) in 515, and which seems to have totally precluded any possibility of other work, as their lives were entirely devoted to the maintenance of a perpetual round of prayer, 24/7, using shifts of monks in succession [11].

The time spent on the Office in each of these communities clearly both constrained or permitted very different forms of religious life for the religious in them, and this was in turn reflected in the particular shapes of their offices, so before we start looking at St Benedict's particular form of the Office, I thought it would be useful context to look at some of the theological drivers for this diversity, on which more in the next post.

The three monasteries in summary

	St Maurice of Agaune	St John of Arles [12]	St Benedict
Location	Kingdom of Burgundy (Swiss Alps, near Geneva)	Arles, France [Gaul (Provence)]	Italy
Type	Relic site/royal foundation (Sigismund)	Urban/episcopal	Rural/lay
Foundation dates	[Refounded] c515	506 started building outside walls; 519 monastery built 534 Rule finalised	[C505-15 Abbot of Vicocaro] C505-25 Subiaco C529 Monte Cassino [?Plombariola] C545 Terracina [?c560 Lateran]
Founder/Benefactor	Prince (later King) Sigismund of Burgundy, aided by bishops Maximus, Avitus and others	Bishop Caesarius of Arles	Benedict (with assistance from lay benefactors?  Ecclesiastical approval??)
Founding abbots/abbesses	Hymnemodus	Caesaria (sister of Caesarius); Caesaria the Younger (niece of the bishop)	Benedict [Scholastica]
Dedications of monastery/church/chapels	St Maurice and the Theban legion	St John the Baptist,  St Martin of Tours St John the Evangelist,  Our Lady	St John the Baptist,  St Martin of Tours

The dimensions of difference

Over the next several posts I want to try and draw out the way the different charisms of these three groups of monasteries affected the forms of the Office that they each used. 

And there are four particular aspects of the liturgy that I want to focus in on to do this, namely the Office as a vehicle for the praise and adoration of God; for promoting prayer and meditation (and the objective of 'praying without ceasing'); the intercessory dimensions of the Office; and the location of the Office in sacred time.

Before doing this though, it is, perhaps, helpful to provide something of an overview of the dimensions and drivers of liturgical diversity in late antiquity, starting in the next part in this series, which you find here.

Notes

[1] RB 18: 22].  St Benedict's caveat on the possiblity of using other distibutions of the psalter is that all 150 psalms must be said each week:  Hoc praecipue commonentes ut, si cui forte haec distributio psalmorum displicuerit, ordinet si melius aliter iudicaverit, [23] dum omnimodis id adtendat ut omni hebdomada psalterium ex integro numero centum quinquaginta psalmorum psallantur, et dominico die semper a caput reprehendatur ad vigilias. [24] Quia nimis inertem devotionis suae servitium ostendunt monachi qui minus a psalterio cum canticis consuetudinariis per septimanae circulum psallunt, [25] dum quando legamus sanctos patres nostros uno die hoc strenue implesse, quod nos tepidi utinam septimana integra persolvamus.

[2] Laszlo Dobszay, Critical reflections on the Bugnini Liturgy, pg 8: "If it is true to say, Chorus facit monachum (Office in common makes the monk), then we may complete the proverb thus: Hic chorus facit hunc monachum (The order’s own  Office shapes the self-identity of the monk).”

[3]  In Timothy Fry (ed), RB 1980 The Rule of St. Benedict In Latin and English with Notes, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesotta: 1981, Claude Peifer claimed that despite the differences between the various monastic rules of the period, “the life actually lived in Western monasteries from the end of the fourth century up to the sixth seems to have been basically the same”.  (pg 85)

[4] For a more accounts of the attempt to develop a 'tradition', see Albrecht Diem, ‘Inventing the Holy Rule: Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West,’ in Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress (eds.),Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of early monastic observance  (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp 53 – 84 and Conrad Leyser, Authority and asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great, Oxford :  Oxford University Press, 2000.

[5] See Adalbert De Vogue, SC La Règle de saint Benoît, commentaire doctrinal et spirituel, Vol 5, Éditions du Cerf, Paris, 1977.

