Praying the psalms with St Benedict/6A: The Office as intercession

 In the last part  of this series on St Benedict's approach to the psalms I talked about the Office as the supreme good work of the monk, necessary at the very least as a foundation for his other manifestations of faith in works.

But there is another reason, I think, why late antique monastic thought considered the Office, at the very least, the most important of the good works the monk could do, and that lies in its intercessory power.

Is the monastic Office inherently intercessory?

The modern theological view, articulated for example, in Sacrosanctum Concilium, is that the Divine Office is inherently intercessory, an exercise, like the Mass, of the priesthood of Christ:

Christ Jesus, high priest of the new and eternal covenant, taking human nature, introduced into this earthly exile that hymn which is sung throughout all ages in the halls of heaven. He joins the entire community of mankind to Himself, associating it with His own singing of this canticle of divine praise. For he continues His priestly work through the agency of His Church, which is ceaselessly engaged in praising the Lord and interceding for the salvation of the whole world. She does this, not only by celebrating the eucharist, but also in other ways, especially by praying the divine office. [1] 

Although the modern office certainly includes prayers for specific intentions, this summary makes it clear, I think, that the intercessory power of the Office does not rest solely in those specific parts of it, but rather in the work as a whole.

Historians and liturgists, however, following Baumstark, have often argued that one of the key distinctions between earlier and later monastic liturgies is their intercessory orientation. [2] Many liturgists, for example, have argued that the early monastic office, in contrast to that of the cathedral, was primarily meditative in character, directed at personal transformation rather than having a strong ecclesial and intercessory dimension. [3]

Intercessory monasticism, it is frequently argued, was a rather later development, above all epitomized by the ‘powerhouses of prayer’ of the Carolingian period, dedicated above all to praying for the intentions of their founders, family, benefactors and the State. [4] This transformation, it is often claimed, necessitated the addition of special sets of psalms and prayers over and above the core Office set out in St Benedict’s Rule, for various specific intentions.

So the question I want to discuss in this post is, is the modern view of the Office, as inherently intercessory, anachronistic when applied to the sixth century Office of St Benedict?

I want to suggest that the answer is no.

The duty to pray for family, benefactors, city and the state?

The first point to note is that monks and nuns in late antiquity, as laypeople, shared in the general duties of all Christians, and that included the duty of intercessory prayer.

In a recent treatment of this subject, Renie Choi, for example, has convincingly shown that intercessory prayer for the State, for example, was always part of the monastic paradigm at least to some degree, in keeping with the general duty of Christians. [5] In 1 Timothy 2, after all, St Paul instructs that:

I desire therefore, first of all, that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men: For kings, and for all that are in high station: that we may lead a quiet and a peaceable life in all piety and chastity.

Early Christians took this instruction seriously, as Tertullian, for example made clear in his Apologia:

For we offer prayer for the safety of our princes to the eternal, the true, the living God, whose favour, beyond all others, they must themselves desire...Without ceasing, for all our emperors we offer prayer. We pray for life prolonged; for security to the empire; for protection to the imperial house; for brave armies, a faithful senate, a virtuous people, the world at rest, whatever, as man or Cæsar, an emperor would wish. [6]

A propitious offering?

More fundamentally, there is plentiful evidence to support the claim that although explicit prayers for particular intentions were undoubtedly used at times, the life - and especially the primary work of monks, the Office - was viewed as inherently intercessory in character in late antiquity.  

Justinian's Novel 133, for example, which justified his regulation of monastic life in the Empire on the basis of the benefits that flowed from the monk's holy lives and prayer:

For if the monks offer prayers to God with pure hands and unstained minds, it is clear that the army will fare well and cities will flourish—for when God is propitious and well-disposed, how could it be that the greatest peace and complete observance of the laws would not exist—the earth will bear the fruits and the sea will yield its products, these prayers conciliating the benevolence of God in favor of the whole empire...[7]

The Office of St John of Arles, for example, almost certainly included some explicitly intercessory components, in the form of the ‘capitella’, or selected psalm verses used to conclude the various hours. [8] It is clear though that Caesarius of Arles regarded not just the capitella, but the whole of the Office as intercessory.  At the end of the Rule, for example, he says:

I beseech and supplicate you before our Lord God, O most dutiful sisters...that by your charitable intercession keep watch for us day and night [ut pro nobis diebus ac noctibus intercession uestrae caritatis inuigilet] and in public prayer through your holy supplication, obtain, in solemnities by day or vigils by night, that your petition…for faults are not amended unless he remits them through the prayers of the saints...[9] 

In part, of course, this springs from the very nature of the core of the Office, the psalter, since so many of the psalms contain pleas for help, not just for the individual, but the for the people as a whole.

Heresy and monasticism

But as for the early christians under Roman rule, the difficulty many monasteries faced in late antiquity was that their most fundamental prayer for the state was surely not for its maintenance, but for its conversion, or in some cases, their own protection from the State itself: they could hardly pray for intentions often at odds with the faith.

