In my last few posts I've focused on the mechanics of the Benedictine Office - finding you way around the breviary, and how to say Matins.
I now want to turn to its theological and spiritual underpinnings in order to help you absorb its deeper meanings.
Matins as a generic, monastic and Benedictine hour
And on this, I want to suggest that there are three key dimensions of the hour that we need to consider.
First, the hour has long traditions, dating both before and after St Benedict's time, that encompass a variety of forms of it, and types of participants in it.
The second perspective is as a particularly monastic hour: Matins seems early on to have been regarded as the pre-eminently monastic hour: monks, someone recently suggested, 'prayed Matins so the rest of us don't have to'!
And the third perspective, is a focus on the particular form and meanings of the Benedictine version of the hour.
Taft and the liturgists
Before we go into any of these perspectives though, it is worthwhile, I think, very briefly revisiting the origins and early history of the Office as a whole, and three key propositions around it, not least because many of the claims made in the standard accounts (such as Taft's The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West) are now, in my view at least, either discredited, well and truly out of date, or both.
Most modern accounts of the history of the Divine Office such as Taft's, effectively view the Office as largely a fourth century invention, a product of the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. They tend to dismiss later references to Scriptural models to explain particular hours and practices associated with it as mere 'proof-texting', and view the pace of the psalms in it as a result of the rise of monasticism. A number of recent discoveries and studies, however, have challenged these propositions.
Roots in Jewish prayer and the New Testament?
Although it is true that earlier attempts to link the Office to Jewish daily prayer as it developed after the destruction of the Temple largely failed, for example, there is now reasonably strong evidence for its roots in the diverse regular daily Jewish prayer regimes - Temple-based and otherwise - as practiced at the time of Our Lord.
Sources such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Cairo Genizah have shone a new light on both early Jewish and early Christian prayer, and the implications of this are still being worked through.
One of them though, is that we should take seriously the idea that 'the prayers' referred to in Acts, as among the activities practiced by the newly converted Jerusalem crowds, are a reference to a proto-form of the Office. The text says:
And they were persevering in the doctrine of the apostles, and in the communication of the breaking of bread, and in prayers. (Acts 2:42)
St Benedict's famous insistence on the absolute priority of the 'Work of God', I would suggest, may well flow in part from his emphasis in the Rule on that early Jerusalem community as the model for his monks.
The Office as an ecclesial tradition
Following on from this, some historians and liturgists tended to dismiss as nonsense eighth century (and earlier) claims that the diverse forms of the Office found in different places had apostolic origins.
But while the earliest sources don't provide much detail of what the earliest forms of the Office consisted of, there are actually quite a few early references to prayer at fixed, particular times that go some way to making the case for a degree of continuity.
One of the most important, I think, is from Clement I's letter to the Corinthians (composed circa AD 70-96), which seems to imply that the Office was a Divinely-instituted tradition:
These things therefore being manifest to us, and since we look into the depths of the divine knowledge, it behooves us to do all things in [their proper] order, which the Lord has commanded us to perform at stated times. He has enjoined offerings [to be presented] and service to be performed [to Him], and that not thoughtlessly or irregularly, but at the appointed times and hours. Where and by whom He desires these things to be done, He Himself has fixed by His own supreme will, in order that all things, being piously done according to His good pleasure, may be acceptable unto Him....
The idea that the Office was an established ecclesial tradition from its very beginnings, that needed to be safeguarded by the Church seems actually to have been well established by St Benedict's time, as from the fifth century onwards we have records of bishops commissioning books for it; holding synods treating on it; and issuing decrees around its form, content and obligation to say it.
Indeed, in the early sixth century, the influential Abbot John of Gaza noted that the liturgically minimalist approach of the hermits of Skete that St John Cassian had lauded a century earlier as the ideal model for monks (their Office involved saying only Vespers and Matins as a Vigil for the Sunday only), was suitable for hermits only, not laypeople or cenobites. He said:
THE [fixed canonical] hours and odes are ecclesiastical traditions, and they are good from the perspective of the unity of the whole people. Similarly in communities for the sake of unity among many wills....With regard to Vespers, those of Skete say twelve psalms; then at the end of each they say the “Alleluia” doxology and offer one prayer. It is the same at night: twelve psalms, then after the psalms they sit down to manual labor.
St Benedict clearly agreed with Abbot John's view of the liturgy as a force for creating community and maintaining unity within it, insisting, for example, that everyone attend it, even those otherwise temporarily excommunicated; insisting the abbot recite the Our Father aloud at Lauds and Vespers as a way of addressing internal scandals, disputes and slights; and, inter alia, inserting some communal rituals (such as the blessing of the weekly kitchen servers) into it.
The place of the psalms in the early Office
A third key issue relating to the early Office relates to the psalms. The Office as we know it has the psalms at its core. But was this always the case?
There have been some very curious theories put forward about the use of the psalms in the Office over the last fifty years or so.
The early liturgists, for example, conflated the meditative recitation of the psalms in their Scriptural order through the day with the Office, and drew from this the conclusion that the monastic Office was about 'praying without ceasing' and individual sanctification, without it having any broader ecclesial dimension (while a smaller selection of psalms was used in the ecclesially oriented 'cathedral' Office). In reality its now clear that the Office and meditatio on the psalms were two quite distinct monastic practices.
Another theory particularly popular in the 1970s and 80s (particularly among those arguing for saying fewer psalms in the Office each week!) was that originally, the psalms were treated as readings rather than prayers, and had to be 'turned into prayer' as it were, by long spaces for meditation after saying each one, and use of 'psalm collects'. But in fact, several of the earliest commentaries on the psalms directly contradict these claims: while they may have been treated as both readings and prayers in some places and times, St Basil the Great, for example, argued that although the psalms effectively encompass all of Scripture, we absorb its messages unconsciously as we sing them.
A third theory was that the psalms only became the core of the Office as a result of monastic adoption and promotion of them in the fourth century. But we know the psalms were sung liturgically in Our Lord's time - aside from assorted New Testament references to them, Josephus even records the particular psalm numbers used at the sacrifice each day in the Temple for example. And now, fortunately, some newly discovered sources, most notably that of some of the long lost commentaries on the psalms by Origen, have confirmed their importance in the liturgy in the first few centuries of the Church's life.
No wonder then, that St Benedict prescribes that the readings can be shortened or cut altogether if necessary, but all 150 psalms must be said each week.
But more on all this in the next part of this series!
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