[6] The most recent treatment of this issue relies on the claim that the arrangement of the 'de psalmiis' responsories, now used during Epiphanytide, and which use psalms more or less aligned to the Roman Matins cursus each day, were originally a prototype set  used throughout the year (see Lazlo Dobszay, the Divine Office in History, in Alcuin Reid, ed, T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy, Bloomsbury, 2016, pp  207- 235).  However the earliest references to the de psalmiis responsories dates from long after St Benedict's time, and there is every reason to think that their current arrangement changed over time (not least because of the inclusion of non-psalmic elements in the set). Moreover, the claim depends on the assumption that the psalms utilised were essentially selected randomly, for their fit to the curus.  In reality there are good reasons to think they were actually selected for their appropriateness to the season and readings therein (paper forthcoming). 

[7] A view developed primarily by Callaewaert and Pascher.  for a helpful discussion, see James McKinnon, The Origins of the Western Office in Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer (ed), The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography, OUP, 2000, pp 63-73.

[8]  See in particular: Daniel Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity, University of California Press, 2002; Peter Brown, Treasure in Heaven The Holy Poor in Early Christianity, University of Virginia Press, 2016.

[9] Estimates of the amount of time spent on the Benedictine Office  in St Benedict's time vary wildly: Dom David Knowles estimated at least eight hours a day in his book The Benedictines; modern Benedictine commentators (perhaps less familiar with the full sung office?) such as Kardong suggest around four.

[10] Estimate from 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.

[11] There is a large literature on Agaune, but the most helpful and up-to-date treatment of  primary and secondary sources is 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.

[12] For Arles, the most important sources are the Rules for monks and nuns, in Caesarius of Arles, Oeuvres Monastique, de Vogue and Courreau ed and trans, 2 vols, Sources Chretienne 345, 398 and W. Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul, Cambridge UP, 1994.  For a full listing of relevant studies see the online bibliography managed by W Klingshirn: https://arts-sciences.catholic.edu/academics/interdisciplinary/early-christianity/projects/caesarius-studies.html

*Note: Some of the material in this post and planned subsequent ones derive from a conference paper originally presented to the Australian Early Medieval Association in 2018. 

Praying the psalms with St Benedict/1: Why forty psalms each day

This Lent I plan to provide some commentaries on the Benedictine Office, and particularly the psalm cursus.

While this topic isn't explicitly Lenten in focus, there is, I think, a Lenten connection, in that one of St Benedict's key themes, both in the Rule and the Office, is on the process of conversion of our way of life, of turning away from evil, and cultivating the good. [1]

And this process of progressive transformation, I want to suggest, is something St Benedict explicitly and implicitly connects to the symbolism of the forty days of Lent, not least through the number of psalms said each day in the Benedictine Office (viz forty; see the appendix below for a discussion of how the number is made up).

Lent in the Rule

St Benedict in his Rule gives particular attention to Lent: it is the only liturgical season he discusses, devoting an entire chapter to its character, and making mentions of the disciplines that apply during this period in several others.

But perhaps one of his most important comments on the subject is this: the character of the monk's life ought always be Lenten in character. [2]

One particular way that he builds this dictum into the life of the monk, I would suggest, is the Office, for each day the monk's daily 'pensum' (weight or measure), or in this context obligation, consists of saying forty psalms in total. [3]

The number is surely not random.

Forty

Lent may not have been strictly forty days in St Benedict's time (just when it became so is hotly contested).

But the symbolism of forty psalms each day is, I think, made clear not only by the various Biblical forty day fasts (Moses, Joshua, Elijah and Our Lord), but also the periods of purgation represented by the forty days of rain in the Great Flood, and the forty years the Israelites spent in the wilderness before being allowed to enter the promised land.