When the young monk, later bishop, St Fulgentius arrived in Rome from North Africa in 500, for example, having been turned back from his Cassian-inspired trip to Egypt by the threat of the monophysite heresy that had infected the monks there, he was horrified to find the holy city feting the (one and only) visit of the Arian Ostrogoth Emperor Theodoric the Great. [10]  He hastily cut short his trip, stopping only to take in the martyr sites and do a quick round of the Roman monasteries.  Instead of learning more of monasticism as he had hoped, he returned to a life playing cat and mouse (coupled with long periods of exile in Sicily) with the Arian rulers of his own territory.

Around the same time, the young St Benedict also fled Rome, first for  a religious community at Affile, and then to Subiaco, the former summer palace of the great persecutor-Emperor Nero.  

Whether Benedict fled Rome for the same reasons as Fulgentius, or it was other events  - such as the pagan revels of his fellow students, who ran naked through the streets of Rome to celebrate an old feast; clerical celibacy scandals, or worst of all, the violent Laurentian schism - that propelled him, the symbolism of twelve monasteries rising on the ruins of the old palace was surely a clear statement. [11]  In both cases, they may have prayed for the State, but for its salvation, for the coming of the new kingdom, rather than for the secular aims of the current regime.

The case of Arles

Caesarius of Arles, as a Catholic bishop in a territory mostly governed by Arians, had a far more ambivalent and attimes deeply strained set of political relationships to juggle, not least because the city was beseiged and changed hands several times during this period: indeed, the first monastery built outside the walls for his nuns was destroyed before it could be completed, and then had to be rebuilt in a safer location, within the walls.

The Life of St Caesarius commissioned by the nuns of St John's shortly after his death suggests that he solved the problem, at least in part, by focusing the monastery on the city itself, rather than its changing (and mostly heretical) overlords.  In particular, the Life explicitly claimed that the foundation was inspired by the desire for intercession for the city:

The man of God formulated the idea by divine inspiration from the ever-reigning Lord that the Church of Arles should be adorned and the city protected not only with countless troops of clergy but also by choirs of virgins. [12] 

The Rule written for the nuns similarly refers to the nun’s role in praying ‘for all the people’. [13]  

The case of Agaune

The monastery of Agaune is a particularly interesting case because unlike Arles or Subiaco, the monastery could, in theory at least, support the state, since its principal patron, Prince later King Sigismond, had converted from Arianism to Catholicism some time before he provided the funding to the monastery.

What is more hotly contested, however, just how far its intentions went so far as the connection to its secular rulers is concerned.

It is certainly clear both from correspondence of the time and the early Lives of the monasteries Abbots, that the bishops of Burgundy played a major role in supervising the foundation, and approving its constitutions. [14]

The funding for it, though, came from Sigismond, and a rather later (but on the whole plausible) life of Sigismond claims the idea of having a number of choirs maintaining a perpetual liturgy was his (inspired by a conversation with the martyrs on how to get them onside for his future rule).[15]

Still, there is after all, on the face of it, nothing inherently intercessory about a regime of twenty-four hours a day:  if it was Sigismond's idea, he could still have been motivated by strategic considerations as much as anything else. [16] And more importantly, perhaps, the constant singing of praise to God fits well with Eucherius of Lyon’s Passio which depicts the martyrs of Agaune as transformed into an angelic legion, gathered around God’s throne, devoted to his praise and adoration rather than intercession as such. [17]

There was of course some intercessory focus: in a sermon for the dedication of the monastery of Agaune, Bishop Avitus referred to the monk's prayers as a force for good for the region:

 You flee the world to be sure, but you pray for it, even though the saeculum has been shut out by you the act of which…may your sacred vigil keep watch over all, by which…May our Gaul flourish; let the world long for what [this] place has brought forth...Today let there begin an eternity for devotion and dignity for the region, with these men praising God in the present world, who will praise him equally in future. [18]

That intention of praying for the region though, seems to me a long way short of the claims made for it by Albrecht Diem, who has argued that the whole purpose of the foundation was to pray for the state of Burgundy, and particularly for its King, and that the militaristic language of the psalter would have taken on a whole new dimension in this light. [19] 

The choice of the monastery’s first Abbot seems particularly telling in this regard. According to his Vita, Hymnemodus had been a courtier to Sigismund’s Arian father, Gundobad, but had left the court to become a monk at Grigny.  The monks, though, were so afraid of possible retribution that they refused to accept him, so he became a hermit instead; it was only many years later that he was elected the monastery’s abbot, and then subsequently transferred to Agaune.  His Vita makes it clear that he saw a clear separation between what was owed to God, and what to the king, a distinction that would have become important in the event, given an early falling out between Sigismond and his bishops not long after became king. [20]  More importantly it was Hymnemodus, according to the Vita, who had already demonstrated his commitment to God over mammon, who set about recruiting the number of monk’s necessary to maintain a perpetual round of prayer, and presumably to organize and design its liturgy.

And Bishop Avitus' sermon at the monastery's dedication seems to have been designed to reinforce this eschatological orientation for its efforts: its perpetual liturgy, he argued, fitted perfectly with that described in the Book of Revelation, the future world to come after the descent of the jewel encrusted New Jerusalem, a place in which there would be no night:

Whose entry is not shut at night, because it has no night, whose doors are always wide open to the just, but inaccessible to the impious…[21]  

Intercession for friends, family and the state clearly were already important though, in this time, and I want to look at some of these in the context of the Benedictine Office in the next post. 

Notes

[1] Constitution On The Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium, 83.

[2] A. Baumstark, Comparative Liturgy, rev ed  B. Botte, trans F L Cross, Westminster, 1958, pp 111 ff.

[3] For a critical review of the distinction, with an extensive bibliogrpahy, see Stig Simeon R. Frøyshov, The Cathedral–Monastic Distinction Revisited Part I: Was Egyptian Desert Liturgy a Pure Monastic Office?, Studia Liturgica 37 (2007), 198-216.

[4] The paradigm is breaking down however.  Renie Choi, in Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms, OUP, 2016, provides a somewhat more nuanced account of the development of intercessory prayer as a core element of monastic spirituality; and Albrecht Diem as argued that Agaune actually represents the first example of this type of foundation, 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.

[5] ibid.

[6]  Apology chapter 30: Nos enim pro salute imperatorum deum invocamus aeternum, deum verum, deum vivum, quem et ipsi imperatores propitium sibi praeter ceteros malunt...precantes sumus semper pro omnibus imperatoribus. illis prolixam, imperium securum, domum tutam, exercitus fortes, senatum fidelem, populum probum, orbem quietum, quaecunque hominis et Caesaris vota sunt...

[7]  Fred H. Blume, Annotated Justinian Code, 2nd ed, 2018.

[8] Rule for Virgins of Caesarius of Arles (RC), ch 40.2. For the full text of the Rule see Caesarius of Arles, Oeuvres Monastique, de Vogue and Courreau ed and trans, 2 vols, Sources Chretienne 345, pp 190ff, ch 66.

[9] ibid, ch 72.  The translation is by Maria Caritas McCarthy, reproduced in Daniel Marcel Le Corte and Douglas J McMillan (eds) Regular Life: Monastic, Canonical, and Mendicant Rules (TEAMS Documents of Practice), 2nd ed, Toronto, 2004.

[10] Robert Eno (trans), Life of Fulgentius, in Fulgentius: Selected Works vol 1, Fathers of the Church 95, Catholic University of America 1997.

[11] Gregory the Great, Dialogues II, chapters 1-3.

[12] Caesarius of Arles: Life, Testament, Letters, trans Klingshirn, LUP, 1994, Life, Bk I:28.

[13] Rule for Virgins of Caesarius of Arles (RC), ch 40.2. For the full text of the Rule see Caesarius of Arles, Oeuvres Monastique, de Vogue and Courreau ed and trans, 2 vols, Sources Chretienne 345, pp 190ff.

[14] On the case for the bishops as the prime instigators of the foundation, see B. Rosenwein, ‘Perennial Prayer at Agaune’, in S. Farmer and B. Rosenwein (eds), Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society (Ithaca, 2000), pp. 37–56; see also Vita abbatum Acaunensium (BHL 142), § 3, éd. B. KRUSCH, MGH, SSRM, III, Hanovre, 1896.

[15] On Sigismond's Vita, see Claire Maître, De saint-maurice d’agaune à saint-denis-en-france :La louange ininterrompue, Fruit d’une volonté politique? ,Revue Mabillon, n.s., t. 21 (= t. 82), 2010, p. 5-36.

[16] See 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.

[17] Eucherius of Lyons, The Passion of the Martyrs of Agaune (translation in the appendix of Tim Vivian, Kim Vivian and Jeffrey Russell trans, The Life of the Jura Fathers The Life of the Holy Fathers Romanus, Lupicinus , and Eugendus, Abbots of the Monasteries in the Jura Mountains...,  Cistercian Studies Series no 178, Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo, 1999,  Studies Series 178); for the latin text see Passio Acaunensium martyrum, BHL-5737.

[18] Danuta Shanzer and Ian Wood (ed and trans), Avitus of Vienne: Letters and Selected Prose, LUP, 2002, pp 380.

[19] Albrecht Diem, Who is Allowed to Pray for the King? Saint-Maurice d’Agaune and the Creation of a Burgundian Identity, in Post-Roman Transitions: Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West, Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann (eds), pp. 47-88, Brepol 2014.