St Augustine, for example, commented in a sermon now used at Matins of Ember Friday in Lent in the 1962 Benedictine and Roman breviaries:

The number forty is put before us as hallowed, and, in a way, perfect. I think that your love knoweth this God's Scriptures often and; often witness it. Ye well know that a Fast of this number of days is hallowed. Moses fasted forty days. Elias did the same. And our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself fasted this number of days complete...Love is the fulfilling of the law; to the fulfilling of the law belongeth in every work the number forty. [4] 

And it is the forty years in the desert that we are daily reminded of in the Benedictine office if we say Matins, with the invitatory psalm (Psalm 94), and particularly its verse:

Quadragínta annis próximus fui generatióni huic, et dixi: Semper hi errant corde; ipsi vero non cognovérunt vias meas: quibus jurávi in ira mea: Si introíbunt in réquiem meam.

Forty years long was I offended with that generation, and I said: These always err in heart. And these men have not known my ways: so I swore in my wrath that they shall not enter into my rest.

The monastic day, then, I would suggest, symbolically traces the path of the Israelites in the desert each day, the path of our life in this world: we have come out of Egypt, and are learning how to serve God; at the end of the day, in the last Psalm 133, we hope to stand at last within the Promised Land, in its very heart, the heavenly Jerusalem.

The psalms, in this context, act as a means of purgation both personally and for the world, one for each year in the desert.

Indeed, St Augustine's sermon quoted earlier may well be the source for two key memes in the Benedictine Rule, namely the idea that our lives ought always to be Lenten in character, and to our hoped for reward as labourers in the vineyard:

We, then, make our pilgrimage in this world a Lent, by living good lives, and abstaining from her iniquities and her forbidden pleasures. But at the end of this life-long Lent there will be an Easter indeed. We look for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour   Jesus Christ When that hope is realised, when that faith is swallowed up in knowledge, then indeed shall we receive every man a penny. In good sooth, it is true that every labourer in the vineyard will get his wages... [5]

Monks and laypeople

I don't want to suggest by this that laypeople should attempt to say all forty of the psalms the Rule specifies for each day - most laypeople have too many other demands on their time, and other, proper duties associated with their state of life, to fulfil that must take higher priority.

Rather, and I hope to come back to this point later in this series, I would argue (unfashionable though this idea is) that one of the key functions of religious is that they say them in part on our behalf; the point for us is to be aware of this function, and do what we can, financially and otherwise, to support their work.

Nonetheless, one possible Lenten practice might be to add just one extra psalm each day to our normal Office, and thus reach the number 40 by the end of Lent?

That way, we too can seek to purify ourselves afresh, and to support and build the community of like souls who travel with us, hoping that we too, may eventually be found worthy to enter the promised Land; that we too might dwell in the halls of the heavenly Jerusalem described in Psalm 133 at the end of the day, at Compline.

You can find the next part in this series here.

Appendix: How many psalms are said in the Office each day?

Some authors suggest that the number of psalms said each day in the Benedictine Office is 38, since the Laudate psalms are said under one doxology and should therefore only be counted as one.

I would suggest firstly that this is being overly literal, and it is far more likely that St Benedict had in mind the symbolism of forty given his attention to other key Biblical and other numbers throughout the Rule. First, although St Benedict specifies that Laudate psalms should be said at Lauds each day, he doesn't actually specify that they should be said under one doxology. Indeed, the problems of divided psalms aside, St Benedict actually varied the number of psalms said at a few hours on different days:

Matins: 14 (ps 3, Ps 94 + 12 variable psalms or parts of psalms of the day)
Lauds: 5 or 7 psalms depending on how Laudates are counted; one less on Saturday
Prime: 3 psalms or parts of psalms, 4 on Sundays
Terce, Sext None: 9 psalms or parts of Psalms
Vespers: 4 psalms or parts of psalms, with 5 on Mondays (but generally counted as one as Psalm 115 and  116 under one doxology)
Compline: 3 psalms

The custom of doing so, I would suggest, could well be a later shortening of the Office imported from the (later) Roman version of the hour, since most liturgists seem to agree that the Roman Office of St Benedict's time didn't actually have doxologies, but adopted the custom later in the sixth century.