[20] Op cit. The key part of the Vita says: Sanctus igitur Hymnemodus natione quidem barbarus , sed morum benignitate modestus , ita inmunis ab omni feritate beneficio divinitatis effectus est , ut sub habitu saeculari iugum Christi blanda clementiae libertate portaret . Hic dum in aula regali sedulus famulator regiae potestati adsisteret hac tota mentis integritate commissum sibi ministerium adimpleret. Reddebat iuxta Salvatoris praeceptum , quae Dei erant Deo ; regi quoque inoffense debitum servitii e exhibebat. Nam cum , fervente spiritu, perfectae religionis intrinsecus maturasset consilium, mundanis spretis in lecebris et pompa tumentium potestatum dispecta, festinus  in monasterium Grenencense expetiit...

When he became King in 516 Sigismund quickly alienated many of his subjects through a bitter dispute with his bishops over their excommunication of one of his courtiers, leading him to exile most of his Catholic bishops for an extended period.  His subsequent murder of his eldest son precipitated attacks from both the Franks and Ostrogoths, culminated in the death of both him and his family at their hands in 523 (though he was later deemed a martyr).  The Kingdom itself did not survive him all that long as a separate entity: it was incorporated into Frankish territories in 534.

[21] Avitus letters...opcit; It is worth noting that the editors see this passage as a reference to Aen 6.127 and the gates of the Virgilian underworld, but Apocalypse 22 seems the more important allusion in the light of what follows, viz, Christ is its foundation, faith its frame, a wall its crown, a pearl its gates, gold its street, a lamb its light, its chorus the church.  Caesarius and other contemporaries such as Cassiodorus interpreted Revelation 22 not literally, but as depicting the Church inaugurated by Christ.

Praying the psalms with St Benedict 5D - St Benedict on the liturgy as prayer Pt 2

Given that today is the feast of St Benedict, I thought this would be a good moment to tease out a few key points on the relationship of the Divine Office in St Benedict's Rule to ceaseless prayer.

Good works as prayer

In the last post in this series I suggested that St Benedict generally talks mostly about frequent, or short and fervent prayer, rather than continuous prayer, as the objective of the monk; and followed a line of Scriptural interpretation that interpreted 'prayer' very broadly, as a state of mind as much as a formal act, so that prayer encompasses, even requires good works beyond formal and informal prayer.

In this he was surely following the monastic models of St Basil, with its emphasis on good works; and the line of exegesis suggested by St Augustine, who, rather than insisting on the monk or nun be constantly ruminating on Scripture while they worked, ate, or even slept, provided an alternative solution to the problem by defining good works as prayer:

Praise the Lord, you say to your neighbour, he to you: when all are exhorting each other, all are doing what they exhort others to do. But praise with your whole selves: that is, let not your tongue and voice alone praise God, but your conscience also, your life, your deeds. For now, when we are gathered together in the Church, we praise: when we go forth each to his own business, we seem to cease to praise God. Let a man not cease to live well, and then he ever praises God....But God has willed that it should be in your choice for whom you will prepare room, for God, or for the devil: when you have prepared it, he who is occupant will also rule.  Therefore, brethren, attend not only to the sound; when you praise God, praise with your whole selves: let your voice, your life, your deeds, all sing. [1]

But in saying this, I don't want to suggest, as some have done, either that the Office (or at least the psalm component of it), was not actually seen as constituting prayer at all (a theory propounds by some in the past); nor do I want to suggest that the Office does not play an absolutely crucial role in sustaining our ability to, as Psalm 1 puts it, 'meditate on the law of the Lord day and night.'

It is quite clear, I think, that  even though St Benedict took a much wider view of what constituted  good works appropriate to a monastic than others of his time such as Caesarius of Arles, the Divine Office was, for him, clearly the supreme good work: what after all could be preferred or put before the good work that is the Work of God. [2]?

Is the Office prayer at all?!

Before I go on, I thought I should briefly touch on the argument, popular in the 1970s and which still has its advocates today [3], following the work of Gabriel Bunge and others, that in late antiquity singing the psalms was not seen as prayer as such; instead the psalms were viewed as akin to other Scriptural readings, that had to be turned into prayer through pauses between psalms, use of psalm collects, and other such devices. [4]

It is certainly true that some of St Benedict's contemporaries employed practices that have been seen as fitting this model. Most of the psalmody at the monastery of Arles that we have briefly looked at, for example, was responsorial rather than antiphonal; psalm collects do seem to have been employed there; and Scripture reading in general featured much more heavily in the Arles Office than in the Roman or Benedictine. [5]

But even if these practices reflect a view of psalms more as Scripture than as the prayerbook of the Church (a view I rather doubt), it was certainly not the only tradition.

 Athanasius' famous Letter to Marcellinus for example, makes it clear that the psalter not only services as Scripture and a personal spiritual guide, but also gives us words we can use as our own prayers, identifying particular ones as appropriate to our various needs.

Similarly St Basil the Great, in his sermon on Psalm 1, highlights not only their ability to teach us doctrine; to calm and soothe out souls; but also represent a means of asking for help, and bind us together:

A psalm forms friendships, unites those separated, conciliates those at enmity. Who, indeed, can still consider as an enemy him With whom he has uttered the same prayer to God? So that psalmody, bringing about choral singing, a bond, as it were, toward unity, and joining the people into a harmonious union of one choir, produces also the greatest of blessings, charity. A psalm is a city of refuge from the demons; a means of inducing help from the angels, a weapon in fears by night, a rest from toils by day, a safeguard for infants, an adornment for those at the height of their vigor, a consolation for the elders, a most fitting ornament for women... [6]

And it is this tradition, I would suggest, that St Benedict's Office follows: the psalmody is antiphonal, not responsorial; there is no mention of pauses or prostrations between psalms; nor is there any mention of psalm collects. [7]

The psalms, it is true, had a special status in St Benedict's Office, but I don't think we should assume, as some argue, that Chapter 20 of the Rule, on prayer, is only referring to prayer outside the Office. [8]  Rather, it seems to me that St Benedict's comments on the importance of reverence, fervour, and short but pure prayer, is something of a defence of his Office in the face of  other contemporary traditions, as well as instruction on prayer more generally.

Short but fervent?

That emphasis on frequent, rather than literally continual prayer becomes even clearer if one compares the Benedictine Office to the two other contemporary Offices we've talked about in this series, those of Agaune and Arles.

The table below shows just how much shorter the Benedictine Office is compared to that of the two contemporary offices we've been looking at: the Benedictine is around half the length of that of Arles, and a third of that of Agaune.

As a consequence, the Benedictine psalter spread the psalms over a much longer period, a week compared to the day or couple of days of the others.

Moreover, St Benedict's Office wasn't just lighter on psalmody; at least compared to the Arles Office, it seems to have been much lighter on Scripture reading as well.

Table: The liturgies of the three monasteries [9]

	Agaune	Arles	Benedictine
Foundation details	Monks Royal foundation (Sigismond) Dedicated to St Maurice and the Theban legion. Located in Burgundy. Refounded c515.	Nuns (though similar rule for monks). Episcopal foundation (Caesarius of Arles). Dedicated to St John the Evangelist and St John the Baptist. Located in Gaul (Ostrogoth Kingdom), c510.	Monks (and nuns). Lay foundation (St Benedict with lay patrons). MC dedicated to St Martin of Tours and St John the Baptist. Located in Italy. Foundation dates Subiaco c505, Monte Cassino, c529;  ?Plombariola;  Terracina, c545.
Length of Office	24/7 in shifts	12-16 hours per day	4-8 hrs per day
Extended/all night vigils	Always	Yes – Fridays and Saturdays, feasts; some seasons	No
Psalter said over…	Day+	?2-3 days, depending on season	Week
Psalms per day	Unknown – estimated 450?	60-80+	40
Psalm order	Unknown	Some fixed psalm for each hour; at Vigils, numerical order	Selected for each hour
Scriptural readings (other than psalms)	Unknown	Readings at all of the hours except lucernarium + vigils of readings interspersed with prayers and psalms Sat&Sun plus winter.	Scripture light – short verse only at all hours except Night Office on Sundays and winter weekdays. Summer weekdays:  short verses at all hours only Winter: three readings and responsories at weekday Nocturns
Hymns, antiphons, prayers	yes	yes	Yes – but no collects
Divided into x ‘hours’ per day	[?7]	[7-9] Nocturns/Vigils, Lauds, Prime (S&S only), Terce, Sext, None, Lucernarium, Duodecima,	8 – Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline

Liturgy sustains us

One possible explanation for St Benedict's very different balance between liturgy and other good works to Agaune and Arles lies perhaps in St Augustine's argument that liturgy is needed to sustain us as we do good works.  And in St Augustine's view, the amount of time needed for formal prayer is not minimal or minimalist.  In Letter 130 the saint explained:

When we cherish uninterrupted desire along with the exercise of faith and hope and charity, we pray always. 

But at certain stated hours and seasons we also use words in prayer to God, that by these signs of things we may admonish ourselves, and may acquaint ourselves with the measure of progress which we have made in this desire, and may more warmly excite ourselves to obtain an increase of its strength. 

For the effect following upon prayer will be excellent in proportion to the fervour of the desire which precedes its utterance. And therefore, what else is intended by the words of the apostle: Pray without ceasing, than, Desire without intermission, from Him who alone can give it, a happy life, which no life can be but that which is eternal? This, therefore, let us desire continually from the Lord our God; and thus let us pray continually. 

But at certain hours we recall our minds from other cares and business, in which desire itself somehow is cooled down, to the business of prayer, admonishing ourselves by the words of our prayer to fix attention upon that which we desire, lest what had begun to lose heat become altogether cold, and be finally extinguished, if the flame be not more frequently fanned. 

Completeness...

There was also a certain symbolism in St Benedict's insistence on praying seven times a day (and again in the night), given the association between the 'sacred number seven', as meaning completeness due to the connection (which the saint alludes to in his explanation) to the number of days of creation, and eight, as symbolism the new age inaugurated by Christ. [10] St Augustine, for example, interpreted seven times as signifying continuously or always:

For whence is that which is said, seven times in a day will I praise you? Does a man sin who does not praise the Lord so often? What then is seven times will I praise, but I will never cease from praise? For he who says seven times, signifies all time. [11]

In the next post I will explore the importance of short but fervent prayer more, in the context of the Office and intercessory prayer.