And at least in the form we know them, both the Roman and Benedictine Offices maintain a certain symmetry (albeit in different ways) in the number of psalms said in the morning and evening:

Roman Lauds: 5 psalms if Laudates treated as one
Roman Vespers: 5 psalms

Benedictine Lauds: 7 psalms (if Laudates counted as three)
Benedictine Vespers: 4 psalms + 3 Compline = 7

Perhaps even more compellingly, St Augustine's Tract 17, quoted further above, on John provides a commentary on the number 38 that associates that number with weakness:

...the man healed by our Lord at the pool of Bethesda had had an infirmity thirty and eight years. I wish to explain why this number of thirty-eight is proper rather to weakness than to health. Love is the fulfilling of the law; to the fulfilling of the law belongeth in every work the number forty...

But in love we have given us two precepts: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. When the widow gave all she had for an offering to God she gave two mites; the inn-keeper received two pence wherewith to cure him that had fallen among thieves Jesus abode for two days among the Samaritans, that He might establish them in love. 

When, then, anything good is spoken of as two, the two great  divisions of love are the chief mystic interpretation. If, then, the law is fulfilled in the number forty, and it is not fulfilled if there be lacking the two  precepts of love, what wonder is it that he was infirm who lacked two of forty? [6]

And you can find the next part in this series here.

Notes

[1]  See for example the conclusion of the Prologue ll. 49: Processu verso conversationis et fidei, dilato corde, inerrabili dilectionis dulcedine curritur via mandatorum Dei...All English translations of the Rule come from Justin McCann ed and trans), The Rule of Saint Benedict in English and Latin, Burns Oates, 1952; for the Latin see the Latin Intratext Edition,  2007.

[2] RB 49.1: Licet omni tempore vita monachi Quadragesimae debet observationem habere...

[3]  See RB 49 &50.

[4] Augustine, Tract 17.4 on the Gospel of John, translation from the Maquis de Bute translation of the Roman Breviary: Quadragenarius numerus sacratus nobis in quadam perfectione commendatur. Notum esse arbitror Caritati vestrae: testantur saepissime divinae Scripturae. Ieiunium hoc numero consecratum est: bene nostis. Nam et Moyses quadraginta diebus ieiunavit, et Elias totidem 6 ipse Dominus noster et salvator Iesus Christus hunc ieiunii numerum implevit. Per Moysen significatur Lex, per Eliam significantur Prophetae, per Dominum significatur Evangelium.

[5] ibid: In hoc ergo saeculo quasi Quadragesimam abstinentiae celebramus, cum bene vivimus, cum ab iniquitatibus et ab illicitis voluptatibus abstinemus. Sed quia haec abstinentia sine mercede non erit, exspectamus beatam illam spem, et revelationem gloriae magni Dei, et salvatoris nostri Iesu Christi. In illa spe, cum fuerit de spe facta res, accepturi sumus mercedem denarium. Ipsa enim merces redditur operariis in vinea laborantibus...  For the labourer image, see especial Prologue to the Rule 14: Et quaerens Dominus in multitudine populi cui haec clamat operarium suum, iterum dicit...

[6] ibid: Videamus ergo quid voluerit significare in illo uno, quem etiam ipse servans unitatis mysterium, sicut praelocutus sum, de tot languentibus unum sanare dignatus est. Invenit in annis eius numerum quemdam languoris: Triginta octo annos habebat in infirmitate. Hic numerus quomodo magis ad languorem pertineat, quam ad sanitatem, paulo diligentius exponendum est...Caritatis praecepta duo sunt a Domino commendata: Diliges Dominum Deum tuum ex toto corde tuo, et ex tota anima tua, et ex tota mente tua; et: Diliges proximum tuum tamquam teipsum. In his duobus praeceptis tota Lex pendet et Prophetae. Merito et illa vidua omnes facultates suas, duo minuta misit in dona Dei: merito et pro illo languido a latronibus sauciato, stabularius duos nummos accepit unde sanaretur: merito apud Samaritanos biduum fecit Iesus, ut eos caritate firmaret. Binario ergo isto numero cum aliquid boni significatur maxime bipartita caritas commendatur. Si ergo quadragenarius numerus habet perfectionem legis et Lex non impletur nisi in gemino praecepto caritatis; quid miraris quia languebat qui ad quadraginta, duo minus habebat?