Notes

[1] St Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, Psalm 148, J.E. Tweed, trans, From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 8. Edited by Philip Schaff. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1888.

[2] RB 43.3: Ergo nihil operi Dei praeponatur.

[3]  See for example Columba Stewart, Benedictine Monasticism and Mysticism in Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, 2013.

[4] Gabriel Bunge, Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer According to the Patristic Tradition, trans Michael J Miller, Ignatius Press 2002 (original  German ed, 1996).

[5] See chapters 66-68 of the Rule for nuns of Caesarius of Arles (for the full text of the Rule itself, see Caesarius of Arles, Oeuvres Monastique, de Vogue and Courreau ed and trans, 2 vols, Sources Chretienne 345, 398).

[6] St Basil the Great, Exegetical Homilies, Sr Agnes Clare Way, trans, Fathers of the Church no 46, Homily on Psalm 1.

[7] Joseph Dyer, in the The Singing of Psalms in the Early-Medieval Office, Speculum, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Jul., 1989), pp. 535-578 (and subsequent articles) argued that the switch to unison singing and alternating choirs happened rather later than Benedict's time.  More recent studies, however, have challenged this view, pointing to descriptions of alternating choirs in the sixth century monastic literature, including in St Gregory's Dialogues (IV:15), and in the Rule of Paul and Stephen.

[8]  See in particular Adalbert De Vogue, The Rule Of Saint Benedict: A Doctrinal and Spiritual Commentary (Cistercian Studies) 1999.

[9]  Based on the Rule of St Benedict, chapters 8-19; Rule of Caesarius of Arles, chapters 66-72; 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.

[10] St Benedict cites two verses of Psalm 118 in support of his construction of the hours in  RB 16: Ut ait propheta: septies in die laudem dixi tibi. Qui septenarius sacratus numerus a nobis sic implebitur...quia de his diurnis horis dixit: Septies in die laudem dixi tibi. [4] Nam de nocturnis vigiliis idem ipse propheta ait: Media nocte surgebam ad confitendum tibi.Ergo his temporibus referamus laudes Creatori nostro super iudicia iustitiae suae...

[11] Sermon 45.

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

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

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

Rome and ceaseless prayer?

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

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

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

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

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

St Benedict on prayer

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

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

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

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

Prayer and good works in St Benedict's Rule

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

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

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

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

Psalm 1 and meditation day and night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

St Benedict and the liturgy

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

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

Notes

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

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

[3] The Rule of St Augustine, ch 2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The martyrdom of St Maurice and the Theban legion
Source: wiki commons

In the last post in this series I talked about the monastery of St John of Arles, where the ideal held out was for each nun to literally pray without ceasing, even when sleeping; aided to achieve this through a Rule that sought to eliminate as many distractions as possible (through a strictly regimented life and severe restrictions on visitors),  and through long hours in church.

Today I want to look briefly at another interpretation of praying without ceasing, practiced at another monastery contemporary to St Benedict, namely that of St Maurice of Agaune, where the emphasis was on maintaining a regime of continuous prayer at the communal rather than individual level.

Literally praying without ceasing

Before we move on though, it is worth noting that although the literal interpretation of the injunction to pray without ceasing is largely (though not entirely) out of favour now, it had a well-established genealogy, and continued to have adherents long after St Benedict's time.

Its advocates could point to Scriptural precedents, such as the widow and Prophetess Anna, described by St Luke as never leaving the Temple, but instead serving God night and day with fasting and prayer (quæ non discedebat de templo, jejuniis et obsecrationibus serviens nocte ac die). [1]

And the practices of this school of spiritual theology - such as the continuous recitation of the psalter - were discussed not just in Cassian, the Lives of the Desert Fathers, the Canons of Hippolytus and other influential texts of early monastic literature, but also in writers such as St Clement of Alexandria, who saw the fixed hours of prayer such as Terce, Sext and None largely as props for those who had not yet achieved the state of continual prayer. [2]

Nor did this approach fall out of favour in the centuries that followed: many monastic saints lives, Benedictine and otherwise, from the seventh to tenth century showcased prodigious feats of psalter recitation: St Benedict Biscop, Bede the Venerable's teacher, for example, apparently recited the entire psalter twice daily in addition to singing the Office of his monastery. [3]

Continuous prayer as a corporate action

This literal approach to St Paul's injunction was, however, far from being the only interpretation of how to pray without ceasing (or to pray day and night, as Psalm 1 enjoined): a key alternative interpretation saw it being achieved not necessarily at the individual level, but rather through collective effort.

In particular, Agaune, a monastery dedicated to St Maurice and the martyred Theban legion, a group of soldiers who, according to the Vita by Eucherius, refused an order to slaughter their fellow Christians for refusing to offer sacrifices to the Emperor, instead laying down their weapons and allowing themselves to be first decimated, and ultimately all martyred. [4]

The monastery was refounded around 515 with the monks organised into several different choirs, which took turns to maintain the perpetual round of psalmody. [5]

Just how they organised themselves to do this remains speculative: all of the details of their practices date from a much later era, or from other monasteries that claimed to adopt their customs. We know though, that the monks were organised into five to nine units (turmae, terminology that echoed the military) or choirs, who maintained the psalmody in turn (with possibly all the monks attending the core six or seven hours, and the different shifts then filling in the gaps).

The roots of perpetual prayer

The Agaune model, on the face of it, seems quite different theologically either from that of Arles, which sought to aid the religious to achieve a state of literally continuous prayer, or that of St Benedict, who insisted that the individual monk fulfill his Office obligation individually each day, reciting it, if necessary, even if out working in the fields or absent from the monastery for some reason.

Instead it made the church, rather than the individual monk the locus of  perpetual prayer, to be maintained by a  newly created ‘monastic family’ (hoc est monachorum, familia locaretur), who, according to the Vita of the first three abbots, imitating heaven, would maintain the divine office day and night. [6]

There were certainly clear precedents in both Scripture and monastic tradition for this approach.  In the Old Testament it could point to the Temple traditions, such as the Levite families chosen to live in temple chambers to serve day and night (1 Parap 9:33); in he New Testament, the vigil maintained by the community of Jerusalem, praying for Peter while he was imprisoned (Acts 12: Oratio autem fiebat sine intermissione ab ecclesia ad Deum pro eo).  And in the monastic tradition, one of the Apophthemgmata Patriae tells the story of a monk who prayed as he worked in order to earn enough to support himself, and to pay someone to pray for him when he slept. [7]   

The angelic chorus

One of the intriguing points of distinction between this approach and the other models though, seems to me to be the way in which the Divine Office on earth is depicted as being linked to that of heaven.

St Benedict, of course, directs us to be mindful of the presence of the angels when praying the Office, and adjust our behaviour accordingly: the angels, not the monks, are the 'watchers', observing us. 

Clement of Alexander elevates the status of the ascetic somewhat higher, seeing the prayers of the perpetual prayer as serving to unite him to the angelic choir:

His sacrifices are prayers, and praises, and readings in the Scriptures before meals, and psalms and hymns during meals and before bed, and prayers also again during night. By these he unites himself to the divine choir, from continual recollection, engaged in contemplation which has everlasting remembrance. [8] 

The description of the Agaune model in the very early lives of the first three abbots, takes it one step further, for it is depicts the monks' choruses as explicitly imitating those of heaven (qui die noctuque caelestia imitantes, cantionibus divinis insisterent). [9]

Some historians have argued that Agaune's perpetual liturgy regime evolved naturally out of the Gallic tradition of long hours in church typified by the liturgy of Arles, in response to particular local concerns and issues. [10] The more obvious direct inspiration for this model, though, as others have pointed out, was that of the Sleepless monks of Constantinople that I discussed in a previous post, with their multiple repetitions of the angelic chorus recorded in the New Testament, and whose fame had certainly spread to the West by this time. [11]

All the same, their model must certainly have seemed a particularly good fit for a monastery dedicated to the maintenance of a shrine where the founding legend concluded that the soldiers, by their martyrdom, had been transformed members of the angelic choir:

Thus that whole angelic legion was murdered, which now, we believe, joins with legions of angels in heaven in always praising together the Lord God Sabaoth. [12]

Half a century later Gregory of Tours provided a story that nicely echoes this imagery, in the story of a young monk who died, to the great distress of his mother, who then spent her days weeping in the Church.  [13] Happily, St Maurice appeared to her and assured her that her son was still part of the chorus made up not just of the still living monks, but the dead among their number, as well as the entire Theban legion itself.  To prove this, he invited her to return the next morning at Lauds, and every subsequent day that she so desired for the rest of her life, so that she could (miraculously) hear his particular voice joining that of the other (still living) monks.

The angelic life

The idea of monks as imitators of the angelic life was not of course new, and was certainly not unknown in the West.  Monks were regularly compared to angels on the basis of their commitment to chastity, their dedication to prayer and contemplation, and in their quest for virtue.   And St Martin of Tours' brand of monasticism, for example, also seems to have joined in the rejection of manual work, something also part of the Agaune charism.

Indeed, the Preface to his Latin translation the Life of Pachomius by the Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus in Rome in the first half of the sixth century provided an origin story for monasticism that held up just this image:

For when by the Lord's permission, the pagan Emperors rose up and brought savage and stormy persecutions against Christians everywhere...[monasteries grew up] practising abstinence as they renounced the world and adorned the secret places of solitude...They sought the quietness of solitude, and by looking for the joyous divine gift of their own salvation through faith, they have furnished an example to others of a more sublime and sacred life. Freed from all earthly cares, they emulated the holiness of the Angels while still living in this mortal flesh. [14] 

Still, this view of monastic life seems more characteristic of the spirituality of Syrian and Eastern monasticism than that which generally prevailed in the West.  Certainly neither the Rule of Caesarius of Arles nor that of St Benedict really play much on this concept, and St Gregory's Life of St Benedict more often depicts his disciples as sinners than angelic imitators or saints!

Rather, St Benedict's Rule depicts the monastic life as that of a group of sinners struggling  towards perfection, a life that is the ordinary Christian life lived intensively; differentiated from the lay life primarily by being lived in one place, and under obedience to an abbot and a rule.  In the next post, I will look at how St Benedict's particular take on praying  fits with this.

Notes

[1] Lk 2:36-8

[2] See in particular Cassian Conference 13; Canons of Hippolytus 27 (Egyptian c336-340) “When a man sleeps in his bed he must pray to God in his heart” (quoted by Taft, Liturgy of the Hours... pg 71).

[3] Bede, Life of Benedict Biscop in his Lives of the Wearmouth Abbots.

[4]  Eucherius of Lyons, The Passion of the Martyrs of Agaune (translation in the appendix of Tim Vivian, Kim Vivian and Jeffrey Russell trans, The Life of the Jura Fathers The Life of the Holy Fathers Romanus, Lupicinus , and Eugendus, Abbots of the Monasteries in the Jura Mountains...,  Cistercian Studies Series no 178, Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo, 1999,  Studies Series 178); for the latin text see Passio Acaunensium martyrum, BHL-5737. 

[5] There is an extensive literature on Agaune; for the most up-to-date and systematic treatments see in particular Anne-Marie Helvétius, L’abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune dans le haut Moyen Âge, Autour de saint Maurice. Actes du colloque Politique, société et construction identitaire : autour de saint Maurice, 29 septembre-2 octobre 2009, Besançon (France )- Saint-Maurice (Suisse), dir. N. BROCARD, F. VANNOTTI et A. WAGNER, Fondation des Archives historiques de l’abbaye de Saint-Maurice, 2012, p. 113-131 and Laurent Ripart, De lérins à agaune: Le monachisme rhodanien reconsidéré, in Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, Monachesimi d’oriente e d’occidente nell’alto medioevo, Spoleto, 2016, pp123-193.

[6] Vita abbatum Acaunensium (BHL 142), § 3, éd. B. KRUSCH, MGH, SSRM, III, Hanovre, 1896.

[7] Lives of the Desert Fathers, 

[8] Stromata bk 7, Chapter 7.

[9] BHL, op cit.

[10] For this view see in particular B. Rosenwein, ‘Perennial Prayer at Agaune’, in S. Farmer and B. Rosenwein (eds), Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society (Ithaca, 2000), pp. 37–56; Albrecht Diem, Who is Allowed to Pray for the King? Saint-Maurice d’Agaune and the Creation of a Burgundian Identity, in Post-Roman Transitions: Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West, Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann (eds), pp. 47-88, Brepol 2014.

[11] See Helvetius op cit. The fame of the Sleepless monks had spread to the West by this time - they maintained a regular correspondence with the Pope over assorted theological disputes in Constantinople the early sixth century, and delegations visited on a number of occasions.  The monastery's royal patron, Sigismund of Burgundy and or his episcopal advisors could well have encountered or heard of them either there, since he converted from Arianism during a visit to Rome, or in the course of Burgundy's attempts to negotiate a treaty with Constantinople to protect the Kingdom against the threat of invasion from Theodoric in Italy, or Clovis and his heirs in Gaul.

[12] See Eucherius, op cit.  There is also an anonymous passion of the Martyrs, available atg BHL 5730, available in translation by David Woods, The Passion of St. Maurice and the Theban Legion (BHL 5740); see also Eric Chevalley, La Passion anonyme de saint Maurice d'Agaune Edition critique*, dans Vallesia,VL (1990), pp. 37-120.

[13] Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloria martyrum, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM 1.2: Gregorii Turonensis Opera. Teil 2: Miracula et opera minora. Editio nova lucisope expressa (Hanover, 1885), pp. 34–111 (at c. 74-75). Trans Raymond van Dam, LUP, 1988, pp 69-71.

[14]  http://www.vitae-patrum.org.uk/page11.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does it mean to pray without ceasing?

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

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

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

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

St John Cassian on praying without ceasing

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

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

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

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

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

The nuns of Arles: waiting for the bridegroom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The good works of religious

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

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

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

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

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

The liturgy of Arles

The Arles liturgy was steeped in this theology.  

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[12] ibid, Sermon 234.

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

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

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

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

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

[18] RC 15.

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

Gentile da Fabriano
Image source: Wikipedia

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

Cathedral vs monastic?

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

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

The pure praise of God

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

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

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

For this reason, Pope Benedict XIV suggested that:

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

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

The repeated memes

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

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

Giving thanks for creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

[4] ibid.

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